Left-Rights

Driving is a poor way to learn a place.  Walking enables a person to discern the minutia of lawn design, roadside detritus, home disrepair, fraying utilities, and domesticated wildlife.  It adjusts perception of civilized habitats.  Bicyclists become familiar with grading, pavement conditions, wind patterns, shoulder clearances, and shortcuts inaccessible to cars.  Both modes of transport provide an intimacy with physical surroundings precluded by the speed and structure of a vehicle. 

Driving, however, represents a place as it was meant to be seen by those who designed it.  There are exceptions, of course, but urban development in the United States is largely based on two kinds of supremacy:  white and automotive.  Blight can disappear with some creative highway planning.  Strip malls and expressways maintain segregation.  Gates and tollways restrict geography according to desirability, itself a byproduct of race and money.  Certain neighborhoods look uninviting to the downtrodden based on the type of serenity that suggests police diligence. 

The vehicle a person drives also influences perception.  I operate a school bus, for example, and since I began a familiar environment has become overwhelming.  I know trash day by zip code; areas where residents suck at parallel parking; left turn lanes likely to produce congestion; corners where pedestrians cross on red; stoplights that take forever to turn; and dozens of wayward signs and telephone poles. 

Cul-de-sacs are a nightmare.  Most are too tight for the bus to navigate without backing up (a no-no); all of them interrupt momentum.  Going around the block, the normal way to correct missed turns, is a rare solution in the neighborhoods of Northern Virginia, which are filled with asphalt circles.  Getting lost is a source of serious stress.  Because of the inability to freely navigate, as in a car, the design flaws of suburbia are glaring—if they’re flaws in the first place.  After all, DC itself is encircled by a highway.  It’s easier to drive around than into the city. 

*****

What is suburbia’s most emblematic feature?  Picket fences?  Basketball hoops?  Tract houses?  Strip malls?  Stop lights?  Manmade ponds?  Lawn jockeys?  

What about the cul-de-sac?  It has to be in the top five, right?  The cul-de-sac isn’t an object or edifice, per se, a thing we readily visualize, but it aptly represents the peculiar class structure of US society.  It’s an architectural dud that kills the joy of walking and wastes land in order to cram oversized houses onto limited space while maintaining illusions of privacy.  Under capitalism, even circles manage to foster disconnection. 

The cul-de-sac isn’t isolated, though.  It illuminates the triumph of automobiles, with all the global violence their preeminence requires.  It affects property values, a petite bourgeois obsession, and thus facilitates the disbursement of compatriots into discrete subdivisions.  It nurtures fantasies of safety and serenity, paving over the terror of a less disciplined world. 

I dread running into one, but I see them everywhere, these oblate monuments to repetition.  On my first day driving without supervision, I missed the turn into a school, something the passengers happily pointed out, and set about to double back.  I took the next left and ran square into a cul-de-sac.  An RV took up around a quarter of the space. 

The kids giggled as I muttered sanitized obscenities.  Backing up to the main road was risky; it was too busy and visibility would be limited.  A U-turn was out of the question thanks to the RV.  I knew I’d soon panic, so I decided to just move the bus wherever I could find space.  I inched the nose onto a driveway and then slowly reversed until the RV filled most of my mirrors, repeating the process a few feet at a time.  Five minutes later I had completed a nifty nine-point turn.  Sweat poured into my eyebrows as I raced away. 

The loading zone at school (normally crowded, I’d later learn) was empty.  “Sorry I made you late,” I called out.  The passengers reassured me that they weren’t upset.  My misfortune was their pleasure, a situation that would be repeated a week later. 

I know some people desire cul-de-sacs and others never think about them, but I hate the goddamn things.  They make me feel like I’m cruising through Thomas Friedman’s brain.  And they disconnect neighbors in ways that make cooperation and comradeship virtually impossible.  Those disconnections are evident from the air.  Check out residential development from a window seat during takeoff or landing.  You’ll see cul-de-sacs spread across the landscape like grape lollipops, their houses separated by mere yards but for all intents and purposes in different cities. 

