The Riders on the Bus Go Up and Down

Story time!

Sort of.

While I am going to tell a quick story, it’s really more of a thought exercise about personal space and attractive strangers.

A few months ago, I was heading off to the airport. Getting there from my place requires riding a bus across Manhattan. I hate busses. They continue to surprise me in bad ways. This day was going to be no exception, unless you want to debate if this was really “bad.”

I got on the bus and sat down in an open seat. Two stops later, an attractive guy whose age I’ll call “Jailbait” got on and sat down on the seat right next to mine. The bus was fairly crowded, so this was nothing special. His behavior, however, was.

Moments after sitting down, his head rolled back, his body went slack, and he fell asleep. Whump. He was on my shoulder.

Ok. Interesting. My response was neutral. On the one hand, I’m not a fan of needless personal contact. On the other, I’ve been known to make larger exceptions for people less attractive than this guy.

As I was sitting there pondering my own ambivalence in the matter, his head rolled gracefully off my shoulder and landed with a soft plop in my lap.

Wait. Really?

This was apparently about as comfortable as I would have expected, because he spent the next fifteen seconds settling in to his new position with my crotch as his pillow.

I should pause for a moment and mention that this was (probably?) not as overtly sexual as I’m making it sound. Everything I’ve said is true, but there had been zero removal of clothes, this guy was (probably?) semi-conscious, and there was still a tiny amount of space between his mouth and my penis. Probably.

Again, I found myself inexplicably neutral about the situation. Keeping me cheerful was the fact that this was really, really funny. Getting me anxious was the fact that I was nervously looking around the bus for witnesses looking concerned about Jailbait’s plight.

Native New Yorkers just took a moment to laugh to themselves. They knew perfectly well that no one on that bus was interested in the fact that Jailbait appeared to be giving me an especially lazy hummer.

I slowly began to realize that no one cared what was going on and no one was going to start caring anytime soon. I returned my attention to Jailbait, whose head was bouncing in my lap to the rhythm of the bus.

As I grew more accustomed to the situation, my mind started to wander to more practical aspects of what was happening. I was about to board a plane. How likely was I to accidentally do the same thing in a situation like this?

I concluded that the odds were not high. Jailbait was pretty clearly comfortable snuggling up to strangers in ways that I could never be. Armed with this dubious conclusion of “guilt,” I finally got around to wondering if I should be responding to the situation in some way.

Nah.

But maybe I should take some pictures!

That sounded like a great idea, until I got around to wondering if I really wanted photographic proof that I had ridden a bus with “Jailbait’s” head massaging my privates.

Twenty minutes later, he came to, rose from my penis without comment, and exited the bus.

Really?

And here I had been looking forward to the look of mixed horror and embarrassment on his face when he realized both what he had done and that I was totally cool with it.

But no. Nothing. Not even eye contact.

People are weird. This is probably why I don’t like to touch strangers.