We were riding south on the Clark Street bus on one of those hot, dizzy afternoons. Not much talk, everyone floating in various stages of wakefulness. Mostly male, mostly young. One of the exceptions was a middle-aged man with an avalanche of graying hair, overdressed in a stained, wounded blue suit. He was of indefinite ethnic lineage, probably a European but long enough in America to have lost the major signs of his nationality, not to mention his dignity. His hands were crawling suggestively around the hips of his companion, a much younger woman whose harsh, angular face was intensified by a permanent look of bitterness; even her occasional smiles looked painful. He kept whispering in her ear, or maybe he was just tasting it, always getting the same enervated response, a grim expression of acceptance.
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“Put it out, old dude,” snarled a young dude sitting next to me. In answer the old guy blew a fat, heavy cloud of smoke in our direction.
But the moment had passed. The old dude was already off the bus, dragging the girl with him toward the doorway of a drugstore. He paused as the bus swam by, flipped us all the finger, and called out his parting shot: “Look for me on TV when I win the lottery, you assholes.”
“You ever win?” This sarcasm came from the young dude next to me.
Both blacks scowled. The worn-out guy next to me shook his head in what was already a familiar gesture of contempt. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Yeah, it says Ron on your T-shirt.”
“You know,” said David, plunging fearlessly on, “if I won the lottery I’d buy that house in California, the one that William Randolph Hearst built, you know, the guy in Citizen Kane. It’s so big the state of California can’t even pay for its upkeep. It’s got something like 52 bedrooms.”
