Tuesday, September 21, 2021

ATTEMPTED HIJACK OF A TRIMET BUS-UPDATED

 

So this is a tale that I never wanted to ever have to share. But here I am. The scariest moment in my life, up until now. TLDR: it’s not gonna happen. I don’t even know where this story is going to end right now, so you’ve gotta read every fucking thing. Sorry, my friend. My birthday last year was spent driving back from the coast when our skies were so red it looked like an apocalypse video game. We had spent the last several days camping on BLM land and without service to the rest of the world. Our tent and poop bucket was erected right under a “deadly tree” (yeah, we are optimists). Thankfully we ventured into Roseburg for some produce and realized that we needed to head indoors for the foreseeable future. We actually spent that evening getting as drunk as we could in Newport and then paying some stranger $20 to drive us up the hill to our hotel. Thanks, Seth. You and your hoarder Subaru are were the best! So this year I spent my birthday with good friends celebrating their multi-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars housewarming party. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but we support our friends, right? I can bet that one of those friends reads this and they have no idea that I am BridgeCityBus. That’s a really good possibility, knowing my friends. (9/11 birthday! I turned 18 that day, so my childhood and adulthood has been so precisely separated by this date.) I also spent that birthday driving the 2 and I put out an actual fire at a bus stop. My inner monologue became, “who needs candles when you can put out an actual fire?” Yeah, it was exciting. This is the story of the week after my birthday, hat so happens to me by ex-husband’s birthday, September 18th. Anyways…. I feel like I need to give you an outline if you’ve gotten this far. It’s going to be a long-ass story and I have a lot to tell. So here’s the outline: Dude uses words to hijack bus. I stop and dude tells everyone not to leave. Me, and those who don’t leave (and stay in solidarity to me), spend a grueling 13 minutes with this crazy dude waiting for police. At 12 minutes I lose my shit, yell and sob and beg. Cops finally show up and dude gets off my bus. Cops don’t say one word to me, or ask me any questions. We all have a good little survival party and I get ice cream and get one side of a missed connection story. Andre, if you’re reading this, you were my lifesaver that day!! You’re fucking awesome and I hope to see you again! Okay…. So here is the long winded fucking story with every detail that I can remember: So I was driving the 2 to Gresham on Saturday. I wasn’t expecting much to happen, since the last Saturday I put out an actual fire on the side of the road. It was the 3rd time I’ve used a fire extinguisher this summer. It was my birthday, too, so I just assumed that that was my ultimate birthday candle that someone had left on SE Division and 87th. May as well hope for the best, right? Anyway, I am just driving 30 mph east on Division, and some guy walks past both yellow lines (you know we have a ‘new’ yellow line, right? If not, please get familiar with it!) and he very assertively tells me, “Don’t stop the bus! Keep driving!” I, of course, begin looking for any hazards. Is he asking me to stop because people are running after the bus? No. Am I by a bus stop and there is someone that I shouldn’t board? No. I am not by any bus stop. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening, other than this guy barking orders at me. So I find a safe place to pull over and I stop and open my doors. My thinking at the time is, “If this bus is getting hijacked, I will at least give an opportunity to folks who want to get off.” A few folks did just that. I remember one guy saying something like, “I’m not sticking around for this shit,” and bouncing out the back door. He wasn’t the only one. I wish I could have joined him. So the bus was stopped and the doors were open. Angry Dude (we will call him ‘AD’ from here on out) confronted me about why I stopped and turned and told everyone on the bus, “Don’t get off the bus!” I later learned that at this point, he body blocked a woman and her teenage daughter from leaving out the back door. The words that he decided to use in this moment had me and everyone remaining on the bus in fucking high gear for survival. He asked me why I wasn’t moving. As I was keying in messages to dispatch, I told him that I did not feel safe with him on the bus and that I needed him to get off. This entire time, I’m looking him up and down and waiting for a weapon to come out. I must note here that this guy was tatted from his face down to his ankles. He has an “LA” tat on one of his calves and he was dressed in all loose black clothing. While driving the bus, I don’t really ever care what you look like. I will say “good morning” and “thank you” to everyone and I trust you to be copacetic until you prove me wrong. Portland is full of the weird and reformed (or unreformed), and I am willing to serve everyone. As long as you’re cool with me and your other bus mates, I’ll get you to where you’re going. I don’t even care about fare anymore. Just be a kind human. So I get ahold of Dispatch (I’m gonna try to link the calls below). I play it as cool as I can. They tell me that police are on their way and I just assume it’s “lights and sirens”. So I tell them that I’m “good” for now. They offer to stay on the line with me, but AD is standing right over me and almost mocking what I’m saying. So the best that I think I can do is say, “Great, police are on their way.” In retrospect (and it always is), I probably should have been up front with Dispatch as far as what he said, or I should have hit the silent alarm to speed the response up. In my head, I was trying to stay as calm as I could until the police showed, hoping it would be within minutes. Well, it took 13 minutes. In those 13 minutes…. My follower showed up. I made an announcement to my current passengers that if they needed to get home, I would wave that bus down so that they could keep moving. Mama Bear (the woman who was body blocked earlier at the back door with her teenage daughter), stated loudly, “You’re scaring the driver! I will not leave her on the bus with you alone!” No one moved. They all stood in solidarity with me. All 6 of them. AD continued to argue with each individual on my bus including myself. At this point, I didn’t really think that he understood the impact of his first words to me and the passengers, but his behavior was still very unpredictable and I had to assume that he may have weapon. I also worried that maybe another passenger had a weapon and that things may get out of hand within seconds. My follower passed me up and I waved him down, giving my passengers a second chance to jump board. It was after 6pm and I’m sure everyone wanted to get home. They didn’t want to leave my side. But in the meantime, I got a few words off at coworker. Something like, “Police are on their way. I’m good. My passengers won’t leave me alone with him.” For some reason this just triggered the tears. Everything between the brim of my hat and the top of my mask was wet and streaming. The deep breaths came and I could hold them. The 12 minutes of looking for a weapon and thinking of the worst just hit its climax and I lost it. “GET THE FUCK OFF MY BUS RIGHT NOW! GET OFF! GET OFF THE FUCKING BUS!