TWO UGLY PEOPLE

I was simultaneously depressed and elated when I rode up to the bus stop. I had successfully started what I hoped to be the rest of my life, and it was glorious. I was only depressed because I had waited to long, and the classes I was most eager to take were already full. My mind swirled between mild self-reproach and fantasies of myself as some sort of virtuoso composer, finally expressing myself in a way that was totally mine, and no one else's. The voice of a middle-aged woman demanded my attention, shattering my pleasant dreams of a successful future with a question that shocked me.

"Why is that cop chasing you?" I looked over my shoulder and saw a police car in the turning lane, heading in the opposite direction from where I had ridden up.

"He wasn't?" I replied, honestly confused.

"No, he was chasing you. What did you do to make him chase you?"

The voice was harder now, much like the blue eyes that peered out from a face that was even harder, a hyperbolic, almost impossible kind of hard.

"I didn't do anything, and he wasn't chasing me," I said, indignant.

"Yes you fucking did. You rode up, and then he was right there. Was it a coincidence?"

"It clearly was. Why else would he drive away from where I am? You don't chase someone by going in the opposite direction."

She looked at me like I had just spat on her. "I just asked you a question, you didn't have to get an attitude with me."

I was a little amused by this. Her face had softened, and so did her voice. I smiled a small smile, and said, "It was kind of a dumb question." The softness was gone.

"You're fucking ugly." Her eyes narrowed, becoming dark slits that hid those ice-blue eyes. "What if I ripped that shit out of your fucking mouth, would that be a dumb question?"
 
Pain exploded in my chest, and my heart starting beating as if it would never beat again. Just as fast, I could feel the pain inside sooth, numbed by the anger and adrenaline that were seeping into every cell in my body. My thoughts raced ahead, out of my control, intelligence and malice summoned by barely repressed rage.

"No, that would be an action, not a question." I locked eyes with her, but I still noticed that other people at the bus stop edging away, putting on headphones, or simply walking off.

"Well how about I knock your nigger ass off that bike?" She vomited the words, each one making my skin crawl as if it was being hit by flecks of bile. "You've got that shit in your mouth, it disgusts me!"

"You know what disgusts me? White people. You're so pale, your skin has the pallor of a corpse." Her face shifted, hate and disgust turning to an expression of confusion that only fueled my own hate and disgust.

"Pallor? Are you too dumb to understand that? Do you need me to define it for you?" My voice inched upward, sounding shrill and immature, a fact I duly noted from the mental cage I had put my normal self into.

"I don't need a dumb nigger telling me what words mean. You're lucky I don't just kill your ass right now. Would you like that action?"

"Apparently you do! You seem to have trouble deciphering what I said in my retort! Oh, do I need to explain to you what retort means? Am I using too big of words?"

The 1M bus rolled up. I made no move to leave, because the bike rack on the front was full. I had been hoping for a rescue; in the face of this newest turn of events, I resigned myself to hell.

"Why aren't you leaving?" She asked.

"The bike rack is full. You've got me for another twenty minutes."

She asked me to repeat myself, and so I did. She thought for a second, and got on the bus, giving me one last glare before getting on. A handicapped man in a wheelchair was trying valiantly to wheel himself up the hill as the bus closed its doors. I waved at the driver, and pointed at the man. I moved out of the way so that the wheelchair-bound man could maneuver up the ramp, onto the bus, and then onward, to do whatever it is he does with his life.

I started to calm down. The shock of the situation was wearing off, and my mind was replying her words, memorizing every detail about her for some unknown reason. Her pink pooka shell necklace, the oversized black peacoat, the knees that peeked out from her denim shorts and were purple with bruises, and the ashy calfs that looked unshaved. Her shoes were new, some sort of crosstrainers, and she was wearing neon green socks. I thought of my childhood in the '90s, when neon colors from the previous cocaine-infused decade still not uncommon.

The bus doors opened again. I looked up, and she stepped out onto the sidewalk.

"I just wanted to finish our debate." She said this softly, disarming me again with a geniune smile. Never one to turn down a debate, I returned her smile, and said, "Let's do it."

She sat down on the bench, a hemisphere designed solely to make any poor soul who sits on it beg for a quick death, and lit a cigarette.

"I saw you ride up, and then I saw a cop come right behind you. I don't know if you did anything or not, but I don't think that's a coincidence. I really believe that you did something and he was chasing you,"

In a move that would've made my brother triumph in his point being proven, I immediately thought that it was because I was black. I didn't want to accuse her outright of racism, so instead I said, "Do I look like an aggressive person? Do argyle sweaters, button-down shirts, and silk ties usually remind people of violence? Did I say anything aggressive or threatening to you?"

She stood up and appeared instantly in front of my eyes. I could smell alcohol and cigarette breath, as well as her perfume. It was floral, light and airy, exactly the kind I hate on women. 

"Your face is aggressive to my fucking eyes! I can't stand it! Why do you niggers have to offend people by putting that shit in your fucking face? You eat with your fucking mouth, you kiss girls with that mouth, what the fuck were you thinking?"

She had deviated from the standard pattern of debate. You make a claim, and back it up with evidence. This was something different. I was calm, master of myself once again.

"What were you thinking when you got your ears pierced?" I queried.

"This is ornamental. You need to Google ear piercings and then come back. That shit you have is just ugly."

"My lip rings are ornamental. Tell me, what's the inherent difference between lips and ears? Why is piercing one 'wrong' and the other okay? Is there some intrinsic sanctity that I'm infringing on?"

Her eyes literally shook. The wrinkles around her eyes had all but disappeared as the blasphemous message hit her. I'm still not sure how much she understood, but I don't think she needed or wanted to.

"It's fucking wrong! I don't want my son, my children to grow up and become like you! It's a goddamn shame that I have to look at you! I don't want them to see some...thing like you! You walk around with your argyle sweater, and your fucking white priest thing, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!? Look, your glasses don't even match your eyes you fucking dumbass! You're just fucking ugly!"
'
"In your opinion," I offered weakly. "If you don't want your children to look like me, that's your problem. I don't see why you had to yell at me."

She exploded. My ears were showered with the word nigger, just as my face was blasted by her stale cigarette breath. My eyes watered from the fumes of whatever liquor she'd been drinking. She told me how it was so offensive to her eyes to have to see me, that she'd rather rip the hemorrhoids from her ass she got from giving birth than even know that I existed.

"And I know you're not from America, because if you were my son, I'd rip that shit out of your fucking mouth." I didn't bother to ask what the two ideas in her statement had to do with each other.

"You also don't have a mother, because how could anyone let their child do that?" The anger was returning. I have a lot of issues with the concept of a mother, as it's literally unnatural to me, having not been a part of the majority of my life. I have one now, though, and hearing this vile woman even mention her almost made me lose physical control of myself.

"What kind of mother are you? I haven't said a single vulgar word to you, I haven't said a single foul word, and you've been cussing at me this whole time?"

"My kids got taken away from me. I don't see my kids because their father is a fucking pussy who's scared of me!" My heart broke for that man.

I lost it. Not physical control, but perhaps even more dangerously, control of my mind.

"I wonder why he's scared of you? Did you threaten him because he's not like you? Did you beat him, or attack him? Or is the real reason your kids got taken from you is because you're a crackwhore, or a junkie of some kind?" I was just getting started, seeking, probing for a weakness, for anything to get a rise out of her, but her face was gone, replaced with a sculpture of a face, with all the life in it a statue can have. "You probably lost your kids because you're a horrible mother, and I'm glad you did, because you'd teach them to judge others for no reason, and even worse, to hate others who aren't like them. They'd be wild animals with you, cussing and fighting and hating. Have you been diagnosed with schizophrenia? Bipolar disorder? Are you on any psychiatric medicine, perhaps mood stabilizers?"

For a brief second, I saw the pain in her eyes. I saw how the lines of despair came to be carved so deeply in her face. Shame, utter unfettered, unabashed shame swept over and through me like a tidal wave. I will never forget that feeling.

Another bus came by, this one a local route instead of regional one. "I'm only getting on this bus to keep me from killing you," she said, her voice low and raspy, like the voice of the dead. She got on the bus, and left.

The 1M came again. I was silent, and got on it, shaking with rage, lost in confusion and suffering from a wound that infected me. Out of nowhere, other people got on it too. My tunnel-vision must've cropped them out of the picture. I wondered what they thought of me.

This woman's ugliness, both in body and spirit, shocked me. The pain from it still burns inside my chest, making each heartbeat agony. I had always styled myself as someone very much in control of themselves, and I had lost it. No one who knows me would say that I am truly a hateful or ugly person, but they can only make that statement because I've only let them see what I wanted them to see, which rare exceptions. The truth is, I'm ugly inside, just like that woman. I rant in my head about the Mexicans ahead of me in line, or the obese people I see when I'm walking to class. My ugliness, my repulsiveness was brought out by a woman either unashamed or unable to hide hers. There is some Machiavellian point to be made here about the nature of people, but I'm more considered about what this made me see. I'm like Dorian Gray, only instead of a painting collecting all my sins, it's on the inside, and no matter how much I claim otherwise, it's a very real part of me.

I hurt that woman. There is no justification for it. I could've left. I could've ridden off and left her to be crazy, I could've put on my headphones, I could've done any number of things, but I didn't. Why? Did I feel like defending my 'honor'? Or was it, as I suspect, that I wanted to hurt her all along, in retribution for an insult I should have ignored? I've never felt so guilty, so full of remorse and sadness. I sought to injure her verbally, and for no good reason. I dug and scratched and pulled on the scab she had made with alcohol and drugs, and then dug into her wound with the skeletal hands of the Reaper.

This is why I'm hurt. Seeing hatred and responding in kind, hurting because I was hurt, reacting instead of acting consciously. It was instinctual, even. It was a primal reaction that I couldn't control, the primitive Homo sapiens eradicating his Neandertal cousins. It was every person killed in hate. It was genocidal; an extinction-level event on par with a nuclear winter. It was nature, human nature, a nature I have always fought with, sought to understand, and to overcome, or at least rein in. It can't be cut out like a tumor or excised like a demon, instead it will always remain a part of me. I'll wake up in a few years, and perhaps this story will be a humorous anecdote that I'll share over a beer or during an after-show party sipping a vodka tonic, but the smile I put on while telling it will be fake. I'll remember the pain, the shame, and the way my heart beat the word ugly into my chest.