Betting everything on black

In almost everything I do in my life, I take the outcome, analyze it and apply it to other areas of my life. I’ve always had an instinctive introspection for as long as I can remember in a semi-successful attempt to stop learning “things the hard way.” Either way, I always have something new to think about.

I spent the weekend playing the ponies. I’ve always loved gambling. Luckily, my miserly instructs are stronger than my gambling fever so I’ve been able to keep it under check. But, you know how it goes – you get on a streak, get a hot tip or get bored and next thing you know, you are betting on horse racing all day.

After doubling my money on Friday’s BoSox vs Seattle and making 20x my money on a single race at Louisiana Downs, I settled in and made slow and steady progress on the Los Alamitos, Saratoga and Del Mar racetracks. When you’re on a roll like that you have two distinctly different, yet evenly strong thoughts that go through your head:

Overpowering Thought #1: Booya! I’m on a roll! This can never end!
Overpowering thought #2: I better stop before my luck runs out.

Anyone who has done any type of gambling – especially sports betting – will attest to the devil and the angel on your shoulder, telling you opposite things. Another thing a sports better will tell you (and I would imagine it’s the same with penny stock traders or amateur forex speculators) is that it’s a nerve-racking hobby. You place a bet or series of bets that will either break the bank or send your kids to college. And then you wait. Sometimes you wait hours and sometimes it’s only 30 minutes, but it’s always a painful wait. I have found two ways to take the edge off of these wait times: running and more gambling.

So, once again the devil on my shoulder won, as he always does despite my having learned most life lessons “the hard way.” Avarice, envy and pride won out as I placed an obscenely sizable chuck of my weekends’ winning on a single spin at the roulette wheel. If I doubled my money, I would be set. If I lost, well, losing wouldn’t happen.

I clicked SPIN and closed my eyes. I opened them and looked at my monitor. My money was gone!

After that, I quit and went out to dinner and saw a movie with my girlfriend. Old adages and proverbs whizzed through my mind in an attempt to glean a lesson from my profound and sad loss.

Slow and steady.
Tortise, not the hare.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Waste not, want not.

With something new to think about, I went to sleep.

Today I woke up early and read the news before heading off to work. I read the story of Ashley Revell, a Londan man who sold all his possessions, even his clothes, flew to Las Vegas and bet $135,300 on a single, double-or-nothing roulette spin. He won $270,600 and walked away.

So it does happen.

What is the real lesson here? Whenever I wax philosophical about the meanings behind life or ways to live and hold my life in the context of the world I come up with the same thing: There are no hard and fast rules for life, except that life can and will change in the blink of an eye. Boundless choices are around every corner and it’s up to us to accept every treasure and consequence.

Whether you are betting everything on red or sitting at the Everest base camp looking up at your icy grave, one thing is certain. Fortes fortuna iuvat; fortune favors the bold.

The Hottest Place I've Ever Been pt II: Volcan Pacaya

The accommodations I chose at the St. James hotel in Antigua, Guatemala were spartan, to say the least. For $10USD, I got a bed, a light and a night stand. It was adequate for the first few days, but after a while, I started to feel a little disconnected from the world. I am a news junkie and I hadn’t seen an English language newscast or an English newspaper since I left the US. Add that to the fact that I was about to take my fifth cold (public) shower in a row, I was starting to get antsy. I had enough of Spanish colonial town sightseeing, street venders and churches.

I decided to go see the Pacaya Volcano. Volcano Pacaya (or, Volcan Pacaya) is just on the outskirts of Antigua Guatemala. It’s part of the Ring of Fire – a horseshoe shaped ring of volcanic and seismic activity that encircles the Pacific from Peru to New Zealand. I’ve always had a particular interest with the Ring of Fire, having lived on one of its more famous tectonic plates, the San Andreas fault, and being in the shadow of the West’s more famous volcanos; Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Shasta. Each of those geographic hot spots have their own unique properties and mythical legends that date back to when the indigenous peoples of the area first started telling stories about their surroundings. I knew Pacaya would be no different. I hit the streets and tracked down Marlon. Marlon was a street hustler who is the "go to" guy for just about anything in Antigua. He doesn’t actually sell or have anything, but he could hook you up with someone that did have what you want. We took a liking to each other immediately because we both used to live in Los Angles, although we lived (and left) under completely different circumstances. I left to relocate to San Francisco for a job and other reasons. He was an illegal laborer that was deported because, well, he was caught by the INS. When I found him on a corner I asked him to hook me up with a bus that would take me to the foot of the volcano. He led me to an office that did tours and said they would give me a deal, which they did. Marlon got his cut of the transaction and then offered me a prostitute and drugs, which I politely declined but told him I would be back for him later in the week for more help.

