The Commute
By the time the metro screeched to a stop…
…at the Glen Park BART station, Ike Bunson’s final strand of sanity was beginning to fray, rapidly becoming disentangled, its component parts snapping free and slingshotting off into the ether and leaving him on the verge of the first honest-to-goodness BART station breakdown since last Thursday at Bayfair when Dorothy Gainsfield stepped off the train and directly into a not insubstantial pile of human excrement, which caused her to slip and fall directly into said excrement, dramatically catapulting her purse and its contents across the platform and onto the track.
As Bunson hobbled, visibly fuming, face reddening, chubby hands shaking, from the car third from the back and began jockeying with the crowd towards the escalator, he could feel his heart thudding erratically beneath his shirt, one of the five off-white Verona brand dress shirts he owned, which had, at the time of purchase been stark white. He stopped short, nearly tripping to avoid a wheeled suitcase that faithfully trailed a stubby white woman with $2 thong sandals slapping against corn-riddled feet and a blonde mullet that wormed down her neck to rest atop a sweaty Raiders tanktop. Exasperated and struggling to keep his breathing from spiralling into panic-attack territory, he spastically raised his hand, along with the tattered briefcase it clutched, to his chest to try to quell the hammering. The corner of the tattered, yet still quite solid briefcase caught him like an uppercut on the chin which had been hanging slack as he tried to catch his breath. His chin, not at all cushioned by the thick doughnut of neck fat hanging just beneath it, slammed shut so emphatically under the force of the blow that an incisor - second from the front on the bottom, stage left of his mouth - cracked and became dislodged from his gum. Virgin nerve-endings, suddenly exposed, sent flowery blossoms of bone-rattling agony throughout his head and down his neck and for a moment he froze, his eyes squeezed so tightly shut that the crow’s feet on either side of them glowed neon yellow. Fireworks went off behind his eyelids, painting in photographic negative like palm fronds in the periphery of the darkness. He screamed. It was a robust scream, one with cojones, one that sent the pigeons aflutter outside the station, one that was more than the sum of its constituent parts, which are here annotated in four parts, detailed below:
Around two hours ago, Bunson had been summoned over the loudspeaker to his manager’s office and fired from Gadgeco Inc., the company to which he had altruistically donated the last fourteen years of his professional life and from which he had received relatively little in the way of biweekly compensation, retirement fund matching, or insurance benefits. There were reasons cited for his termination which his manager, Steve Spurgeone, relayed with the trademark aloofness that everyone in the department had become accustomed to. Spurgeone was a stick-thin and squeaky frequenter of Sunday-morning NA meetings on the corner of 8th and Geary. He liked to incorporate the psychology of his own recovery into his managerial style, as well as plagiarized snippets he lifted from fellow meeting goers, a fact his associates had made a habit of snickering at behind his back around the watercooler. As a result of experiencing the “wicked throes” of substance abuse in his younger years and spending the better part of his thirties committing himself to recovery, Spurgeone had a difficult time sympathizing with what he perceived to be “lesser” problems, Bunson’s employment predicament being a prime example. Per Spurgeone, the foremost reason for Bunson’s termination was described as repeated (and apparently extensively documented) incidents of “negligence” with regard to the stringent quality control operation Bunson was responsible for overseeing. The back-breaking straw for the camel vis-à-vis his employment, had been a hefty string of particularly vile and vehement complaints that had flooded the inboxes of the customer relations department following the roll-out of what Gadgeco Inc. had (overzealously) billed in an aggressive and astonishingly costly advertising campaign as “The Last Toilet Plunger You’ll Ever Need”, which Bunson had thought sounded more like a warning than an incentive to buy. The litany of complaints that had rolled in during the first week following the launch of The Brute had all come across Bunson’s desk via CC to his email inbox and each one he read had contributed in no small part to the systematic yellowing of his previously crispy white dress shirts. The one that was stuck in his mind as Spurgeone went through the minutiae of letting him go was from a woman in Des Moines who, despite being “literally enraged” over the utter ineffectiveness of her recently purchased The Brute plunger, had been thorough enough to include a photo along with her lengthy grievance. The picture was of her bathroom, which Bunson had, at first glance, thought to himself was immaculately decorated and really quite lovely as far as tiny apartment half-baths go, except, obviously, for