By Randy Horick, Walter Jowers, Matt Pulle, Grace Renshaw, Jim Ridley & Adam Ross
Cocooned in their cars, commuters choose their own company: friends, co-workers, the radio. Bus riders have to take what comes. The bus is like a bar. It is a community of strangers that can be as lively as a football crowd and as lonely as the last person in the corner at last call. That some never look fellow riders in the eye makes them no less a community. That some riders see each other every day and know each other by sight, name or even by stop, makes them no less strangers. The bus may be the only place they come in contact with each other.
The bus in Nashville is several communities, really. They are figuratively parallel and literally moving in tangents to each other, physically intersecting at one downtown point only.
We decided to explore.
On a series of days this November, several Scene writers and photographers got on the buses around Nashville. We rode where the routes and the day took us. We learned a lot about the difficulties of getting around the city without an automobile. We saw a snapshot of a community that many Nashvillians glimpse only in passing. And we met some interesting people along the way.
The “redheaded amazon bitch”
No one meets my eyes when I get on the #7, heading downtown after dark. The bus is largely vacant, and so are the expressions on the riders’ faces. They’re trance-like, except for the four boys near the back, who carry on a lively banter as they create four piles of dollar bills, as if engaged in an impromptu three-card monte game.
“I can’t believe you ate five hamburgers today,” one boy says to the largest in their group.
“I didn’t eat five.”
“And chili cheese fries!” another chimes in.
“I had just two.”
The money, it turns out, is not part of a game but an adventure. Taking advantage of a school holiday, Anthony, Tyree, Michael and William have been selling candy door-to-door in Belle Meade to raise money to attend summer camp in North Carolina. They plan to go together as part of the Jesus Holy Temple Youth Group.
All four are between seventh and ninth grade and grew up together near the Preston Taylor Homes. Michael and William are first cousins. None had ever been to Belle Meade before.
The boys walked mostly along the side streets, a little awed by the mansions and manicured lawns. “Some people were real nice,” William says. “One man got real mad. He yelled, 'Go away, kid!’ ”
The boys seem equally wide-eyed to learn their names might appear in a newspaper. For them, that would be another first. “Where do you print them?” Anthony asks. “Are you writing the story now? Could I write a story for the paper?”
When we reach downtown, the boys put away their money. They netted over $100, they say. All their peanut M&Ms are gone. The last I see them, they’re together on a bench, waiting for another bus, still celebrating the day’s windfall.
The boisterous boys are an exception. Night riders are different, explains Bill, who drives an evening route along Nolensville Road. They’re quiet. Everything’s less hurried. That’s why Bill likes it. “The passengers are more relaxed at night,” he says. “If I get caught in traffic and they’re a few minutes late, they don’t yell at me.”
Bill drives from 4 to midnight Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 to 11 p.m. on Saturdays. He runs from one route to the next—Donelson, Nolensville, Bordeaux, Meridian Street—then starts over again. When we reach Haywood Lane, Bill turns left, then down an alley, then back on Nolensville toward downtown. “See you tomorrow,” he says as he lets a woman off the bus. “You get to know a lot of the regulars,” he says. “I knew she was going to this side [of Nolensville], so I brought her back around where she wouldn’t have to cross the busy road.”
As that woman exits, another enters—a tall, 50-ish lady with auburn hair who greets me with a “hello” that sounds friendly and exhausted all at once. She has just finished her shift as a stylist at a salon near Elysian Fields. She says she’s headed to North Sacramento.
“North Nashville, I mean. I’m just tired.” She closes her eyes and shakes her head, as if scolding herself. “I’m originally from California.”
When asked what brought her to Nashville, she doesn’t miss a beat.
“Stupidity.”
Then she explains. “I had it rough since I been here. I had one of those Jerry Springer stories. I was married for 20 years,” she says. “I had my own hair salon in Santa Clara.” Then she fell for a man from Nashville—Tony. “I followed him here to get married,” she says, shaking her head again.
