This is my shameful confession.

At first sight, you might imagine me a normie. Perhaps you would then notice the lack of symmetry in my face, the slightly crooked smile, the devious piercing eyes that distinguish us.

Against a quiet revolting innermost voice, you’d decide to carelessly wave it off.

But despite our similar appearance, you and me, we’re different.

Unlike you, the pampered middle-class reader of this cultured publication, I am a criminal deviant.

I evade. I ride.

*****

I still remember the first time I got on for my first ride.

It was a mercilessly hot summer day in 2018 in the neighbourhood of Coburg, Melbourne, Australia: I, then a carless and starry-eyed striver of the academic precariat, decided to shorten the walk to the train station. I still remember Bell Street — the six-lane urban artery, mutilating this geography of nowhere by dissecting it from north to south — sunbathed and bleached in afternoon amber.

I decided to wait.

For the bus.

Little did I know that this seemingly harmless decision would alter the course of my life forever.

****

After a characteristic delay, the bus pulled up at my stop next to the indifferent highway.

I still remember the moment I mounted: The alcohol-bloated face of the driver in a reddish solar evening hue, his upper face impenetrably shielded by mirrored sports shades. I uttered a naïve and lucent greeting to his stoic shrug, a non-response.

It was still a response, a silent acknowledgement.

I saw the neatness of my clothes transform into a front, a desperate losing act of fading middle class pretence, similar to the moment the white-collar criminal enters the maximum-security prison: “All that you believed you know is worthless.” and “You are one of us now.”

I penetrated into the dark.

Contrary to busses in Europe, the Melbourne bus is designed to be shielded from the sun. It therefore resembles a private coach more than a bus. It shields the in-mate. A shady realm of ominous privacy opened before me, an interior in tones of washed-out black complemented by an eye-piercing Anglo-neon safety-orange. The shading of the windows suspends the effect of public transport panopticism on the bus: No internalised external eye of decency can discipline the in-mate.

A way of life for criminal desperados, perverts, Europeans

I still remember my own eyes nervously darting around what resembled a 1980s New York urban limbo: Faded graffiti slogans, key scratched obscenities, blended in with posters of bus abuse hotlines, injunctions to behave: an obscene psychosphere of criminality, mental pornography sparking the imagination of the inevitable bus incident.

My wild gaze fell on my fellow passengers: the depravity of a Weimar scene in a George Grosz painting; a realm of underworld figures: the on-edge methhead, the downtrodden worker, the defeating self-talk mumble of the criminally insane, the cooking tiktoks in Babylonian tongues autistically repeated innumerable times in complete disregard of the Other. I will never forget the smell: The nauseating cheap sweet musk of supermarket deodorant, the oppressively saccharine energy-drink- and vinegar-crisp MSG-zest, the penetrating stink of stale sex-and-fear-adrenaline driven layer-deep into the seats.

I did not know it at the time.

But from that moment, I was on.

***

In Melbourne, the plausible deniability of being middle class ends the moment you get on. Whereas in a city like London, the bus has something innocuous and functional, in its poetic red and its harmless lower finance sector passengers, the bus in Melbourne is the entry portal to something wild and different – a heterotopia, a temporary autonomous zone.

The naïve and uninitiated may believe that the bus is just another form of public transport similar to the tram or the train. But in Melbourne the bus is both a declaration of social defeat and an opening to a strange and exciting parallel world: In a city where everything is built around cars — an antihuman “Autogeddon-Archipelago” (Sellars) of public spaces irrevocably separated by long distance drives — not owning a car is an anti-way-of-life. It separates respectable society from the rider.

A way of life for criminal desperados, perverts, Europeans.

The bus combines the traffic-jammed frustration of the car with the inconveniences of public space. Along Melbourne’s veins of automobile Stalinism, the bus creeps along, a defanged and angry predator in a sea of stunted 8-laneway urban congestion.

Of course, the strange and compelling universe of the bus drew me in immediately.

It was only later though I could admit this to myself. I realised it one morning, when I noticed I had been unconsciously uttering a 10-minute-long insane and frightening bus laughter.

Despite my initial repulsion, I decided I needed to get on more and more frequently: The cheeky weekend ride gave way to a midweek ride. Eventually, I rode every other day, then every day, then multiple times a day. At first, I attempted to maintain an air of middle-class respectability, still tapping my card on and off to pay for the ride, setting me back an obscene 5$ (the price of an average overpriced coffee) each time regardless of its length and duration.

But it was already written into the stoic expression of the driver upon opening the door. A silent shrug. He and I knew: The bus had long taken possession of me. Gradually, the depraved universe of the bus and my own consciousness converged: The bus and I became more and more alike.

I understood that my habit destined me to financial ruin. I was torn: Between my bourgeois instincts and my increasingly violent compulsion to get on. I struggled but then, in a moment of crystal lucidity, remembered the pained yet brave and cheerful chants of the in-mates which arise every night towards dawn: “if one could pay for the bus, one would not use it.”
Eventually it got to me. I decided I wanted to go all in. I joined the other riders, my in-mate brethren.

I decided to evade.

**

Evading on a Melbourne bus fundamentally changes the relationship to the driver. It is built on the unspoken contract between him and the in-mate.

The bus operates as the externalised nervous system of the driver, both God and Nemesis of the evader desperate for his next ride. Arguably, it is also the reason the driver is venerated in Anglo culture: Every passenger is acutely aware of his emotional constitution and tyrannically subjected to his erratic moods.

I was once like you, a normal and proud man, a productive member of society

When it is good, the bus imperceptibly melts through the streets like a warm bar of butter.

When it is bad, the driver breaks and accelerates aggressively: Old ladies, the invalid start flying and stumbling into each other like teenage punks in a mosh pit.

Only an experienced rider like me can find ways to enjoy this callous spectacle. The second movement of Beethoven’s 9th starts playing in my head as I contemplate the scenery: The kinetic chaos of Bruegel’s Battle between Carnival and Lent, the xenomobility horror of de Bont’s Speed, the slowboiling seething descent into employee insanity of Schumacher’s Falling Down.

Hence, the driver, this frightening thymotic idol — at whose mercy an entire platoon of urbanites helplessly awaits the catharsis of buspocalypse — must be permanently calmed, and emotionally soothed. When hopping on and off, the driver is sheepishly thanked by the in-mate, kisses are waved by blushing young women, deep heartfelt and respectful bows are offered by the old.

Only in this way, the in-mate superstitiously believes, can this titan be governed: So that the ride-addicted evader may avoid what is still his shameful and inevitable fate: The walk of shame.

Here, the driver inevitably punishes the evader. He refuses to open the middle door to discretely let him out, forcing him to walk towards the front to the cruel jeers and grins of the other in-mates. Only the most experienced amongst them have developed a psychological immune response to this degrading punishment against all odds: The notion of ‘Bus-Zen’ designates the practice of an overcoming of the jealous mind, a sort of ego-death and state of absolute placidity, following this ritual of humiliation: After all, the driver must still be thanked as he will certainly be encountered again. In this confrontation of hurt pride, it is the prideful passenger eager to get on who always loses. He must avoid escalation at all cost as it might risk permanent banishment from a line.

*

Upon reading this confession, you may laugh at me, you may cry with me, you may judge me.

But I was once like you, a normal and proud man, a productive member of society.

Do not judge me. You do not know me.

I could be your office colleague. I could be the man who serves you your ham-and-cheese toastie, the man who recommends you boutique organic soaps, the man who sells you budget river cruises.

Your drowning middle class friend.

But I am not like you.

I evade, I ride.