The next morning I got on the bus and headed up to Pacaya. When the Guatemalan Civil War ended in 1996, most of the country was in dire poverty from the governments’ use of "scorched earth" warfare, genocide, torture and other brutal methods. Crime continues to be high and rural areas are said to be rife with bandits and armed gunmen. Marlon assured me that there would be armed guards on the hike up the volcano, but what I didn’t know is that we would be under the auspice of a single 13 year old boy on a donkey with a shotgun. It was unsettling but I guess beggars can’t be choosers, right? I sat next to a couple of Scots and a guy from Phoenix, AZ (who, coincidentally, is the same guy I met in Guatemala City a few days prior and helped me get on the correct bus). We discussed the security situation and decided to forge on. The Scots thought that the old ladies in the group would get robbed first and this reasoning gave them enough peace of mind to put the thought of getting shot to rest. The first part of the hike to the summit was a 3 mile walk through a wooded area of the Pacaya National Park. It was a steady ascent and as we approached the volcano, I saw several signs warning me of the dangers of hiking of an active volcano. It was at that moment that I realized that this excursion is actually pretty dangerous. In America, if there’s an active volcano somewhere, the government builds a fence around it and evacuates everyone in the area. And they certainly don’t let people hike up it. I looked up and saw the steam, smoke and ash billowing out of the top and decided that the chance of being burned alive by molten lava or shot and left for dead by banditos was worth the risk to see, with my own two eyes, lava in a crater.

Forging on, the hike became a trudge as the elevation increased and dirt path turned into scree, talus and sand. The steep angle and lack of footing meant that for every three steps up the volcano you slid back 2. We had to stop numerous times because the old ladies just couldn’t make it and the Scots were adamant that we wait for them.

The attractive young girls in the group giggled and commented on how chivalrous and kind the Scots they were, but I knew better. The old ladies were bait; they were kept around for the same reason gazelles tolerate sick and dying animals in their pack. It something bad was going to happen, statistically, it would happen to the slow and weak first. I’m not one to fuck with natural law, so I kept my mouth shut and offered one of them one of my Power Bars.

As we got closer to the top, the sulpher, heat and ash were overwhelming to the senses. My eyes were watering as I took off several layers of clothing. The rock and sand were warm to the touch and you couldn’t face the crater directly because of the amount of steam and heat that came down from it. The old ladies decided that enough was enough and decided to turn around and head back down. Even the Scots seemed to think that was a good idea. The rocks were a strange color. They were reddish, with stark, yellow streaks. The yellow was sulpher. I picked up a couple of rocks and they crumbled in my hands. The top layer of rock on the volcano must have been lava that was exposed to air pretty soon after erupting and didn’t fully harden like some of the other rocks.

Finally we reached the top and the heat was almost unbearable. The guide said that this is far as we can go and told us not to look over the crater. Sometimes, the guide explained, you can see lava but today was a particularly active day and it wasn’t safe. The crowd groaned in disappointment. The guy from Phoenix came over to me and, in a low voice, said "I didn’t hike all the way up here for hours to look at rocks. I came here to see lava and I’m going to see lava. Are you in?" Of course I was. We walked around some rock formations, away from the kid with the shotgun. He went first – he climbed up the rock face and peered into the crater. He jerked back, rubbing his face and eyes. "What happened?" "It’s hella hot dude," he said, "you can’t really see anything. It’s too hot." I yelled back, "Take a picture." I hiked up to join him. He wrapped his hand and arm in my jacket to protect it from the heat and leaned over the crater, turning his face away as I held onto his belt to keep him from falling in. He snapped two pictures. We swapped places and I took a few pictures.

"Do you smell that?" "Yeah," he said. "It’s the soles of our shoes melting. We better get back." We both hiked down and nonchalantly rejoined the group. No one noticed that we were briefly gone. Afterwards, on the bus ride back, we shared our crater pictures with the group on our digital cameras. Back in Antigua, we joined the Scots for a couple of beers and we all agreed the volcano was the coolest thing we had ever seen.

The Whiskey Rebellion

Brian Rankin was old for a 12 year old. He had connections like no one's business: he was the hookup for cigarettes, booze and most importantly, porn. The year was 1985 and porn was one of the hardest things to come by. Before wack-off stations like Cinemax was on cable, before even a haphazardly crafted a internet search could yield millions of naked breasts, before scantily (and barely) clad women were delivered directly to your email account daily, porn was a commodity - a veritable currency used by adolescents all over the world, traded and sold for anything from baseball cards to bullets to a week's worth of homework. Entire platoons of boys were formed and deployed to scour the stomping grounds of perverts nearly every weekend, turning over piles of leaves in abandoned lots, rummaging through trash cans in public parks and searching shacks and shanties in the poor side of town for porn magazines. Today’s kids don't know how lucky they have it. I have had to give away so much of my dads blank audio cassettes, his tools, his AA batteries, his bullets - the currency of '80's era adolescents - just for a short glimpse at Miss November. That gaze lasted me several nights.

So, naturally, you can see how important it was to have a friend like Brian Ranking. Because of his cigarette, booze and porn hookups, Brian was surrounded with servile sycophants that fawned over this every move - the most unashamed one being Michael Sargent. This kid was only good for swiping his mom's Virgina Slims (or, Vagina Slimes as we called them) and passing them out in the schoolyard. We had been caught smoking several times and had the packs taken away and because of that, high school was something we all looked forward to. It was filled with metal-head and stoners and every corner of the school grounds had a sanctioned smoking section. No matter how many packs of cigarettes were confiscated, Michael came through again and again, week after week. He was tolerated because he knew his role and complied. We all knew our roles and complied.