She packed her two teenaged-children and all her worldly goods into a pickup with a camper shell and headed east. When the truck broke down, she had to leave it at a rest stop. When she finally returned, it was gone. A sympathetic truck driver agreed to take the children to Nashville ahead of her. “Stupidity,” she says.
The trucker abandoned the kids in Memphis. She hitchhiked to Nashville, where Tony abandoned her. Because she was homeless, the children were placed in foster care.
“I was on the streets about three years,” she says. “There’s no help for a homeless person who doesn’t do drugs or have an alcohol problem.
“I had a camp for a while near where they park the buses. It was one of the nicer ones. I had a tent and a fireplace and picnic table. The cops would harass us every day.”
To make money, she cut copper pipe from abandoned buildings and sold it for 85 cents a pound. “I learned a lot on the streets,” she says. Finally, she earned enough money to pay for a beautician’s license and get a job.
“Do you see your kids?”
“Yes and no.” When her daughter turned 18 and left foster care, she took up with Tony, her mother’s old boyfriend, and moved back to California. “That ended our relationship,” the woman says. “Now my granddaughter’s involved. They had a child.”
She occasionally sees her son. “He’s doing 30 percent of 26 years in Tiptonville,” she says. “He robbed a couple of Waffle Houses at gunpoint and beat up a drug dealer. He got into a gang when he was in foster care.”
She tells all this as if recounting an uneventful trip to the grocery store. “I’m barely squeaking by right now,” she says. “But it will get better. I just got married in August.
“I’m Sharon,” she says finally, when the bus reaches Fifth and Deaderick. “I don’t mind you using it. My name was 'Amazon’ on the streets. Actually, my full title was the 'redheaded amazon bitch,’ because I’m tall and don’t take any crap.”
She gets off to catch another bus, and I wish her good luck.
—Randy Horick
Dirty laundry
During rush hour Wednesday, as second-shift workers commute to their jobs, many of the riders on the #12 express gratitude that the city has an adequate bus system—calling it anything more than that is a stretch—but they wish that more could be done to free up their time.
Michael Jackson, a Gulf War vet, says that riding the bus to his food service job at the Veterans Hospital takes up as much as three hours a day. Jackson used to have a car until an uninsured driver took care of that. Since then, he hasn’t been able to “raise the funds for another one.” Now he has a decent walk from his South Nashville apartment complex to the bus stop, where he takes a bus to the downtown transfer station; then he waits as long as 30 minutes for a second bus to take him to Veterans Hospital, nestled in the middle of the Vanderbilt campus. He works from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and on the way back the closest the bus comes to his apartment is Harding Mall, leaving him a 45-minute walk home. Michael says that if he had a regular 9-to-5 job, he wouldn’t have as long a wait for the bus and he’d be dropped off a lot closer to where he hangs his hat. “They just don’t think enough about the second-shift workers,” Jackson says. Other passengers vigorously nod their heads in agreement.
Kim Jackson, who by appearances at least is not in any way related to Michael, says that an ordinary trip requires careful planning. “If I have an appointment on the other side of town,” says Jackson, who works at Captain D’s, “I’ll have to leave hours before.”
Cindy Neel, who works at the Country Music Hall of Fame as a visitor service representative, says that her bus ride to and from her South Nashville residence takes about an hour and 45 minutes. Naturally, she also would like “more routes and more service hours.”
Onetime New Yorker Margaret Andoh, a hairdresser with a rich Caribbean accent, wishes it was easier to switch buses mid-route. “In New York, you could transfer to any bus just about. Here you can’t. Does that make sense to you?”
Actually, it does. Much like the other bus I rode this morning, which looped through East Nashville, our bus is barely one-third full, which, according to the regular passengers, is the norm. Adding more routes and transfer stations would only dilute that share, which would force our friends at the MTA to raise rates. It’s a defeating cycle, as the bus system can’t provide better service until it attracts more riders. But it won’t attract more riders until, well, you get the point.
