NEW YORK STORIES

"The Chinatown Bus" by Joshua Poole

I am constantly arguing with my friends about the best way to get from New York to Boston. Since my discovery of the Chinatown bus several years ago, I have refused to even consider another route. At $15 each direction, it is by far the cheapest and most efficient way to make the four to five hour journey. My friends, however, scoff at the idea of boarding the Fung Wa Express. They tell me that they value things like: guaranteed reservations, comfort and not sharing seats with chickens (I am friends with many unreasonable people.) 

One Fung Wa quirk is that they hand you a quarter when you get on the bus. They don’t explain it, but you are supposed to give it to the driver as a tip when you get off. It’s a way to motivate the bus driver not to kill all of the passengers before they hand over their quarter, I suppose. 

On my last trip on the Fung Wa, I found myself in a germaphobe’s nightmare. I desperately needed to pee and though there is a restroom onboard, it’s difficult to make your way to the back of a moving bus when the driver obviously has no working knowledge of how to use a clutch. 

Once inside the bathroom (still being bounced around by the driver’s seeming disregard for my bladder) I raised the seat with my sandal, careful not to touch it with my foot, and unzipped. As soon as I began to pee, the driver hit the brakes and the seat came slamming down. I fell against the back wall and urine splashed on the floor. I was going to need an alternate approach.

I raised the seat again and braced my foot on the rim of the toilet with the toe of my shoe holding the seat up. I leaned forward in a sort of modified lunge position directly above the toilet bowl. I rotated my pelvis backwards and prepared to pee straight down. I would not miss again. 

Unfortunately, my calculations did not include wild speed bumps in the middle of the highway. As the bus hit the first of many bumps, I watched helplessly as my stream flew over the rim and soaked my left foot and sandal. I overcorrected as the bus’s shocks kicked in and my urine shot to the floor and drenched my right foot. I was covering the bathroom walls and floor with pee, and I began to laugh uncontrollably at the sight of me peeing literally all over myself. 

I exited the bathroom unable to do anything to hide the fact that I had thoroughly drenched myself in urine. I had soaked the front of my shorts, and the pee was slowly dripping down my legs and creating pools of urine in my Birkenstocks. 

I bobbed down the aisle, left and right, forward and backward, reaching my hands into the done-up buns of Chinese women for balance and inadvertently slapping the bald heads of men. There were bags in the aisle and I cringed as I rubbed my urine-saturated leg hair all over them, trying pathetically to step around as the bus lurched in unpredictable directions. 

I reached my chair and plopped down. I took a deep breath and turned to my seatmate, who I expected to be looking at me with abject horror. But she was oblivious, staring at the seat in front of her with an animated food coma drool. I looked back at the people I had practically molested with my pee-bathed hands (there was no soap or water, obviously), but not one person looked put out or even slightly annoyed. No one took any notice of the dark stains on my shorts or the squishy sound my sandals were making. And not a single person appeared to notice the stench of liquid excretions that was invading my own nose. 

The Chinatown bus may be a lot of things—it doesn’t offer luxuries like a law-abiding driver or a mop to clean up the bathroom when you’re finished—but it’s not a place of judgment. As I sat there, submerged in my swampy shorts, I knew I was right where I belonged and nothing that anyone said could change my mind about the Fung Wa. 

The last time I took the bus, I’m ashamed to say, I used the bus driver’s quarter to buy a soda at McDonald’s. But this time, I gave the driver a knowing nod—one that translates from English to Mandarin as roughly, “Fuckin’ ay, man”—and I threw him an extra quarter, straight out of my own moist pocket. 

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