the feces which had somehow become caked in splotches to every flat surface in the room, horizontal and vertical. According to the complaint, this fecal fiasco had been caused entirely by The Brute’s asinine engineering and was not attributable in any way, shape or form to any degree of user error, a fact the woman had emphasized in her account of the events (“I know damn well how to, excuse my French, use a goddamned plunger!”) The complaint concluded with a scathing indictment of Gadgeco Inc. and each and every individual it employed as being responsible for such a disgusting farce. Spurgeone sighed apathetically towards Bunson, his clunky, industrial-strength reading glasses sliding down his nose, which was, whether viewed head-on or in profile, a craggy, Alpine nose, undoubtedly complete with deviated septum. Bunson noted that his manager’s concern read rather disingenuous, with signs pointing not indirectly to an involuntary chemical response to a chronic blood-sugar deficiency, and having precisely nothing to do with his employment at all. With the meeting rapidly devolving from one-sided conversation into awkward silence, Bunson rose and left the room without a word, off to collect his meager desktop possessions, proverbial tail-between-legs. Spurgeone watched him leave, blowing his beak into a purple handkerchief before urgently scavenging his desk drawers for a box of Milk Duds.
As the elevator shimmied closed behind him and the sprawling expanse of the seventh story of the Gadgeco Inc. parking structure materialized through smog-filmy glass doors, Bunson grunted, laboriously shifting the weight of the Banker’s Box that contained a sorry assortment of junk that had accumulated in his cubicle over the course of the past 14 years. He shouldered the doors open and lugged the box, along with his briefcase, to his completely unflashy and unapologetically utilitarian four-door sedan with laser-measured floor mats and a 24-piece roadside emergency kit in the trunk. He dumped the box in the backseat, snorting dispassionately as it tipped over, spilling a sort of remixed desktop diorama across the faux leather. Pens and their caps shot every which way. A stack of overly inky faxes, memos and email chain printouts that were now completely devoid of any significance whatsoever and really had no business being anywhere but the bottom of a shredder, avalanched out, carrying a bevy of multicolored push-pins and matching paperclips, which tinkled like sad-clown confetti into every crevice imaginable. He slammed the door, leaving the office soup to slosh around on the way home. But at street level, Folsom was at a dead stop, cars and trucks idling impatiently as far as the eye could see. Bunson sat, silently seething, waiting for a sliver of slack in the post-Giants game traffic into which he could slip. A spear of sunlight, as if concentrated by some impishly sadistic, magnifying glass-wielding deity, blistered Bunson’s dashboard and the longer he sat, the further up the dash it crept. By now an impatient and boisterous line was accumulating behind him in the orifice of the parking garage. He had inched his way as far forward as he could, but now happened to be perfectly impeding all foot traffic and garnering an assortment of cynical sidelong glances and colorful condemnations from passersby on the sidewalk, the most notable being a trio of teens on skateboards who were deftly weaving through the congestion at a remarkable pace. They were whooping and laughing back and forth, which behavior seemingly impelled them faster through the crowd, invisibly linked, like three nodes of a single gnar-shredding machine. The apparent ringleader of the trio was a long-haired and long-limbed Korean kid who was sweating bullets beneath a black stocking cap and with tall white socks that, try as they might, didn’t have a chance in hell of making up the impossible distance between his bony shins and the bottom of his head-scratchingly short jean shorts. The kid saw the sedan way too late, at least partially due to its utter unremarkableness, which Bunson had always regarded as urban camouflage that, more often than not, came in handy in a city replete with vandals and overeager meter maids. So the kid didn’t see Bunson or his boring car and rode headlong into the broad side of the vehicle, leaving a gangly-Korean-kid-shaped dent in the quarter panel. The kid yipped a stepped-on terrier sort of yip as he tumbled across the top of the hood before coming to rest, upside down and half inside a large planter in the shade on the other side. His friends skidded clunkily to a stop, warily assessing the situation, uncertain whether to laugh at their friend or skate away. Bunson, startled for a moment out of a fit of agoraphobic consternation, saw the kid crawl his way out of the planter, brushing dirt off his shirt and hairy thighs. The hood of the sedan had a half-trampled quality, with each sizable dent corresponding to a now bright red and visibly sizzling patch of skin on the kid, who had launched into a theatrical tirade directed at Bunson; he was wincing, while whirling around, trying to both clutch