Wednesday morning at the corner of Sacramento and Cherry. The three of us—me, the bus driver, and an elderly woman—peer into a parked bus with muted awe. Inside, an enormous man is shouting at a crumpled blanket. “Hey, HEY! Wake up! Get up!”
As it turns out, under the blanket lies a man wearing ripped clothing; he staggers to his feet at the third admonishment, limps out the door, and vomits. He has no idea where we are. “Are we in Sacramento?” he asks. “No,” says the enormous man, a Street Crisis Response Team “peer specialist” dispatched to respond to a report of an unresponsive adult male on the 33 bus. “We’re on Sacramento and Cherry. Presidio Heights. San Francisco. West Side.”
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If there’s anything redemptive in methamphetamine, it might be the glimpse of pure unreality that it affords you when shaken awake by a stranger to find yourself barely clothed and covered in vomit at a bus stop in a neighborhood you’ve never seen before. Or so I imagine.
In any case, while blanket-man stumbles out the back door, the bus driver shepherds me and the elderly woman through the front door. Before the man can even wipe the dribble of bile off his mouth, we’re peeling down the street at breakneck speed.
It’s a thrill. The elderly woman, seemingly unfazed by the incident, begins chatting with the driver. She’s heading to the Mission to visit her grandson, an honor student at Everett Middle School. She’s lived in San Francisco for almost 20 years, she tells him; but before that, when she lived in Manila, she got hit by a bus while crossing the street. She was in the hospital for three weeks but somehow came out unscathed. “A full-frontal collision,” she says cheerfully. The driver nods. We speed down Arguello.
In the Haight-Ashbury, we pick up a skater with a black eye and a gaggle of Colombian nannies pushing strollers. One perches herself over the handles and takes a no-headphones videocall with a long-distance boyfriend, I presume, given her tone and body language. The others talk with one another and coo at the Anglo toddlers when they cry. No seas llorona, mi amor. A toddler babbles back in Spanglish.
Two stops later, the skater gets off and we pick up a masked man dragging a trash bag filled with cans and a group of teens who run to the back of the bus and start blaring TikToks. The strangeness of this doesn’t occur to me until later; it’s the early afternoon. Aren’t they supposed to be in school?
This is an off-peak weekday crowd: aimless, bored, and undersocialized. It’s a crowd that suits the 33, a kind of anti-commuter bus that takes a winding route from northwest to southeast, cutting through the Haight and up to Twin Peaks, plummeting down to the Castro and the Mission, swerving abruptly to end in Potrero Hill—diligently circumventing offices, stores, and schools at each turn. In its inefficiency and senselessness, the 33 is a worthy avatar of San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni), a perennially mismanaged organization whose officials have had to make deep service cuts in an effort to stanch a budget shortfall of over $300 million.
As a recent piece in the San Francisco Standard puts it: “Ask people in the know to describe the fiscal state of [Muni,] and you’ll get a sharp inhale. An ‘incredibly dire.’ An ‘extremely concerning.’ Maybe even a ‘clusterfuck’ or two.”
In other words, Muni is doing about as well as any other branch of the San Francisco city government. By any fiscal, logistical, or rider-comfort standpoint, the whole service is dismal. But it rewards those who suffer it—on the 33, at least. We look up as the bus makes a hairpin turn near Twin Peaks and behold our gift: a panoramic view of the mystical city of San Francisco and its shimmering bay, stretched out before us in the clear morning light.
Photo: Eric Broder Van Dyke / iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus
