The Bus After the Next One

Yesterday began just like any other day. I woke up. I came to work. I worked. I ate too many office Christmas treats. I got ready to go.

Late in the afternoon, I started to hear the pitter-patter of precipitation on the air-conditioning unit that hangs outside the window.

"Great," I thought. "It's gonna be a long trek home."

I slipped into the Subway right outside my building, over-sized hood up, ipod on, completely oblivious to the 6 seconds of rain that may or may not have fallen on me.

2 stops on the uptown R later, I took the underground tunnel into Port Authority, dodging the elements all together. At this point, I had no idea what was happening outside.

As I walked through the terminal, I could sense that something was wrong. The lines were too long. Longer than they should be, even for a rainy day. People were tense. Something was up.

I got on my usual line at gate 7, with all the familiar faces: jerky Wall Street guy, good looking skater guy in black hat who I always try to start a friendly conversation with but never do, pretty Spanish woman in boots. As you already know from my previous profile on commuting, while we smile and nod at each other as we scoot down the aisle of the bus, that's as far as it goes. We never speak, so these shallow descriptions are all I have.

6:20 came and went, but the bus did not. 6:30, 6:50, 7:00, 7:20. At this point the lines had circled in on themselves and wrapped around the terminal so many times, they were completely indecipherable from one another.

Then the announcements came: "Due to inclement weather, we are currently experiencing delays on all inbound and outbound traffic." Good looking skater guy gave a look like, "wonderful." I knew we were in for an even longer than usual night of not speaking.

The woman behind me looked worried. "What does that mean, delays? How long will we all be here? HOW WILL WE GET HOME TONIGHT!!!?!?!?!" She was yelling, and making a scene, and personally I thought she began to panic a little to early, but I went with it.

A mob began to form around the Academy Bus dispatchers. The mob was angry. And terrible things like "group-think" and "mob-mentality" began to take shape.

"EVERYONE NEEDS TO JUST CALM DOWN, AND STOP CLOSING IN ON US. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE OUT THERE. I GOT DRIVERS FROM JERSEY STUCK IN TUNNELS IN BROOKLYN, AND DRIVERS FROM UPSTATE ON BACK ROADS IN GREENWICH. IT'S MADNESS. MADNESSSS!!!!!"

With that outcry, even the people who were keeping it together lost their cool. The Academy dispatchers never had a chance. The mob closed in around them and bludgeoned them to death with their own Walkie-Talkies and clipboards.

That's when it started to get out of hand. First the looting. The crowd raided the Hudson News stand and made off with every issue of Good Housekeeping, US Weekly, Just 18, and Latin Inches. Along with all the pocket sized reading lamps and Triple-A battery packs they could find.

The Auntie Anne's Pretzel Stand employees rapidly tried to roll down their metal-panel wall while simultaneously sling-shotting cinnamon-sugar pretzel sticks at people to hold them back. It was so naive. Didn't they know the aroma would only draw MORE people??

Meanwhile, upstairs at Leisure Time Bowling: Spirits and Lanes, angry commuters carelessly took to the lanes for free without the proper footwear. All Hell was breaking loose, and it showed no signs of stopping.

I survived most of the massacre with a few other people inside the men's bathroom on the main level. I was just whistling and tapping my foot to pass the time, and for some reason that seemed to draw looks from the other men. Weird.

During the next hour, the food supply dwindled fast, so did the heat. The Pepperidge Farm display in Duane Reade was completely cleared out, save for the Apricot Veronas. No one ever liked those.

People were freezing, hungry, and the body count started to climb. First the elderly went. Then the children. The larger commuters survived longer, living off their own stored energy and body heat for a few extra hours.

It got very quiet. You could hear the moans and cries of the almost dead, and the tears of the hopeless. "So this is how it ends," I thought. I sat outside the door of Gate 7 for a while, just thinking about things.

My eyes began to fade. So... cold... so... ridiculous...
















Suddenly, a voice.

"Anyone going to Lincroft? Parkway Express 109?"

That was my route. By the grace of God, one bus had made it through. I thought I'd have to tear my way through crowds of people, but there was no mad rush to the door, because only a handful of us were still alive. I made my way onto the bus alongside pretty Spanish woman in boots, and skater guy, but Wall Street guy didn't make it.

As we rode home in silence, I wondered: would anyone be there to greet us? Was the Port Authority apocalypse a mirror of the outside world? Or was it just a taste of things to come...

On some level, maybe this is the universe telling me I'm not cut out for this. Or maybe it's just something telling me to speed up my moving plans and get into the city sooner rather then later.

My good friend Maura recently decided that New York was in her future. All this time I thought I'd been living it already, but I'm starting to realize that commuting doesn't mean the same thing as NY. And until I make the move onto the island itself, I'll always be waiting for the bus after next...