But if the MTA can’t add more routes just yet, the agency can pay more attention to other quality-of-life issues. Andoh says that the floors should be cleaner, yet another comment that resonates with the other passengers. She also says that the exit steps should descend closer to ground level. Tommy Brown, our bus driver, who hails from Detroit, notes that the MTA buses seem to break down a lot, delaying routes and costing everybody time. “Buses are buses, and anything can go wrong,” he says matter-of-factly.
Brown then makes sure I notice a broken-down MTA bus being hauled away by a tow truck.
Kim Jackson has a commonsense suggestion that I might have made when I first rode the bus at age 5. “I think the bus drivers need to make sure everybody is seated before they take off,” she says, though not in reference to our own driver that day.
Interestingly, the complaint that seems to trigger the most fervor deals with the youngest bus-riding demographic: magnet school kids. The school system doesn’t provide transportation to any of its downtown magnets, so parents either drive their children to school or put them on an MTA bus. Apparently, however, the mix of school-age kids and frazzled worker bees doesn’t exactly go together like Hall and Oates. “That’s the worst part about riding the buses—these kids,” Michael Jackson says. “They disrespect you and carry on their partying games.”
“They are very disrespectful,” echoes Kim Jackson. “And they use bad language. They should have their own bus and be separated from the normal passengers.”
Michelle Shoemaker, who works as a waitress at Shoney’s on Thompson Lane, has no complaints about taking the bus to work. Having arrived recently in Nashville from Texas, in part because of her love for country music, Shoemaker says that she always makes it to her job on time. She also appreciates the professionalism of the drivers, notwithstanding their failure sometimes to come to a complete stop. “I sometimes see people come onto the bus with attitudes, but they are handled pretty quickly,” she says. “I definitely feel safe.”
What seems to make everybody’s ride easier, in our bus at least, is the unassuming camaraderie among the riders. “We’re always looking out for each other,” Neal says, adding that many of them keep up with each other’s lives.
“You get to a point when you know when everybody works and when they don’t,” Michael Jackson says.
The bus driver also tries to do his part. “I try to lift people’s spirits if I can,” says Brown, who has driven buses for MTA for 15 years now. “But if I can’t, I don’t say anything.”
—Matt Pulle
“The crew”
Hume-Fogg Academic High School is a 90-year-old castle fortress of a building, wedged tightly between Seventh and Eighth avenues with a couple of scraggly strips of lawn in front. At 3 p.m., kids come spilling out the dingy doors and down the steps. Cars are double-parked in the front of the building, where utter confusion reigns as parents struggle to pick up kids waiting on the school’s ample steps.
A few kids trickle around the corner to the Seventh Avenue bus stop. Some are waiting for more savvy parents to swing by and make a faster pick-up. But most are waiting for the #7 Hillsboro bus, which they ride home from school every day.
At the bus stop, the kids jostle and tease each other. The girls are wearing scruffy hiphuggers with bellbottoms, and they have long, straight hair. Other than a couple of cell phones, a video recorder and one kid whose low-riding pants reveal about four inches of loud boxer shorts as he hoists two girls onto his back, there is nothing in sight that would tell you that it is 2002 rather than 1972.
The November wind is chilly, but half the kids are in their shirtsleeves. No one looks cold. No one sits down. Everybody talks at once. Many heft backpacks that look like they weigh 80 pounds. It’s the day after election day, and one boy pronounces, more than once: “I think I’d rather have Bredesen as a governor and Alexander in the Senate than Clement and Hilleary.” The grass on the steep little hill behind the bus stop looks like it hasn’t been mowed all summer, and it’s studded with trash. On the back of the Hume-Fogg building, windows that once held window-unit air conditioners are now filled in with new plywood. Hume-Fogg just got central air conditioning, and the building has fresh scars all over to prove it.
