I Respect Your Hesitation

I wheel onto the streetcar, maneuvering my scooter past a young man who's blocking the way with his enormous duffel bag and a lumpy brute of a dog. I wedge myself into a corner and stare out the glass doors. I don't look at the man. I don't want to look at anyone. A woman gets on at the next stop with a walker and the young man says to her, “I respect your hesitation.” I don’t know what he’s referring to but I figure it must be something to do with masks. It's always about masks, or the virus, or the vaccine. I’m so tired of it all. We’re all so tired of it all. 

The young man goes on to talk about how he’s not vaccinated, that he doesn’t need it. “Every day I drink antioxidant tea. It kills everything. Really strong stuff. Nothing bad can possibly survive in my system.” He laughs. “I haven’t been sick in ten years.”  After a few stops he starts singing what sounds like a Native American song, mournful and haunting. He gets louder and louder and when I finally sneak a glance I see that he is rocking back and forth and flapping his arms. I’m surprised to see that he is, in fact, wearing a mask, one of those heavy duty ones. 

At the next stop, he and his dog and his duffel bag all tumble out and an elderly Black man in a leather cowboy hat gets in. The woman with the walker asks him to put on a mask. He says he doesn’t have one. They start to argue. I've seen this guy before and every time he gets into the same argument with people. Masks are required on all public transportation, but there’s no one to enforce it. In the beginning of the pandemic, all the trains stocked masks and hand sanitizer, but they don’t anymore. 

 

The woman asks the man to stay away from her. She sounds hysterical but it looks like he's just sitting there. I push the button for the next stop and when the doors open and the ramp descends the woman with the walker pushes past me as I’m trying to leave. “One side,” she barks to a man standing on the sidewalk with a giant sack of cans. He just looks at her and shakes his head and hoists his cans.

The Goodwill is packed with people pushing their way in front of me. A man on a motorized scooter nearly runs me down, then barks at me for being in his way. I see the woman with the walker,  muttering angrily to herself. I try to get past her in one of the aisles but she refuses to move as she fingers a statue of a dolphin. I eventually find a pair of corduroys as well as a figurine of an ant made of wired-together rocks, holding a tiny bottle of Corona to his mandibles. 

I get back on the streetcar to head back downtown. A young man is asking everyone how to get to Vancouver on mass transit but no one knows. I tell him there’s a bus but I’m not sure where to catch it. He says he woke up this morning on a park bench in Portland and has no idea how he got there or what happened last night. The last place he saw his phone or his car was across the river in Vancouver. “I admit, I think I was driving drunk,” he says sheepishly, collapsing into a seat. At the next stop he says, “ I need some water,” and jumps up and dashes out the door. As we pull away I expect to see him retching but he’s just standing on the platform, staring at the ground, swaying slightly. Resigned to his fate.