Strange Days Seneca has an odd encounter on the bus

Here's the first installment in my Hellenic soap opera, Wine and Barley. Eventually I plan on having them sequential, but for the time being I'm just going to write them as they come to me, and worry about putting them in order later. For those interested in continuity, it takes place pretty early in the series.   Seneca sat slumped in the back of the bus, his foot propped up on the seat in front of him, bone-weary from his graveyard shift at 7-Eleven. It wasn't even his day to work, but the Mexican kid who usually filled that position had vanished suddenly. Seneca, perennially scraping together pennies, had jumped at the chance to work overtime, even if meant another lonely night without Chloe. Very shortly, though, he'd be back home, her small, warm body comfortably entwined with his. Seneca set aside his dog-eared copy of Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult, too tired even to read from his favorite book. The words were swimming before his eyes, an incomprehensible jumble even though he knew most of the passages by heart. It had been an especially rough night. The swing shift crew hadn't done any prep, which meant that Seneca had had to stock the cups, lids, and trays himself within the first few minutes of arriving. Then he had to clean all the caked on gunk from the nacho and hot chocolate machines, which apparently hadn't been done since the last time he worked graveyard. During the night he was witness to an act of domestic violence, had a couple drunken teen-agers try to swipe a six-pack from the cooler, had a woman get a $100 bill jammed in the slot machine, which necessitated a call to the vending company, had a customer cuss him out because he couldn't create a Western Union money order at 4:00 am (the machine is shut off at 10:00 pm), and had a customer track mud all over the floors just as he finished mopping. The worst part was that he put up with this shit for a lousy $6.50 an hour. But thankfully it was all over for the evening . except for the long bus ride home. Seneca rubbed his eyes, which were sore and gritty, and looked around. At six in the morning the bus was mostly empty. There were a couple young Mexican guys in paint-smeared over-alls, talking animatedly in their musical, rapid-fire Spanish. One of them let out a full body laugh, almost spilling his styrofoam cup of 7-Eleven coffee before he caught it. Seneca wondered what the hell could be so funny at six in the morning. The other commuters were much more reserved. There was a tiny old Chinese woman clutching her purse to her chest like a nervous bird, shrunken in upon herself. There was a teenaged girl on her way to school, with a nose ring, spiky purple hair, a tattered black hoodey with Rancid, Green Day, NOFX, and KoRn patches sewn on, bobbing her head to the insipid nu-metal that blared from her head-phones. There was a bleary-eyed black youth, his faux-platinum medallion and silk shirt attesting to a night of partying at the clubs. And there was a slickly-coiffed woman in a crisp lavender business suit who seemed profoundly uncomfortable to be riding the bus. She disdainfully glanced at the grimy floor and graffitied windows around her. Her lips pulled back from her polished white teeth in even more disgust as she took in her fellow travelers. Seneca tossed his other leg up on the seat in front of him and met her contemptuous gaze with a lazy smile. He was too tired to bother with her social hang-ups. The bus stopped and let on another passenger. He was a short, gangly man, not even five feet tall or a hundred and twenty pounds. He vaguely resembled Davy Jones of the Monkees, in that way that all people down on their luck do. He wore dirty, frayed blue jeans and an old Doors t-shirt with more holes in it than fabric left. (A big chunk of Morrison's sultry Adonis face was missing.) His rat's nest of hair looked like Einstein on a bad day, and his skin was brown, wrinkled, and leathery from a lifetime - perhaps as short as three years - on the Vegas streets. He had a battered guitar strung over his left shoulder, which had a smiley face sticker that read, "Don't Worry - Be Happy!" and was missing two strings. The man dug through his pockets, finally pulling out a handful of pennies and nickels. Before he could start counting out his fare, the bus driver waved him on, eager to get the last run of his shift over with. The man stumbled to the back of the bus, his unsteady gate only partially due to the lurching bus. He sat down opposite Seneca and began tuning his guitar. He strummed a few chords, the strings so loose it hardly made a sound. He smiled up at Seneca, missing his front four teeth, the rest of them black with rot. Seneca tried not to notice the man's stench, but even across the aisle he could smell the pungent mixture of sour sweat, urine, and cheap alcohol. "Got a pick?" the vagrant asked, trying to focus his rheumy, blood-shot eyes on Seneca. Seneca shrugged, "Sorry, all out." "S'okay." The man replied, rifling through his pockets again. He pulled out a dirty pack of matches and began strumming a tuneless song with them. A couple moments later his cracked and warbling voice broke out in song. "The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round -" He laughed, which turned into a wet and racking cough. He recovered a couple moments later, wiped the spittle from his lips, and then started playing again. It might have been a different tune, but Seneca couldn't tell. "Welcome to Las Vegas," he sang, "Fabulous Las Vegas, where the sun always shines, and the women smile back at you - if you've got a dime." Seneca