When the bus arrives, the kids move up the sidewalk past a line of cars, clamber up the steps en masse and head for the back of the vehicle, trapping a couple of unwary men who look like they wish they could move.
“The Crew,” a group of four boys—sophomore Phillip and freshmen Jacob, William and Nick—assembles in a couple of seats near the very back. They have ridden the afternoon bus together for more than a year (the morning schedule’s too inconvenient). On Friday afternoons, Crew members stop on the way home at San Antonio Taco Factory.
The Crew forms a tight knot in the middle of the group of students at the back of the bus. They spar with each other and with another student who gets on at a stop around the corner with a girl. “Russ!” a Crew member calls, “Is that your sister? She’s taller than you!” Russ nods and turns pink.
When The Crew gets off together past Hillsboro Village, the three girls left on the bus breathe a collective sigh of relief.
“You know, separately, they’re all pretty nice—well, _____ is kind of mean—but when they’re together, they’re all mean,” one girl confides. “They don’t like me.”
“They like me,” the second girl chimes in.
“That’s because you’re new,” the first girl says.
“I’m new, and they don’t like me,” says the third.
“That’s because you’re naive,” says the first girl. “The problem is, they’re all really smart—and when they’re together, they get arrogant. And they don’t like girls that whine.”
“They like me,” the second girl says again.
“That’s because you’re new,” the first girl says again.
“____ is smart?” asks the third girl doubtfully.
“No, not him,” the first girl says dismissively. “But Jacob got like a 98 as his lowest grade, and he doesn’t even study.”
The bus reaches the Green Hills mall, its final stop. The girls get off.
On the ride back, passengers sit silently. Over the crackling radio, another bus driver complains to a dispatcher: “I’ve got a load of kids in the back that are driving me crazy.”
—Grace Renshaw
A Scrap of Tinsel
It is dawn, the day after Halloween, and the #12 bus down Nolensville Road takes on more and more passengers as it nears downtown. A long-haired man with Coke-bottle lenses puffs steam off his Mapco coffee. A burr-cut teen in a workman’s uniform tromps down the aisle in a kind of slopewalk as he makes his way to the rear: upper body back, feet inching forward, planted against the bus’s forward motion. Near the back, the half-dozen passengers are scattered and nobody talks.
Up front is livelier. Halloween was a wild night for one woman, whose community-center party was interrupted when a kid escaped custody nearby, streaking off in the cold night wearing nothing but handcuffs, shackles and khaki shorts. “He bent up a car on the news,” a regular chimes in. “I think it was a van,” says another. “There was an awful lot of wreckage.” He avoided capture, the woman explains, by pretending the cuffs and shackles were his costume. The bus rides smooth even on the 440 overpass, where construction gaps send compacts bouncing.
Under the shelters at Fifth and Deaderick, John Osborn says, “Ask me how many sausage biscuits I ate for breakfast.” He wears a wool stocking cap and grins broadly. He’s got a face full of scraggly whiskers. “Ten! Ten sausage biscuits!” He volunteers his age as 66. Numbers are plainly his obsession, especially thousands: number of T-bone steaks eaten last night, number of children he says he’ll have when he marries a white woman. “I’ll buy you a wedding dress for a thousand dollars,” he tells a woman photographer who stands nearby smoking.
The bus now departing the Fifth and Deaderick Shelter for Nolensville Road is a lot quieter, and emptier, than the one we road in on. Just behind the driver’s seat, a slender kid in a peace-sign beach hat coughs violently into his fist and vigorously wipes his pants. When he hears a conversation about the Nashville Zoo, the stop approaching, he perks up. “That’s where I’m going,” he says. In warmer days, he worked in maintenance, where he had to unclog a creek dammed by beavers. His voice, made low and raspy by a cold, is hard to hear above the motor, but the solution apparently involved otters. “They hate otters,” he offers, and leaves it at that. With business slowing for the winter months, he’s being laid off this afternoon. When asked what he’ll do for the season, he says, “I don’t know,” and there’s nothing more to say after that. The doors squeak open near the zoo entrance, and the bus is one passenger lighter.
