It was beautiful, an apparition belonging to a different time and place, like say Detroit in 1982. Forlornly abandoned in front of fabled Grandview Park smack dab in the middle of Commercial Drive one morning last week was a city bus, burnt out, its windows broken, and black graffiti tags spray-painted down its sides.

Had broiling resentment finally breached the lid? Had long-awaited mob rule finally arrived? Had the revolution been called while we slept?

The question awaiting everyone making their way up for morning coffee was, “Did you see the bus?” Immediately facts jostled with each other like so many clawing cats in a bag. The driver was attacked and is barely alive in hospital. The bus was blown up with Molotov cocktails. A huge swarm of gangs blocked the bus and dragged the driver out of her seat to savagely beat her. The armed Translink police, walking as all police do with that John Wayne swagger on account of the new guns on their hips preventing their arms from swinging in the normal way, kept oglers away. “Don’t touch the window!” one shouts, “You wouldn’t want your fingerprints on it.”

Camera crews from the news networks began piling out of unmarked vans (this was “hard news” after all) and reporters groomed in front of tiny mirrors. “No one knows why the gang dragged the driver from the bus and savagely beat her,” one reporter intones with rehearsed incredulity for the camera, carefully angled to catch sight of the broken window and the charred driver’s seat behind it.

On Commercial Drive, there are more rumour mongers than rumours to go around, and consequently the same rumours come around over and over again, gaining the semblance of truth by sheer dint of repetition. People who have lived, worked, shopped and hung out on the street for the better part of their adult lives begged camera-toting lunks who needed directions to find the street to tell them what happened in their own backyard. The crazy ones who think the heroin-dealing Queen-knighted George Bush and his Bilderberg-New World Order gang of shapeshifters are triggering Earthquakes in Iran with the Alaskan HAARP climate-controlling array (whew!) try to theorize about the burnt and abandoned bus for the annoyed cameramen who have the look on their faces of someone watching a Teletubby episode for the first time.

By the time of the first television report, it was a gang of native youths who beat the driver who is, thankfully, recovering in hospital, the reason for the attack “a mystery!” Why, why, why, everyone asks. “Natives,” comes the answer, as though that be ‘nough said.

But rather than clear mysteries away, the reports and rumours pile them on top of each other. The driver, it later emerges, never got to hospital. She walked home. What? Too distressed from the swarming, it’s said, she walked away from her bus and went home, leaving the bus company to come out to rescue the abandoned bus hours later. And the Molotov cocktail attack? Apparently that came later: now the word was, the gang swarmed the driver and drove her off then came back and finished the job an hour later, torching her bus.

Word buzzed up and down the street: who would do that? It was drug-related maybe, another brazen attack in the lengthening string of gangland drug turf wars that have seen six shot to death in a Surrey apartment last month, a Chinese food restaurant on Broadway riddled with bullets earlier, and what’s this? As if to confirm the already dark and now darkening story, someone was shot to death up the street 35 blocks within hours of the bus attack!

Still the torched and tagged bus sat there, mute testament to man’s inhumanity to man. There was talk the denizens of Grandview Park would be rounded up in a new police crackdown. No doubt the spies were already out in force, watch who you talk to! Police cars were spotted in the allies behind the front row of stores. Up went the yellow Police Line Do Not Cross tape incasing the bus like a bug in sap. A paddy wagon was parked ominously across the street from the bus: was a mass arrest about to unfold? Camera crews backed up as the cop approached his car and got in, careful to catch every facial expression, but there was none: it was poker face time for the police. This was serious business. The million-dollar bus was a complete write-off. Property damage charges, quite aside from assault charges, would be substantial.

By evening, fresh news was coming fast and furious. It wasn’t any old natives, it was a swarm of native girls who attacked the female driver! And the attack resulted from the driver trying to hand out candy! It was, after all, Halloween night, and what could be more friendly than a bus driver trying to give candy to kids? Crazy native girls! We’d seen this kind of thing before in the Reena Virk story, hadn’t we, only they weren’t natives, but still. The story had become a Girls Gone Wild, Commercial Drive episode. Only these ones weren’t in bikinis, they were wearing Santa suits. Now the whole thing became a twisted and bizarre Clockwork Orange tale. Only it wasn’t anymore a gang or a swarm of anyone. It was, apparently, just two native girls in Santa suits. Though how anyone should know they were native girls, let alone girls in the first place, being behind Santa beards presumably, is anyone’s guess.

By the following morning, other cracks began to appear in the officially-reported story. The driver wasn’t handing candy out to kids, she had thrown a handful out the open door. Now who would do that? She can’t have come down off the bus to hand candy out, that would be terribly unprofessional and unsafe. And she can’t have meant to distribute candy by throwing it onto the street, that would be a stupidly dangerous thing to do. Would the kids be expected to rush up beside the bus to pick the candy up, and risk being run over? And what about the driver, leaving the sanctuary of the bus she has control over, with a two-way radio inside, to walk up the street beside a dark park to leave the bus there and go home, after having just been attacked.

Further news arrived next day: the torching of the bus might have been nothing more than a fireworks product placed on the driver’s seat. Nothing was burnt but the driver’s seat and a few items within easy reach of its flames. Everyone that night was storming around with fireworks, that’s Halloween for you. How much would it take for some goof to think it funny to put a firework of some kind in the abandoned bus, not thinking that it would come to engulf the bus in flames? What about the design of the new buses, apparently made of material on their seats vulnerable to catching fire? And the graffiti tagging? That came along much later, after the burnt bus had already been sitting there for hours.

The apparent attack, the torching, and the tagging now were clearly three different and probably unrelated incidents. And the attack itself, once a gang of youths, was now possibly just two pissed-off Halloween revelers the driver of the bus might have thrown a handful of candy at from her seat inside. Nonetheless, the second evening news featured spokespeople from the bus drivers’ union intoning about how the drivers simply need more protection from the crazy and unpredictable public-transit using peasants, including cameras, shields, and more substantial contact than a two-way radio, but the bus company, bastards, refuse to spend money on this obvious kind of necessary protection, the burnt and tagged bus on Commercial Drive a glaring case in point, parked there behind the finger-wagging union man.

Meanwhile, nobody seems to know where the bus passengers went. Wouldn’t they know the whole story? No one has been able to find anyone who was there. The bus, finally, was hoisted up by the hook of a truck and dragged away to its yard, now just another reason for them who bought the purple-trimmed homes behind the street expecting to find a Kitsilano Part Deux to shake their heads instead and make plans for a move to Tsawwassen. It’s just that kind of a crazy neighbourhood!