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH ON A DAILY BASIS?! I HAVE COWORKERS WHO HAVE HAVE BEEN SHOT AND STABBED AND BEING SPIT ON IS A NORMAL THING. RIGHT NOW YOU ARE SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF ME AND EVERYONE HERE. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO. JUST GET OFF THE BUS! PLEASE!” At that point I was sobbing through my mask and just trying to plead with him to leave, while also knowing that I crossed the ultimate line of professionalism. I was hitting more buttons for Dispatch, stuck on the idea that I would just call for “lights and sirens”. As I was doing this, I watched a cop car mosey on up my way and put their lights on to make a u-turn to park behind me. Fucking finally! 13 minutes later. AD must have seen them pull up, because he finally stepped off. (I also must note here that every “problem child” that I have had on the bus has disembarked before the cops showed up, with the exception of a couple really sleepy dudes. The aggressive ones always seem to make their way off the bus before cops are even called—so this was already unusual.) As soon as AD gets off the bus, me and the 6 other passengers have a huge collective sigh of relief. I think the first words out of my mouth was, “That was so fucking strange. What the fuck?!” We had a collective, awkward chuckle and then I said something like, “I quit smoking two days ago. What terrible timing!” Mama Bear said, “Girl, I gotcha. I’ll smoke for you!” So I stepped off the bus with her and stretched my legs for what seemed like the first time in ages. Mama told me that she doesn’t rely on transit, but she has just decided to take her daughter on the bus that day to mix things up. She told me that she had been raised in a rough environment and showed me the knife she keeps on her when she rides, joking about how her daughter asked her what it was for earlier. Little does she know, her voice during those 13 minutes gave me the power and hope that I needed to get through it. I like to remember that we hugged each other at some point during the smoking session, but I can’t quite remember. I feel like I got a hug from her. She said something like, “I couldn’t do your job because if shit like this.” My response was, “people like you make it the best job ever.” And I mean that. 100% I went back to my driver’s seat after talking to Mama Bear, and everyone was still there. I wish I had a better memory for faces and voices at that point, but I was totally consumed by adrenaline. I do remember a sweet young gal offering me her pepper spray. She told me she had 7 more at home and that she always carried on the bus. I responded with, “no, I can’t carry any weapon, and pepper spray would be a bad idea on a bus.” I told her about how we have the phone handset as a weapon if we need it and that some old school drivers still have the punchers hanging off their belts. Going back once again….As soon as AD got off the bus, there was one guy who was itching for food. He had sat there with all of us for a long, stressful moment when he could have just gotten the other bus had been home by then. When the coast was clear, he hightailed it over to Dairy Queen, hoping to catch the next bus. Well, with all of the hoopla and agitation, we forgot about the poor guy. My road supervisor had already shown up and did her best to calm me down. I had my moment with Mama Bear and Pepper Spray Gal. We all had our moment to briefly debrief about this crazy thing that happened that none of us could really put a finger on. My follower’s follower finally showed up and picked everyone else up…..except for Dairy Queen Dude. Andre showed up 30 seconds after the bus left and he was defeated! He had a bag full of food and a large strawberry shake. I joked and asked where my shake was. He pulled out a caramel sundae and handed it to me with a spoon, while telling my supervisor that I “did good”. With my supervisor’s permission, I sat on the bus with Andre and ate my ice cream while on the clock. At that point in time, I should have been on my way home. But instead, I got to shoot the shit with this awesome guy that moved here a year ago from Louisiana. He assured me that he got everything on video, “including you crying.” I begged him to cut out the part of me losing my shit if he decides to put it on YouTube. He assured me that wasn’t what it was for. It was “just in case shit got real.” I’m so glad it didn’t. We both got to get that crazy moment off our chests, and he also told me that he has had a crush on Pepper Spray Gal for a while now, but doesn’t know how to approach her, because, “people who talk to people on the bus are weird, apparently.” Pepper Spray Gal—if you’re reading this, give Andre a chance if you can. He seems like a solid dude. And Andre—thanks so much for being that friend when I needed one. And Mama Bear: I hope I can be as badass as you are someday. You are the fucking shit! And to everyone else on my bus on Saturday: thank you for everything. And thank you for sticking with me and your fellow passengers in solidarity. It means more than you can ever know. You folks are the reason I decide to get up and go to work every day. I’ve been super revved up and scared all weekend. I was driving the 30 earlier today, from Clackamas to Estacada. There is almost zero potential for easy shit on that run, and that is the only reason I was able to show up today. But one guy walked up right behind me to ask for a courtesy stop—nothing unusual—and I was left sweaty and scared for no reason. I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off to work through this shit so I can be solid when I go back to work on Wednesday. I’m gonna do my best to be good to myself. In the meantime, if you feel safe to back up your operator during these crazy, scary times, more power to you!! We can’t do our job without you level-headed folks. You mean the world to me.
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