The Blogs: They’re Heeere! Teenage Invaders on the 91 Bus

I never thought much about alien invaders. I did not try to imagine what they would look like or how they would act.

When we visited New York last year, all the talk was about UFO’s landing in New Jersey. Walking home from shul Friday night, we saw a man holding a brown paper bag and looking up at the sky.

As we passed, he said, “They’re heeere,” echoing the movie few saw but everybody quotes. “That’s a UFO.”

We looked up. “How can you tell?” we asked. “It looks like a star.”

He answered with the disdain New Yorkers show dumb hayseeds. “Everybody knows they’re UFO’s!” he barked. “Dontcha watch the news?”

I thought no further about such things until one day my wife and I set out on what should have been a routine, early-afternoon ride on the 91 bus.

We passed the Jerusalem Theater and stopped at the light. Ahead was a bus kiosk where mostly one or two people wait, or none at all.

Author photo

This time a writhing, roiling mass of smallish humanoids filled the kiosk. They had surged out onto the sidewalk and spilled into the street. They looked like teenagers, though people say aliens can fool you. A few adults were among them.

Whoever they were, there were a lot more of them than could fit on one bus. The 91 is the only line that stops there. They were coming for us, all of them.

“They’re heeere!” I thought.

When the light changed, the bus crossed the intersection but could not reach the kiosk. One of the adults called out, “Achorah!—move back!” Some of those blocking our progress got back on the sidewalk. One of them pounded on the bus. A grownup stopped him.

The bus inched forward. The doors opened.

And they came.

Shouting, yelling, hollering, smallish boy and girl invaders poured through the front and middle doors. They filled every seat. They packed every centimeter of the aisle. They climbed up the backs of seats. They perched on railings.

And they screamed and shouted.

Two of them sat opposite us. With a straight face, the taller one extended his hand to shake mine. At a certain age, goofing on grownups is fun. (I skipped that age myself, having gone from toddlerhood straight to late middle-age.)

A rolling roar filled the air. All at once this was punctuated by a song they all seemed to know. Everyone loudly sang two lines. Then they stopped, clapped, yelled, and pounded their feet.

I could not make out most of the words, but they seemed to end with kulam zonot. (I could be wrong. It may have been minei mezonot. But I don’t think so.)

I turned to my wife. “You know,” I said, “we’ll never get off. The driver would have to clear the whole front of the bus out the door. And how would he even hear us?”

“They will all get off before we do,” she said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I don’t,” she said. “But I hope so.”

A young man perched on a railing ahead of us took out what looked like air freshener and sprayed the air. Then the tall hand-shaker opposite me took out the same thing. Smoke soon billowed from his mouth.

Like many other things, vaping is so after my time.

At one stop, a regular passenger got off at the rear exit, setting off an alarm. The driver exited his cab and the bus. He had to shoo the invaders out of the well near the rear door, so it could close. Then we proceeded.

We passed the Inbal Hotel and Liberty Bell Park. As we turned right, the atmosphere in the bus suddenly changed. The roar calmed. The visitors looked around, alert. There had been no announcement, at least an audible one. Yet they all seemed to sense that something was up. What conveyed the signal? Pheromones? WhatsApp?

When we turned down David Remez Street, the reason for the change became clear. They were all getting off at First Station. Salvation!

The bus rolled to a stop. The doors opened. And the young invaders, howling with exuberance, spewed out the doors as fast as they had stampeded in.

Within the bus: Serenity. Solitude. Silent prayers of thanksgiving.

My wife and I stayed on the 91 for a few stops. Climbing down, we did not kiss the ground. At our age, passersby would have had to winch us upright. And we would have had to explain what the devil we were doing.

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Some years ago a New York Times correspondent spent two years in Japan and wrote a book when he left. Such books are fun. They tell you about a country you probably won’t visit, and show you, for instance, “how the Japanese really are.”

In one passage the author visits a kindergarten and finds that Japanese kids aged 5 need no adult supervision. They enter their classroom, sit down, fold their hands on the desk, and say nothing till the teacher enters.

The writer links this behavior to a local proverb, which he says that Japanese don’t just quote but take seriously:

I have not been around here long enough to form firm opinions about much. But I will allow myself a tiny, tentative suggestion: