The Hipster Bus

By Vince Basehart

It is the kind of hot October afternoon with air so dry your skin itches and the sunlight lays down on the cityscape in a way that announces, undeniably, that it is fall in Santa Monica.

Inside a Big Blue Bus, on the route along Wilshire, a middle-aged homeless man slumps sideways on his seat, snoring vigorously. A half-smoked cigarette is hooked behind his ear.

His head lolls inches away from a tiny, college-aged Asian woman who sits next to him, pretending not to notice the slumbering vagabond as she texts a message on hand-held electronica. With every jolt of the bus the man snorts, and she flinches, but keeps on thumbing the mysterious acronym language of the text. She wears a Hello Kitty T-shirt, knee-high wool socks and a schoolgirl’s skirt.

Seated across from the woman is a lanky young man in a brick red T-shirt with the word “evidence” in white block letters across the chest, reading “Krakatoa” by Simon Winchester with great intensity. On the cover is an etching of the infamous volcano.

Somehow, even in the heat, he insists on wearing a fashionable knit cap. The holes in the knees of his jeans were surely placed there by a fashion designer, the nonchalant stubble on his chin measured and groomed that morning with the kind of care Wimbledon’s groundskeepers give to turf.

There are other young people, probably UCLA students, swaying with the motion of the bus, backpacks at their feet.

One grad school-aged blonde woman looks like she could be hitch hiking her way to the Summer of Love. She is painfully slim, with long hair stacked on her head in a pile of dreadlocks. A small metal stud glints on her left nostril. On one arm the Lens counts five individual, colored rubber wristbands designating different causes.

Here, on a bus traveling westward on Wilshire, is a gallery of plugged-in, nose-studded, tattooed, I-podded, ironic, up-to-the-minute, new media consuming, small carbon footprinted hipsterdom, all but for the Lens sitting near the back seat, who, by comparison, is as trendy as an encyclopedia salesman from 1950’s Wichita; and the homeless man, whose idea of style is a set of tattered plastic garbage bags threatening to disgorge his belongings across the bus’ ribbed floor. Even the uniformed bus driver, a black man in his thirties rippling with muscle, maintains a perfectly shaved head, and a perfectly detached slouch behind the wheel.

All along the route the Hipster Bus rolls along, picking them up and letting them off: two plump women with cat eye glasses and pink and purple dyed hair get on near the Aahs gift store; another woman, with hair as spiky and black as a sea urchin, wearing a torn Ramones’ T-shirt over men’s madras shorts and patent leather boots, gets on with an easy wave of her bus pass; when the bus stops near Whole Foods, the 20-something passenger bearing a guitar case and sporting a pork-pie hat and a tiny soul patch on his chin, suddenly leaps out of his seat and dashes out the back door as if he’s being chased by a grizzly bear.

At the next stop the Lens exits the Big Blue Bus in his classic business attire, wondering if he was ever that with it, questioning, even, if anyone even says “with it” any more. As he steps out the back exit he sees an elderly man getting on in front, his pants pulled up to about mid-chest, a sensible hat atop his head for no other reason than that is what sensible men wear outdoors, his only concern with “hip” being that stabbing pain on his right side as his pulls himself up to the driver’s platform.