and not clutch the red blotches where the impacts had been. The sidewalk’s flow slowed, nearly matching the coagulatedness of the traffic on the street, and becoming an impromptu audience for the kid’s performance, which was shaping up to really be something. He looked pretty worse for wear, the kid, with a thin, steady stream of blood coming down the side of his face where it mixed with the sweat from the now dirt-covered stocking cap which, despite being laughably out of season, may have been just enough to keep the accident from requiring immediate professional medical attention. It became apparent to Bunson that the red marks all over the kid were in fact burns, not just garden-variety points of impact. His eyes, already more than a little glazed over, slowly drifted from the burnt, dirty skateboarder, who was now crescendoing into the coda of his performance with all the fervor of an amphetamine-addled composer, to his sun-scorched dashboard. Beneath the dust-covered plastic, between the speedometer and tachometer, Bunson saw the engine temperature gauge and its needle, which was firmly implanted in the red. Smoke began to roll out from beneath the hood, escalating furiously from thin strands to voluptuous plumes spewing from either side in a matter of seconds. Bunson’s head fired in all directions. He grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and throttled it like a rattlesnake. The car seized back and forth on its suspension and the Korean kid actually stopped screaming long enough to take a full-sized breath, which he compromised by lighting a cigarette while taking a protracted step back at the sight of Bunson convulsing rabidly in the driver seat. The other two skateboarders high-tailed it in the direction they’d come from while the street traffic inched forward reluctantly, at this point captivated by the drama unfolding streetside. Smoke billowed from the hood of the nondescript sedan as Bunson grabbed his briefcase and erupted out of the car. He slammed the door and set off, steaming, down the sidewalk, leaving his car and the kid to smoke their little hearts out behind him.
After a sweltering twelve-block walk to the Embarcadero BART station, Bunson was aggressively approached by the mother of all San Francisco vagrants. She had almost no hair, but what little was left was dotted across the scaley landscape of her overcooked scalp like the aftermath of a brushfire. She had two lazy eyes and two teeth to match, one affixed to a blackened mandible and the other dangling from what appeared to be a necklace of woven hair clotting to her emaciated chest. Her legs were both crooked, but not the same kind of crooked, and they served her about as well as legs of wet cardboard would have, so standing was out of the question and walking, forget about it. Her face was snot-covered and sweaty, glistening like a grotesque wax sculpture come to life. As Bunson neared the escalators leading down to the station, he caught a glimpse of her smearing the snot across her face with what appeared to be a wet leaf of newspaper she’d pulled out of a trash bag she was guarding. Her demeanor was one of agitated paranoia amplified by the heat and dramatically exacerbated by each and every passing person who did their best to ignore her. By the time Bunson arrived at the top of the escalator, she was only feet away and had her full attention honed on him, shrieking like a banshee and waggling her hand in his very specific direction like an angler fish might waggle its lure. Still very much preoccupied with the events of the past hour, Bunson paid no attention to the woman until she lunged ravenously at his pant leg, growling demonically through clenched gums. He was thoroughly startled and recoiled instinctively to avoid her snotty, smelly little claw, jumping to his left and tripping over a pair of pamphlet-wielding tourists, a small Chinese boy and his mother, who was the same size as the boy and who had obviously not been made privy to this little asterisk of life in San Francisco by the travel brochures. Having been inadvertently shoved by Bunson, the boy fell forward, banging his forehead on the stairway railing and immediately bursting into lung-busting sobs. His mother scooped him up and tried to soothe him amidst the sea of rush hour commuters and over another outburst from the snot-woman which, this time, consisted of a slew of obscenities marked by a distinctly salival and lispy quality that only a one-toothed vagrant could manage. Equal parts disgusted, appalled, guilty and exhausted, Bunson, who had twisted his own ankle amidst the ruckus, implored the tiny Chinese woman’s forgiveness for launching her son into the railing. She stared at him blankly for a moment, not blinking or breathing, before graciously offering a ten percent smile and a look that Bunson liberally interpreted as understanding with a dash of forgiveness, before returning her attention to her son, the little trooper, who was already pulling her by the hand down the stairs into the station. Bunson started down himself, apologizing for a second time as the diminutive duo disappeared beneath the crowd.