Michael’s parents went out of town and for some strange reason, he was left alone in the house. Natch, we jumped on that deal, weaving detailed and meticulous lies about Michael's parent-sponsored "Slumber Party" while Brian's oafish older brother Keith impersonated Michael's dad for those adults that wished to discuss the weekend’s activities on the phone. It's a miracle that this plan actually came together because it truly was a house of cards; Keith was 17, so to us 12 year olds, he sounded like an adult but any parent with any sense and a little bit of digging would be able to unearth our whole scheme. But, thankfully, that never happened.

The next part of my story will undoubtedly be the hardest for my younger readers to fathom. My older readers will woefully remember these dark, gloomy days long since past and thank their lucky stars for DVD's and computers and other gifts of miracles bestowed upon us in the mid-90's by their Creator. Mark my words, children, you will rue the day that you actually have to work for something rather than have it all handed to you on a silver fucking platter.

Carson Smythe, another member of the crew, was particularly adept at theft and smuggling. Carson's dad had a friend who was a millionaire and owed boats, cars, houses and what seemed like the largest collection of pornography on Super-8 film in the world. Or at least that's the way Carson described it. The last time Carson was at the millionaire’s house, he snuck into the bedroom and ripped off three reels of film. Of course, we held the film up to the light, but could hardly make out anything. There's only one person we knew of that had a Super-8 film projector: my dad. The meanest dude on the block, and half of my friend were banned-for-life from my house for the slightest of infractions. The proverbial baseball had been hit into the junkyard guarded by the old junkyard dog, and I had to climb the fence. But, even as a child, I knew that fortune favored the brave and this was not the time to be meek. In the middle of the night a few days prior to the party, I grabbed my dad's projector and carried it to Rankin's house. I snuck back into the house undetected. If my thievery was discovered, I would wake up dead. It never was, and the projector was returned a week later and my dad was none the wiser.

Saturday rolled around and it was time. Friends from all over came to Michael's house. For many of us, it was the first time we had been away from our parent’s supervision. Most kids had some type of contraband to contribute. I had the film projector. One kid brought a pretty big bottle of whiskey. Brian Bein brought his dad's handgun. Of course, Carson had the reels of porn. Other contributions were less outrageous, but important to the evening nonetheless: cigarettes, Cheetos, heavy metal cassettes, candy and fireworks. But, the core group that brought the booze and porn were instant champions. Cowards turned into heroes overnight. Pure admiration by your peers is a rare and intoxicating thing. We were only ten minutes into our evening and I was already planning my next shenanigan. I had to keep my rank and reputation safe in the group. A white sheet was hung on the wall and the porn began to play, in silence. My dad’s projector performed magnificently. If he only knew the filth and perversion it was participating in... Since the films didn't have sound, Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden was piped in from Keith's room.

Pretty soon, the whiskey was opened up and the bottle was handed straight to me. Everyone seemed hesitant to take a drink. I wanted so bad to stay the hero for the night that I grabbed the bottle, held my breath and took the biggest swig of whiskey I possibly could, swallowed it down and let out a bellowing laugh and shouted, "Damn that's some fine drink!" That was something I had seen my uncle do every holiday. My insides were on fire and my face grimaced with pain, but undeterred, I took another swig and passed the bottle on. Porn continued to play while the Thin Lizzy was turned up louder. Out of nowhere, Michael stood up and walked over to Brian (the kid with the gun), and punched him in the face. Brian's hands went over the head as he looked up. Michael was smiling and motioning for him to get up and fight. Brian got up and jabbed him in the gut, followed by an uppercut to the chin. After a few exchanges, they collapsed on the floor, bloodied and laughing. We each took turns fighting each other until we were soaked in sweat and dripping blood everywhere. It was a booze, nicotine and violence filled rite of passage.

For several millennia, men proved themselves with physical feats of strength as a part of tradition in a rite of coming of age. Modern boys are denied and robbed of this because the typical things that turned boys into men have been replaced with an obsession of the accumulation of wealth. The measure of a man has change in fifty years. We no longer have to be fit nor brave. Anything that is difficult or could potentially cause any type of physical or emotional harm to children is frowned upon; around the age of 13, boys spend the next 20 years getting in touch with their feminine side. Kids today can’t even play dodge ball at school because some might get their feelings hurt. My brothers and friends and I played dodge ball every week, but with rocks and BB guns. That night back in 1985 certainly wasn't the last time I felt like a man, but it was the first, and the most poignant. I've been trying to recapture that feeling ever since.

And you're probably wondering what happened to Brian Bein and his handgun. Ah, you think everything's that easy? You’ll have to keep reading to find out about that one.