Outside the Tusculum Mapco, a large woman flails her arms and bolts across a grassy median, flagging down the bus. “Thank you, bus driver!” she pants, feeding change into the box up front. “Got to get to that J-O-B. Got to get those coins to fill that up!” The ride downtown is quiet, save for a forlorn cell phone conversation a few rows back. “It’s just this thing’s been weighing on me,” the man says. “I can’t even sleep. I’m under so much stress.” By now Legislative Plaza is in view, and the bus bound for the Super Wal-Mart on Charlotte Pike departs shortly.
The no-nonsense driver is T.J. Caruthers Sr. The sign says “26 Years Safe Driving,” and for the first time this morning, children climb onto the bus. Nine-year-old Ashley Oswald flounces onto the second seat from the back, where she spends the ride fretting about her witch costume. The night before, she was sick and missed out on trick-or-treating. But she has a Halloween party this morning, and she worries that she needs something more than the sparkly witch’s broom she carries in her bag.
“You didn’t want any makeup,” her mother Kim reminds her.
“The Wizard of Oz witch doesn’t have makeup,” Ashley counters.
“She had a green face!” her mom replies, laughing.
“All witches have green faces,” she argues. When she climbs off the bus with her mom, she leaves a scrap of tinsel on the seat from her broom.
The ride down Charlotte is a mirror image of Nolensville Road. The signs form a kind of found poetry of inner-city retail: COOL STUFF. WEIRD THINGS. CLOTHES FOR THE BIG & TALL MAN. The bus pauses long enough to pick up a worker from the nearby McDonald’s, where the drive-through is congested. The generic signage of fast-food huts and chain banks gradually yields to vibrant ethnic grocery stores, Vietnamese salons and tacquerias. By the end of the line, though, the bus is so deserted and dead that the sighting of a groundhog rouses excitement from the last two passengers onboard.
Evening finds a jittery kid standing at the intersection of Peachtree and Nolensville, waiting for a bus near the tail end of rush hour. MTA lines are slowing to hourly rounds, the kid just got off work, and if he misses the night’s last connecting bus to Donelson, which he says leaves downtown at 5:45, he faces a six-mile walk home. “Is it 5:45 yet?” he asks, jiggling nervously and fumbling in his pockets. “It’s not 5:45 yet, is it? You know what time it is?”
It’s 5:50. We ride the bus together toward the lighted skyline. Once downtown, he will check to see if there is a later Donelson bus. When we pull into Fifth & Deaderick at 6:10, he’s first out the door. The last I see of him, he is frantically running from bus to bus, checking to see if he lucked out this time with his connection.
—Jim Ridley
the money-eating machine
It’s 6:48 a.m. Friday, and photographer Eric England and I jump on an eastbound #3 at Elmington Park. The first thing I discover is that the money-eating machine at the front of the bus cheats you. “Just feed the money in like a slot machine,” the bus driver says. So I slide in three dollar bills for a $2.90 fare. I get no change. The MTA bus machines, like the dollar changers in the Atlanta airport, keep a little something for their trouble. Before I even sit down, I’m screwed out of a dime.
There aren’t many people on the bus. The few that are here have the look of folk who aren’t so much going somewhere as they’re trying to get away from something. Wherever they’ve been, whatever they’ve been doing, it’s taken a little toll on most of them. They don’t talk, and I don’t try to make them talk. I just sit and read the advertisements above the seats. Believe me when I tell you: If you want to find out where to go to get a job, get off drugs or get rid of sexually transmitted diseases, get on the bus.
At 7:12, our bus pulls into MTA’s giant bus farm at Fifth and Deaderick. Rather than carry a pocketful of change, or keep losing a dime a ride, I decide to buy two all-day passes, at a cost of 10 bucks. All-day passes in hand, England and I hop back aboard the #3 bus, bound this time for Belle Meade and Bellevue. Following our driver’s instructions, I put the passes into the money-eating machine. Well, don’t you know, those sumbitches are gone for good. More on that later.
