Minibus
I usually ride in minibuses everyday. These are street beasts that lurch suicidal, one that takes at no chances in missing a heartbeat to cover distance. I can reach the city in twenty minutes riding in them. Compared that to the conventional transit, the lumbering jeepneys and multicabs, who shall pompously discharge you from their innards after forty five minutes. The minibuses mean serious business.
They are not really large though. They are about half the size and length of the bus. The two are similarly cut like a bread loaf — the bus is cut boringly straight, the minibus has a softer “head”, curving toward the windshield before the driver. By virtue of imagination, the two have the same load capacity.
Some of them appear flaring when by design their sides have metallic fringes formed into tongues of flames. This enhances their chances at weaving through the traffic no matter how jammed, by appearing bullish. Other minibuses should rather be ads for porn, their skins sprayed with luscious feminine forms in g-strings and bras that leave nothing to imagination. I have spotted two whose murals included nude women in eagle-spread, heads tilted towards the passengers, droopy eyes, ready for the action; not a few have topless men in various stages of unbuckling.
There’s no mistaking of their message. People driving them must be reading Freud.
Others though are alternatives to the pulpit, emblazoning the end of days and the urgency to repent, the failure of which shall bring one to sure damnation. It can make apostle out of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which I still can’t pronounce without tripping.
Their drivers don’t just hold the steering wheel; they coil their forearms around it. Their foot on the accelerator doesn’t usually relax. And they are the devils that heed no prayer of any woman, man, child or cats who do not leap out from the way. They speed, they plow through. They overtake, they broadside other vehicles. They establish larger roads by using the opposite lane. Somehow they manage to ease the bulk of the minibus into the most congested roads, shooting out of the bottlenecks. On inauspicious days, they tail behind a speeding ambulance.
It helps that drivers have sidekicks — konduktors, we call them — whose spit can be deadly woofers. They can scream and not go hoarse the next day. Their throats are well suited for this profession; booming in shrieking, even much shriller when they collect fees among sedate passengers. They can spot troglodytes, beings who are contemplating their fate to cross or not to cross and hence have decided to put their lives ready for God’s taking, miles away. The sidekicks forewarn in primal scream lest someone becomes a relic on the road. Horns are seldom used by drivers who believe, that in the age of electronics and video streaming, there are things only humans can be trusted with.
The sidekicks have other tricks that come in handy. They can cram the minibus to its last crack of space. Space is money and therefore precious. Breathing, in this case, is strictly reserved for survival. Air is thus obtained by competition. One can inhale lustily when equipped with large nostrils and larger windpipe. No one expects the air to be pure oxygen of course. It comes with aerosols from old people coughing. Or the pungency of cheap perfumes, armpits, and foul breaths. Plus the nutritive smog in the city. The weaker lungs can die without anyone noticing.
One time, a father hailed the minibus to a stop because his child passed out. The toddler was cold, pale and not moving. This solicited remarks from passengers. The father was good-for-nothing fellow, they said. He should have exposed his son’s head generously out of the window. No one mentioned about the child’s deprivation of his right to breathe and riskier position in displaying one’s skull available for lopping, and thus the sidekick comes out clean from any responsibility.
The sidekick, like Rudy Baylor of Grisham’s The Rainmaker, has a calculator rattling somewhere in his brain. Mention the place where you’ve boarded and he can tell you how far is it from the city, how far is it from your destination if you are not alighting in the terminal, the fare, and the change once a bill is handed over. All in split second. He tells you the flag down rate for first six kilometers, the rate per succeeding kilometer, and the latest traffic enforcer gunned down yesterday for being such a stupid ass stickler. And if you come friendly, not cocky, oafish, and brave enough to take in the gore, he tells you who killed the poor man.
He throws information about fuel prices, the fucking government, the corporations preying on hapless creatures like him and his driver. Most ignore him, others nod. Now some passengers choose to engage in debate with him. Big mistake. Debates are appreciated only as far as it produces a brawl. Forget it if you want your digestive system complete at the end of the trip.
He can be forgetful once someone misses to demand the change. It’s miraculous actually, the way he can hint amnesia.
It is with these fellows that I find myself everyday, commuting to work. At the peak of the afternoon, around three, I station myself for their attention. Immediately they come. On other days, I wait for couple of minutes. Ten minutes running and they are nowhere in sight, I go for the multicab and wish for luck.
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