The Hottest Place I’ve Ever Been, Part I

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Georges and the Hospitable New Yorkers

The year was 1998 and the time was 4:03PM on a balmy Wednesday afternoon in Tampa, Florida. I was eating a sandwich when we received the news. A hurricane was predicted to hit the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast. The faces around the office were as stunned as they were panicked; half were frozen with the fear of not knowing what to do. The other half had the look of “Oh no, not again.” Their minds were still fresh from the devastation of Hurricane Andrew which ravaged the Gulf Coast in 1992. At the time, it was the costliest disaster in US history.

A tropical depression has just turned into a named storm – Georges, a few hours prior. The Gulf Coast has had its fair share of storms, named storms and the dreaded hurricane. A run-of-the-mill storm gets named, like Mitch or Ivan or Katrina when it reaches 33 miles per hour. It becomes a hurricane at 73 miles per hour.

The office know-it-all, Lanny, sidled in over the Vice President of Operations and quizzed us all on what a hurricane was. “Do any of you…. know… what a hurrrrry-cane is?” His southern drawl interjected awkward pauses at the most awkward of all moments. My native Southern Californian tongue cringed just about every single time he opened his mouth. Lanny was from Pensacola, Florida – the heart of the Redneck Riviera, the stretch of coast from Mobile, Alabama to Apalachicola, Florida. A lifetime smoker and ex-Marine, Lanny considered it his job to boss around the helpless old ladies and recent college grads in the office while hacking his bile onto the office carpet every few minutes.

“Well, anyone?” Lanny insisted.

Betty, with a conspicuous New York accent answered. “It depends on where it is, Lanny.” She rolled her eyed.

Lanny, somewhat disappointed that someone knew the answer, gave us all a lesson. Betty rolled her eyes again and walked back to her desk. “A hurricane is a storm going about 70 miles per hour east of the International Date Line. Typhoons are in the Northwest Pacific, west of the dateline and everything else is a cyclone.” One by one, the office left him and walked back to their offices and cubicles. I sat down at my desk and wondered what I should do next. I lived in Orange County, California and I was in Tampa doing a database upgrade job for the company. I had been to Tampa many times and enjoyed everything it had to offer from a white-trash Disneyland called Busch Gardens to the white sand beaches next to the anything-goes strip clubs. Still, a fucking hurricane? I prefer earthquakes. They are over and done with in 30 seconds flat. Hurricanes give you plenty of warning and tons to time to get to love your fear of death. Get the will up to date and find your insurance policies because we might not make it out of this alive. I grabbed my stuff and decided to take a walk back to my hotel room and think about things. I could try to take a flight out, but Tampa International would be crowded for days.

I walked outside and saw the high-rise of the Hyatt Regency and remembered I was on the 25th floor. No, I won’t be staying there. I might be safer if I stayed in the office. Betty came up behind me. She was one of the few people in the office that was actually nice to me; everyone else saw me as “the help” and ignored me. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Not sure. I think I’ll stay here or drive to Alabama or something.”

“You’re better off staying here. It is still several days away. No offense, but you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Neither do you. You’re from New York.”

“My husband is from New Orleans. You can stay with us.”

It was as good an idea as any; what else would I have done? Wait for the hurricane to sweep me away like some Bizarro Wizard of Oz? I accepted the invitation and we waited for the storm to hit. Georges spent a few days in the Atlantic, hitting several Caribbean nations and Key West, before turning to the Gulf Coast. I was hunkered down with Betty and her husband, which turned out to be one of the nicest gestures of hospitality ever extended to me. Georges lost most of its power in the Florida Keys and eventually dissipated, but not before drenching the Gulf Coast region with buckets of water. The Tampa area alone was flooded and the power was out in most of the city. Still, disaster had been averted and we all were relieved.

The emergency radio we listened to told of the damage in the Caribbean. The newscaster said that New Orleans was saved again by her sophisticated, but aging, levee systems. Betty’s husband, a civil engineer and New Orleans native, piped in over the newscast. “They really need to upgrade those levees before something really bad happens in New Orleans. They’re living on borrowed time being below sea-level and shit.”

We all nodded our heads. Yeah, I’d say so.

Vegas, baby, Vegas!

Most people, when they think of Southern California, they conjure up one of two images: perfectly tanned beach babes with their movie producer/actor/director boyfriends or AK toting gangbangers driving around in lifted Denali’s with chrome plated spinners. While both stereotypes are very much real, all you really have to do to break the stereotype is drive an hour east on the I-10 or I-15. You do that and I’ll show you a totally different side of California.

I grew up in that area, around the outskirts of Los Angeles and Orange County. Beyond Disneyland and the Hollywood Hills, where the streets are paved with gold and everyone is beautiful, are miles and miles of nothing. Meth labs, junk yards and the occasional cheesy tourist trap dot the map all the way to the Arizona and Nevada borders. Anyone that has spent any time around LA knows these freeways well because it’s the only way to Las Vegas. Everyone has their own story about driving to Vegas on the 4th of July or Memorial Day, where the temperature is 120 and traffic is moving at 35 mph. In this case when you’re spending 5 hours in the Mojave Desert on your way to Vegas, it’s actually the destination – not the journey that's is important, but that’s not to say there isn’t anything worthwhile out there.

