There are commutes and then there are Commutes. Yesterday I had a Commute To End All Commutes. It started out normal: briskly walk from Georgetown to Foggy Bottom (I will forever hold a grudge against those lame-bots who voted against a GT metro stop), just make the 5:45 towards Franconia, suffer through a series of stop and go's (plus the downright bad music blaring, in orchestra, from several iPods), race up the Pentagon escalator and squeeze onto the bus right as the doors were closing.
And yes, I did a fist pump. The bus driver liked that a lot, let me tell you. It took me a second to realize that the guy in the bike shorts in front of me was not going to sit down. He was not going to sit down for many reasons, the major one being the blood streaming down his legs and gushing out of his forehead. "Oh don't worry about that," he said to no one in particular (but sensing, rightly, the stricken atmosphere his mere bloody presence incited), smiling so jovially I wanted to crawl onto his lap and ask for a list of Christmas presents. But there was the issue of all that blood so I refrained.
"There is blood gushing out of your head," said a heavily accented, mustachioed man in a crisp suit, pointing.
"Ah yes, thank you." The man with the blood nodded politely. "I didn't notice." He set his helmet onto the ground and tried to clean his face off. Five real life handkerchiefs proferred from the hands of five real life gentlemen started to wave in front of him: "Take this! Sir, use this! Here! Please!" Blood has a way of making the natives restless. And this was a mess my beloved prepster neighbors needed clean, like, yesterday. [That treacherous phrase is the only way to explain the expressions of frantic "Help This Man" that creased so many of their faces.]
"I will hold your hat," said the mustachioed man, grabbing at the helmet. It was a small gesture, so endearingly wrong, that my grinch-like heart grew 5 sizes. All through this the bloody man kept saying cliches in that same, jovial voice: "It doesn't rain but it pours!" "Need lemons to make lemonade!" The bus driver was crowned with the highest honor: "Just one hell of a guy!"
By the time we got off the freeway the guy's blood was staying pretty well inside of him. We got to our first stop and heard a ponderous clap of thunder. The rain let loose right then and there; the trees looked about ready to snap in two from the wind. The bus driver turned off the bus, lumbered off, and fiddled around on the engine for a few minutes. Exasperated sighs all around. He lumbered back on and we could all tell from his face that we weren't going to like the next words out of his mouth: "Folks, we're going to have to take a little detour." He put our groans in place: "We won't have enough juice to make it if I don't."
The "juice" needed refers to the ever so slight incline of my offramp. When I say "ever so slight" I mean "virtually flat." If we didn't have enough juice to get up that bad boy, we were in sad shape indeed. The detour consisted of a feat of derring-do: instead of just exiting (a straight shoot all the way) our trusty driver thought the best move might be to go around the loop one more time, in effect building enough speed to slingshot our bus up the incline. That's right: slingshot. The man sitting next to me was getting visibly excited as he saw what was about to take place. He was practically jumping up and down in his seat when he proclaimed, to the delight of the whole bus, "I saw them do this on a Star Trek episode!"
Unfortunately, the bus got caught at the stoplight (the guy across from me said, witheringly, "I mean, couldn't he have timed it better?" as if the bus driver could stop time--or at least the stop light). We had no juice. The bus lurched and belched its way past the stoplight. Finally it resorted to a truly comical puttering crawl up the ramp. It shuddered to a stop just yards away from its usual stop. We were all laughing by this time, at the ludicrousness of the whole thing. Three hours later, when I got back from running errands, the good ol' 25C was still there. Its electronic banner flashed its rainbow pixel message: "Not in Service."
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