Roger and Me

Mission 1. Hook up with someone as old as my mom (54) and as young as my sister (20) in a month.
Mission 2. Live a completely gay lifestyle (without the gay sex) for a month.
Mission Three: Live without an apartment for a month.
Mission Four: Reconnect.

I’ve been a new person for the past week or so. But I’d been that person before. Now, I was subtly becoming a recurring character in my own life, and something needed to change. I needed freedom. I needed variety.

I needed to get off the fucking bus.

In the beginning, it was adventurous. There were new characters in my life, and they were called commuters. For the first time I did not have the distance of a car window or yellow line to seperate. No, with these people, I was alive and in-between, smelling their knock-off cologne, listening to their awkward cell calls, reading an article over their shoulder. I was on a bus. And I hated myself for it.

I'm not the ideal person for public transportation. First of all, I'm decent looking. Most people that ride that thing are homeless or hags. So the eye-candy factor was way low. If I wanted, I could have ruled the bus. Gone all Lord of The Flies on their ass, but I wasn't there to ethnocentrically upend the busses class system. I was just passing time between cars.

Honestly, the bus got old fast. I’m generally on my own schedule, and am flawed with details. I was lost more times than found. But, when I finally did force myself to understand the system, I felt a strange sense of accomplishment. And that realization made me sad for myself. I was uplifted because I understood the fucking Blue Bus. What happened to the guy in the Porsche? The one with the cool beard.

In other cities, the bus can work. But here, it is best enjoyed in the abstract. As a social commentary rather than an actual practiced method of transport. In LA, the bus serves as the idyllic answer to an urban transportation problem. But if you take it beyond the sound byte and into the day-to-day, that manifestation can quickly deteriorate to the banal.

There were people on the bus who spent the whole time singing its praises. They scoffed at the car-enclosed drivers, slow-motioning their way to work. Most were professionals, but occasionally, there was a warm breeze of urine and a burlap-covered wino followed.

"Maybe this would force more people to take the bus, to stop all this traffic," I thought. In mere days, I was turning into a public transportation activist, someone with a fucking cause. I hate causes. But as I was connecting and diverging with this strange cult group of bus groupies, I felt myself slipping away, becoming them. Becoming obsessed with fossil fuels.

My God, I started calling gas, fossil fuel.

Then there was Roger, one of the only commuters that allowed me to break into his peculiar circle. He lived a block away and worked a few streets down. He was on the bus every morning, with a brown paper bag and the LA times curled under his arm. He also carried a “bus kit” that included, among other things, a power bar, travel baby wipes and a white, thin towel. Roger had a thing for germs, and always wiped his seat and the back of the seat in front of him. Then, to be doubly sure, he laid the towel as an additional barrier. This process took a whole two minutes. In bus time, that is an eternity. But no one seemed to mind. He was a fixture, and every time I took that bus, the driver and passengers waited patiently for Roger to exorcise his demons and the busses germs. Then we were off.

But after a few days, the novelty of Roger’s towel and the whole bus scene wore off. Sure, I could live without a car, but the life I was living was not real. I was not going to yoga or on dates or playing basketball. I put my life on hold to make the bus work, but really nothing was working. And as much as I wanted to seem rebellious by not needing a car, I didn’t want that to be the way I identified myself. I like driving, heading up the coast or down the 10 for some greasy El Cholo.

The bus began to regress me to the life stage when I didn’t have a car. When I had no small-town escape. Where I had no freedom. I had no desire to reconnect to that adolescent stage in my life, so this past weekend, I finally pulled the trigger on a car.

I had a hard-on for an old Toyota Land Cruiser for a while, but I became more and more concerned as I slid down the purchase funnel. Seems these cars have developed a bit of a cult following. I didn’t want a car like that. A car that strange gear heads talk to me about. My Porsche was a dime a dozen. Every prep-school kid or mid-level agent with an expense account had a fucking Boxster. But this was different.

I also worried about the coolness factor. I didn’t think I wanted to be extreme cool or grunge cool. In fact, I didn’t want to be cool at all. So, I was a bit worried about that. Plus, these cars were commanding some serious coin, and they were almost 30 years old. I really couldn’t see myself laying down that kind of cash for a car that old. I needed something a bit more reliable. So Saturday, I swore off the Land Cruiser and was back to the drawing board, with no idea what I wanted. No idea how I was going to get it. I grabbed a beer and got lazy, again. Maybe the bus wasn’t so bad, I thought. And after beer three, I was convinced of that.

Then, the phone rang.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Did you get one?” the voice asked, with marked anticipation.

“No,” I said, changing the channel. I let the phone go silent.

“Oh, goodie, Val from work is trying to sell her car, and I told her you might be interested.”

I woke up.

“What, Trace, the blonde mom chick? What the fuck are you saying that shit for without asking?”

“I don’t know, I just thought it would a better car for a 30-year-old than a dirty old Jeep”

“It wasn’t a Jeep, and what are you doing saying ‘Goodie.' Are you high?”

“I just came back from a late lunch at el Coyote, I’m a little buzzed.”

“Yea, me too. The buzzed part.”

“Rob, why are you cranky, don’t you even want to know what kind of car it is?”

“No.”

“You’re lazy. You know, I figured out how to take that stupid ring tone off your phone, but I’m not doing it. I’m giving you tough love, Rob. You need to stop being such a boy. You need to stop being lazy and get a car.”

“I’m drinking beer. Can boys do that? Not if they're not 21 or have a fake ID, Huh? Huh? Take it back.”

“I’m coming over, slacker.”

“We’re going to dinner at Stephs in like, a few hours.”

“What, so that means I can’t come over now?”

“No, but-“

‘Hey, Rob…Fuck you, I’m coming over. And we’re going to see her car, and you’re going to buy it.”

“But, I’ve got lounge shorts on.”

“Then you can lounge in the passenger seat.”

"All right, where does this chick live?"

“Calabasas, we can take the coast. Bring your checkbook. And if you buy this car, I’ll change your ring tone.”

“Are you getting some kind of finder’s fee?”

“Stop it, get dressed and I’ll be over in fifteen.”

“Fine," I said, knowing I would never win this battle. She was right. I was a bit lazy.

“Don’t you want to know what kind of car it is before we leave?”

“No,” I said , hanging up, “see you in a few.”

I really didn't.

So I unlounged and unwrapped, grabbed my checkbook and said goodbye to that horrible time in my adolescence when I was at the mercy of my mom’s taxi. And I quickly discovered the best part about reconnecting is discovering the things you never wanted to connect with in the first place.