Off one of the two main freeways that lead East, the Interstate 10, there’s a pretty odd but nonetheless cool town called Cabazon. It’s home to the same giant dinosaurs that were in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. It’s a nice stop to get some food, look at the dinosaurs and stretch your legs if you’re on a road trip to Havasu (aka The River) or Phoenix.

You can't go inside the T-Rex, but the Brontosaurus has several flights of stairs that lead through one of the legs and into the stomach where there's a pretty garish gift shop.

Moving on, there’s Death Valley. It’s one the most desolate and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Just make sure you go in the winter or spring. Summer temperatures reach 135 degrees. At the entrance to the Valley in the Mojave lies one of two of California's bona fide ghost towns, Calico (the other is Bodie). Calico is a weird place - no American would ever be caught dead there, so most of the visitors are French or Germans, gleefully giving away their money to see fake gun shows, short train rides around the city and panning for gold that yields nothing but pebbles. It used to be a thriving mining town but in the 1890's, the price of silver plummeted causing the abandonment of many towns. Walter Knott, founder of Knott's Berry Farm, purchased the town, renovated it based on historic photographs, and donated the town to the county of San Bernardino. It's a county regional park and a California Historic Monument. There's not much to see here, so I would suggest passing on Calico unless you are really really into ghost towns or a sucker for novelty like I am.


The highlight of the Mojave is Bun Boy in Baker. You ask anyone in Southern California or Nevada about Bun Boy and they will say, "Oh the world's largest thermometer." If you don't love Bun Boy and the 134 ft thermometer, you must hate America and puppies too. Here's an interesting factoid about Bun Boy: the store has produced more instant millionaires in the California Super Lotto than any other single location in the state. How does that stack up against your odds at the blackjack table at Circus Circus?

While you're in Baker, stop by Zzyzx. It's a tiny town off the I-15 that was founded in 1946 by Curtis Springer. He named the town and the road that leads into the town Zzyzx, claiming it was the last word in the English language. He built a spa and a mineral spring on the land which he ran until 1974. The Federal government found out about it and

confiscated the land from him and threw him in jail. It's federal land which he didn't own and couldn't legally set up a business, let alone found a whole town. Nothing beats the immensity of Vegas or the beautiful beaches of Orange County, but if you have some free time and are traveling between the two cities, spend some time exploring. I know there's a lot more out there and I've only scratched the surface. I guarantee you will be surprised at what you can discover out there.

Airports are weird places.

I am sitting here on a black pleather chair, domestic terminal, San Francisco International Airport. I’m surrounded by people from all aspects of life. College kids from Berkeley sitting on the floor while there is ample seating (maybe they don’t know the seemingly leather chairs are fake leather?), business men and women, players making deals on the phone, mothers and families and their screaming kids. I wonder if there is a serial killer among us. An al-Qaeda operative? Homeland Security put out an “Orange Alert” recently, after all.

Even with all these people and all of their unique stories, I still don’t feel this is an accurate cross-sections of Californian (or American, for that matter) society. Traveling – especially by air – requires a certain amount of capital. More importantly, it requires an actual place to go. An office to work at, a sister or relative to visit, a hotel to stay at (which requires even more capital), so naturally the “have-nots” of our society are excluded from being on this plane with me. Which was just delayed twenty more minutes.

There are more kids around me than I am usually used to seeing. Living as a single guy in his thirties in the single guy capital of the world does not provide me with a lot of opportunity for exposure to children. I am just not used to it! There is a kid, on the filthy SFO floor, writhing around like an epileptic. He’s screaming and his hands and arms (which are sticky from ice cream) are flapping around. He reminds me of a vicious fish that has just been ripped from the comfort and safety of him home in the ocean and thrown onto the floor of a crusty old fishing boat. No, he reminds me of Legion. Legion was a character from the Bible. He was possessed by either demons or Lucifer and cruised around Judea terrorizing the local Jews. He would scream, foam at the mouth, drop to the floor and writhe and shake and have fits until he exhausted himself. A lot like an epileptic. A lot like this kid on the floor. He been there so long, the grime and dirt has attached to the stickiness of the dried ice cream on his arm, creating a thin film of gray filth. It makes me want to wretch.

I have flown at least forty times since 9/11. It crosses my mind once in a while that each moment could be my last, but I’ve never once thought I was really going to die on a plane. It’s sensation – that immediate death feeling -- that most Americans have never felt. The Israelis rely on busses for their primary mode of transportation. It takes a little getting used to, as an American, when busses are often viewed as the transportation method of the poor.

I have just witnessed something I have never witnessed before. Never, ever, ever. I have flown enough miles to get a free trip to the moon using points and I’ve never seen this before. The flight attendant went up to our row and asked everyone if we were comfortable sitting in an exit row and if we were aware of our responsibilities and knew that we had to open the door if the ship went down and what to do the case of an emergency. There’s a really big part of me that while always hoping there isn’t any death or destruction or a crash lading but secretly wants to be put to the ultimate test of rescue and survival. This MD-90 goes down in the Cascades and the pilots are dead. The flight attendants are hysterical and it is up to me and my superior survival skills to get these people to safety. I need you, you and you. Get those old ladies away from the leaking fuel.

