Audio By Carbonatix
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to frolic on city buses. Paleolithic paintings from the Lascaux cave in France clearly depict nomadic hunter-gatherers sitting in orderly rows on a giant stone slab the size of a bus, with the one in front wearing a wild boar as a cap. He’s the driver. In the next panel, the driver exits the vehicle to club-pummel an enormous horned goat with nine legs while the nomadic bus riders get excited, as can be deduced by the tiny lines indicating motion and the stunning amount of bloodshed. During World War II, it was well known that General Patton would reward his units for a particularly efficient day in the field by allowing them to play freely on a giant, broken-down double-decker as “The Wheels on the Bus” echoed long and far into those hot Tunisian nights.
Today, man’s obsession with buses continues. If you’re walking down the street and happen to come across an abandoned bus, the only rational thoughts that should cross your mind are a) What is the quickest and most effective way of getting myself on this bus? and b) Should I pretend to be the driver, or the creepy guy who squashes his penis against the glass?
There’s no right answer for b).
John the What’s So Funny Reader knows this, as does his girlfriend, even though she doesn’t have a penis.
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A few weeks back, on the second night of the first blizzard, John and his girlfriend were feeling a little stir-crazy and decided to go out and enjoy the snow. They trekked from John’s Capitol Hill apartment to the Park Tavern, where they had pizza and beers, shot a little pool and enjoyed that convivial pub environment experienced at any bar that managed to stay open through a storm that turned Denver into Buffalo: omnipresent snow, a football team that always loses, everyone two-fisting wings. I like to think that maybe while our heroes were at the Park, completely unrelated, two smoking-hot lesbians had an extreme makeout/grope session in the bathroom that steamed up all the mirrors, and their nipples were very hard from the cold, but I have no way of confirming this. John and his girlfrend left and headed to a friend’s apartment on Pearl — and then, at 12th and Pennsylvania, what did they see? Two abandoned RTD buses.
Like a lighthouse in a white squall, these buses had attracted the lost — and bored. Some neighbors had dragged a keg between the two vehicles, and people sat there in lawn chairs swilling cold beer and enjoying their good fortune. Others had piled on board, where John and his girlfriend snapped a few photos and swung on the bars. “We were just little kids on a jungle gym,” John remembers. “Nobody took a shit on the bus, nobody set fire to the cushions, nobody did anything to the bus but play on it.”
But then a police spotlight signaled that recess was over. John and his girlfriend were exiting the scene, arm in arm, when Denver’s finest caught up with them. “Guess we’ll take you two, as you’re the slowest of the bunch,” one cop said before grabbing John by the collar, handcuffing him and throwing him in the back of a squad car. His girlfriend got the same treatment.
They were charged with trespassing and failure to obey a police officer, and thrown in jail. Four hours later, a friend bailed them out — at $500 apiece — and they were given a court date for last Thursday.
I agreed to meet John and his girlfriend at the courthouse, but as I am an idiot and forgot to ask John what he looked like or tell him what I looked like — cocksure and handsome — we never met up. But I did learn that the clerk in courtroom #122C is a phenomenal bitch and that there are some crackheads whose entire heads appear to actually be made from crack. When John and I later reconnected, he told me that he and his girlfriend had been offered adult diversion by a city attorney — which means the charges will be dropped if they agree to undergo counseling or do some community service. Say, scrub the semen from the seat of a #15 bus. They’re considering their options.
“Maybe this is karma for all the stupid stuff I did when I was a kid,” John concludes. “But I honestly don’t feel I did anything wrong. I find the whole thing pretty ridiculous.”
And what will John do if he ever comes across another abandoned bus?
“Run,” he says with a laugh. “Or go and preach to the people who were partying around it to not get caught.”
