When You Have Buses, Who Needs Clock?

I need to tell someone about my dreams.

In one of them, I’m being chased in slow motion through a meadow. Just as I’m about to be caught, a bus pulls up, opens its doors and rescues me. . . .

The other dream is even scarier.

In that one, I’m in college and about to take the astrology-for-nonscience-majors final only to discover that I’ve somehow ended up in an advanced macroeconomics class. As panic sets in, I hear the sound of brakes. I look out the window and there it is: a bus. The driver is beckoning me. . . .

Among the sleeping set, The Chase Dream and The Final Exam Dream are pretty standard stuff. But even the most Freudian of Freudians will admit that the bus angle is, uh, different.

As best I can recall, these dreams started about six months ago--that’s about the time I moved in to my new house. It’s a darling little place in Venice with a cute little yard, a cute little vegetable garden, parking, swell neighbors, swell landlords and it’s a short walk to the beach. Best of all: it’s convenient to transportation.

Real convenient.

Let’s say you rolled out of my living room and down the front steps. As soon as you rolled past the front gate, you’d be at an eastbound RTD bus stop. And if you rolled a few feet more across the street, you’d land at the westbound bus stop.

I guess I’m fortunate in that I live on a 24-hour-a-day bus line. Even better, I’m at a stop sign, which means about 550 buses stop and start in front of my house every week.

If you live next to a factory, a freeway, a firehouse or any place where loud noise is a constant, you know what I’m talking about. We only wish we had a neighborly pianist and a barking dog to keep us up nights. Instead, we have cars, DC-10s and lunch whistles.

So we go out and buy “white noise” to drown out the other noise: air conditioners, air purifiers, floor fans, cassette tapes with sounds from the Pacific Ocean. They do the job, the Department of Water and Power loves us and everyone is happy.

Except for the companies that make clocks. When you have buses, who needs clocks?

The 5:37 awakens me.

But sometimes when I’m really feeling lazy, I’ll get up with the 5:43, the 5:49, the 5:54, the 5:56 or the 5:58. (Unless of course I watch the morning news, in which case I’m not out of bed until the 6:08, the 6:10 or the 6:11.) Otherwise, the 6:19 means it’s time to get up.

I start coffee as the 6:20 goes by.

I’m in the shower for the 6:27, 6:31 and 6:32, and if I have to wash my hair, I’m not out until at least the 6:41 or the 6:42. Of course this means I really have to get a move-on if I’m going to catch the 7:06 to work.

It’s gotten so that I can tell which bus is ahead of schedule and which is behind. I can tell the older models from the newer ones. I can tell the ones that are full from the ones that aren’t.

Two rush-hour buses passing by means a three-minute egg is done.

And, oh, the challenge of starting the “Minute Waltz” at 7:42 and finishing before the 7:43 arrives.

At night, I fall asleep to what I call the Lullabye of Buses. By now, RTD buses have slowed to a virtual crawl--there’ll only be two an hour after midnight. But their sounds, made even louder by the quiet night air, are joined by a busly choir of Santa Monica Blue Buses and Culver City Buses up the block as they make their way around Venice Circle.

And then the riots came. And during the curfew, the buses stopped coming from dusk to dawn.

How odd it was to be able to hear the TV without turning it up all the way. How strange to be able to make phone calls and not have to scream so that you lost your voice.

You could even have quiet romantic dinners again. There was no more shouting across a delicately set, candlelight table:

“DARLING, I LOVE YOU!”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

“I SAID, ‘DARLING, I LOVE YOU!’ ”

“OH, I LOVE YOU, TOO. MORE WINE, MY TURTLEDOVE?”

“HUH?”

During the curfew, I ran into a few of my neighbors and as much as we had complained about the buses, we found ourselves saying things like, “It’s sooooo quiet. . . . I hate it” or “I miss them sooooo much” or “I want them back.”

I thought of how I had called my mother during my early days in the house to grouse and how horrible I now felt. How could I have bad-mouthed the buses so? (Of course Ma was far from sympathetic. “Where do you think you grew up?” she sniffed. How could I have forgotten my roots? I had spent the first 22 years of my life living on one of the final approaches to LaGuardia Airport.)

Now that it’s summer, the buses to Venice Beach--the 33, the 333 and the 436--are all belching and burping past my house. And out-of-town house guests seem to be coming just as frequently.

When I lived in Phoenix, I used to warn them that I had roaches the size of Cadillacs. Now I warn them that I have buses.

But each guest gets white noise and they sleep through the night. As for me, I don’t need it anymore because I don’t hear the buses anymore. They are as much a part of background noise now as the birds, the wind and the waves.

But they are still in my dreams.

The other night I had The Death Dream again.

It used to haunt me, but no more. I’m still not sure if I’m going north or south come Judgment Day, but one thing’s for certain: I know how I’m getting there. In the dream, I have exact change in one hand and a transfer in the other.