Salmonella has nothing to do with chickens

On the bus, gray windows, blue seats, an entire mirror filled with the bus drivers face, studying me with fatherly or lecherous concern, or something in between, an uncle. He laughed when the doors slowly blinked off the morning, quieting the cold steam of outside-this San Diego air I find so particularly familiar. This girl, this woman I should call myself, for some man in some play will read this line and think how twenty-three-year-old women still call themselves girls how thirty-seven-year-old-women still think of themselves as girls, how sixty-eight-year-old women are girls in their sleep…this woman sits on the concrete molded bus bench with bare knees, with thick pink socks and cowboy boots no one else is wearing: in her velvet Christmas stewardess dress swinging her knees in girlish tribute and her big bug sunglasses, he thinks how this woman looks like a postcard in her mind and a misfit on the rocks.

But he lets her on with her questions about where this bus is headed, questions asked without wondering, out of obligation. She knows this bus will go straight. She knows the general nature of buses. And he says yes in broken English, yes it will head straight down fifty-four. It will pass a Sears and an auto shop and several overgrown hamburger stands, more plastic than vines. It will dead end suddenly into Montezuma and if you turn right you’ll hit highway 8 and 805 but the bus will lumber left and the girl in the green dress, the girl that is myself with several improvements will watch a Mexican man on the corner unapologetically. The windows are tinted for the benefit of the passengers and he cannot see her.

He stands on the sidewalk corner, waiting to cross University, smoking a cigarette with his lips and his right hand. It’s windy outside but warm and the left sleeve of his gray rustling sports jacket (with a variety of snaps, zippers and closures) is twisted in the wind for moments, but mainly caught in the empty rhythm of swaying.

This girl wonders for a moment why he does not pin it up when his left arm obviously ends at the elbow. She wonders what knife fight he lost it in. She wonders what torture is like in jail and what being fifty or so with one arm means in terms of drug experimentation? What small dark rooms has he loved in, thrusting mainly to the left, collapsing onto his right elbow when the wrist was weakening? In what small dark room can you visit his blood stain?

Then there is a bell, and the jacket sleeve like extra skin follows his crossing as the bus pulls away. She did not see him throw the cigarette down so she cannot jump off the bus and pick it out of the pile of twenty-five or so sleeping like soft bones in the sidewalk crack. She cannot keep it in her pocket until the hem of her dress smells like Pal Mal tobacco or sell it as an oddity. Why can’t old men and women with strollers be famous? Why can’t red carpet roll under the feet of the one-armed man as he anonymously crosses the street?

Later she ends up at San Diego State University. The driver asks her where she’s trying to go. She smiles and slyly quotes convention. She doesn’t care. Not really. As long as she’s back in time for worry to still be sleeping, as long as she has this story to tell. So she goes on a walk to make herself miss the next bus, and the bus drivers parked and smoking when she’s back in sight don’t know of the 955 so she waits twenty minutes next to two very fat black women and their small adorable children who are the same age and who, if they were prince and princess would face being betrothed to each other.

The queens abandon the dreams of their men with every word, calling them liars, loving the sound of Terrance and George in their own voices, loving the owning of offspring. The girl in the green dress is caught eavesdropping through her sunglasses and realizes later, after she has gotten off the bus, transfer intact, after she has driven lost for seven minutes and passed a very fat man in an electronic wheelchair making lazy half circles on the sidewalk outside of a video store, that some people lose their arms when babies are born, and some people have heart attacks after a life time of never eating butter and that the rules for everything were burned in cigarette papers and into bedposts hiding bed stains, bloodstains, the love of drugs and dresses, all burning so close to the ocean.