The B-Side: Public Transit - The Great Equalizer
Or: Two Times I Watched People Almost Learn A Lesson
A quick note from me, Liam. I have my debut solo comedy special coming out next week. On Tuesday, October 21st.
Look out for Monday’s poat with more info!
A pair of true stories, the first from 2004:
In London, I was walking to Trafalgar Square, heading past a church. It’s probably super-famous, it’s right across the street from the National Gallery, but I had a New York City public school education which means I learned two things:
I don’t know
And more importantly, I don’t wanna know.
There were some young ruffians hanging out on the steps of the Church. A couple more were banging on the window of a bus, challenging a middle-aged black woman sitting at the window:
“You want to come out here and say that? Come on out!” etc.
I don’t know what it it was she’d said to them, but it was clearly insulting enough for them to overcome their paralysing fear of being beaten up by a dumpy woman at least twice their age.
She was nodding, “Yes,” to indicate that she, in fact, did want to come out and say that to them again. And at the same time, and this was what was infuriating them, she was not making a move to do so. This infuriated them further and they ran after the bus as it pulled away. And it reminded me of an incident from my younger days:
I was sixteen, seventeen or so, waiting for a friend in Queens near my high school. A group of young black kids were hanging out near me, just shooting the shit, doing nothing in particular.
A city bus pulled up in front of them, held in traffic. A white kid, looked like a preppy, was in a white shirt and short haircut, is sitting in a window directly in front of this group of kids. He waits until he makes eye contact with one of the black kids and starts making monkey motions at him. Full on sticking out his lower lip, bugging his eyes, and scratching under his arms.
He then mouths the n-word at him and laughs.
We all looked at the black kid to see what he would do. He took a deep breath, said nothing, and walked five feet down to the bus stop and waited for the bus to pull up to it.
The white kid watches him and his face - oh, it was a thing of joy to see. I can only describe it as - imagine the Mask of Comedy melting into the Mask of Tragedy. Imagine watching the blood in someone’s face realize that someone’s about to forcibly evict it, and rush away inwards into the body where it can never be found.
So the bus pulls up, and the black kid cuts the line and jumps in. We all on the street, having followed this story so far, waited breathlessly to watch him beat the shit out of this kid. Instead, we watch him talk to the bus driver and then, a few seconds later, he emerges:
BLACK KID: Yo son, I forgot my bus pass.
HIS FRIEND: Yo n—-a, you stupid.
I wish I could say that the preppy white kid learned some kind of lesson. I wish I could say that. But instead, he laughed and gave the black kid the finger as the bus pulled away.