Downs

There was a Downs Syndrome girl caught my attention in the Seattle bus depot the other night. Early twenties, perhaps, not much younger or older than that but its hard to tell . Anyway she was trying to get her some goodies from one of the snack machines that rip off the passengers in all bus depots from coast to coast. To avoid giving $2.50 to the machine for a bottle of water in Vancouver later that night, to digress only slightly, I wandered in to the little convenience store, where the lady gladly charged me $4.50 for the same thing, and smiled while she was doing it.

Anyway this downs girl was seriously trying to come to grips with the whole transaction and was not succeeding. She caught my eye and I went over to help. She had part of it figured out. To get the cookies you put in the money, and she had found the coin slot and had found her coins in her little pink purse. She knew you put the money in the slot, but she didn’t know about amounts, or denominations or the differences between coins. Or numbers, like on the trays in the machine. Or that she had given me, to put into the slot for her, a stupid Rutherford B Hayes one-dollar coin, and she did not know that the god damned machine then kept said one-dollar coin and would not disgorge it when I pushed the coin return plunger and got back a random assortment of everything else, pennies nickels dimes and two quarters.

I been ripped off plenty by the fucking machines in these dumps, and the Seattle bus depot is just that, a total dump, right up there with Oakland the oldest and dumpiest of them all. And I know better. I don't put nothing in there I want back.

She did know to ask for help, and she did understand I was just as frustrated as she was, and that the greyhound clerk she collared to replace me wasn’t about to help either. He told her to call the number on the little sticker on Monday morning during business hours. She really didn’t have many of those concepts down, nor the concept I got from his obfuscation, which was a polite way of saying you are shit out of luck lady, downs or no downs syndrome.

She was humble about it, and about her handicap. She understood, or seemed to understand, that there is a lot of shit in this world beyond her kenning, that she would never get.

Hours later as she was leaving the bus she noticed me sitting up toward the front, recognized me and gave me a shy smile.