MANNERS & MORALS: I Want to Be Alone

None of Manhattan's bitter intramural feuds is waged with more desperate intensity and temper than the battle of the bus driver v. his passengers. To the riders, the driver is a chronically exasperated ogre who delights in abandoning them on rainy street corners, or, if he consents to take them aboard, greets them with insults and treats them to bone-crushing lurches. To the driver, the enemy is a hydra-headed beast: a door blocker, a purse fumbler, and willfully uninformed. Jockeying his big green and cream-colored juggernaut down congested Madison Avenue one day last week, Driver James Coyne gloomily considered...

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