Eugene author’s satirical novel looks at life through the windshield of a bus

In the new novel “Off Route,” an unnamed narrator begins work as a bus driver at a quasi-public entity labeled “Cosmodemonic,” in a city that may or may not bear certain similarities to one Eugene, Oregon.

“There are fates worse than death,” the narrator laments. “Like becoming a bus driver, for instance.”

The book is the product of six years of observation by its author, Rick Levin, a bus driver for Lane Transit District and a longtime journalist.

It’s not a memoir, nor is it an exposé. Rather, it’s a fictionalized satire of Levin’s time behind the wheel and in offices of LTD. (The “Cosmodemonic” name is a nod to Henry Miller’s “Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company,” which that author used as the stand-in for Western Union in his own autobiographical novel “Tropic of Capricorn.”)

While the book is based on his experiences as a driver for Lane Transit District, Levin, 57, said it’s a collage of his experiences at LTD and the many working-class jobs he’s logged time at during different moments in his life.

The life of a bus driver in a city that looks suspiciously like Eugene, for both Levin and his unnamed narrator, means a front-row seat to what he calls a collapsing American empire, from the everyday indignities of a working class gig to daily encounters with people in the throes of mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness.

Levin said the job can be both numbing and infuriating, something he tried to capture through his narrator’s shifts between sympathy and reactionary frustration.

“No one person should swallow what we’re seeing,” he said. “As a bus driver, sometimes I feel like Alex strapped into the chair at the end of ‘A Clockwork Orange.’”

From writing to busing and back again

Levin was prepared to become a keen observer of the system he works in, thanks to decades of experience as a journalist. He quit his job at the Eugene Weekly in 2019 after a decade of arts writing and film criticism for the alt weekly, hanging up his press cap after a 25-year career in journalism.

The change came, he said, because he was done with editorial meetings and office life. The decision to become a bus driver also had an ideological twinge — what he called a “lefty, working class romantic notion” to get back on the ground and work an honest job. 

At the time, Levin thought he was done as a writer. He hadn’t penned a great American novel (as many journalists hope to do), and he held a “private mock funeral” for his writing career as he transitioned to bus life.

It wasn’t a smooth pivot. His training began in the spring of 2020, and he was able to drive a bus for only a week and a half before being laid off during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. When he returned to drive the bus later that year, it was into a changed world with an even more fragile social fabric than had been in place before.

He started writing what would turn into “Off Route” through a Eugene writer’s collective, the Stone Cutter’s Union, as they were preparing for a reading in 2023. His past writing wasn’t inspiring him, so his wife, Liz, suggested that he just sit down and write something new. He started writing about the bus.

“Three thousand words poured out of me in a weekend,” he said.

Six months later, he had a novel-length manuscript. A few years later, “Off Route” is rolling out of the lot.

Capitalism, COVID and life on the bus

Levin, while writing through the struggles of a life on the bus route, does not romanticize or make heroes of his narrator or his peers. They are flawed people, with ugly, honest feelings about the city they drive through and the troubled people who often board the bus.

“Off Route” does not shy away from describing this friction, like when a pants-less man charges the bus while swinging a baseball bat, as the narrator pops the emergency brake and hopes the windshield is shatterproof.

That episode and others in the book were taken from notes he tapped out on his iPhone, what he described as an “endless stream of little horror-show visions.” Working as a bus driver, he said, is direct exposure to all of the forces and pressures that lead people to reactionary anger, something he fought when he felt it in himself.

For him, the empathy came from a more direct place. Levin’s narrator, like himself, is a recovered alcoholic and heroin addict.

He recalled a moment when another LTD driver was complaining about addicts and homeless people on the buses. Levin remembers the comments as vicious. 

Levin interrupted him: “‘That used to be me,’” he told him. “‘I probably rode your bus to my dealer’s house.’” 

He said he wanted to call that out, in real life and the book, because he’s concerned with the mounting lack of empathy for people on the margins, both in his day-to-day working life and in society at large. (Indignities of the job aside, Levin said he doesn’t have another career change in him at this point.)

“We all need to work on that, because things are getting tighter,” Levin said. “We’re descending back into something really futile and barbaric.”

The other driver didn’t believe him. Many of his LTD brethren don’t share his Marxist tendencies, but Levin said the role of the bus driver, warts and all, fills a necessary civic gap for people on the margins. 

“They’re kind of like social warriors,” he said. “Regardless of their motivations for doing it, it’s an essential service. So there is something that feels like you’re on a battlefield and you’re doing the right thing. At least I’m getting people to work. I’m getting underprivileged people, or people without a car, around. You kind of rest on that.”

That helps on the bad days. But only so much.

“It’s not enough for me,” he said.

Launch party for ‘Off Route’

A book launch party for Levin and “Off Route” is set for 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31, at Dark Pine Coffee, the downtown Eugene coffee shop at 954 Pearl St., where Levin wrote much of the book. The event it free. Signed copies will be available for purchase.