Strangers at a Bus Stop

On a winter morning five years ago, I stood at a bus-stop in uptown Chicago. I had no experience of Chicago winter, so my clothing was insufficient against the two-punch combo of extreme cold and biting winds. I hopped from one foot to the other, trying to generate heat inside my flimsy cocoon. My eyelashes were frozen, and the hair inside my nostrils was rigid like stalactites.

“Cold, huh?” said a voice beside me.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding at him over my muffler.

We were two strangers waiting for the same bus. I did not know at the time, but this is enough common ground to strike a conversation in America. He told me he was an exterminator. It was a well-paying job, much more than minimum wage, and it was work no one else wanted to do. But despite all the positives, it was still back-breaking work. He made a joke about it being worse for the rats, and then laughed. It had the sound of a joke he had made many times before. He no longer waited for his audience to laugh before him. 

But out of politeness, I threw him a grin. He beamed at me, and his eyes opened wider as if he was seeing me for the first time. He started telling me about a home he had recently fumigated. Every room was full of antique furniture, ornaments, and heavy drapes kept light out of all the windows. Inside its own room sat an old Steinway piano, with audience chairs around it.

“Priceless, they said, but looked like nobody played the damn thing,” he chuckled. “Couple was afraid to move out of the building because they were convinced movers would damage their things in the move. But I looked inside that piano when they were away, and I tell you no one could do much more damage to that thing. It was on the verge of collapsing in on itself. I was afraid to touch it.”

“Uh huh,” I said, nodding as much to be nice as to keep warm. The bus, I had been told, ran frequently during morning hours. I looked up the street but there was no sign of it.

“Snow,” he said, chuckling again. “Probably digging it out of last night’s snow. Don’t worry, it will get here soon enough.”

His son, he said, was not interested in following his line of work. It was a fine independently-run business going down the drain because the job title wasn’t glamorous enough. This was the problem with the world, he explained. Everyone was chasing fancy dreams, even the ones who didn’t have any. He had good work hours, a loyal clientele that recommended him all over Chicago, and you didn’t even need an expensive college degree for it.

“But, at the end of the day, nobody wants to say they’re an exterminator.”

“Except Arnold Schwarzenneger,” I said.

He nodded, then chuckled, then broke into a full laugh. “Exactly like Arnold,” he said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “I’m going to use that one.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s mine.”

“It is now, I’m going to tell everyone I got it from you.”

The bus arrived. I got in, swiped my bus pass and shuffled towards an empty seat. For a couple of minutes, I basked in the flood of warmth re-entering my body. By the time I had recuperated, I looked around and noticed my new friend hadn’t climbed in. I turned back to see if I could spot him at the bus stop, but my view was obstructed by patterns of ice-crystals on the back-window. Only a kaleidoscope of broken images came through. I left the past behind, unwrapped my muffler and took a deep breath.

The bus was empty except for one other passenger, sitting at the front. She held a purse tightly against her body, chanting to herself. A catechism against the cold? Every few seconds she would turn to her right and nod thoughtfully. She would say something to the air in a soft voice, smile, then turn away. How nice, I thought, to have someone.