telephone monkeys

I seem to need to write this story, despite its assumptions and perhaps unpleasant manifestations of bias (including mine). I'm invested in writing what is happening, so we can look at it. Comments welcome, especially if you think I'm contributing to bias.

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I was getting on the bus downtown around 10pm. A man nearby had been yelling forcefully for reasons I did not know. He got on the bus I was getting on, and as he came down the aisle towards where I had sat down, I felt more sure that his behaviors were symptoms of a mental health crisis. 

Having had a different stranger exhibiting similar behaviors publicly choose me as a target for his feelings not long ago, my stomach clenched and I impulsively left my seat (which had an empty one next to it), and slid into the first seat across the aisle, next to a man in a suit, who looked at me surprised. (In Seattle, the social protocol is to sit alone if you have the option. Yeah, it's silly, and a real bummer.) Not sure if I was apologizing to him or the man coming down the aisle, I explained to my new seat-mate that I would feel safer right now sitting next to him, if he didn't mind. He quickly said he understood, and as I registered his clean cut look and suit and tie, I realized I was likely about to have a different kind of cross-cultural moment. 

Just then, the man who was yelling returned past us, back up the aisle, and he turned to everyone, and yelled: "You telephone monkeys! You telephone monkeys! You're all just telephone monkeys!" He kept yelling it, and despite my earlier alarm, and the deep concern that had replaced it... I repeated in my head what he was saying, and began to smile. 

Everyone with their phone in their palm was looking up at him, but soon returned to looking at their phone. My seat-mate then said to me conspiratorially, "The things you see on buses." I was put off by that. I tried to stay open, to connect - I thought about it, and without the same intonation, said, "Yes." Then I started to laugh. At my seat-mate’s surprise, I explained, "I think he's got a great point.” He looked confused, but I just kept laughing. Putting my own phone away, I said, "We ARE all kind of telephone monkeys!" I continued on laughing. I couldn't help myself. 

My seat-mate looked a little bemused, but then nodded and smiled a little. He was holding his phone. He didn’t look at it for some moments, then he started to look at it, then he put it down. I felt guilty all of a sudden - and blurted: “I’m not judging you!” and rambled quickly on, “I use mine all the time!... I mean, I’m addicted!… I just thought it was good social commentary…” He half nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said. Awkward pause. Then he felt compelled to explain, “You know, sometimes it’s just that you don’t feel like talking to anyone…” Pause. As I now started to smile again, he backpedalled fiercely: “Oh, I didn’t mean you!!!” I started laughing again, and assured him I understood. 

He changed the topic back. “It’s gotten a lot worse downtown these past few years, you know. 3rd and Pike… it’s very bad down there now.” I was back to feeling put off, suspicious of his analysis, tired of how shallowly we can see (and not see) other people. “Right,” I said, “it has gotten a lot worse. With all the development, all of the gentrification, and no legal recourse for people, has come a lot more poverty. People have literally been put out on the street.” Awkward silence. 

“What do you do?” he asked. I explained I was a kind of social worker. “What do you do?” I asked. He is a lawyer for a few wine companies in the area. I brought up my hometown of Woodinville, we discussed the development there, and we laughed about the “Tour de Franzia” my friends used to do by bike through Woodinville a few years back. He explained that he was dressed up because he was at a dinner for a law association for Vietnamese lawyers (I’m not sure of the name), to which he had been invited by a friend. As we spoke, I dropped some of my pre-conceived biases against him, and noticed his openness to new ideas, and his kindness. 

We spent the rest of the ride talking about whatever. And every once and awhile, I’d sort of shake my head in gratitude, at the same time as I felt grief, thinking how it was the man who called us “telephone monkeys” who had forced me to sit with someone and look up from my phone, and had enhanced my late night bus ride because of it. And I’m not surprised. I'm really not at all. Someone who’s been so affected must be seeing clearly. And I feel sad. I feel really sad. I’m wishing him and all of us the kind of community that looks at one another, bothers to connect, to take care of each other and believe in each other, the kind he is ringing the alarm for.