The World of Bus Stop Willie

I had quit my supervisor’s job at the warehouse because it had become a dead end, but there was more to it than that.  I was pushing 40 years old when I created Strategic Business Intelligence Service and the lure of actually doing something intellectually challenging modeled on the Kiplinger Letter was just too much for me.  It was a high risk Liberal Arts failure; so in order not to starve, I ended up working for the Area Transportation Authority (ATA) as a bus washer for a short time.  It was a job that was so tough that you had to take a physical for it and besides, it could have led to a union job.  All you had to do was wash one bus in the morning and one in the afternoon.  Bear in mind the fact that each bus had 34 windows.  I was always tired because I worked hard.  Others goofed off and listened to their boom boxes before lunch.

The first step was learning how to drive one of those monsters.  Since I had driven an 18 ft. truck with a stick, it was a piece of cake.  After fetching the bus from the ATA barn you parked it in a line that forms in front of the washing bays.  That is where you do the prep like clean the windows.  (Jerry Curl was especially hard to get off the windows.)  Before that, I opened the back windows so that the giant vacuums sucked all the trash out the front door.  After going through the bays, I'd fill the bus, parked on the level, with two inches of soapy water for the mop-down and finished the job only when the bus came to a jerking halt that sent the dirty tsunami cascading out the front door. That is where Bus Stop Willie comes in because he was the reason I had the job.

I never met Willie, but he’s one of those illusive characters you never think twice about because he’s everywhere, leaving traces of his movements much like a lion that marks its territory.  I cleaned up after him so many times that I felt I knew him and his world as he made his rounds to downtown Kansas City on the Troost bus.  Piecing his story together was not too difficult even though he was just a phantom.

First on his busy schedule was Go-Chicken-Go.  Everyone on the East Side knows they sell good chicken, especially the fried livers and gizzards.  Willie would wash the chicken down with Wild Irish Rose or Night Train and throw the bones on the floor and stuff the empty bottles into the seats.  By this time he would have passed those major Kansas City attractions that never seem to make the guide books: the night club with the bullet holes in it, the tattoo parlor, the innocuous abortion clinic, the myriad of Troost pawn shops, and the hamburger joints with the two inch bullet proof glass by the cash register.  On his way to visit his sister in the county jail or his case worker at the state office building, Willie had time for a good nap only awakening long enough to relieve himself into the drain he had cleverly punched in the floor at the back of the bus.

I’ve had to eat a lot of humble pie in my life to survive; the job market cares little for those with a history degree. Business wants specialists.  Their world is one of things and stuff somewhere between Willie’s primitive needs and mine of idealism that always played second fiddle to hard dirty work.  His world was his briar patch.  Even with its occasional thorns it appeared to be comfortable and predictable, but it is not one I would want to enter because I’m just a different breed of cat.