Pedro

Toward the end of my 16&1/2-year career of driving transit bus for Regional Transit Service in Rochester, I befriended a latino bus-driver by the name of Pedro Collazo.
This would be in the late ‘80s, while we still lived on Winton Road in Rochester — i.e. before we moved out here to West Bloomfield.
Pedro was a few years older than me, and when I started driving bus in May of ‘77, he was a road-supervisor — usually stationed at Main & Clinton, the main timepoint in downtown Rochester.
His job was to field our passengers (“the halt, the maim, the infirm, etc.”), and make sure we didn’t show up too early or late — for which we could get “written up,” and thereby “called on the carpet.”
But like many road-supervisors, he went back to bus-driving, even though it meant a cut in pay.
People used to say the best job at Transit was driving bus. Being a road-supervisor required you to be a jerk, promulgating the crazy ministrations of mindless-management-minions, who were also jerks.
Pedro was in stellar shape, and fashioned himself a ladies’ man.
He had a slew of girlfriends beside his frumpy wife, and manipulated them all this-way-and-that.
The fact I ran was what prompted him to cultivate our friendship — we never talked about his girlfriends.
Once he wanted me to run with him, and I promptly lost interest.
We were running around a small park about the size of a city-block.
Each circuit took about three minutes.
What a joke! I was used to far longer distances; 30-45 minutes.
We went to the quarter-mile track at a local high-school, and started circling it.
It was so boring it was hard to keep going.
After that we parted ways. His idea of staying in shape wasn’t my idea — I could run circles around him. He was in pretty good cardiovascular shape, but would give up after about 10 minutes, saying it wasn’t worth it.