Once he had finally secured a standing-room-only spot on the train, in the car third from the back, and the doors closed and they rolled away from the station, Bunson exhaled voluminously and unintentionally right into the face of a turban-clad Pakistani man who smelled like a pet store bathroom and who didn’t seem to notice one bit. Bunson’s head pounded as it spun, orbiting an inner tempest of confounded disbelief. Sweat gathered along his sparse, wiry hairline, individual droplets swelling and linking with others in the vicinity teasing an incipient flood. The car was packed so tightly he couldn’t even reach his sleeve up there to dab it away without jabbing or otherwise knocking-off-kilter the dozen or so other commuters within reach. The train squealed upon the rails through the intestines below the city, jerking this way and that, impelling those relegated to standing to seek stability in the form of leprotic, slimy and/or grimy straps hanging overhead. Without warning and for no apparent reason, the brakes were downright stomped on, sending the internal organs of the occupants slamming against their insides and the occupants themselves flailing into each other and into the unforgiving hard-plastic and metal skeleton of the train car. Now at a dead stop, the disheveled mass collectively gathered itself, wary not to allow what may well have been a near-catastrophe to break common metro etiquette of steadfastly ignoring each other at all cost. Bunson had inadvertently stepped on the Turban Man amidst the deceleration, further aggravating his already throbbing ankle and placing the not insubstantial responsibility of carrying all two hundred and forty two pounds of him solely upon his right foot. The car remained static, though the passengers trapped inside fidgeted, agitated beneath the electric cyan fluorescence, some staring out the windows past their reflections into the claustrophobic void of the narrow tunnel, made eminently more fear-inducing now as they idled in the dark. Minutes passed. A recorded message was broadcast through the speakers with the obvious intent of putting everyone at ease, though of course it did exactly the opposite. According to the inappropriately chipper voice on the recording, there had been some kind of mechanical malfunction to the standard braking system that had rendered the train unsafe, hence the abrupt emergency braking and the train’s subsequent stagnation. Bunson suddenly felt constipated in more ways than one. He glanced at a digital Timex affixed to the obscenely hairy wrist of a cyclist in full spandex regalia white-knuckling a support pole some four inches from his face. They hadn’t moved for nearly twenty minutes. His breathing was touch-and-go, asthmatic at times, and controlling it was consuming an enormous amount of attention. Conversations were babelling on around him, too many over speakerphone. The effect was disorienting to Bunson as he tried to focus on anything besides the imminent threat of being blasted suddenly from behind by another oblivious train. It was in this moment - while chewing bloody the corner of his lip, imagination helplessly fixated on vivid scenes of destruction, of metal, once rigid, in a flash becoming limp and crumpling into a ball of decimated saran, making ground beef of everything inside - it was in this moment that the lights in the car went off. Pandemonium ensued. The blinding darkness became a medium for a cacophony of hysterics. But within a few seconds they blinked back on, harshly illuminating panicked expressions cautiously being retrieved from the brink as the train strained against itself and began to pull away, albeit at a pace so slow it was ostensibly unnoticeable but for the fluid in your ears. Bunson’s spastic nerves mercifully granted him a full and unimpeded deep breath and he loosened the steely grip he’d had on his briefcase. The train slothed forward, eventually reaching Glen Park station nearly an hour later.
