My most excruiating bus incident was about 18 months ago when on the way to Lansdowne for a Six Nations game. Somebody going to the match rang me and I briefly chatted to them about where their tickets were for and where I’d meet them after for a pint. Upon finishing my call, this big fat weirdo who’d got on at the same stop, gets up from his seat and comes down and sits in beside me. Right away I knew I was in trouble.
I get the 10 from up around the Phoenix Park and it tends to have a very high ratio of weirdos due to the route’s proximity to Grangegorman and the fact there’s a lot of hostels and sheltered accommodation on the NCR. However, that wasn’t the reason I’d clocked this fella as a bit odd at the bus-stop. You’d have known him a mile off. Big and fat with an awkward bowler haircut and non-shiny tracksuit bottoms with black shoes.
Anyway, he plonks himself in beside me and says “so you’re going to the game? I’d love to go but it’s too expensive”. I thought he might start having a go at me for how I could afford tickets or something and just mumbled some reply about the tickets being very dear these days and he goes “well it’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s just they won’t release it to me”. I should have spotted the obvious danger in this but I was flustered I guess and stuck for something to say I asked was it a problem with his bank. “No,” he replied, “its St Brendans Psychiatric Hospital. Well, they call it a hospital, but I call it a fucking morgue. The only way you leave is in a wooden box.”
At this stage I obviously thought Oh bollocks. However, I was really late and didn’t have time to get off the bus. I didn’t want to move seats on the bus in case I offended him. He was a huge guy, and had me kind of wedged into the wall but I figured the chances of him actually doing something violent, or worse untoward, were probably pretty slim, so I thought I could chance waiting it out for another ten minutes until Baggot Street Bridge.
I attempted to strike up a bit of banal converation in order to keep the subject away from his self-professed mental illness and treatment of same. After about five minutes of the most inane prattle about the weather and how bad the traffic is these days, I eventually just ran out of stuff to say. There was a silence between us for about twenty dreadfully long seconds and then he just goes “They do experiments on me at night. My penis is shrunk away to nothing.”
Well. There was nothing to say to that. I just sat there. Stared straight ahead with a blank expression on my face. Then it slowly dawned on me that the main danger was his attempting to verify his allegations. To my blessed relief, he completely changed tack and politely asked me “so where you getting off?” Understandably distracted perhaps, I said “Baggot Street Bridge” to which he replied “Me too!”
We sat in painful silence for another five minutes and then I got off one stop before Baggot Street Bridge and he stayed on.
The fella sitting behind me must have been thinking “oh this is a fucking classic.”
