The Fat Woman and the Trolley Car, By Sara Spring

The lines of life have carved themselves deeply on his face and his blue eyes twinkled with a perpetual smile. His face makes happy expressions and he cracks a light joke but behind all of it is something more deathlike and blank. Sometimes I catch this other set of eyes watching me but when I blink it’s gone and he is back with another joke. I am left feeling uneasy and isolated, my body goes cold and I pull myself back into the moment of the joke to forget what I don’t understand. It’s always there, whatever it is, lurking nearby too disguised to clearly decipher. He has two tattoos on his arms, one indicates his service in Vietnam and the other is a symbol for paramedics. Both are slightly faded around the edges the lines no longer defined, instead seeping out beyond their original framework. I knew I’d seen tattoos like this before but I could not place it.

I met Jason while he was looking for a job. He gave me his resume in a crowded bar and asked me what I thought of it. The paper was good quality though from another decade and the edges were lightly yellowed. The typewriter he’d used was from the 1970’s which I could tell by the uneven alignment of the letters on the page and the old typeset. When I complimented him on his very good typing skills he tried to claim it was done on an electronic word processor, but even still, I knew what he really had. As an enthusiast of all things before I was born, I enjoyed post modernism and product evolution in general. I let the point go, instead sufficiently humiliating him. He left in a huff only to return again the following summer when he was prone to wandering around.

Standing at the bar, I wore red heels and a new dress. He came in with his usual eclectic ancient cheap clothing that had been pressed. Looking down he saw my shoes and the smiling twinkling look in his eyes faded. I watched as the creases in his face became deeper creating grooves and his eyes went blank and hungry, transforming him before me from a human to a manic comic book character with dots for skin tone and deep black lines characterizing an onset craze.

Bending down he lifted my foot, the examination intense. Slipping out of the shoe I continued to stand where I was as if nothing was happening. He was lost in his own world until he realized something had changed. Standing up abruptly, looking guilty the realization slowly came upon him that I didn’t mind his shoe fetish. At once his expression became animated, asking if he could take a picture. I agreed and watched in silence as he gently set it next to his beer and angled it perfectly with great care. In the busy bar his actions were noticed by a few of the regulars but seeing as I didn’t really mind no one made a fuss. Jason gave me back my shoe by placing it on my foot tenderly. Feeling the feathery touch of his finger tips lasting a little longer than they should have, I moved my foot by kicking at him casually like swatting a fly from my face. His laugh was unlike any I’d heard before, twisted and deranged, he scampered away.

Though I never saw Jason again, I still find that he will run across my thoughts as a bad memory of a drug addict I once knew and though I do not want to know what he does with the picture he took of my shoe I am slightly curious.

While I resided in the lovely city of San Francisco, I would take the Haight Street bus to work. An older man, slightly heavy, wearing a tan windbreaker with nice brown leather shoes, pressed polyester pants and a plain white button up shirt sat down before me. He struck me as the pleasant grandfatherly type who would read books with spectacles clinging to the tip of his nose to his grandchildren. The bus was heading out to 19^th Avenue when a young man entered the bus from a stop across from Ameba’s music store near the park. He had a strong build with a London Fog coat on and carrying a new leather briefcase, he looked very well educated, perhaps from Harvard.

The older man could not believe what he saw when he looked at the young man, his pale blue eyes glazed over. He seemed lost. He blinked and I watched in bewildered curiosity as his whole body shifted slightly and his posture changed. He stared fixated at the young man with a look of horror mixed with grief and despair. He began to mumble a name quietly at first but finally audible, “Charlie.” His eyes pleaded for a miracle as his trembling hand reached out to the young man. His breathing became heavy and erratic.

“Charlie you have to hold on.” He whispered.

The passengers began to take notice that something was amiss, moving away slowly from the situation. The old man began to shake his head, “I am not giving your tag to your parents because you are going to see them again. Charlie, you are going to…” He moved his head slightly to the right and gasped. “Charlie.” He stammered. “You are going to be…”

A woman leaned over the bus driver, “I think you need to call the police, this guy is a day tripper and he is starting to scare me.”

Still stopped at a red light, the bus driver got out of his seat to speak with the old man, “Hey! You need to stop it, you are scaring people.”

The old man shook his head becoming more confused as he stared directly at the bus driver. I watched in silent protest as the driver took the old man by his arm and lifted him up onto his feet, I looked back at the young man desperately pleading with my eyes for him to interfere. This man was clearly a Vietnam Vet and having a flash back.  Why couldn’t anyone else see this? We were in San Francisco for Christ’s sake! You would think these people would have figured it out! Were we that far removed from our history that we could no longer recognize it? My heart was heavy and I wanted to help but instead sat there frozen like the rest of us. The young man told the bus driver he was harmless but the driver had already decided to remove him, branding him as an old coot that was on drugs. Confused the old man walked out with the driver who was not being exactly kind, muttering and crying to himself as Charlie died in his arms once again. I could hear the rational side of the man saying to the driver that he couldn’t leave the bus because he would miss his daughter. The bus took off leaving him near the Botanical Gardens in the Golden Gate Park were the drug addicts came out at night to feed. I wanted to get off the bus and help him; I expected that there should be a number to call his social worker or an emergency contact in his wallet but at the tender age of eighteen I was still trying on the passive role in society. I was tormented inside, I knew what to say to have stopped the situation and I hated myself for not taking action. The man in the London Fog jacket had moved near me and now I could see the Harvard emblem on his scarf. It wasn’t until the bus had turned the corner that I said in a shaky soft voice to the driver loud enough for the Alumni to hear, “He’s a Vet. He has PTSD. We should have checked him for a phone number to call or he will miss seeing his daughter. We can’t leave him there.”  The driver assured me there was always another bus, but the Harvard Grad asked the driver to let him off. I watched as he took off in a run going back to assist the old man and in that moment he became my hero even if it was for just a single act.

The old man has held Charlie in his dreams many times after the Vietnam War ended and that night he was going to do it again. Had the young man not gone back, I would have had to cling to the hope that the old man came back to us before night fall when things in the park get backwards and upside down. A dangerous time span in twenty four hours when someone’s father would become another statistic of petty crime, but now I just let dirty old men take pictures of my shoes free of charge.