Unexpected America by Wanjiru Warama

Author:Wanjiru Warama [Warama, Wanjiru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Athomi Books
Published: 2016-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Free Rides

In my quest to break into American society, it seemed wherever I went men were the majority—down-on-their-luck men, scruffy men, sly men—all sorts of men. Take my apartment building for instance: I had not seen women or office-type residents. Most of the men there looked underfed and scruffy, except the manager who seemed overfed and an African-American/Mexican couple down the hall. I had no idea white people could look so beat-up by life like the people I looked at with distrust in Nairobi.

I hungered for human interaction and sometimes chitchatted with the manager. One day he took me into his confidence. "Some of these tenants need to stay in rehab," he said. The majority stayed clean, but might have suffered permanent damage. He fell off the wagon, he said, but worked on himself and got back on. It appeared he replaced his drug habit with food. He shuffled, toes facing outward, after parking his ancient Ford or Chevy, his grocery bags weighing him down on both sides. Within months, he lost his job or quit and became a regular tenant. Years later, I found out excessive eating could qualify a person for a government check. I do not know whether my ex-manager qualified for such a check, but afterward he ate and watched TV in peace, without tenants disturbing him.

Another chatty, scruffy drug survivor became the new manager.

*

The men I met in the larger population varied. Two weeks hardly passed before I witnessed benign or potential mini drama. The worst I had experienced, so far, was an occasional bus rider having a bad day and mouthing off to a fellow rider. If everyone ignored the troublemaker, lack of an audience calmed him. Once I gathered courage and made a comment. My non-American accent produced the same effect, even extracted a questioning look.

Sometimes ignoring a rider or a different accent had no effect on some people. Such was the case one afternoon when I kept company of a man of about twenty with uncombed hair, curled in little balls, wearing uncared-for dirty clothes. He stood about fifteen feet away at a bus stop in Hillcrest, near UCSD Hospital. The bus stop had no bench or canopy, just a post that listed several bus route numbers. I threw the man an occasional cursory look, but his presence did not bother me; three other people stood by waiting for their buses.

A bus stopped about ten feet from me. The three people hurried and entered the bus. The young man followed. He stood on the doorstep, held onto the frame with his left hand and handed over his bus ticket to the driver. The driver told him, in not-so-subtle words, that the bus ticket was yesterday’s. “What? Yesterday’s?” the man asked. He took the expired ticket from the driver and examined it. He then threw his hand up, mumbled something and stepped down to the curb, stroking the ticket between his index finger and thumb. The bus left; the man returned where he stood before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.