Just slip out the back, Jack.
Make a new plan, Stan.
No need to be coy, Roy.
Just listen to me.
Hop on the bus, Gus.
No need to discuss much.
Just drop off the key, Lee
and get yourself free.
- Paul Simon
The proletariat chariot ain't for everybody.
Yeah, there are still those among us who turn up a collective nose to riding the Metro or the TANK. I used to be one of those public transportation snobs.
But years of living in the 'burbs, an eternity away from everything, changed all that.
The No. 20 Tri-County line was my first experience. On it were a lot of passengers like myself: suburbanites commuting from bedroom communities to the big, scary metropolis that was and is downtown Cincinnati. Yeah, right.
But it was really not proper training for riding a public bus, because of its route, its typical passenger profile and the fact that it stopped running pretty early in the day so there was little opportunity to experience any real riffraff.
From there, I graduated to the No. 17 Combined Clifton line. In case you've never had the misfortune to board any of those routes, let's just say depending on which one you choose - Northgate, Groesbeck, North College Hill, Mount Healthy, etc. - each one is akin to spending time in a different rung of Dante's Inferno. Yep, Hell.
Why? It's a combination of things, but really it's like a bad mixed drink: too many ingredients that ultimately upset the senses.
There's the Lower Clifton aspect, then the University of Cincinnati contingent. Mix that with the wannabe weirdoes from Ludlow Avenue to the nouveau-hip of Northside, add a dash of rowdy, disrespectful teen-agers from Hughes High School and you find yourself giving Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority good laundry change to be traumatized.
Once I moved to Walnut Hills, I was in public transportation heaven. I had my daily choice of the Nos. 11, 24, 56, 69, 64 and 31 routes. There was always a blue-and-white coach going my way, and sometimes the 11, 24, 56 or 69 would arrive at the corner of Victory Parkway and William Howard Taft simultaneously in any combination and I'd have my pick.
(Hint: When this occurs, always choose the coach least occupied. It will probably leap frog the more crowded bus and get to your final destination more quickly.)
Enough about my past loves.
Since this is the Best of Cincinnati issue, let me tell you about the mutha of all Cincinnati routes and my all-time favorite: the No. 78 (Carthage, Evendale, Lincoln Heights, Lincoln Heights-Southern Ohio College, Lockland via Vine, Lockland via Wayne, Tri-County and Wyoming I-75 Express).
Here you have choices ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. What's beautiful about the 78 is it's just like I envision heaven to be: factory workers sitting beside students, who are behind housewives, who are in front of businessmen, who relinquish their seats to single mothers, who depart to make way for the homeless, who were once perhaps a segment of all of the above.
While it's my favorite route, however, the 78 is not for the squeamish or the weak-hearted. Because the line is so long - in mid-day traffic, the 78 can take an hour and 10 minutes to get from downtown to Tri-County Mall - there are oodles of other lines that intersect its route, thereby providing transfer points for passengers from less desirable routes.
Take the No. 46 Avondale line. Now, I've got no problems with Avondale personally. I used to live there. But, hey the people that ride that bus need to lighten up. They mainly look like non-verbal terrorists and they leave hair care products smeared on the windows, so you can barely see your stop approaching.
On the 78, we talk to one another, scoot over to give others room to sit down and know the general protocol.
You can always tell novice 78 passengers because: A) they never have adequate reading or listening material for the long haul; B) they fall asleep and haven't perfected their body clocks to awaken them, so they miss their stops and are embarrassed to wake up in the heart of downtown Lockland; and C) they look anxiously out the windows, afraid they'll miss their stop and have to walk a few extra feet.
Back during my years as an evening assistant in the literature department of the Main Public Library, for a time I still lived at my father's Forest Park crib. To save parking money and wear and tear on my hooppie of a Volkswagen Beetle, I parked in Lockland and rode the 78.
I got so good that at night, after work, I'd board the 78 and be in a deep sleep by Vine Street and Central Parkway. I'd casually wake up two to three blocks from my stop a full 45 minutes later. Only once did I oversleep, and I ended up in Reading.
It wasn't so bad. The driver woke me up and I went to White Castle, ate a couple of sliders and caught the bus back to my car.
I've met the good, the bad and the ugly on the 78. There were those, when I was first learning, who taught me how to transfer, where to get off and when to catch the next bus.
There were drunks who fell asleep on my shoulder, people who snacked on stinky food and youngsters who eyeballed my watch like it was a T-bone steak.
My all-time favorite has to be the guy who sat in front of me, pulled out his penis, fell asleep and urinated on the floor. My favorite seat being the last one before the back door, I promptly got up and watched his urine trickle down the steps onto the street.
Aah, public transportation.
It can be icky, but it's so very necessary.
And it's so much like sex when you think about it: Every experience won't be great, but you might as well relax and enjoy the ride.