The westbound #3 bus has the character of a neighborhood diner. It carries a group of regulars, mostly folks who work in Belle Meade. The mood on the bus is convivial. One man, Aubrey Valentine, steps onto the bus, then goes down the aisle hugging people, patting them on the back, and exchanging warm greetings. I respect few things more than an unashamed hugging man, so I strike up a conversation with Aubrey Valentine. As it turns out, he takes the bus to his job at St. Thomas Hospital, and he enjoys the ride. He suggests that I come back another day, and jump on the 7:10 bus. “That’s a lively group,” he says. “That bus has got a comic.”
The last of the passengers gets off in Belle Meade, and the bus runs to the Bellevue Park-and-Ride lot with just me, England and driver Larry Binkley aboard. During that stretch, I make it my business to smell the bus. My nose can do the work of two bloodhounds, so you can believe me when I tell you: A Nashville bus smells like a mix of diesel fuel, deteriorating fabric, body odor and car wax. Car wax is the strongest smell; body odor is the weakest. When it comes to bus smell, I guess that’s about the best you can hope for.
The #3 bus takes England and me, and a few late-morning stragglers, back to the bus farm. There, I ask driver Binkley how I can use the all-day passes I’d put in the money-eating machine. He says the passes “were put in by mistake,” and he’d get a supervisor to get us new passes.
Well, the supervisor refuses. He’s an angry man. “Y’all don’t need any all-day passes,” he says, turning and walking off. So I buy two tickets to take England and me back to Elmington Park. This time, they cost me $3.10. Up 20 cents from the morning.
Next time, I’m driving. I might miss the company, but driving is way cheaper.
—Walter Jowers
“everyone needs to write a book”
On the corner of Fifth and Deaderick, next to the series of bus shelters that dominate the north and south blocks, Daniel Baker, 18, leans against one of the tent poles of Michael Ryan’s hot dog stand, closes his eyes and smiles. It’s a bitterly cold day, with winds whipped into gusts as they’re channeled through downtown’s streets and avenues, but Ryan has a propane heater set up under the canvas and Baker cops some of the ambient warmth off the blower. It’s nice by the stand. There’s the combination of smells wafting off the grill—steamed sauerkraut and burning meat-smoke off the turning dogs. When Baker opens his eyes again, he’s got that satisfied expression only an 18-year-old can muster when he’s landed what in his mind seems like the perfect gig.
Baker sweeps the shelters for the MTA. His job is straightforward, not terribly taxing and, best of all, it has that glorious lack of structure only the coolest jobs have. “I sweep when it gets dirty,” Baker says. “And when the big boss shows up, I sweep some more.” Baker claims to be the youngest employee in the whole MTA. “They don’t usually hire people under 21,” he says, “because they don’t think they’re mature enough. They gave me the job, though, because my Dad’s a bus mechanic.” Baker looks around, nods approvingly at his clean domain. It’s cold, but he’s toasty, crazy content. What does he do when he’s not sweeping? He gestures toward Ryan. “I hang out with Mike,” Baker says.
Ryan wears a turtleneck, sweatshirt and a baseball cap, has both his hands jammed in his pockets, but assures me he isn’t cold. Like Baker, he’s got a permanent smile on his face. “I’m from Elmira, N.Y.,” he says. “Near Syracuse.” He pulls a hand from his pocket and twirls his finger in the air. “This is balmy to me.” Like Baker, Ryan has hit paydirt. “This is the best location in the city,” he says. He indicates the shelters, the buses unloading a steady stream of potential customers. “I work 5 to 5. No weekends. I get all types. Get lawyers, professionals, bankers. Get students. Get a breakfast and lunch crowd. See this?” He opens a cooler next to his grill. Inside there are packs upon packs of hot dogs sitting on ice, shipped down by Ryan special from Buffalo. “I sold 7,000 dogs in two months.”
