Nobody's Hero: The Insanity of Driving a Big-City Bus

My neighbor just said something that made me respect the hell out of him.

And perhaps question his sanity.

For years, Jim drove a city bus in downtown Los Angeles, during the era of the notorious LA riots, when the city's race relations were at their low point.

Now retired, he’s is an easy-going type, with the countrified looks and soft-spoken demeanor of some old fella you might hire as a bass fishing guide.

For years, though, he sat in that hot seat, lurching his big bus along mean, pot-holed streets in across the city, his route ending at the county jail.

I mean, whew.

Imagine some guy just gets sprung after a few low-down months in the clink. He’s leaner and meaner than when he went in, and he’s none too happy about having to take public transportation back into his life. 

He’s pissed off, maybe ready to settle a few scores.

And Jim’s is perhaps the first face he sees when that bus door opens.

“People used to challenge me all the time,” he said. “They’d say ‘What are you doing here, man?’”

The other day, I saw Jim in his front yard as I walked back from the mailbox.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Just my blood pressure,” he said.

Then he told me about the bus and we talked about those years, that part of his life I knew nothing about.

Those years he considered carrying a knife for protection. 

That was nothing. 

Many of his fellow drivers, he later learned, carried handguns, breaking the rules for drivers, but they were taking no chances out there.

For me, the stories provoked a flashback of a long-forgotten time.

In 1994, just two years after the city's riots, I wrote a story about is most dangerous bus line — which rolled straight through neighborhoods still angry.

I wanted to talk to the people who had no other choice than to ride that line, to drivers who sat at those steering wheels day after day, feeling afraid and often helpless.

Who on earth would do such a dangerous job?

They were, as it turns out, people like my neighbor Jim.

Stanley Francois sat in the driver’s seat of his bus, on his break, reading the paper. 

I said I was a reporter who wanted to ride his route though South Central, write about what happened along the way.

He said I was crazy.

I asked about what would happen if one of his bus passengers was ever attacked.

What he told me became the lead of my piece:

“Driver Stanley Francois has a grim warning for riders on the 204 Line: Become a victim on his bus, man, and you’re on your own.

That means if some slick character points a gun muzzle at your temple, jabs a blade between your ribs or snatches your pocketbook, don’t look for this driver to play guardian angel. Sure, he’ll keep watch in the rearview mirror, hit the silent alarm and even use his two-way radio to summon help.

But he will not leave his seat, he will not get involved.

No way, no how.

“Why should I?” he asks. “I’m not going to risk my life. Something bad happens on that bus, I can’t help you. Nothin’ I can do but get myself killed trying to be a hero.”

Francois is nobody’s hero. 

He’s just a no-nonsense driver on the 204 Line along Vermont Avenue–a lumbering, round-the-clock, nine-mile run between Hollywood and Manchester boulevards that I was told was the most crime-ridden bus line in Southern California.”

I spent weeks riding with Stanley and other drivers like him, day and night.

I got to know the circadian rhythms of the 204 line.

Every five minutes during rush hours, an empty bus rousted from its resting spot at the corner of Hollywood and Vermont. Within a few blocks along the commercial strip, the bus filled with workers or students. Other than an occasional crying baby or whispered comment, the scene had a strange, funereal quiet.

Moving on, the 40-foot-long bus rumbled south through the Wilshire and Pico districts, past the intersection of Pico and Vermont — the route’s most crime-infested corner, and then on to the coast.

The drivers I interviewed were gun shy and tired.

“If I wasn’t driving it, I wouldn’t be riding this bus,” said one. “I’d get a car some way, steal one if I had to.”

Passengers on the 204 line knew both the rules and the risks.

They knew the pungent smell of ink from the garish graffiti scrawls, felt the slippery plastic seats beneath them, saw the bullet holes in the scuffed-up, plexiglass windows and wondered if they came from inside or out. 

They heard the wail of sirens from the street outside and clenched their teeth as the bus made its squealing, lurching halt at almost every corner.

Most of all, they knew the unspoken rules against prolonged eye contact. They knew the importance of reading a novel, newspaper or the graffiti come-ons — anything — rather than letting their glance invade some stranger’s personal space.

Strangely, nighttime didn’t strike the greatest fear into 204 riders.

It was after school, when cliques of teens stormed on board, noisily pushing their way to the back seats, sticking out their feet to trip frightened elderly riders, spitting out the windows, mocking people.

The youthful avalanche of boisterous riders turned afternoon bus ventures into high-anxiety escapades. Only later came the gang members and fast-talkers.

I spoke with James, a 250-pound teacher’s aide who looked more like a football lineman. From his regular seat at the back corner window — he called it the shotgun chair — he could eyeball the bus and all its commotion.

Like the guy who got stabbed because he stepped on another rider’s foot. Or the woman kicked and beaten because she wouldn’t talk to the pair of drunken strangers. He’d seen people smash windows because the bus would not stop for them.

Most times, he didn’t get involved. But once he interceded on behalf of an old woman badgered by a troublemaker.

“He spit on me,” James said. “So I cold-cocked him. And then I threw his ass out of the bus, outside into the darkness.”

Crime and punishment. Justice on the 204.

Nobody had to tell Stanley Francois.

He still shuddered over the memory of a fare-jumper who sought revenge.

“The guy got off the bus, turned around and pulled a pistol on me. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t jump off that bus. I just sat back and thought ‘Lord, this is it.’ He stood there for the longest time. He didn’t pull the trigger, though. And I’ll never understand why.”

My neighbor Jim had heard all those stories and experienced even more.

He told me about the time he had mistakenly tripped the silent alarm on his bus, located on the bottom of the steering wheel to avoid detection.

When he pulled up at the county jail and all of his passengers herded out, he was surrounded by a trio of LA transit police, guns drawn.

I believe that was the day my neighbor named Jim questioned his own sanity.