Toolbag Wednesday #18: The Unfriendly Confines of Drunk Bus
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Opening Day is this coming Monday and the Cubs’ first home night game is scheduled for April 21. This of course means I’m on borrowed time before the return of Drunk Bus.
Drunk Bus is what I less-than-lovingly call the late afternoon east bound #152 during baseball season. Every time the Cubs are at home with a 7:05 start time, my commute home turns into a disaster of suburban debauchery. It’s like being in a bar at 2 a.m. Everyone’s wasted, reaching fever pitch, and things are about to get desperate in close quarters. And lucky you, you decided to be the DD sipping water all night.
Only you’re not in a bar and you’re not surrounded by friends. Instead, you’re me and you’re on your way home from work. You’re wearing trouser pants and strappy sandals and are being spilled on by strangers who smell like a brewery because they’ve been imbibing for hours and want you to know all about it. Strangers who don’t seem to understand that you should hang on when you’re standing on a moving bus.
One of my personal favorites are the middle-aged men who are ”reliving the magic of their Wrigleyville Days” by carting their wide-eyed sons and post-divorce girlfriends (with the overworked “cute” pink Cubs shirts of course) downtown and want them (and everyone else) to know they “know exactly where we are” because they can (sort of) list off the cross-streets on the way to Wrigley. They are that smart and that “in the know.”
If I sound jaded and hateful, it’s because I am. I’m not ready for Drunk Bus. I haven’t had enough time to regroup from last year’s longer than usual season. I’m not ready for the girl fights (last year, I personally witnessed two in June alone), nor the trash-talking when a random Sox fan happens to unknowingly board. I’m not ready to sit in bumper to bumper traffic on Addison for an extra 40 minutes. And I’m not ready to hear the bus’s back door alarm wail when the teaming, sweaty, swearing mass of booze hounds first glimpses Wrigley’s lights and begins to repeatedly attempt to push their way off the bus thatverysecond, refusing to acknowledge these fancy things called BUS STOPS.
Now, I know you’re probably saying “Nic, if you chose to live there, then deal with it.” But I don’t live there. I do have to go through it, however, to get to my little sliver of solitude. My oasis of calm. An East Lakeview tree-lined street that’s quiet and breezy and from which I can softly hear the roar of the crowd on a warm afternoon with the windows open. That’s how I like my baseball to be: somewhere just far enough away for me to reflect on it romantically as something of a pastime, not the fate it’s succumb to…an in-your-face Drunk Bus that’s all too real.
yikes. sounds crazy.
but i mean, yanno, the whole “if you can’t beat em join em” thing, right?
“If I sound jaded and hateful, it’s because I am.”
Nicely said. And I share your jaded and hateful feelings. I try to avoid that madness of Wrigleyville, at all costs. But what’s frightening is when that exact madness suddenly appears OUTSIDE of Wrigleyville, and you don’t have sufficient amount of time to mentally prepare yourself.
When that happens, I usually go to my standard coping mechanism, and curl in a ball and suck my thumb. For days…
One of my personal favorites is the genius who takes the Red Line from Belmont to Addison because apparently he can’t walk four blocks. Or the one who, when arriving at the Addison stop, actually questions whether or not that’s Wrigley Field in front of him. Seriously, dude? SERIOUSLY?
I never had to deal with the drunk bus, but the drunk train sucked the life out of me for seven years. I won’t even begin to discuss the parking situation in my neighborhood on game nights.