an excerpt from
    Steve Abee's
The Bus (Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit)
 
 

  I am walking, right now, walking  down Echo Park Avenue, in Los Angeles,
California, walking, making my way by foot, seeing like  I haven’t seen
before, I am walking and looking and I am listening to my feet bounce
off the head of the universal day dreamer, lolly pop wagger and eternity
bragger, the big bagger of loose changes making hay down to Sunset Blvd,
a cross town bus to catch Man its sweet. It’s hot. It’s gooey, my
neighbor Larry  has his binoculars out and is looking into hopefully
undressed rooms, There is the Magic Gas Station and there the house
where the pain in the ass kids live and play,and piss you off just to
walk by,but, whatever, they are cool.
 
    I am walking, right now, walking   in Los Angeles, California, I have a
crosstown bus to catch at Sunset Blvd.  Sweet. Hot. Gooey. Where’s the
cheese? Trash on our sidewalk. A couch on the curb, a stove in the
grass, bike frame by the telephone pole,  still life. I pass the  ranch
where they house many roosters, rabbits  and sometimes goats, and this
amazes me, in the middle of the city, the police academy around the
corner, Dodger Stadium next door, freeways on all sides of us, and this
ranch, sometimes they even have a horse... Church across the street.
White clap board, country style, has services at night, and you can hear
them singing, mournful, horrible, chanting Jesus love songs, screaming
in Evangelical Spanish, breaking  English, the unmistakeable rhythm and
drive of the saved, the convicted, convicted to the bloody flaming lips
of  Jesus, The Christ, The Savior, The Prince of Heaven, the kind
lunatic of fire and peace,   the chant is unmistakeable, yet understood
only by the faithful,  and I,  walking in the shadow of bamboo and
rooster huts, have that  faith,  know what they are healing, what wound
they are sinking into, I know. I try to remember something, I don’t know
what it is. I check my pocket,  bus cash, keys.
 
  Batey Market at the bottom of the Del Mor apartments,  the Batey
Market, little market, glass bottles of Coke and Squirt, Hecho en
Mexico,    childhood,  sweet with secrets,  sad and delicate secrets, a
mystery gas seeps out the door and around the gum stains and the woman
on the payphone, it humps her leg, it climbs, the brick wall, it opens
the window to the rest of the world, the rest of the world yawns and
turns the page, changes the channel, opens a door somewhere, anywhere,
all at once, mystery shapes meaning,there have to be places you see but
don’t know, that you are in but never own, the woman at the Batey waves.

 Scraped faced drunk ass man, face looking like a flat tire,
Cambodian reading a ticket the cops just gave him, paint peeling stucco
house, windows of wood cracking and grass growing crabby weeds between
the cracks of the cement and a sidewalk bent up broken with roots and
roots and a shopping cart in the street, what about gun fire, what about
the severe and the bent... just a shopping cart in the street, kids
running around playing tag between the cars,Junkies do  the hand off,
very serious ,but the people at the bus stop don’t care, there’s a yard
full of orange nesturtums, stray dogs looking for a drink,  the streets
belong to Mexico , Los Angeles, the hills surround the street,  green in
the rain, bulging with weed secret lots and groves of mixed trees
Eucalyptus, Pine, Cypress, Pepper and Palm, these hills, bending and
burying people in their own backyards, are old, these hills, house the
freak dreamers, You can feel it, it’s hippy like that around here,
people making something, a pot of beans, a bucket of chicken, painting
faces on the ceiling,   it’ so pretty with it’s big dogs and little dogs
and little girls in pink mud spot dresses, and good looking girls and
fat old men and cowboys staring at her,  and I can’t help but feel that
these hills were someting important to the first peoples that lived
here, too. You can feel it, hills, shade  groves just up and  looking
over the basin. You can feel the hills,stand up, bend around each other
like walruses or sea lions, looking at the sea, watching the city spread
out over the plain, cursing the men, blessing the children.

 I’m not even thinking.I’m doing something else. I’m swimming. Yeah,
that’s it, swimming in the brain waves of sparrows and the little super
sexo magazine rack across the street, looking for keyholes in the
sidewalk, smelling the aromatic curves of the Pioneer Chicken and the
Phoenix Express Chinese fast food. House of Spirits, behold that sign of
neon, blip blip clouds of smoke from the house’s chimney   It is that
time of rush hour day.  It is full, full tilt a whirl spinning in the
hands and eyes of us people in the cross walk, wino, mother, Pep Boys,
Homeboy, fine art maker, downtown Politico, Raza lover, families piled
on top of shopping carts, going to the laundry, people getting tamales
at Celaya, or down further,fish plate at Pescado Mojado, and some hot
looking girl in a mini skirt and a gangster boyfriend, moving like a
radio’s in her head, and please note that  lonesome Heavy Metal brother,
just walking down the street, eloquent destruction in his mind,and
nothing in his pockets, nothing at all, Buddhist Monks in Saffron robes
waiting for the bus,  an old lady, Puro India, walks her grandaughter to
the 99 cent store, the little one’s mother is in night school, learning
English,  bus empties, the neighborhood kid who made it to UCLA, gets
off the #2 , crossed more worlds in that hour and fifteen minute ride
than Shakespeare dotted “I”s, alright, Jeffery Cruz pop locks in the
flood light spot light sidewalk grandstand,he goofs, bites it, Cynthia
laughs at him, “Haha, you suck.” She’s his sister.  Echo Park, lovely
and mean as hell. The House of Spirits,Pioneer Chicken, Pioneer Market,
Pioneer Liquor there used to be, liquor store sidewalks crowded with
gunned down ghosts.  Kids everywhere, yelling “fuck you,” “Where you
going?” from  beat up stairways,  across the street, drunks up against
the wall,any wall, every wall, drinking, drinking, drinking, Banda falls
from a window, somewhere up the stairs, Hip Hop Seville, one-third paid,
booming loud “ 69 69... Pussy for me and Pussy for you.” Echo Park
behind the wheel,  blue lights, red lights, yellow  lights, just coming
on in a full glow sun setting sky,  a drunk eye at the corner, gotta be
after five,   ECHO PARK AND SUNSET   in full tilt bloom, full human dew
drips, elote corners, mango sugar sticks, Indian dreams of naked
sunlight, Pachuco visions of holocausts, tender youngness in a halter
top crossing the crosswalk for days, the tender eyes of love, homework
forgotten, popsicles for sucking, while watching the world become the
world. Everyone watches. Then they cross and car after car after car
goes by.

The Bus will be published by Incommunicado Press fall 1999.

Swab the Deck        Aye Eye Captain