S2

So I was back in DC for a day trip interview session with a client. Note to self: Never travel on the Chinese bus when attempting to do business. I know that I've said this before, but now I'm serious. I got up at 7:45 in the morning only to end up pulling into town 20 minutes before my set meeting at 3. And it would take another hour for me to get there due to my stupidity and the general nature of the beginning of rush hour.

I went from Chinatown to McPherson Square via some quick train shifts. There were cabs but as I remembered the S2 bus ride not being that bad, I hopped the public transpo, apparently thinking that I was LL in the Pink Cookies video. Bottom Line: I wasn't. The cute girl with the lovely legs kept her earbuds in the whole time. And I was in no mood for any kind of holleration.

The S2 and I have had a pretty interesting relationship. In some ways if it wasn't for it, my first novel, Dark, might never have been written. S2 chronicled the misadventures of an unnamed hero racing to rescue his homeboy from enigmatic danger only to find out said homeboy had merely fallen asleep and left his phone off the hook. It was classic fiction for the early 90s, fueled by a kind of paranoia that so many of us boys walking the streets of Dodge City carried proudly. That unnamed young man eventually became Thai Williams. And that story put me on the map with my favorite English professor at Morehouse: Dr. Cindy Lutenbacher.

I first took the S2 for my weekly visits to Mrs. Henderson, my algebra tutor. I sucked in math and so my Mom had called in reinforcements. Once a week I took that long trek from downtown up to the Gold Coast, home to many of the kids whose parties and events I'd be welcomed to like I was one of their own.

It still looks the same. But the passengers on a bus that was once generally Black and half-full, is now a commuter tram for the poor Latinos who have inhabited many of the stretches middle-class Blacks have left behind.
Once upon a time up there I made linguini with clams for a girl up there that I thought I loved and her family. Her mother did love me. And that, as usual, was the kiss of death in high school.

As I placed a mic in front of my subject I continued on a journey through the past, back to the days when Marion Barry was the black John Gotti, and when DC was still a place "for us by us". The things I miss the most about public transpo in my hometown are the free transfers and the dollar bill receptors. New York could learn a thing or two from us. But it often seems as if the Rotten Apple enjoys making the same mistakes over and over.

Lasbrey was onto something when she said that something wonderful is on the way for me. She has no idea of how right she is. Out.