And so because of all this - the termination, the car, the vagrant, the injured boy, the ankle, the subway ride into and out of hell, the briefcase corner and the shattered tooth - because of all of this, in the midst of the haggard, frazzled and visibly shaken commuter crowd pouring out of the crippled train, Bunson stood, lopsided, ankle throbbing, mouth bleeding, incredulously arriving at the fringe of lunacy. Then he screamed. It echoed virulently throughout the station causing the particulate members of the crowd to shudder and collectively repel themselves away. He was blowing a gasket. His marble bag had ripped wide open and all the marbles bounded away like animals from a forest fire. The blood vessels in his eyes had burst and the whites were now redder than the rest of his face. Snarling, he reached into his mouth and, with the same finger that had only minutes ago been clutching the nasty subway strap, fished the pieces of his tooth out from the space between his cheek and gum and flung them onto the marbled concrete. He spat a bloody loogie out after them, some of which splattered onto a young lady’s high-heeled foot that she couldn’t pull away fast enough. She gagged, losing her balance, breaking the heel and collapsing into a heap right into the bloody, toothy puddle. Appropriately and understandably disgusted, she then began to wriggle away downstream, all the while gawking in caustic incredulity at Bunson who was oblivious, busy eclipsing the event horizon of the black hole of madness.
Then, in a moment of immeasurable and eerily genuine anguish, the likes of which have been seen only a handful of times since the days of Job, Bunson let loose another rafter-rattling wail as he flung his tattered, but still very solid briefcase high in the air. It floated, not in slow motion, but not exactly at normal speed either, up about twenty five feet where, somehow, the briefcase flung itself open like a leather-bound butterfly bursting joyously forth from its chrysalis, spewing papers and business cards and a handful of actually pretty nice customized Gadgeco Inc. ballpoint pens raining down upon the crowd. Bunson collapsed, like really collapsed, at free-fall speed, landing jarringly with both of his kneecaps cracking against the concrete and passing out cold. The briefcase then, through no fault of its own, began its descent, still wide open, emptied and appearing vaguely vulnerable in its own right. It landed, of course, gilded corner first, atop the head of the very same small Chinese boy Bunson was responsible for injuring earlier at the stairs of Embarcadero station. Just as with the stairway railing, the boy never saw the briefcase coming. The mother became a wreck immediately, letting loose a new wave of exhausted hysterics from some previously untapped reserve, having obviously endured the same metro debacle Bunson just had. A barrage of devastating sounds spewed out of her, none of them in English, which English-speaking witnesses later remarked really emphasized the horror, making it palpable. The same crowd which had repelled itself from Bunson amidst his derailment only seconds earlier now coalesced protectively around the poor woman. They looked around as she clutched her unconscious son, sobbing sloppily into his hair, and one by one, they noticed the crumpled heap of Ike Bunson, the briefcase owner, not thirty feet away down the platform.
BART police were rang and arrived quickly. Details were fleshed out from cooperative witnesses. Accounts were corroborated by closed circuit cameras surveilling the station. Bunson was attended to by a team of paramedics, eventually coming to, woozy and entirely unaware of the damage he’d inflicted. The paramedics, along with a pair of officers, concluded that he was no longer a threat and also that he was in urgent need of not just one type of surgeon, as they led him clumsily up the escalator to the street where two ambulances were waiting. They kept the reason for the second ambulance from Bunson as they loaded him in through the back and laid him on the gurnee. The doors were slammed shut and they took off for the hospital. The two officers who’d helped Bunson up to the ambulance watched as it sirened out of sight, wiping their foreheads and exchanging sardonic smiles before turning to head back to their cruiser. The bigger of the two pulled a crumpled Marlboro softpack from his pocket. After fishing out and lighting the last smoke in the pack, he caught his boot on a piece of dislodged cement on the sidewalk, tripping oafishly and dropping the just-lit cigarette right through a sewer grate and out of reach. They both heard it fizzle in the murky water below. “Sonofabitch!!” he exclaimed to his partner. “I am having myself one helluva bad day!”