The cul-de-sac happens when a society scorns public space, or at least when private development stands in for universal social preference.  It is an epiphenomenon of the profit motive, fancied by consumers made to imagine a world with endless resources, enough anyway to manipulate unlimited space into middle-class utopias.  The cul-de-sac isn’t simply an ideal; it is an impossibility.  The kind of security it promises can exist only by maintaining precarity in neighboring environs. 

Although cul-de-sacs seem random, there’s a logic to their preponderance.  They isolate communities into classed enclaves, manifesting a colonialist myth that development is the epitome of progress, each flattened sphere its own exceptional world.  Homebuyers cite safety as a major attraction.  What does it tell us about a society that the absence of intersections is considered desirable?  More than anything it says people who can afford single-family homes by commuting to technocratic jobs desire protection from the same machines that created their fantasies.  

Sooner or later, though, a flustered bus driver will barge into the space with a passel of rambunctious children and no idea how to get the hell out of there. 

*****

One of my routes goes to a working-class apartment complex populated by immigrants.  Its lot is filled with food trucks and work vans.  I have two stops at the complex, where I deposit around 75 elementary schoolchildren.  Then I have a final stop elsewhere with two students, after which, barring unforeseen problems, I’m done for the day.  The final stop is at the stem of a cul-de-sac, a mile by road from the apartment complex but no more than a few soccer fields in actual distance. 

I’m jolted by the proximity of the cul-de-sac to the complex despite the rupture created by artful placement of park land and commercial property.  Juxtaposition of poor and rich neighborhoods is supposed to be a feature of cities in the Global South, but it’s not uncommon in the United States (it’s long been a feature of rapidly-gentrifying DC, for example).  US urban planners are adept at designing infrastructure that compartmentalizes people while maintaining illusions of equal access.  They don’t tell you that access is contingent on unequal opportunity. 

The working-class apartment complex offers exhilarating contradictions.  It is worn down, with piles of trash bags outside of overflowing dumpsters, but it also possesses an energy absent from manicured subdivisions with single-family homes.  Street life exists in the apartment complex:  adults congregate on stoops to chat in multiple languages; children scurry across receding green spaces; everywhere one hears the reassuring noise of music, laughter, argument.  Whatever its problems, the complex has achieved the status of a community.  The cul-de-sac, on the other hand, is an empty gesture of civic obligation. 

Despite bureaucratic attempts to standardize Northern Virginia, the covert capital of US Empire, interesting activity insists on bursting through the planning.  Arlington, where DC sends its high rises, is a lost cause and will only grow more yuppified with the arrival of Amazon.  Alexandria, which once boasted a robust Black population, is on a comparable trajectory.  The edge city of Tyson’s Corner is a study in futuristic banality, and the business district around Dulles Airport has all the charm of a boarding gate. 

But amid a landscape of spooks, lobbyists, consultants, and politicians, alien life exists in ribbons of unrefined habitation.  Here notions of community govern social conduct, where residents decide that not every square inch of their neighborhood will be demarcated by HOA legalese and microscopic claims of possession.  Hell, sometimes children even spontaneously knock on doors and ask their friends to come outside. 

These spaces, crisscrossing a programmatic county, highlight the irrepressible human desire for kinship and vivacity.  Governments and institutions are capable of controlling life down to its mundane details, but no ruling formation has ever been clever enough to legislate humanity into dullness. 

*****

In my industry’s parlance, route sheets are called “left-rights.”  A route sheet sounds simple, but so do Ikea assembly instructions.  Its main purpose is to guide substitute drivers.  Some are outdated, others incorrect.  At times, typescript is crossed out and replaced with illegible scribbles.  And left-rights don’t merely tell a driver where to go, but also where to stop for pick-ups and drop-offs (along with confidential medical information and lists of students who must be released into adult care).  It’s common for drivers to pass a stop without locating the cross street. 

