A hefty young woman, possibly 20 but easily passable for 40 is in some delusions talking to nobody about shooting meth and too much vodka downtown last night. Another, who I thought was her friend, is carrying on about how fucked up Duluth is because the tourist tricks aren’t paying her, her ‘hookup’ sold her some ‘bad shit’ yesterday and suddenly gets on the phone with someone about a bed at the hospital and ‘I wanna go back to L.A. – please, wire a ticket to the bus depot and I’m fucking leaving.’. Five blocks later the conversation turns to threats of jumping off the Medical Arts Building, Duluth’s tallest, where quite a few people have unfortunately carried through with this. It’s time to start making eye contact with ANYONE who appears somewhat sober but all I see are sundry head cases and the bus driver, who looks ready to phone the cops. This girl’s voice is getting faster, louder, angrier, and I’m sitting there looking at the beauty of Lake Superior while looking at so many people who’ve lost their lives to substances years ago and are now so high I don’t think they know where their stop is. The first one, amped up on meth, immediately recognizes two men on the street and is gone. The screaming one, who is either crashing or was given some very bad heroin, does not look good at all. Red circles around both eyes, her mouth, and hands. She does get off at the hospital before the driver calls anyone. Maybe he just pushes a button. I wonder where she’ll be in a week.

This is the most bizarre time to take the bus in Duluth. Just leaving the ‘Y’ after working out for two hours, I felt the exhilaration of my post-workout accomplishment fizzle as I watched a scene that is getting more dangerous and reminiscent of my life and hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, with an extremely affluent population living right next to Canada’s poorest postal code, the downtown eastside, home to the highest concentration of HIV+ street addicts in North America. I’m all too familiar with what I’m looking at here in Duluth as I think to myself ‘not here!?’, while thinking what it must be like to watch someone you love go down this road. I’ve done it watching family members’ decades-long struggles with alcohol. But meth, cocaine, heroin, all this injectable shit…it’s a one way ticket to AIDS and a fast death from there.

You don’t have to go to church on Sunday to realize what’s going on around you and ask yourself ‘what can I DO – and have that conversation with yourself on what you can do for people who society has clearly no interest (or continued energy – I realize when some familes have had enough) or ability to care for.

I don’t know what else to say besides don’t even try this shit. I’m willing to bet the majority of these very young men and women once held a lot of promise until ‘that one day’ and everything changed. All of them are trying to either get as high as they were that first time, which never happens, or are going crazy because of what’ll happen if they don’t use.

A boisterous woman got on the bus, and told the driver, “I’m the one with the handcap. I’ve been on your bus before, I have a plate in my foot, don’t start the bus til I’m sitting down.” She gets on the bus, sits down, the driver starts the bus. The woman starts saying “hi” to people she knows, which wound up being half the bus – most of these people didn’t seem to recognize her, but she knew many of their names and said “I see you on the bus all the time!”

A couple of people who did obviously know the woman were sitting about halfway across the bus from her. She offered to buy them dinner if they got off at her stop. They said that they had already eaten, but she invited them along for company.

The woman proceeded to invite everyone on the bus, including the driver, to dinner – her treat.

The man sitting next to her, an older man with a fresh wound on his face, told her he was homeless. She told him “come home with me, you can sleep on our couch! I’m serious!” She tacked on “I’m serious!” to the end of most of her offers of free meals.

A part of me wishes I hadn’t had perishable groceries in my lap so I could have seen how this played out.

I hopped on, opened my newspaper, and was promptly whisked to St. Paul on the 94C.

Fuck.

I swear that some of the lights were burned out on the route sign on the front of the bus, converting that “94″ into a “14″. Or perhaps I simply willed myself into seeing a 14. We shall never know.

At any rate, I was blown significantly off course, and as luck would have it, I forgot my cell phone today as well, so I was kind of up a creek without a paddle. Left with only my wits and a bus pass, I hiked from the first stop in St. Paul (I-94 and Snelling) to Marshal and Fry street and waited for a west-bound bus that I hoped would take me down Lake Street to the point where I could get back on my usual 14 at Bloomington Ave. After waiting 15 minutes in the chilly wind, I was joined by a group of three Chinese students who had no idea when the next bus was coming either. Somebody in a silver car honked at me as I stood there with my collar up – if you are a Bike Lover or friend, be advised that I could have used a lift…

At any rate, my Chinese students and I, travelers joined by fate, finally boarded a west-bound 21 and that took us down the hill to MPLS. Despite a little language barrier, we all sort of made friends as they practiced their English on me and I coached them on how to get to the Mall of America via the Light Rail. We wished each other a safe journey as they headed south on the train and I continued on to Bloomington, only to wait again for a 14 and finally made it home after wasting a little over an hour on a transit tour of the Twin Cities.

Next happy hour, I am just going to ride my bike.

In Duluth, generally, the further east you go, the more ’90210′ it gets. So as we coast eastward along Superior St I’m guessing we are in for a quiet ride on this DTA bus. Guess again. A young black kid with the most ghetto fabulous, sparkling white North Face ski jacket that I’ve ever seen hops on. I’m jealous. He’s talking a mile a minute on his cell phone to (I’m assuming) someone who cares enough about his sexual encounters with girls whose names he can’t remember, but hey, he’s homeless, she had a place, they both wanted to get laid and I suppose that’s what passes for flirting/romance/foreplay in this heterosexual interracial wasteland. This kid is full of shit and obviously puffing his feathers so everyone can hear how this ‘motherfucking white bitch’ whupped his ass and even sunk her teeth into his chest bad enough that I could see he had gauze taped all over his chest. Why wasn’t he heading downtown to urgent care to get this looked at? I make a lot of assumptions on the bus…some wrong, but there’s a definite unspoken code especially this far north that some people come to Duluth the same way people escaped to Canada or Alaska: they’re running from something bad, they’re not giving their real name to nobody, which means any medical problem or crime against them can’t get reported. They’ll just have to live with it…that’s the price of this temporary freedom…risks of sickness, violence, and homelessness. So this kid goes on and on about ‘this white bitch’ who, by description, I’m guessing is about 15 (this kid is 25 at least). I glance to my left at the 70-something woman who has a look on her face that’s just beyond description. We make eye contact like we were both witnesses to some bad comedy act.

Finally the bus hits my ‘hood on Woodland Avenue, and I’m getting off…the bus. You know, I’m young, I’m cute, dare say I’m a catch, yet being gay here is very liberating…I feel like a unicorn. There might be a variety of races and classes here, but gays do not live here. You don’t have dates. You definitely never get laid. The closest it gets is time spent bitching about how much Minnesota sucks on gay.com. But if I don’t get a sex life, well, hell…at least all I have to do is hop on any Duluth Transit Authority bus and hear how the other 96% (aka straight society) lives. Can I just say this? I feel bad for straight girls and I hope you’re educating your guys. They don’t appear to understand the basics (wearing a clean pair of underwear twice a week, brushing teeth, wondering how many girls they’ve knocked up rather than knowing)…

Cue in Alice Deejay’s ‘Better off Alone’…!

A man had taken his foot out of his shoe and was resting it on top of the shoe. But… he had no sock on, and he had the gnarliest long yellow toenails I have ever seen. Hope I never see anything like that again.

DUDE. Put some SOCKS on.

One small benefit of taking the bus is more time for reading, which is more important now that I’ve got an active book club to participate in.

I am convinced that if America is a melting pot, then the bus is cauldron where the real work gets done. Downtown office women, students, immigrants, slackers, down-and-outers and up-and-comers all sway together in (mostly) silent communion, brought together by happenstance and the need to somewhere else.

The bus is a real world cultural “butterfly effect” experiment that unfolds every morning and evening. Invisibly and imperceptibly passengers influence each other, as we move together, many parts as one unit, lurching along towards our now shared destiny.

Everyday the rest of the passengers and I would ride to our destinations without bringing attention to this woman. One day a group of kids from my school got on and sat near her. Throughout the whole ride they made fun of her laughing loudly the whole time.

I’ll never forget that day because it was more proof that humans are cruel when they don’t understand someone or something. I still saw her for a few years after that around the neighborhood. Every time I saw her I became sad because she was a reminder of the cruelty I witnessed.