Truth be told, Ryan and Baker are the only two people in sight who look happy. Because the buses run on fixed schedules, there’s no passing the time staring down the street in anticipation, no hope of the surprise arrival. The bus is either on time, or it’s late, and shelter to shelter the passengers look more and more forlorn between gusts. They sit with their hoods up and hands buried in their pockets, necks tucked into their chests like pigeons on sills. In Nashville, there isn’t the opportunity for quicksilver connection that New Yorkers, Bostonians or Chicagoans enjoy on public transit (nor is there the broad racial mix, as most passengers here are black). It’s primarily line to hub to line and back. There’s the trip to the bus, the bus ride and the trip afterward. With rare exceptions, the bus isn’t the beginning of the trip or the end: It’s the middle.
“The system is all spokes, no wheel,” says Gordon Bonnyman, founder of the Tennessee Law Center and a bus rider for the past 30 years. He lives on Sweetbriar and takes the #2 down Belmont to downtown in the mornings—6:30 this morning to be exact. Bonnyman has worked in D.C., Budapest and Jerusalem—all cities with vital public transportation options. “If you don’t live on one of the spokes, it’s not a convenient system.” But for those who are lucky enough to live on Nashville’s multitudinous spokes, why do so few ride? “It’s a psychological thing,” Bonnyman says. “If they live and work on one of the bus lines, they can save a lot of money and a lot of hassle. It costs me $25 a month to ride the bus. I can read a book or read the paper. We’re not talking about a rational thing here—we’re talking about a cultural thing.”
Back at Deaderick, two passengers, a husband and wife in matching stone-washed denim outfits, are about to board the #26—a straight shot that runs along Gallatin Pike all the way out to Rivergate, terminating at the Wal-Mart and then doubling back. Both husband and wife take a long pull on their cigarettes before they board, holding the wafts in their lungs as long as possible, entering the bus single file and exhaling from their nose as they hop the steps.
Our driver, James Otey, isn’t pleased. Although he’s not the kind of person who registers much agitation, he’s not someone you’d want to mess with. He’s possessed of the same tough, world-weary good looks as actor Paul Winfield, the gravitas perfect to play cops, generals or Starfleet commanders—which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of authority an MTA driver needs. “This bus is called 'The Beast,’ ” Otey says, “because it’s 66 tons, 666 pounds.” The beast looks like two buses connected by a rubber joint that lets it bend like an elbow. If you’re sitting up front across from the driver when he turns a corner, passengers in the right rear disappear from sight until the vehicle straightens out again. It’s an action that confers the momentary thrill of an amusement ride.
Otey stops the bus on Fifth. “See that lady,” he says, indicating an older woman at the information booth. “She’s gonna be late because she needs a pass.” He opens the doors and yells to her. “Okay, I’ll wait. I can make my time up on this run.”
Otey, who’s been driving for four years, wears black leather weightlifting gloves and an MTA hat. He’s barrel-chested and remarkably long-armed, like Monk Mayfair from the Doc Savage pulp fictions. Unlike Mayfair, he’s got a booming voice and conducts a monologue while he drives that’s spoken to the city in front of him—he never takes his eyes off the road.
Like Mayfair, however, Otey was once a chemist at a printing company. “I worked for 30 years and nine months at INX Inc. I was the assistant branch manager.” But before all that, Otey was a musician. After he got his degree, he went out on the road and played drums for the likes of Taj Majal, Little Richard and James Brown. (“Brown was tougher on some musicians, but not me. I could play his style to a tee.”) Now Otey plays with the Imperials. “Private stuff mostly,” he says. “Country clubs.” After retirement, Otey spent a few years driving his mobile home around the country, but grew bored. A friend turned him on to the job at MTA. He got his commercial driver’s license and was hired immediately. “You don’t work,” Otey says seriously, “and you die.”