You; you look strong. Quick. That dude is pinned down by one of the turbine engines. Get him out from under it because we’ll need his body to eat tonight to keep us alive. And the rest of you, calm the fuck down cause I’m in charge.

So, the thing I just saw I’ve never seen: two people stood up and said no, I do not want to sit in an exit row. I do not want to rescue people. I do not want to open that emergency door and watch the rubber ramp inflate and help people to safety. I am too weak, dumb or lazy to be trusted to follow cartoon instructions printed and inserted in every seat in every row. Please reseat me.

Back to the Israelis. They use busses for everything. When I was there, Sharon called up Israeli Army reservists to help protect settlements and security installations. This was before the pullout that is going on right now. There are two types of busses there; Egged busses which shuttle people and Army between major cities and there are the green city busses that’s like our AC Transit or MUNI. Egged busses have airport-like security. Your have to get your bags x-rayed, you have to walk through a metal detector and there are armed soldiers on every bus. On the green city busses there is no security. Granted, there are cops and soldiers everywhere on the streets, but getting on one of these busses for the first time is kind of terrifying. My mind flashes back to grisly video on CNN of a green, twisted, burned out hulk, still smoldering, mothers, husbands, old women crying hysterically looking for any sign that their loved ones are still alive. Then I stepped on the bus. I felt awful at my next reaction because in American society, everyone is a suspect – not one religious, racial or social class. But an Arab with a backpack steps on the bus and my heart races and I look down, ashamed, but can’t help looking at him, trying to catch a glimpse of nervousness or second thoughts. My stomach is a pit of bile and I wonder if I should pray when it occurs to me that all the Israelis are laughing and talking, not fazed by the Arab. It must be OK. Then I notice the young man with the handgun in a holster on his hip. Everything is going to be OK. I think. Unless he’s crazy too. Fuck it. If I die, I die. It’ll be my big chance to get away from it all. There it is, the bus is moving again. He’s not detonating himself and the crazy guy with the gun hasn’t capped anyone because he’s, well, crazy. It’s ok. My stop is in a few blocks. Fuck it. I’ll get off here. I need the exercise. No. Bush says we can’t let the terrorists win and if I get off this bus the terrorists have won. But, I do need the exercise. Yes, I do. I’ll get off the bus because I want to work out, not because I’m scared. So I stand up and grab my huge Lowe Alpine mountaineering sized backpack and edge my way to the exit when I notice that everyone is staring at me with apprehension and trepidation. It’s me with the huge ass backpack, not the Arab. It’s me that looks like an outsider, not the Arab. It’s me that’s traveling alone, not the Arab. It’s me that’s sweating like a whore in a church, not the Arab. It’s my eyes that are darting around scanning bodies, not the Arab. It’s me that keeps looking at the holstered gun, not the Arab. And it’s me that people are giving plenty of space to, not the Arab.

You see, interesting things happen when traveling, regardless if you’re taking the 38 from 36th to Fillmore or United Flight 580 with service to Portland or an Egged bus from Haifa to Tel Aviv. You just have to get out and explore. And it doesn’t require that much capitol.

Goodbye, red double-deckers

Last Friday was the last day of service for London’s famous red double-decker buses. They have long been the backbone of London’s transit system, but are now being retired in favor of buses are more accessible to people with disabilities. Even though the double-decker buses have only been in London for the last fifty years or so, they have become as much a symbol of London as Big Ben or Buckingham Palace. I have to admit, I never rode on a red double-decker bus in London and now I wish I had. I did, however, ride the London Underground subway system which I thought was impressive, but a little anti-climatic. Maybe I watch too much TV, but I expected the Underground to be filled with angry London youths with mohawks, snooty aristocratic types, football hooligans and chimney sweeps shouting “’ello, Guv’nah!” Instead, Londoners I found Londoners to be normal people, just riding the subway in an orderly fashion.

I’ve always thought that the best way to absorb the culture of a city is to ride the public transportation that the locals use rather than going with a tour group or renting a car. You can see so much about the culture of the city you are visiting simply by sitting on a bus, train or subway with the people that live there. It goes without saying that I would prefer to do this when I’m in a foreign county, but it is even more true for traveling in America. America is vastly underrated among Americans that like to travel, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. If I had a choice between spending a year traveling the United States or a year traveling one other continent in the world, I tell you, it would be a real toss-up. The United States – especially the fly-over states -- is so geographically and culturally diverse that you could spend a lifetime seeing it all. Furthermore, the best way to see these areas is riding the local transportation.

