The head of the man in the black and royal fleece bobbed into the aisle like a week-old Mylar balloon, forcing me to pause until it lilted clumsily into a position of fleeting uprightness. It lolled again into aisle obstruction the second I passed and found an empty seat a few rows back.

In Milwaukee, where I live, public transportation is looked at as something one is condemned to. There is a general stigma against the whole ritual: The waiting; the dropping of coins and feeding of bills into the till; the angled tear of the bright neon transfer slips; the weak-kneed dance one is forced to perform while walking the plank of aisle, the bus accelerating while one is still hawkeyeing a vacant spot to park one's ass. People here are afraid of having to do without the slutty convenience of a car. They coil in fear at the thought of having to walk from stop to store and then back again, weighed down by toilet paper, all purpose cleaner, tinned fruits, topical ointment and more lactose than is wise. They want - no, need - to rock star park and rumble away on a whim.

Oh, plus they don't want to have to be confronted by those people. There's always that. Them. Whatever.

I take the bus wherever I go. When I divulge this to someone for the first time, there is always a slight crinkling of facial features. "You mean you don't have a car?" As if saying that I don't is an admission of an overall failure at living. As if I'm admitting that I'm one of those people. What they, the mulish auto steerers, can't for the life of them grasp, can't accept, is the fact that it's a choice I've made. Like how some people choose to join the Peace Corps or eat their eggs over-easy, become corporate lawyers or rock climbers or members of the clergy. My freedom of choice is a moot point. I'm just one of those people, or at best slowly becoming one. A fate worse than snapping your neck.

"He's drunk, I bet. Three in the afternoon an he's already plastered into cranial instability," I thought, though not in those words. As I settled into my seat, I flushed the thought of the man in the black and royal fleece out of my mind. My route fifteen time is mine alone. I scrub away the surface scum of extraneous commotion, of real life being lived, all the murmurs and jolts of sound, the shifting snapshots of city bustle. Lichen-plagued oaks, the limping elderly, a too-young girl pushing a preemie in a covered buggy, the release of pent-up hydraulic air. For me, the easiest way to register and, in fact, appreciate the terrific, prosaic reality of those things is to drown them out. A book, headphones, stone-cold navel gazing.

Maybe that's why I relish my time on the bus so much - it gives me a chance to bow out of the real world, to not participate in it for a bit. I sit back and get transported into a Bermuda Triangle of the mind.

Anyway, it wasn't until I noticed that we'd been at a standstill for longer than is normal that I looked up. Sometimes drivers will stop for a for a while to refill on coffee, throw a whiz, or simply mute their haste for the purpose of schedule realignment. But this time there was the exaggerated lag, and then the driver cutting through the lull of the idling engine to ask in a confident, unconcerned voice, "Sir? Are you alright? Sir?"

The head of the man in the black and royal fleece was now violently pressed against the bus's window. I was afraid that the dead weight of its pressure would send a halo of hairline cracks in every direction.

The man didn't respond to the driver's disconnected booms and slight shoulder pokings (she seemed afraid to touch him with conviction), so she went back to her perch and called for help on her CB.

He was dead. I was sure of it. The motherfucker drank himself to death plum in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, on route fifteen of the Milwaukee County Transit System. His heart had stopped, gin choking its woozy palpitations. And I was either lucky or unlucky enough to witness its lead-in and aftermath.

We stayed parked, everyone craning their necks and straining their eyes in order to suss things out. Intermittently, they'd glance down at their watches, bearing witness to a few big hand ticks, impatient for the corpse's extraction. They all had things to do: Afternoon errands to run, dinners to prep, beers to crack, barking dogs to drown in tepid bath water.

Sirens screamed suddenly, as if swooping out of empty space. The corpse in the black and royal fleece bolted to attention. But only briefly. After he registered the sound, he went back to spirited bobbing, as if he'd never been dead. A gaggle of flat-topped firemen got on board and were pointed in the direction of the surging and suffusing life. Outside, kids with afros stepped up to the bus window and curled their hands around their eyes, shielding out the sun's imprint to get a better glimpse of the commotion inside.

One firefighter posed questions to the ghost in the black and royal fleece - questions about medication, insurance, etc, questions I couldn't quite hear - while the others looked on and smirked at the answers which bubbled out with a total lack of oomph from the ghost's mouth. But there were answers, actual, albeit unintelligible, answers. Coded messages from beyond.

"We're taking him in for observation," the interviewer boomed authoritatively, grabbing the man in the black and royal fleece by the grimy hood and holding him at a disgusted arm's length, as if hauling home a link of rotting sucker fish that had been hooked through the gills.

As soon as they were off, so were we, rumbling down Kinnickinnic, back in business, as it were. As if nothing had happened, I returned to my book, my attention broken only when it was time to pull the Stop Requested cord and start my walk home.

Let them keep their cars; let them keep their snide comments. At least I've got stories to tell. At least I've got that. Them. Whatever.