Drive far enough down Gallatin Pike and slowly but surely the bus, full at Deaderick, empties out to only a couple of passengers, so that wherever you’re going feels like the metaphysical End of the Line. The only person riding this far is a young black woman shopping at Wal-Mart; she’s been moving closer to us at the front the farther we get from downtown and admits she’s never taken the #26 to its terminus. While we’re stopped at the Wal-Mart parking lot, Otey inspects the bus for bombs or suspicious packages (“New rules,” he intones, “terrorism”), then shows me pictures of one of his three Harleys. (“That’s my Heritage soft tail classic. It’s got a 1500 cc motor that I beefed up.”) There’s also his remodeled ’64 Chevy Super Sport, a car-show winner so bright red it still looks newly painted. He’s got the pictures stowed in a plastic bag behind the seat, as if they keep him warm, and while he flips through them he talks about his biking club, The Steel Horsemen, which he started with five other riders. The organization does charity work raising money for toys, food, coats and heaters for the underprivileged.
Otey grew up in Franklin, where his father owned a construction company. “It wasn’t a low-class environment,” he says. “I grew up in a house.” From his father he learned to build things—like the fountain pool in back of his home stocked with Koi fish. (“Did you know Koi only grow as big as the space they’re in? I just learned that.”) From Coo Coo Marlin and Jack Marlin, Sterling’s dad and brother, Otey learned the ins and outs of machines. “They taught me how to drive, how to fix cars. I didn’t encounter prejudice until I came to Nashville.” He talks about all the old all-black Nashville nightclubs that he used to play, places like New Era and Black Hawk and New Rev-a-lot and Good Jelly’s. (“They called it Good Jelly’s because the owner’s name was Jelly.”) All of them are gone now, places Otey watched go from all-black to half-white/half-black back to all-black again, a musician’s continuum of the race relations in the city.
“I need to write a book,” Otey says, shaking his head. “Everybody needs to write a book.”
In Rivergate, heading back south toward Nashville again, we don’t pick up many passengers along the strip malls populated by Media Play, Bed Bath & Beyond, Rio Bravo and Michael’s, the landscape completely indistinguishable from Brentwood—and oddly hopeless. But once we move into Madison, the bus starts to fill as the storefronts change. We have entered the land of temporary retail, and street by street, the topography, in all its dilapidation and impermanence, feels like destiny. We pass Rent-a-Center, Instant Rental and Fashion Cents; Payday Loans, Cash to Go and Cashville; Option Rentals, Rainbow Rentals and Family Rick’s Adult Flicks. Gallatin Pike must have more auto repair shops, discount markets and churches than any other strip of road in Nashville, all of them so densely clotted together and relentless on the eye it must be hard to pass along this view day in and day out and not think of life as something to be grasped at desperately before it whips by.
But then the city appears. It comes into view all of a sudden across the river as we head toward Victory Memorial Bridge, appearing as monumental as it does indestructible. Cars pass us on the left and fly up and over the bridge toward it, disappearing at the apex. We pick up one more passenger before crossing, so there’s time for a good look. It seems like you’re approaching Nashville from outlands, and it’s hard not to imagine that you’re briefly reacquainted with the spirit of ancient nomads, how they must have felt when they saw a city on the horizon. The bus is full now, engine gargling, the Beast laboring over the bridge, and the city, its towers packed densely and walling off our view of the sky, seems full of opportunity, drawing us toward it rather than the other way around.
—Adam Ross
The standard adult bus fare is $1.45, and transfers cost an extra 10¢. Senior citizens ride for 70¢, as do students in grades K-4 or lower. Students in grades 5-12 (who are 18 or younger) ride for 70¢ when presenting a Commuter Connection Card. Children 4 and younger ride for free. For information on bus schedules and bus pass packages, call MTA at 862-5950 or visit online at www.nashvillemta.org.