Chicago’s L trains give more than their money’s worth when visiting the city. A ride from O’Hare to downtown can give you a real look at what a major US city looks like from the inside out. My favorite route is the Red Line, getting on at the terminal at Howard Street. From there, the train runs on an elevated track between buildings. You can look out the train window into backyard porches and windows that are facing the tracks. If the train wasn’t moving so fast, you could tell the color of someone’s eyes who happened to be sitting on a porch at the time. Once, a train stopped for a few minutes and an elderly lady noticed that the whole car seemed to be peering down at her on her patio. She indignantly folded her newspaper and stomped off inside, slamming her door behind her. She reappeared a few moments later to give us the evil eye, let her dog in and slam the door once again. The Red Line goes underground at the Near North Side and reemerges at Roosevelt. During the ride, you pass by landmarks such as Wrigley Field, Michigan Ave, Loyola… and Cabrini -Green. Cabrini-Green, perhaps one of the most infamous housing projects in the United States, and it looked like Fallujah. As the L passed between the buildings, they got increasingly more dilapidated. Soon, I was looking out the window into burned out buildings, buildings that had sides demolished but were still standing, and piles of rubble. One building had been burned out, almost perfectly, in half. It looked like a real life cross-section of a building you see diagrams of in architectural digests. From the L, I could see a twelve story building with people living inside the apartments, one wall completely exposed. Once man had a BBQ going in there; another room looked like a crack den. I live in San Francisco and gentrification has become contentious topic. When urban redesign is done correctly, like in the inner city of Atlanta, a good mixture of low and medium-income housing in the same neighborhood can drastically improve the condition of schools and other factors that contribute to poverty. Seeing at the problems first-hand that dense pockets of sheer poverty in areas like Chicago and New Orleans cause make me think that the old paradigm of grouping people together in socio-economic areas, in the long run, hurts everyone. Even the rich people.

Riding New York City’s subway and San Francisco’s MUNI are very similar in the sense everyone rides them, regardless of their background, and if you are observant enough you start to recognize the cultural microcosm inside the cars themselves. The fascinating thing I find about riding the subway or MUNI is that something strange, funny or scary can happen to you almost every single time you ride if you’re observant enough. In San Francisco, for example, I have seen the weirdest things riding MUNI that really should warrant its own story rather than including it here. San Francisco is famous for its locals that have a penchant for public nudity, masturbation and urination. If you are visitor and want a primer to this weird and often disturbing phenomenon, MUNI is a good place to start.

One of the absolute best experiences I have ever had riding buses around a country is in El Salvador and Guatemala. It is a phenomenonal experience that, in itself, is worth the price of a plane ticket. Spending a full day traveling was no chore because of the diverse and amazing scenery you see, people you meet and food you eat. The public buses in El Salvador are old American Blue Bird buses (the old yellow ones used to ferry kids around) that were purchased by the government and converted into transit buses. When I say “convert” I really mean “pimped out.” The safety mechanisms that prevent the front door and rear emergency exit from opening while moving have been removed. A stereo is usually installed next the driver, with speakers drilled into the side walls playing local El Salvadoran music or Reggaeton. The drivers’ area is as ornate as it is cluttered; Virgin Mary of Guadalupe statues and trading cards of different saints adorn the huge dashboard. Beads and fuzzy balls hang from the ceiling and front windows.

The outsides of the buses are painted in a style that is both practical and a collage of many different styles. Every single bus is unique and hand painted. Some have murals on the sides of oceans, forests or Nativity scenes. Others are two-tone paint jobs with simple designs or stickers. I was in a small town called Tazumal in northwestern El Salvador, and I saw a bus that had “METALLICA” written on the front, in the bands lettering. It was prefect too, like I was looking at the album cover of Master of Puppets! I chased after it to get a picture but couldn’t catch up. I can’t express how diverse and colorful these buses are; the outsides are adorned with everything from silver ladies, clasped hands praying, heavy metal band names, pictures of animals, etc. The front and back of the buses always have the number of the bus route and the starting and destination cities. These numbers and letters are always different as well. Some are block letters, some are written in the Iron Maiden style of lettering (Central Americans LOVE heavy metal), dripping blood, Gothic or a cursive style. The buses are a real source of pride for the El Salvadoran people. After being wrecked by over a decade of bloody civil war, the country doesn’t have a much by the way of infrastructure. Even though the machines themselves are old, they are well maintained and deeply loved by everyone that works on or rides in them. The system is extensive, reliable and respected. The bus drivers themselves sincerely care about the bus, the riders and the route. The buses in El Salvador are a symbol of achievement and civic pride. It is their way of standing tall and proud after the civil war and building something that benefits the whole country.

I always enjoyed the bus rides. There are way too many potholes to read a book, so I usually looked out the window, talked to someone in Spanglish or just watched the locals interact. In the bigger cities, there was a revolving door of religious preachers and food vendors that enter the bus, give a lecture on morals or sell caramelized peanuts or purses and then get off a few stops up. I watched them and they usually crossed the street and waited for the bus approaching from the opposite direction. I am sure they did this all day; catching a bus in one direction, selling something or preaching something, then getting off, only to repeat it over and over again. In Guatemala City, a boy stepped on the bus wearing a bear costume and red paint on his face. Once the bus starting moving, he broke out in his routine or singing and dancing. I wish I could tell you what it was, but I didn’t understand a word of it. It seemed funny and the bus was roaring with laughter. He came by collecting money and I have him a few quetzals for making me laugh even though I didn’t know why I was laughing.

