Part Two: Everyone is Someone's Weirdo

The cat and I are in search of amusement.  “One takes one’s jollies as they come,” she says, handing me my gloves, “and we’ve been rather jolly-less lately.  Let’s go, as you so quaintly put it, looking for weirdos.”

It was her idea that we take a bus ride. 

“When one is tired of the 10,” she murmurs from her perch on my shoulder, “one is tired of life.”

The 10, however, is suspiciously lacking in activity.  We had thought we had struck gold almost immediately when a woman wearing what appeared to be a child’s leggings and a hat in the shape of a panda’s head got on.

And then she struck up a conversation with an elderly man holding a sack of groceries on his knee.

“Nothing to make fun of there,” the cat says.

And then there was the man with the headphones.  He was only with us for six stops or so, but he rapped along with whatever he was listening to for much of that time.  He didn’t know all the words, to be honest, but he was absolutely determined to finish.

“I give him a 4 on the ten-point weirdo scale,” the cat whispers, “It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.”

And then…

He has two bags of laundry, this man, and an armload of clothes on hangers – which he proceeds to hang on the metal bar from which the safety straps hang.

Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, symmetrically striped winner of the 2009 Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes and global bon vivant makes a sound that could only be described as a “chortle”.

“How deliciously tacky,” the cat murmurs. 

The bus fills up.  It is, after all, rush hour now, and soon the seats are full and the people in the aisle are clinging to the hanging straps while getting a face-full of Laundry Man’s shirts.

The bus driver peers into his mirror, watches the back of the bus with interest.

“Excuse me.” 

“Pardon me.”

A large man with a larger satchel attempts to move to the back of the bus, and the man seated next to me is forced to lean toward me.  “Sorry,” he says, over the din.

“That’s okay,” I say.  “You know, I left the house today just to be around people.”

He smiles.  “Well, you got what you wanted.”

I nod.  “I always say, when you want interesting stories and a lot of local color, you ride the 10.”

And like that, the talk around me stops, and several dozen people to turn to look at me.

“… a lot of color…” someone whispers.

And I realize I am the only white person on the bus.

“Oh,” I say, laughing, “that’s not what I meant.  I just meant that when you want to hear people rapping to music only they can hear or have someone string their laundry around…”  I trail off helplessly as my fellow commuters watch, horrified, wondering, no doubt, if I can get both feet in my mouth...

The cat bursts into laughter.

Ding!

“We’ll just be getting off here, if you don’t mind,” the cat says, pushing into the aisle.  "Excuse me.  Pardon me."

Five minutes and several blocks later, we have managed to snag a booth.

“You know,” the cat says, squeezing a fourth lime into her gin and tonic, “I don’t think I’d ever seen you that color of red before.”  And Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, raises her drink.  “Here’s to the weirdo in the stories.  We were hoping to find one today, and we did."  She smiles over her glass.  "We just had no idea that it would be you.”