Welcome To Ypsi

Two friends from Eastern Michigan University and I hop a bus to Ypsilanti, the ghetto sister city to Ann Arbor and a quiet gangly fellow sits down on the stop after ours. His hair is crispy and blond, as though its been abused by a hairdryer and is about neck length. It shoots out from his head, floating raggedly above his creased and weather beaten neck. The skin on his hands and face is tight, leathery, and deeply tanned. Probably about 36, he looks over 50 and has ghastly bony fingers. A vein stands out visibly on his temple and throbs, sliding over the bone as he turns his withered head side to side. His whole body seems to have been left out in the sun too long. His face looks like that of a gaunt, wide-eyed Clint Eastwood. I glance at his wild and bulging winter-blue eyes and notice a burst blood vessel in the right one. As he sits languidly across from me on the number four bus, arms stretched across the backs of seats, eying the driver and my collegiate looking friends and me, he is clutching a pair of metal handcuffs. They don't look like the fake handcuffs that come with policeman Halloween costumes and they're certainly not fuzzy. They look like cop handcuffs, real ones, the chain silver and the cuffs painted dull black. He is holding them in a manner that suggests the attitude "Yeah these are handcuffs, so what?" He has a cheap ring on every finger and wears a dirty leather jacket. The jacket is black and stained all over and he has an ugly plaid polyester vest over it. He sits shiftlessly towards the front of the bus and no one sits next to him. His expression is blank in the way a serial killer's is and he mainly stares towards the front of the bus, occasionally switching the handcuffs from hand to hand, making no effort to hide them. He glances at us again, we whisper to one another, and he more than likely knows we're talking about him. My friend feigns sending a text message to snap a picture of this creepy loner holding handcuffs and I begin to wonder what his story is. The first thing I imagine is an image of him pushed against a car, being handcuffed by a police officer when suddenly he takes the officer down, brutally beating him and making a run for it. Subsequent images are variations on this including a gun fight, knife fight, unbelievable karate moves, various shanking scenarios, and a car chase. I grip the metal water bottle in my hand and wonder what the best way to wield it against a dangerous street person with handcuffs might be. When he slowly sinks his hand into his jacket my knuckles go white and I tense up all over. His hand emerges holding a liter bottle of coke, apparently very well hidden in the folds of his dirty jacket. He just holds the bottle in one hand, the handcuffs in the other and continues to glance around menacingly. He gets off several stops before us and as he walks away I see hanging from his black jeans a chain with dozens of colored hair ties looped through it. The second he is gone my friends and I confer about the strangness of this person. One friend points out that he has seen him before, riding a bike and wearing women's underwear, he is a hustler or crossdresser my friend speculates, and probably a drug addict I add. This seems as likely as any explanation and we theorize about this grungy misanthropic deviant and why he was holding handcuffs until we reach our stop. Now his story's changed in my mind and rather than a highly dangerous felon he is a hustler junkie with a handcuff fetish. "Welcome to Ypsilanti!" my friend says ironically. I just smile and wonder at our public transit system.