These are problems with the route sheet, which say nothing of the problems with the road.  Northern Virginia is fairly well-marked, but not all intersections have signage, and not all signage is adequate.  Street signs can be in terrible spots, covered by foliage, or wind-damaged—if they’re actually pointing in the right direction. 

GPS isn’t allowed.  It appears to be a silly rule for such a prosperous, high-tech region, but the reasoning is solid.  We have to worry about clearance and aren’t allowed to cross multiple lanes unless at a stoplight.  If there’s an algorithm that accounts for these factors, then management either hasn’t discovered it or is content to roll with tradition. 

This isn’t to say we don’t use technology.  The central office can track the movement of every bus (bureaucrats use GPS) and knows when a driver opens or closes the door.  Every bus also has multiple cameras, something that occurs to me whenever I’m tempted to pick my nose or sing along to “Little Red Corvette.”  

“Why don’t they just call them ‘directions’?” my wife asked when I was learning the system. 

It’s a good question, one for which I still have no answer.  I suppose “directions” lacks pizazz or isn’t adequately colloquial.  If administrators want to shoot for maximal accuracy, “left-rights” should be called “folios of clusterfuck.” 

Reducing navigation to two directions can imply that driving is a mechanical occupation, easy to understand.  Whenever I get lost, a regular occurrence during my first month, I have a hard time explaining how it happened and why it was so disconcerting (just as, when I was a professor, I had a hard time explaining that I worked more than six hours a week).  “Don’t you have directions?” family members inquire. 

“Well, yes.”  Thus out of words, I endure the pitying stares. 

Imagine making your way through unfamiliar subdivisions designed by people concerned less with functionality than profit, in heavy traffic (for school transportation roughly coincides with rush hour), holding sheets of paper covered by dense and sometimes inaccurate data that you’re only allowed to view at a complete stop.  Now imagine doing it at the helm of a 38-foot vehicle with protruding sidemirrors, a vicious tail swing, and dozens of children playing backseat driver.  Only people who have never actually worked believe that any type of actual work is easy. 

Left-rights promise simplicity, but they’re lying.  The terms connote harmonious opposition, a kind of spectral interplay, but this too is a lie.  Like all binaries, left and right derive energy from one another, and they don’t always lead to expected destinations.  We also encounter circles, crooks, and curves, some leading to gridlock, others to unmarked interchanges. 

*****

She is large for a kindergartener, in both stature and spirit.  Ruddy and overfed, she asserted her claim to the front of the bus on my very first day.  With volume and defiance, she crowds anybody impudent enough to annoy her. 

It’s easy to picture a future of drunken fights and financial struggle.  In so many ways she already reminds me of an adult.  I’m certain she’s seen the ugly side of adulthood in her five years.  One afternoon she held up the bus by refusing to sit down.  Four teachers had to carry her off.  Another afternoon she wouldn’t stop kicking the patrol.  She didn’t return to the bus for a week. 

I liked her from the moment she glared at me and declared that her new assigned seat would be wherever she felt like sitting. 

That seat ended up being behind me, where she holds forth with endless knock-knock jokes.  Many are funny.  She has an agile mind.  Every day without incident, I stop her on the way out and tell her I’m proud of her good behavior. 

One day the kids were fighting as they boarded.  Two of them shouted “fea!” in the background.  I turned around to quell the dispute and saw her squeezed against the wall, arms crossed, eyes puffy. 

I sprang from my seat and grabbed the intercom mic.  “Listen to me!”  The appeal blared through the speakers with minor distortion.  “Nobody on this bus is ugly.  Nobody.”  The kids had never seen me upset and stared with a mixture of shock and curiosity.  

It’s remarkable the amount of backstory that can occupy a flash of temper.  In the second it took to get on my feet, I remembered dozens of scenes from my childhood school bus, a younger, darker me with crooked teeth, ruffled hair, and goofy eyeglasses playing the timeless role of unsightly foreign kid surrounded by derisive normalcy.  

“You’re all beautiful.  Every single one of you.  Do you hear me?” I finished, my voice breaking, before slamming the mic against its latch.  It hung crookedly until I parked for the evening. 

The next day, she ambled up to me and stood erect, her mouth only a few inches from my eyes. 

“Hey bus driver!” she roared.  “I HATE YOU.” 

“You hate me?  Why do you hate me?” 

“Because I do.”  

Then she smiled and nestled her face against my chest. 

*****

I got into an accident during my second week on the job.  It was a minor event, resulting in moderate damage to a car and none to the bus.  Three elementary students were on board; nothing happened to them.  I barely noticed the accident when it happened, but it has provided a lasting memory. 

I was maneuvering the bus through a tight space between cars parked on either side of a residential street.  A minivan came from the opposite direction and interjected itself into the space, which was too narrow for both of us.  I veered right and was almost in the clear when I heard a hollow popping sound, similar to a cork exiting a champagne bottle.  I had knocked off a sidemirror from an Altima parked at the front of the line. 

For a second, I contemplated driving away, but I quickly scuttled the thought.  The students’ expressions indicated that they had noticed the collision.  I couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen.  This wasn’t like swiping a twig or scraping a curb.  A car part was in the middle of the street. 

“Hold on, I think I hit something,” I announced, pulling the bus to the side.  I was shaking.  I couldn’t believe it.  Only a few days into my new career and I had committed the second worst error (running over a person is first).  I gathered myself and radioed in the accident.  A few minutes later, a supervisor turned up, followed by a cop.  The supervisor, preppy for a bus driver, was businesslike and distant.  The cop was friendly.  I trusted neither of them. 

It took around half an hour to make a statement and complete the paperwork.  Meanwhile another driver came and scooped my students.  After assessing the damage with the cop and supervisor—I had popped the car’s sidemirror and scratched its front left fender—I scurried back to the bus, prepared to drive it across the county to the garage. 

Now alone, I lost command of my demeanor.  A succession of traumas—the stress of unemployment, the fallout of defamation, the abrupt uprooting from Beirut, the physical toll of too many 12-hour days, the months without medical insurance, the bracing loneliness of my pre-dawn commute, the fear of losing this job and again having to find a new vocation—flooded my brain, a staccato montage of images feeding my cortex an antidote to serotonin.  I let out something akin to a howl as my head quivered against the seatback. 

In subsequent weeks I slowly rebuilt my confidence, though caution is anathema to my disposition.  The three students on board during the accident helped.  They raved about how awesome it was seeing the car mirror fly into the air and bragged to students who board later in the route about all the excitement.  As per kid custom, their attention soon drifted elsewhere.  I wasn’t so fortunate; my employer follows a rigorous protocol in the aftermath of accidents.  I’d have to attend various meetings and a three-hour driver improvement course. 

A week after the accident, the supervisor who processed the scene called on the radio.  He needed to reinsert the cartridge that records footage from the bus.  When he arrived at my window, his expression seemed off.  I couldn’t place it.  Some combination of pitying and bemused.  Only after he finished the task did I realize that the folks who reviewed the tape almost certainly saw me crying. 

*****

The driver improvement course was, as advertised, an education.  I expected warmed-over tutorials and platitudes about road awareness, but the three hours proved more interesting.  The instructor asked each of us—about 24 in total, including someone from my training cohort—to diagram our accident on a whiteboard, describe what had happened, explain how the accident could have been prevented, and impart a few lessons from the experience.  I volunteered to go first—not to suck up or to set a good example, but because I planned on dozing off (I’m adept at napping from a sitting position) and didn’t want to be interrupted.  Drawing a bunch of rectangles (cars), arrows (traffic patterns), squiggly arcs (roads), and a black circle (the doomed car mirror), I told my story, finishing with an admission of guilt and a promise to do better.  I did it all wrong.  Nearly everyone else offered a learned discourse on why the accident wasn’t their fault, arguing with the instructor who fruitlessly recited policies from the driver’s manual, and scrutinized the white board like sweaty lawyers during a televised trial.  It was so riveting I forgot about the nap.  