watched the man sing, fascinated by him. Although he felt the same mixture of pity and revulsion that the woman in the lavender business suit did - she had gotten up and moved to the front of the bus when he took his seat - Seneca's feelings were more complex. There was also a superstitious sense of awe and reverence for the man. Primitive man, when faced with the Other, instinctively feels the presence of the Gods about him. Those who blur lines, who flout societal norms, who experience intense psychic states and act in an unusual manner, and especially the sick and insane, are all "touched", holy in the sense of hagne, different, set apart. The spirits spoke to and through them, and it was dangerous to be too close. Man has changed a lot since his days in the primeval jungle - but much remains the same. These thoughts led Seneca to remember a story he'd read years before, when he was first exploring his connection to Dionysos and the Magna Mater Kybele. Kybele, a Phrygian Goddess of madness and fertility, was worshipped by a group of mendicant priests who castrated themselves and wore women's clothing. Through music and dance, the priests would enter ecstatic states, whereupon they would cut themselves with sharp rocks and utter strange prophetic speech. For the people of Phrygia, the tradition of galloi or metragyrtai as they were variously called, was a religious institution as old as time. They had long become familiar with it, and while the begging priests were still strange and magical, there was nothing especially disturbing about them. Things were different in Greece as one of the priests found when he attempted to carry the worship of the Magna Mater into Athens. The people of Athens were shocked at his effeminate attire and the wild, orgiastic rites that he was attempting to introduce. They heard his strange speech, saw the queer gyrations of his dance, and took him for a mad man. Casting stones, they drove the poor priest out of their city in disgrace. But he returned a short time later, leapt up onto the great altar of Athena during the middle of the city's biggest festival, and castrated himself before the eyes of everyone. In unspeakable disgust and outrage, the people of Athens seized and killed the priest, tossing his battered and bloody body into a deep ravine called the borathrum where the people had traditionally disposed of Athens' worst criminals, leaving their bodies to the dogs and crows. When Kybele saw how her priest had been received, she grew angry, and set a plague upon the people of Athens. Nothing succeeded in ridding the city of the plague, and so in desperation the people sent to Delphi for advice. Apollo warned that as long as the Goddess was angry with them, the people of Athens would suffer. The Athenians then sent to Phrygia for another priest, who established the Magna Mater's worship among them, and they built a grand temple for her, called the Metroon. The moral of the story, of course, was that you could never be certain if the crazy man sitting next to you might have been sent by a God, and if you mistreated them, you could incur divine disfavor. The man's odd singing bled through into Seneca's thoughts, pulling him back into this world. "I met her at a truck stop stoned on oatmeal; I can still recall that purple dress she wore; She was drinkin' Dr. Pepper with a wetback, and I knew that she was rotten to the core; My Pooh Bear said I'd swear off booze forever; She said to me she'd have a swiss on rye; But who'd have thought she'd freak out with a robot; I never had the chance to say goodbye." Seneca clapped when the song ended. The bum flashed him another toothless grin, and continued plucking his guitar. Unlike most people, Seneca felt an intense attraction to the liminal and insane. His God was Dionysos, Mainomenos, the mad and maddening God. His was the whole fluid realm of emotion, from sublime ecstasy to raving, destructive insanity. Seneca watched and wondered what it would be like to give himself fully to that realm. To surrender his small, rational mind that it might be overwhelmed by Something greater. To be completely free, not worrying what other people thought about him, not living his life by the tyranny of the time-clock, doing nothing but what was in his heart. Leaving behind his responsibilities, his job, the bonds of family and society to wander the streets, owning and being owned by nothing that he could not carry in a backpack. He knew that it was a chimera-like illusion, that there was nothing glamorous about being homeless and insane. He lived close enough to poverty to know that it was hard, gritty, and soul-crushing, but still he yearned for the freedom of this man. To sit there, singing like that in the middle of a bus. Seneca could never do that. "God speaks to me." Seneca almost didn't hear him over the noise of the bus's engine. "What's he say?" Seneca asked, grinning lopsidedly. "I don't know. The bastard speaks Greek and I don't understand him." He strummed a chord on his guitar. "Fucking foreigners." Seneca laughed, until he saw the bum staring oddly at him. He'd been serious. The bus driver called out Seneca's stop. He rose to leave, but paused in front of the man. Seneca dug out his pack of Djarum Blacks, fished out a cigarette and offered it to him. "Want a cigarette, brother?" "Hell no! Those things'll kill you." He started a coughing fit, which ended with him hawking up a glob of nasty green phlegm. "A man's gotta watch his health, you know? It's the only thing he owns." Seneca tucked the cigarette behind his ear, smiled at the man, and said, "It's been a pleasure." Then walked out into the cool Vegas morning.