Gooney Bird

futuristic dilemma of a beautiful bus driver

Gooney Bird

 

            The trip from his small flat to his job at the bar and grill beyond downtown San Francisco was about a forty minute bus ride. Stewart worked as a bar-back in one of the older bars in Haight and Ashberry where legends like Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and other biggies of the hippie era spent many a night partying.  Now the area was an antiquated remnant of a long gone era where tourists and punkers were the mainstay to the economy of local merchants. When Stew was a child the traffic of the big city sent huge clouds of smog into the sky, traffic that filled the spider web street system up to the hilt with cars and trucks and buses with hundreds of thousands of people. Like Haight/Ashberry’s days of glory and rebellious ‘mod music, the numbers of people depleted with the rise of the water level of the Pacific and the fall of the American dream in the turn of the century, of the millennia. Still life went on, Stew made his way to “Justines” six days a week so that he could mix the drinks, pour the beers, and assemble the sub sandwiches for businessmen from Colorado and male ‘pros’ that found refuge from the streets in the quaint little tavern.

            Justine’s had an honest to God mahogany bar with matching stools, worn down by an unguessable number of reclining asses that sat in them over seven decades of their use. There was an old, beat up juke box in front of the hardwood dance floor that constantly played music from a golden era of long haired troubadours and grand dames, their pictures gracing the walls and their names forgotten icons from the previous century. That ancient ritual of ‘Happy Hour’ always brought the crowds of people to mingle and coagulate with the beer and the booze. The last lawful smoke, marijuana, was finally legalized after tobacco had made an enormous fall in popularity after the government put enormous taxes on any tobacco products. Pot had become one of the staples of the food and drug administration, one of many “things” the great strong man had to put into place to pull one of many states out of what became known as GDII, the second great depression. Pot’s popularity reemerged among the young and old, the healthy and not so healthy, and the copious weed could be seen growing everywhere just as pot tax collectors, or ‘potashers’ as they became known as, grew as truculently as the new budding product of the state of California. Everyone seemed to have left this place and moved to higher ground where the Colorado flatlands was a much better place to go to after the hurricanes of 2012 and the earthquake of 2022 that sent a huge chunk of the west coast into the sea, drowning the hopes and dreams of millions, as well as over half of the state of California.

            San Francisco was still here though, at least most of it. Thirteen years after the big quake the city started to finally come back to life. Nine AM was early to Stew’s standards, and though he did not have to be at work on the other side of the city until noon he stood at the bus stop patiently. Tending bar was getting old and Stew wanted to become a bus driver because of the better pay, but also because he needed to get away from the booze and pot environment of the bar, especially that stupid old ‘rock’n’roll’ music that constantly played in the place. Sure, he was thirty eight years old, but like his old Uncle Stevo once told him, it’s never too late to better yourself. Stew had been taking classes and kissing asses in the transportation department on the weekends and late at night after getting off work for months now. He stood just a little over six feet tall, his skin carrying the prevalent tan that his African American father had given him, not to mention the slim and muscular frame of his dad, and the big blue/green eyes of his loving mother.

The buses that they came up with weren’t always that reliable but because they were provided by the city they were free. He was getting very familiar with the goofy looking buses and Stew was also getting ready to make some real pay by being one of the drivers. The guys at their transportation department, or who Stew like to call the ‘gee-gahs’ because of their gaudy homosexuality, called these buses “OREALST” or ‘oriels.’ Operational Radiant Electrical Ambient Lateral Steam Transport was what the acronym stood for. Stew liked to think of them as ‘gooney birds’ because of the buses’ appearance. Not only were they painted  puke green, but the windows were rounded, reinforced plastic with mirrored finishes to block out the sun’s heat. The c**k-pit of the things, or what would be more accurately described as the head, was like a bubble that stood out in front of the bus leaving the driver literally out over the street with the rest of the bus trailing behind. The c**k-pit/head was on a shifting plate where the steering column and steering wheels were located. The rest of the bus could be shifted to a right angle where the secondary c**k-pit, or the ‘anus’ as Stew like to think of it, could also be steered; it was like one of those old fire engines that they used to use in New York before 9-11. But they didn’t use the latter configuration as it wasn’t practical, at least that was what the gee-gahs said in the training course. Looking at the configuration schematic it was hard to imagine the gooney bird travelling down the street with a busload of people in the ‘anus’ configuration, scooping up what little traffic it encountered in an otherwise deserted city like a fishing net would scoop up tuna. But the Oriel’s real value was that it pretty much just ran on water, exhausted steam, and was fairly quiet. It was a remnant of an era of hundreds and hundreds of attempts of creating ‘earth friendly’ transportation before GDII and the super hurricanes that took out almost half of the human population.

            Stew was going through the various systems of the ‘gooney bird’ in his mind when the bus actually pulled around the corner and approached the bust stop where he was standing. The driver smiled at him and opened the door for him, located just behind the round section of the c**k-pit she was seated in. Stew had seen her before, and for him it was love at first sight. He hadn’t felt that way about a woman since he was in high school, almost twenty years ago. She had long dark hair that cascaded over her shoulders and a thin, graceful figure that was voluptuous in Stew’s opinion. Her face was creamy white with high cheek bones and big, brown Asian eyes that turned her absolutely gorgeous when she smiled.

Of course Stew lived for that smile so he was careful how he looked at her, how he behaved. He’d asked her out on a date once but she turned him down, blushing and saying she was married and had a child. She didn’t even want to tell him her first name. So Stew fell into his professional mode whenever he was around her, smiling cordially for her but desiring her with every fiber of his heart. When he got onto the bus/gooney bird that he would soon be a driver of, he sat about halfway back on the bus.

As goofy as the bus looked, it got up and rolled on down the street very efficiently with a lot of power beneath its wheels. The old city of San Francisco passed beneath the gooney bird and before Stew’s eyes. He’d got on in front of the Presidio park on Geary and 19^th Avenue and the bus headed south on 19^th. There weren’t many people out on a Saturday morning, but a few people boarded in Chinatown and in Dale City. When they finally got to Portola and 19^th the bus pulled over to the curb where Stew got up and got off the bus. This was where he’d wait for the next but to take him down Portola into Diamond Heights, and finally into the Haight/Ashberry district. It was the long way around, to be sure, but the price was right; free. He smiled up at the beautiful bus driver and she returned his smile as she started to drive the ‘gooney bird’ away when a panel truck sped up from a side street and smashed into the side of the bus where Stew had been sitting. The force of the panel truck pushed the bus over on its side and the front bumper into a brick building above the sidewalk. Luckily the beautiful bus driver was strapped into her seat, but also that the cockpit wasn’t smashed into the brick wall.

            Stew rushed over to the bus and around to the front to see if she was alright, and saw the driver unbuckling her seatbelt. Seeing that she wasn’t bleeding and that she was moving okay, he looked for the other passengers. Two little Asian ladies were sprawled on the side of the carriage of the bus, and four guys who’d been sitting together where picking each other up. After helping the two women leave the carriage and helping to carry one guy who’d apparently broken a leg, Stew looked for the driver but she wasn’t on the bus. After he was able to leave the bus again he saw the pretty driver arguing with a short black man with a bald head and a grey beard.

            “You’ve got to be kidding me, man. No insurance company in the world is going to default on this damage.” The lady bus driver was standing in front of the fat guy who plowed into her gooney bird with her hands on her shapely hips.

            “You gotta’ understand, lady; we call this in and I lose my job!” the bearded fat guy pleaded. “Can’t you just let this one be a city insurance issue?”

            “Issue? Issue!!” She was getting more and more attractive the angrier she became. “You think that after plowing into a city bus, plowing into me like that, that I’m going to keep from doing anything and everything in my power to see you not only lose your license and your job, but to see you behind bars, A*****E!?”

            That’s when the fat, bearded guy made another big mistake (his first was getting out of bed that morning) by trying to punch the pretty driver in the face. As easily as smiling for Stew and melting his heart, she blocked his blow with a sidestep, crouched down beneath him, and threw the short, fat, black fellow against the brick wall the gooney bird had also crashed into. Not only was she an amazing beauty, but her instantaneous grasp of the large truck driver’s weight as he tried to punch her allowed her to send all two hundred fifty pounds or so of him up into the air. After the guy hit the wall with his back, and subsequently fell to the sidewalk, there was now two victims of the accident; the fellow who’d broken his leg in the carriage of the gooney bird, but also the driver of the panel truck who ended up with not only a fractured hip and elbow, but a careless driving charge and a DUI.

            After she deftly tossed the truck driver against the wall, Stew watched her stand up and go into a battle stance, ready to beat the crap out of anybody else she might have to. She looked around, seeing only Stew and the other passengers of the gooney bird, looked back down to the injured truck driver and whispered to herself.

            “Oh s**t.”

            She sat down on the curb near the bus and relaxed, contemplating the damaged front bumper of her gooney bird, her ‘oriel.’ Stew walked over to her and asked her if she was okay.

            “I’m fine sir, just fine.” She spoke calmly, breathing steadily as her temper eased.

            “I called the cops and sent for an ambulance. I saw the whole thing and will happily make a statement.”

            “Thank you, sir.” she replied. “I appreciate that.”

            “My name’s Stewart Collins.” He chose his words with kid gloves. “I’ve been studying with the department of transportation to get my CDL. I would like to drive the Oriel, too.”

            She smiled and looked into his blue eyes. “I know. And I was hoping that you’d buy me a cup of coffee after all this mess is cleaned up. I promise to be nice.”

            She looked at Stew with a calm, affectionate look in her smile. Her name turned out to be Grace, and even though she wasn’t married she did have a little girl, six years old. The next day Stewart called old Gus, the manager of Justine’s. It seemed that Stewart had found other employment and would not be showing up that day either.

 

 

SR Urie

 

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

This very well-written little tale held my interest from beginning to end. My age and life experiences allow me to relate well--San Francisco, the hippy movement, etc. It's nice to know, even though ficticious, that the marvelous city by the bay would survive the big one. (Well, part of it) I saw a couple of typos and one little thing that some say is a "no-no"-- that is popping into Grace's head and reading her thoughts. Overall, "Gooney Bird" is very imaginative and skillfully told.

[Marie Anzalone]

A very imaginative piece of speculative fiction. You are getting better in your devices- of letting the characters' actions speak for themselves, instead of telling us, the reader, how we should feel about them. Your description of the buses was quite interesting, and I enjoyed reading this.