I've now taken about 50 bus rides between New Paltz and New York. Most buses can seat up to 44 but only carry, say, 30, and some of those folks are traveling together. So, to my happy surprise, most of the time I've been able to sit alone.
On occasion I've struck up a convo with a person from the New Paltz area who has given me suggestions about cool places to visit or cool things to do, and it's always encouraging to chat with other commuters who tell me that they have taken the bus for years with no regrets. I've met a really nice tutor named Bill, and yesterday I had a great time talking with a guy who knew all the cool places to hike, but today I had my coolest bus buddy yet. His name is Francisco, and he's a professional wrestler.
I know that I would never have struck up a conversation with this guy had the bus not been 20 minutes late. I started by asking him about the delay, since he'd been on since at least Kingston, and before I knew it, we were comparing tattoos. Francisco's left hand sported an Ace bandage, and he explained that he'd hurt it in a bout several months back; part of his trip today was to see a physical therapist. Wait...his PT session today was for his shoulder, which was injured when his car smashed into a tree at 50 mph when the brakes gave out. Amazingly, his only injuries were two broken toes and a bruised shoulder even tho the car was totalled and the airbag didn't open till 90 seconds after the crash! The very picture of this poor guy sitting dazed in his crumpled second-hand Volvo when the airbag finallly went off; well, I was almost crying from laughing. He went on to say that he's got two suits pending against the garage: one for the air bags that didn't open in time, and the other on account of the mechanic who caused his brake pads to melt off as he sped down a twisting, rural two-laner, nearly plunging to his death off the side of the mountainous road. When he realized that his brakes were shot, he had the presence of mind to say a little prayer and aim for the tree rather than crash into a car ferrying a mom and her kids in the oposite direction. The punchline is that he's being sued by the owner of the tree. And maybe it was his tattoos, his accent, or his bling, but after he crawled to a cop who happened to be talking to a local, he almost got arrested. The officer put him in the back of the car and only hours later took him to his house, dropping him off there and telling his family that he might need medical attention.
I was starting to talk about my near-death occurrence involving my unicycle and a school bus and how it made me appreciate life when he mentioned that this car accident was only the 6th time he'd been touched by death. Some of the earlier brushes involved other people (he lost friends on 9/11), but he has awakened in a hospital bed at least two other times. The more recent one was fairly common and involved being a passenger in a car driven by reckless friends, but the other one was pretty wild: At ten, he'd been struck by an 18-wheeler while on vacation when the drunk truck driver hadn't seen him walking on the side of the road. The force of that impact sent him flying down the road, landing in an ugly heap with his nose near his ear and his arm broken in four places; he spent three years in a wheelchair and went thru the first of what proved to be a lot of physical therapy.
Back to wrestling, I mentioned that a good friend of mine works for Vince McMahon, founder of WWE (one of the wrestling federations). We chatted about wrestling, and I was particularly interested to hear about how some wrestlers cut their heads and faces before a bout so that they'll bleed a lot during the match.
Amidst this discussion, suddenly our coach driver hit the brakes to avoid a truck that had slowed down too fast. Some of our fellow riders screamed, reminding me that in all of my rides, no passenger has ever been carsick. To this, Francisco contributed a story from his upbringing in Brooklyn. He'd been on the school bus when one of the other 6th graders had crapped his pants. The driver had tried to put up with the stench for a long time but finally pulled over. He took the smelly boy, Bob, off the bus, went with him to a store nearby, and bought him some clean clothes with his own money. But the story had a bitter (or should it be 'pungent'?) ending; the boy was teased mercilessly till he graduated high school. Francisco still calls him Bob the Poop.
This reminded me of a similar story from my high school. There had been a nerdy boy who had fallen in love with a girl who was not part of the pretty-girl clique. The affair went noticed only on the fringes of our high school radar until a love letter turned up in which our hapless protagonist professed his love with the unusual statement, "I want to blowtorch your panties off." This comment haunted him till graduation, just like Bob the Poop's nickname, but Blowtorch had the last laugh when he inherited part of his dad's fortune, making him one of the richest people on the planet.
Francisco and I had more in common than wrestling, aching left hands, and moving from Brooklyn to the New Paltz region in search of a better life. It turns out that my companion also has a little girl, and her name also starts with M-A. In fact, Maya was born the exact same day as my little Maeve. Wow. And while I started a unicycle club, he's the founder of a wrestling group. I'm a lapsed Jew, he's a lapsed Catholic. Francisco is my part Italian, part Puerto Rican doppleganger. Who knew?
Best of all was how much Francisco sounded just like my favorite comedian ever. Mitch Hedberg apparently died nearly two years ago, but here he was talking to me about priests who child-molest children and airbags that pop open only after the driver is nealy dead. Francisco and Mitch have the same unusual rhythm and pregnant pauses to their speech and both lace their sentences with the occasional Anglo-Saxon term for fornication or feces.
Francisco said that he was expecting to travel back to Kingston at 7:30, and I was looking forward to chatting with him some more, but he didn't show. I look forward to seeing him next week.
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