I don’t want to paint so rosy of a picture so that you all quit your jobs and live out the rest of your days riding the buses in El Salvador. Believe you me, they are not without their drawbacks. Being old school buses, they are very uncomfortable for anyone over 5’5”. I’m 6’2”, so I had to do some creative positioning with my legs in a packed bus. As I mentioned before, the emergency door in the back is usually unlocked, if not flapping open. One of the first long distance buses I took was from the capital city, San Salvador, to Santa Ana. The bus was totally packed; standing room only. When we reached the highway, the driver punched it to about 60mph and all of a sudden the rear emergency door opened and was flapping in the wind. I expected panic to ensue: women clutching their kids in horror and the driver gingerly pulling over to the side, evacuating and radioing in for a replacement bus. That would happen in America, undoubtedly, along with the stream of lawsuits suing over the mental trauma of having a bus door open on up on the freeway.

Not in El Salvador.

A small heroic boy climbed over some groceries and hung out the back of the bus while his brother held onto his belt to keep him from falling out. After a couple of lunges, he finally caught the door and pulled it shut. I was amazed at the bravado of this kid, but after spending two weeks in Central America, his performance was pretty run of the mill. People do things all the time in most other countries that seem dangerous or foolish to Americans. I witnessed all sorts of things that, at first glance made you gasp, but after some thought you realize that necessity is the mother of invention and sometimes necessity makes you hang out of a bus to get something because no one else is going to do it for you.

One particularly humorous experience happened at about 7 in the morning in Antigua, Guatemala. I walked to the main bus terminal to catch a bus to Guatemala City. A boy, no older than 10, was standing on the hood shouting “GUATE, GUATE, GUATE.” The bus driver or the money collector will usually stand somewhere conspicuous and shout the destination of the bus to passerbys. I suspect that the zeal in which they try to get riders might be motivated by my theory that they either get a commission for each rider, or they pocket a portion of the fare. I missed a bus before because I didn’t know “Guate” is what locals call Guatemala City, but I didn’t let it trip me up again. I got onto the bus, stowed my bag and waited. I was one of the first people on the bus and in the course of 20 minutes, the bus was packed like a can of sardines. There was a body, bag or animal in every conceivable nook in that bus. I gave my seat to an old, decrepit lady and was quickly squished into a corner by a mass of bodies. My chin was touching my chest and legs bent at a 30 degree angle like an Abu Ghraib stress position just to keep my head from slamming into the roof when we hit a pothole. Four hours of this lay in front of me, so I tried to relax and just go with it. The ten year old money collector entered the bus and muttered something under his breath, probably something about the overcrowded bus. Flashbacks of my Santa Ana trip played though my mind and I hoped that the back emergency exit didn’t fly open this time. It seemed way too crowded and I knew, if it did, someone would fly out and eat shit on the pavement below. The boy, determined to collect his money, climbed on top of a seat and made his way to the back of the bus and all the way forward again, stepping on the backs of the seats, over peoples heads. I watched him for as long as I could, and sure enough, he collected fare from every single person in that bus. I made it to Guate in one piece but I felt like I spent four hours locked in the trunk of a taxi cab.

Another particularly harrowing set of bus rides I took was around Jerusalem and the long distance Israeli buses between major cities. In November of 2003, right in the middle of the second Intifada, I landed in Tel Aviv and immediately hit the streets. Clutching my phrase book, I asked the driver in poor Hebrew if he could let me off near the U.S. Embassy, which is where all the hotels are on the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv. He answered me in English and I walked to the back of the bus. I was about one or two civilians in a packed bus – everyone else were Israeli soldiers. I sat at the back of the bus, and as I looked up over the seats, I saw rows of M-16 rifle barrels sticking up over the seats that ran the length of the bus. I sat across from a guy from Minnesota. His parents are Israeli born and emigrated to the United States before he was born. After September 11th, he moved to Israel to live with his aunt and joined the Israeli Defense Force. He told me that the IDF uses public buses as their main mode of transport and that I shouldn’t be afraid because no suicide bomber would ever walk into a bus with 50 armed 18 and 19 year olds that had itchy trigger fingers.

Jerusalem was different. I took the city bus twice around town, but started walking everywhere after a bus bombing took place one night in the old section of Jerusalem. I didn’t see or hear the explosion, but I saw the twisted green hulk of the bus burning on CNN. When I went outside I saw the same green buses packed with people and just decided to walk. I saw a lot of the city that way too, but nothing beats riding in a bus.

News stories and blogs are filled with people over the last few days lamenting the loss of the double-deckers in London. For me, it’s bittersweet. I don’t get too sentimental when a legacy dies because a new one is just around the corner. Travel is more about the journey itself, whatever method that may be, than the destination.