Machismo Bullshit

I was on the westbound 95 today on the way to a dentist appointment when something all too familiar went down.

One young punk sitting at the back of the bus, two seats from me, yells up at another nearby young punk, we’ll call him cracker, “Yo, you gay? Quit staring at me.”

A minute passes and the cracker gets up out of his window seat, pushing the woman next to him out of hers, and comes to the back sitting down in the perpendicular seat in front of the young punk. The cracker says shit about starting something. They quarrel a bit with words between Lebreton and Bayview, the cracker threatening to fight him on the bus and saying he’s going to follow the young punk off at whatever stop he disembarks at.

The woman sitting next to me, next to the young punk, is trying to talk the cracker down, I too try to interject. Neither are having any of it. One, clearly a cracker; the other, clearly a young punk with too much ego and too little smarts to not antagonize him, though he did shut up and try to brush off what everyone hoped were empty threats.

I’m getting off at Lebreton. I move to the back doors. Behind me waiting for the bus to stop, the young punk. We make eye contact and exchange a look of ‘that-guy’s-bat-shit-crazy.’

I used my OC Transpo app to get the number for security, poised to call should the cracker get off the bus. Which he did.

Somehow I missed the next few seconds and the next thing I saw was the young punk in the cracker’s tackle hold on the landing in the middle of the stairs.

A few people were on the stairs at the time. Young women who understandably moved away and a gentleman in uniform (appeared to be civilian navy style but I’m not good at identifying fatigues). The gentleman tried to pull the cracker off the young punk from the opposite side of the staircase railing. The two idiots were struggling to move, locked in each others grip, each one begging for leverage over the other.

Fearing escalation, I watched from the bottom of the staircase with another group of young women, one had left to find the emergency call box to reach assistance. I helped her describe where in the station the altercation was occurring. When I returned to the scene, another gentleman had arrived and the situation had diffused.

The young punk fled and I watched the cracker being led back down the stairs by the second gentleman. I assured them security were en route though I never saw them.

When I got up to street level, I saw I had just missed my connecting bus which was now driving away through the intersection, thereby making me miss my dentist appointment.

It was a full bus, half of which witnessed the words on board. There was a dozen people in the station that saw the fight break out.

Dear young punk and cracker: Your actions reach further than the end of your nose. They penetrate the psyche of sensitive attuned people around you. Some are desensitized to violence, other refuse to be. I’ve seen a fight on the bus before, one that resulted in blood and chaos. You have no authority to disregard the rights of bystanders to a peaceful non-threatening passage through their day. Cut the machismo bullshit and grow the fuck up.

Most days you wish for an empty bus or a free seat. Some days you just wish the threats are empty or a bus free of bullshit.