The Lady and the Tram : Bleeding man.

Today on the tram something a little bit sad and pathetic happened.

A man boarded the tram and walked right up to the front to sit down. He sat at the "please make this seat available for people who really need to sit down" spot.
You know for Nanna's and pregnant ladies and stuff.

His seat is just in front of mine.
He sits facing to the right, I am facing forwards. So he is in my direct line of vision.

The man has a long beard, but not the hipster kind.
He wears a bucket hat, a flannelette shirt with holes at the elbows, and over the top of that, he wears a long yellow cotton dress. His skin is covered in dirt, and his hand has a cut that has bled, dripped down his hand a little bit, and the blood had started to dry.



The wound is open, not deep, the blood is bright red.

Mine is the next stop.

He notices the line of blood on his hand and starts to try and rub it away. He is neither gentle nor careful. He is vigorously rubbing at the open cut.

I'm 1 minute away from my stop.

I open up my bag, whip out a bandaid, lean over the seat in front of me and say
"Would you like a bandaid? For your hand?"



Like a shy child, he nods and gently takes the bandaid from my hand.

The tram is pulling into my stop.

This is the moment I realise this man has no idea how to open a bandaid.

He starts trying to bite at it, but he can't get it open (cus you know, you've gotta pull that little bit at the top and it just peels open).

So I stand up and walk over to him and ask him if he wants some help.

Again, like small child, he nods, and meekly hands the bandaid wrapper back to me.



I open it up.

Now, there are still 2 plastic bits that need to be removed... So I start to open it up, not the whole way, and I sort of say "so..this bit...goes on the ... umm"

OKAY pause for a second.
Let's get one thing straight.

EVEN PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT WEARING A DRESS OVER A FLANNY HAVE A HARD TIME PUTTING A BANDAID ON YOUR OWN HAND.
It's a two handed operation. This guy couldn't even open it.

OBVIOUSLY I am VERY concerned about making ANY CONTACT with this open wound because I'm not STUPID.

But also, I am stupid, because I couldn't just be like "Okay here you go" hand him the half opened bandaid and get off the tram never to see him again.

I stayed on the tram.

The tram pulls away from my stop. I am still with the man.

He holds his hand up, looks at the cut, then looks to me.

I Very, very carefully place the bandaid on his hand, not making any contact with the skin.

Now I've placed it on there, removed one side of the plastic, and said "Okay, now just pull this bit of plastic this way, pointing the direction he needs to pull so the bandaid will stick down.

He starts pulling the plastic upwards. Disaster. The bandaid shifts out of place and is no longer fully covering the area. I try to say again "you have to pull it this way" I'm miming the movement. He's not on board.

At this stage the bandaid is mainly just sitting on regular skin and had moved off the affected area.

Fuck it.

I pull the other side of the bandaid, and so carefully stick it down.

I tell him he needs to wash his hand so it doesn't get infected.

He just looks at me with big eyes and nods.

The tram driver holds his hi-vis evst over half of his face. The man isn't that smelly... The driver says to me "You'll get a disease".

The man looks at me with eyeballs like no one had ever even said hello to him, let alone put a bandaid on his hand.

So I got off at the next stop. Walked home. Washed my hands and wrote this blog post.

So if you don't hear from me ever again. You'll know why.

The Lady and the Tram: The Man on the Bus

The Lady and the Tram: A Question and Phlegmy man.

A question:

If you're sitting on a crowded tram and a young man with a broken arm gets on, do you offer him your seat?

I have decided to set some criteria for this:

You should offer your seat to a young man with a broken arm when:

1. He has lots of bags or 1 heavy bag. Having bags is awkward when you can use only one arm.
2. He is having trouble balancing.
3. He is giving you evil eyes and using mind powers to make you give him your seat.

This morning a few people on the 55 tram were full of mucus.

PHLEGM clogging up the nostrils, throats & lungs plagued my fellow public transportians.

One man who was sitting on the seat to my right across the passage had it the worst. This man had holes in his jumper and his shoes were all worn out, but he did not smell homeless so...?

Anyway, his lungs were a phlegmy mess. He had an inhaler which he would deeply suck in, then he would splutter and cough and phlegm-about (new verb?) all over himself. He was an older guy, but not really old. I think he looked older than he was.

From the moment he sat down across from me, he stared at me. The really rude uncomfortable stare. Like he's looking at me and he is not going to look away. He just continued to stare at me. Thankfully the tram became more crowded and his stare was broken by people filling up the passage between us.

The Lady & The Tram; The Screaming Man

The Screaming Man was on my tram today.
He didn't scream as much as last time, he rocked back and forth on his seat and shook his head from side to side, then made some garbled sounds and pointed in front of him as if he was getting someone in trouble.

He was on the 55 Tram once before.

I had sleep walked onto the tram as I do every morning and settled in to a mind numbing staring competition with whatever was in front of me, probably a pole.

Then I heard him scream for the first time.

I thought someone had been stabbed, or an appendix had burst, or the love of his life left him for another man (possibly his brother or a rockstar), whilst simultaneously she split his head open with an axe.
None of those things happened. It sounded like it. I've never heard a more heart wrenching sound.
His scream was not high pitched, it was like a deep manly shout, but it was long.
Like he was dying in pain & terror.
It sounded like hurt and sadness and desperation and it was really, really, really loud.

I was so frightened I nearly punched the guy sitting next to me.

I didn't.

I turned around to see the man sitting behind me.

He was scrawny, lanky, he wore a cap, his skin was grey & dull. It looked like his diet consisted of cardboard and maybe cockroaches, (you know, for protein). He had big glasses underneath his cap, I think his pale blue/grey eyes looked in seperate directions. His tightly clenched teeth were yellow and crooked. He looked old, but he had no wrinkles.
Then he screamed again, and again.

When his screams stopped momentarily, he would rock back & forth, stamp his feet, mutter incoherent words, shake his head, clench his teeth and his neck, raise his hands and hit himself in the head.

Then he would scream again and again. Loud, Painful, Heartbreaking. Sad.
He reminded me a little bit of my brother Joey, when he is upset.
Joey is a great big 24 year old happy-go-lucky guy, he also has Autism.
Joey is kind hearted, compassionate and very friendly. But when he is upset he can yell and throw things and he can be a bit scary if you don't understand what's going on. He is a good kind person who literally has no control over his actions sometimes. People do not understand him. People are threatened by him. My goofy funny friendly brother.

Joey is nowhere near as scary as this guy

it's just sometimes when he shouts it's that same uncontrollable, misunderstood loud noise that has so much feeling behind it you know?

This screaming man is terrifying.
At one point, he stood up, walked up right next to me, looked out the window and screamed.
I was petrified.

I was "acting casual" with sheer terror shooting through my body.
I didn't want to look afraid incase I hurt his feelings.
He stayed next to me, looking out the window, screaming.
He arrived at his stop and went shouting off down the street.

he sounded violent and threatening and scary and loud.

But I think he is harmless.
My fear turned into sadness.
I wanted to give him a hug so that he would stop punching himself.
I wanted to ask if he was okay.

Keep this in mind if you think someone is scary.
Maybe the fear is not of the screaming man, but the fact that you do not understand him.