Zach is a good, quiet, polite young paleface who has long hair and a beard that make him look like a guitarist for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Actually he looks like the singer from the video below, if he dyed his hair brown. Zach takes the bus to work and occupies himself reading such Nobel-worthy literature as Buzz Bunny, By This Axe! and Reverent Chandler.
Last Monday night Zach boarded the bus with a crazy, 50-something homeless woman well known for inhabiting bus stops in Eastern Baltimore County. He broke open his smart phone to read MMA Junky and turned up his—whatever you young people call that thing with a million songs attached to your headsets and began listening to whatever you people are listening to these days.
Although he could not hear anything he knew that the people on the bus were all looking at him and laughing at him so he took off his head phones and found out that “the crazy homeless bitch” was yelling at him, telling him he was an asshole, a bad guy, that he had done terrible, unspeakable things to her and that, most damning of all, “your balls smell!”
As Zach’s eyes became big and the other patrons laughed out loud, relived no doubt that they were not the subject of her ranting, the woman seemed to sense that the crowd was with her and bore in on that point from her bully pulpit as the bus rocked and rolled out into the County toward Essex and Middle River, to Zach’s headache of a job that he was all of a sudden impatient to arrive at.
“That’s right, his balls smell so nasty he could wash them and the smell would still knock you on your ass! His balls smell so bad that he washes those nasty things twice a day and they still reek! He has smelly balls I tell you!!!”
This was a mere sampling of what Zach stoically endured as the bus patrons laughed, until the bus driver, after the 20 minutes it takes to get from Dundalk Center to East Point Mall, got up and told the woman, “Lady, you got ta leave! Ged off my bus!”
With that, Zach was finally permitted his peace of mind, until he told Steevo and me the story and we looked at one another wrinkled our noses and I said, “What’s that smell, dude?”
So Zach, in your honor I present Lynyrd Skynyrd:
Thriving in Bad Places