*****

“Hey bus driver!”  

I peek in the rearview mirror (the “student mirror,” it’s technically called) to see three little heads poking above the seatback like smiling meercats.  My second day has aroused their curiosity.  I catch their eyes in the mirror.  “Yesss?” 

“What’s your name?” 

“Bus.” 

Their smiles disappear, replaced by perplexity.  Kindergarten humor is paradoxical:  clever but earnest, boundless but specific.  They don’t yet comprehend irony, one reason why they’re more likeable than adults who pretend to comprehend irony.  Even when kindergarten humor is mean, it never uses racism or sexism as a motif. 

“Your name is Bus?”

“That’s right.” 

“What’s your last name?” 

“Driver.”

“Your name is Bus Driver?” 

“Bus Driver.  Yep.” 

They begin to realize I’m bullshitting, but they expect sincerity from grown-ups.  One of them finally pipes up:  “Nuh uh!  What’s your real name?” 

I laugh.  They join in, jumping up and down. 

“My real name is Steve.”  They accept the answer. 

“How old are you?”

“Guess.”

“153.” 

“One hundred and fifty three?  What’s the matter with you?  153?  I’m only 143, thank you very much.”  They agree that the new number is more reasonable. 

“Why don’t you have any hair?” 

“Because I’m bald.”

“What’s bald?” 

“Not having any hair.” 

“What’s that on your ear?”

“A mole.” 

“What’s a mole?” 

“That thing on my ear.” 

Now all the kindergartners want to participate in the interrogation. 

“Do you have a girlfriend?” 

“Yes.”  They are scandalized.  Whoops and squeals bounce around the metal interior. 

“Who?”  The question comes from many directions. 

“My wife.”  More scandal. 

“Do you have a crush on her?” 

“Very much, yes.”  By this point even the fifth-graders are hooting. 

I arrive at the school and swing into the unloading zone feeling strangely accomplished, having completed the most honest interview of my entire career. 

*****

Since switching from professor to school bus driver, I’ve learned all kinds of new stuff.  One thing towers above all others:  developers should never, ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to name streets or subdivisions.  (Most of them should be chucked into prison, but we’ll let it go for now.)  Cultured people make fun of Las Vegas for its ersatz monuments, but Vegas is true to its gaudy character; suburbs are the real wasteland of ridiculous simulation. 

One mixed-use development around here is called Fair Lakes.  It has no lakes, though, only artificial, murky ponds with scrimpy fountains that by any decent standard aren’t fair, but fucking ugly. 

Or the Mosaic District.  It’s not a district.  It’s a few acres of new urbanist tedium with chain stores and pretentious restaurants.  One could spend hours walking circles around Anthropologie and Williams-Sonoma without finding a single tile.  The place is a source of special offense because my father is from Madaba, Jordan. 

And, good lord, the street names.  The highly abridged list below could, if completed, take up half the cloud storage in the Dulles Corridor:

• Pinecrest Vista:  Pines, sure, but no crest and certainly no vista. 

• Thames/Parliament/Cromwell/Victoria/Derby/Piccadilly:  All in a subdivision clearly designed by somebody with an Anglophile fetish. 

• Mount Corcoran Place:  California is 2500 miles away, fellas. 

• Lighthouse Lane:  Where streetlamps ensure that SUVs don’t crash into mailboxes. 

• Barnstable Court:  Why not name a street in Virginia after a random town in Massachusetts? 

• Halcyon Lane:  It has two cul-de-sacs. 

