For him, everyone was the enemy and everyone who sat next to him got a hand shake and the offer of a fight with a moron. He was white, with a scar on his face and, as anyone who's ever got the 453 will tell you, he was on a pretty ethnically diverse bus, but that didn't stop him threatening literally everyone who gave him eye contact. If you ask me, he had a knife. Fortunately there was a negotiator in the bus.
Alright, so he was wearing a London underground jacket and he didn't appear to be affiliated with any formal police force but that man had skills. He'd put thought into the exact words a person might say to stop another person, who everyone within earshot had established was looking for a fight, from punching, or getting punched, in and around the face. Drunk man-boy had originally attempted to start a fight with the negotiator asking, shortly after shaking his hand, if the negotiator was laughing at him. He hadn't been, but not only did the negotiator refrain from pointing that out, he guided DMB back down from his stupid rage. He even managed to speak to him from a place of gentle authority, guiding him into promising to behave.
Each time DMB got into a confrontation with someone, which he did despite his promise to behave, the negotiator would gently persuade him that his aggression was unnecessary or else would persuade other members of the bus who refused to break eye contact "That there was a time and a place for everything," but a bus journey in the middle of the night wasn't it. When the negotiator did communicate with other members of the bus about DMB he did so under his drunk radar without him him noticing a thing.
Assuming he didn't have a knife a fight would have ended very badly for him. I work in a pub so I'd been picturing how I was going to get him on the ground since he'd opened his mouth but within ten minutes, everyone else was imagining a similar scenario. But the negotiator was still unwilling to embrace a confrontation. The man had the patience of a saint which is why after DMB had left and I made out the word religion from his barbados, London accent I winced.
But what he said, after a prompt from me to repeat was spectacular. He said that religion tells you, it's possible to repent your sins to abolish there consequences but you can't, and that all that's real is cause and effect.
And go you know where he'd been struck by this pearl of wisdom most recently? when, in the Hollywood film the Other Guys, the Rock was lying on the top of a thieves car being shot at he asks his partner: "how'd I get here?" and his partner, Samuel L Jackson replies "Through a series of bad life choices I assume." Awesome, some people are awesome.
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