In a two-room shanty on the railroads behind the Riverside T station, a television on the wall shouts out the latest Fox News announcements. While T-drivers take their break around two boxes filled with doughnuts, Joanne Butler prefers to pick on her new colleague.

“Did they allow you to shave your head and wear those shinny silver crosses?” she asks, pointing at the young man’s Michael Jordan earrings. “Did you sing rap music before you worked here?”

Teasing is a golden rule among T-drivers.

“We call [Joanne] “Half-Pint” because she’s only 5’3”,” says Tim, one of Butler’s colleague who declined to give his last name. But she never lets them go too far. “That woman, she’s a character,” he adds.

Joanne Butler, 47, joined the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) in August 2002 through a job lottery. “We will always need public transportation. I think people apply because they know they’ll get a secured job. [...] They even give you clothes! So I don’t have to worry about what to wear in the morning,” she continues, cracking a smile over her thin and uncolored lips.

After a six-month program, Butler started as a maintenance agent, taking trolleys in and out of their garage. Then she asked for a full-time job, and became a T-driver on the Green Line. Either driving the first car or trailing –sitting at the head of the second car—she travels Thursday to Monday from 12:50 p.m. to 9:20 p.m., on the B, C, or D line. “Even if I know the landscape by heart, the Riverside to Government Center ride is the one I prefer because I love being surrounded by Nature.”

On the road, Butler keeps her habits. At around 1 p.m. on weekdays, she blows the horn for a kid who stands on a bridge between Newton Highlands and Newton Center. “I know he [is waiting] for the horn,” says Butler who has never talked to the kid. Every Saturday, the same group of Chinese people takes the T at the Brookline Village station. “It’s funny how they are all the same size.” Butler also often looks for the coyote she once almost hit in the woods between Woodland and Waban stations.

Suicide on the tracks is the thing she fears the most. “It’s not your fault, but [...] it stays printed in your heart,” she says, deeply breathing, her eyes focused on the road.

“Badge number 66517, there is a 6529 call for you,” says a voice out of the radio. “6529, that means I’m in trouble! I’m always in trouble.” She takes the phone and agrees to go for a routine drug test on the next day. Butler regularly goes for those tests at the MBTA. “I’ve had troubles in my other jobs, and they know that,” she says. She was a safety assistant on the Big Dig project, and a nurse assistant at the Saint-Elizabeth Hospital, in Boston. She went to the Cardinal Cushing High School, in Boston, and started working when she was 18. “I wanted to make some money to discover the world.” In her 20’s, she traveled a lot to Utah, Jamaica or Aruba. But she never crossed an ocean.

“I had a humble beginning, but now I own a condo in Florida where I go twice a year and I drive a Lexus,” Butler explains. Her father was a longshoreman in South Boston, and her mother a housewife. “[Joanne] was a very happy child, always smiling and dancing,” confesses her mother, Adeline Butler from Quincy, with a husky voice resounding over the phone. Butler’s father died of a heart attack when she was 16. “He drunk too much, and the only thing I remember is being scared of him,” she says.

Besides being responsible for the riders’ security, Butler sees herself as a target for people’s frustrations. “I’m not a doctor, not a lawyer [...] they think I’m just a robot [...] and I face a lot of verbal abuse,” she whispers, checking in a mirror if people are still getting on the trolley. To answer them, she smiles. “[Joanne] doesn’t like fighting. She would only get mad at me,” her mother says. But Butler maintains that if she were attacked physically, she would not hesitate to use her boxing tricks.

Butler started taking her tensions out on boxing in November 2006. At the end of August 2006, she left the man she married when she was 39. “He started drinking too much. The day he beat me for the first time, I left.” She now lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Weymouth.

The T-doors swing as people come in and go out. Back at the Riverside station, Butler walks to the end of the T, kicking a can and a banana skin out of her way. For the rest of the day, she will be trailing.

She points to her wrinkles with her two index fingers. “For an old woman, I think I have great hair. I do the color myself, but I go to the salon for the highlights,” she says, tying back her long red hair. She lifts weight and goes to the gym twice a week to take care of her body.

Fenway station. Two kids climb the stairs up to the T. “I always wait for kids to sit before I close the doors,” she says.

Butler has no children. The most precious thing she has ever owned was Gingea, a 5-pound tan-and-toothless Chihuahua, who died on December 28, 2004. “Joanne loved that dog more than her husband. When she showed me the pictures I thought, okay, this is a lonely woman, this is a sad soul yeah,” said another colleague who wanted to remain anonymous for personal reasons. In 1995, Butler renamed her dog after her middle sister who died, hit by a car at 36 years old.

4:30 p.m., the temperature rises as body odors mix up in the trolley. “We’re getting close to rush hour, people are gonna start yelling at me,” Butler says, flipping the pages of a Brookline adult education magazine. “I could take some ballroom dancing classes, to meet someone.” She is not sure she should have a new relationship yet. “I feel strange, as if I wasn’t used to it anymore. Maybe I should wait until the winter is over.”