• Sunny Hill Court:  It’s no Sesame Street, but it’s trying. 

• Golden Falcon Street:  For fans of Dashiell Hammett. 

• Ad Hoc Road:  Designed by a committee of grumpy professors. 

• Stirrup Cup Lane:  Shit like this happens when drunken aristocrats get naming rights. 

• Autumn Ridge Circle:  No ridges; otherwise accurate three months a year. 

• Wheatland Farms Court:  Beneath this asphalt something useful once existed. 

• Chase Commons Drive:  Every square foot is private property. 

• Fountainhead Street:  I have no idea what it looks like; government vehicles aren’t allowed. 

• MacBeth/Titania/Falstaff/Oberon/Ariel/Capulet/Horatio:  See, English majors can make money, too. 

• Nantucket Court:  Wait, which state are we in? 

• Assembly Drive:  Gather there and find out how quickly white people like to call the cops. 

• Lake Normandy Lane:  Not even Normandy has a Lake Normandy. 

• Sideburn Road:  Now we’re talking. 

I’m being picky, no doubt, but these naming conventions, consistent across an entire region, reveal something about people who design the suburbs.  We can learn a few things about their inhabitants, as well, but it’s not so easy to understand habitation through abstract critique. 

From the perspective of a suburban ruling class—in Northern Virginia’s case, often coterminous with a national elite—the goal is to produce veneers of idyll.  Planners and developers promote visions of urbanity and grandeur by invoking nostalgia for Old Europe—mountains, chalets, lakes, country estates.  Even where people of color predominate, apparitions of whiteness inform the surroundings.  The suburbs are pregnant with biblical fantasies of milk and honey. 

Thus we have imaginary hills, viewless vistas, recumbent crests, concrete shorelines, and private commons, each simulation duplicating the empty reverie of colonization. 

*****

Children’s growth serves as a universal measure of time.  It meant little to me when I was ten or eleven and a strange adult would exclaim “back then you were only this tall,” holding a palm a few feet from the floor.  Now I’m that strange adult, telling befuddled children that they were just babies last time I saw them. 

Becoming another lame grown-up can be disconcerting, as can measuring age through memory.  It’s easy, and inevitable, to recognize our own evolution through the visible growth of other creatures.  For me the recognition evokes a sensual acknowledgement of mortality. 

The youngsters on my bus will remain frozen as buoyant faces peering at me in the mirror, their smiles framed by missing teeth and cheeky jowls.  Perhaps I will see them again someday, but it’s unlikely—and doubtful we’d even recognize one another after a significant passage of time.  I gave them all my attention.  I offered myself to loving ridicule.  I lied in order to entertain.  In turn, they provided me with a tremendous gift:  a much-needed sense of purpose.  I will miss them. 

This job, which has never ceased to feel unexpected, provides a vista of things we’re supposed to take for granted.  Despite its stresses—early mornings, surprise inspections, tedious meetings, long hours—I needed the structure of routine, for as I would later learn (despite somehow already knowing), our built environment doesn’t provide the peace it promises, only simulacra of peaceful living. 

Still, I can’t stop feeling like a fuckup, like a stargazer who made a mess of tidy destinies.  The anxiety can be overwhelming, sometimes immobilizing.  It grinds my abdomen and creates illusions of floating, of disembodied journeys through nebulous scenery.  It is, in so many situations, an unsafe condition.  For too many people around the world, anxiety is an intuitive reckoning with the imminence, and therefore the permanence, of dispossession. 

Hateful expressions of love become a valuable currency on this kind of planet.  Humans require better than enclosure in ugly, restrictive developments.  Nobody can convince me that we’re wired to enjoy counterfeit icons of leisure-class comfort.  And so I struggle to find escape routes throughout each day, memorizing thoroughfares, tracking cul-de-sacs, because like all traitors to common wisdom, I refuse to abide motion without intersections.