I have been enjoying my time in Honolulu thus far, although the crazy is beginning to get to me. As someone who grew up in New York City, I am no stranger to crazy. I cut my teeth on wild-eyed, lank-haired men muttering under their breath and staring me down on the subway. There was Nancy in my apartment building who smelled up the elevator and wore flip-flops and a raincoat in the dead of winter. I have already mentioned once the dreadlocked man who lurked among the incense vendors on lower Broadway in red hotpants and cowboy boots with spurs. And I can’t forgot the frizzy red-haired, trench-coated Evangelist who stood on the sidewalk island in the center of Park Avenue at 51st street and preached from a worn book at the top of his lungs, day in and day out, his voice excruciatingly ragged and hoarse. We passed him on the way to and from school every day and after awhile he was almost comforting. Children need routine.
After a childhood in New York City, came four years of Bard. By my senior year at Bard, I could rattle off a list of people who had earned the surname ‘Crazy’. As in Crazy Bob. Or Crazy Beth. Sometimes several different Crazy people had the same name, which made things a little complicated, but usually the distinctions were quickly resolved. As in, “Are you talking about Crazy Bob who does Coke in the lounge, or do you mean Crazy Bob who brained his roommate with a vacuum?”
But Honolulu takes it to a new level. I have only been here for a month, but I am firmly convinced that Honolulu has Crazy on lockdown. If you imagined levels of Crazy as entertainment technology, NYC was the VHS version. Bard was the DVD upgrade. And Honolulu is the system that beams ultrasonic waves straight into your brain so that aliens can watch movies on the roof of your mouth.
The bulk of my alarming encounters have occurred on or near The Bus, Honolulu’s famed transportation system. It is reputed to be the best bus system in the United States. I’m not sure I believe that. Unless, that is, a bus system’s worth is measured by its percentage of middle-aged male riders dozing open-mouthed with stacks of enormous, shiny, gold WWF belts on their laps. Ditto lipsticked and nail-polished long-haired Korean men playing the guitar. The Bus introduced me to an older woman wearing a bike helmet who complained loudly when someone requested a stop but then no one got off. “I don’t appreciate this,” she snarled to no one and everyone. “I’ve got another bus to catch after this. Shit, this is the longest red light ever.” She had three purses.
Last week the woman sitting next to my roommate Laura on the bus turned to her out of the blue and said, “Guess how old I am?” Laura guessed fifty. “Wrong!” she crowed. “I’m sixty-nine! And I haven’t slept in years!” When Laura asked what she did instead, she said, “Watch television.”
Crazy doesn’t always happen on The Bus. There was also the
stricken man who accosted me outside a neighborhood Seven Eleven one
night demanding, with great agitation, to know where the United States
was. He was quite serious. “I just flew in from Iran.”
He said. “Does the United States have a problem with Iran?”
However, the same gentleman was spotted ten minutes later sitting
on a bench waiting for…you guessed it.