My granddaughter is a freshman in high school and to my
knowledge she’s never ridden the bus to school. She’s always been dropped off
and picked up by her mom or her nana or me.
Which is fine. But it occurred to me recently that maybe
she’s missing out. I had some of the weirdest, funniest, most harrowing, and
most surreal experiences of my life while riding a school bus.
If my folks had taken me to school, second-grade me never
would have met a high schooler named Raymond Clark, who had his own theme song
set to the tune of the Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy vs the Red Baron.” Seriously.
This guy would sing:
Up in the air
A man
in a plane
Raymond
Clark
Was
his name
In first grade I rode Johnny Hester’s bus to Kingman
Elementary, and it was on that bus ride home one afternoon when I noticed some
high school boy wearing a white t-shirt. At home that night I said “Some kid
was wearing an undershirt to school.” Mom
asked how I knew. I said I could see it. “An undershirt?” she said. Yes, an
undershirt. She wanted to know if it was the kind Dad wore, which is the kind
charmingly referred to today as a wife-beater. No, I said, it’s the kind I
wear. Because I wore a freakin white t-shirt under whatever madras-patterned
short sleeve shirt I was wearing, every single day. Sometimes I wore a white
t-shirt under a different t-shirt. Mom assured me that it was fine to wear a
white t-shirt to school but probably not an undershirt of the style Dad wore.
Then why, I wondered, do you refer to my white t-shirts as
undershirts? For that matter, why am I wearing them at all?
I probably shouldn’t have paid such close attention to the
high school kids, considering my naivete. I overheard a discussion once in
which a girl told a boy that one of her teachers said it was wrong to drink.
This ran counter to everything I thought I knew about sustaining life, but
fortunately this statement was clarified before I was completely dehydrated.
Another time I watched a boy give his friend the finger, and since he didn’t
bother explaining what it meant to any six-year-old observers, I just assumed
it was a friendly greeting and passed it along to my one-year-old brother at
supper that night. My dad was shocked and furious, and for some reason I said
“It doesn’t mean anything,” He proceeded to explain that it does mean
something without actually explaining what it meant, and I’m pretty sure that
to this day I have never given anyone the finger.
(This incident found its way into the prologue of the first
part of Trombone Answers, when Parker Graham calls his baby brother a
cunt. Nobody told Parker what that meant either.)
My folks moved from Wallace to Hillsboro in 1967, so for
second grade I attended Richland Elementary and rode Reed Rice’s Bus 8, where I
first heard Raymond Clark’s theme song. This was a fairly uneventful year for
bus memories, but then in 1968 we moved again to the house Dad built west of
Hillsboro and I switched to Stan Austin’s Bus 5. This was an eye-opener. For
one thing, I had never heard music on a school bus before. I had heard
shouting, screaming, the occasional caterwauling, and at least one philosophical
discussion on the morality of drinking, but never music. Stan Austin played
WLS, the rock station out of Chicago, and I was amazed. Stupefied. Was this
even legal? I was one of the first kids on the bus in the morning—boarding in
darkness during the winter months—so I might hear the Archies’ “Bang
Shang-a-Lang” three times before making it to school.
At the time, I thought each band was playing live in the WLS
studio. Logistics was not my strong suit in third grade.
Other highlights and lowlights of my time on Stan Austin’s
bus (third grade through my senior year):
⦿ Third grade. I was sitting behind a gorgeous sixth-grader named Marlea Rogers
one day and she had her gray winter coat draped over the back of the seat. When
the bus stopped and she stood up, the coat fell into my lap. She didn’t notice,
so I picked it up and handed it to her. She said thanks and I joined the ranks
of every other heterosexual Richland Elementary boy with correctible eyesight
by developing a gigantic crush on Marlea Rogers. (This was the inspiration for
the scene in Trombone Answers where Parker Graham rescues Carrie
Denham’s coat from under the bleachers, then waits to make sure there won’t be
a thank-you kiss before going on his way.)
⦿ The bus made three stops in Mellott on the way to Richland. At the second stop
one morning there was screaming outside—and not just the usual wild shrieks of
kids playing grab-ass. No, these were some legitimately horrifying screams, and
when I looked out the window I could see a spreading pool of blood from
someone’s dog that had been backed over.
⦿ My friend John Curtis and I were semi-suave men about town in fifth grade, and
witty and likable enough to find ourselves befriended by a couple of high
school guys named Mike Grenard and Homer Fawcett. Mike and Homer were our
source for a variety of life lessons and explanations of sexual terms, although
they refused to answer one question in particular. It was the day after all the
fifth-grade girls had mysteriously been taken into one room, leaving us guys to
wonder just what the heck was going on. The girls returned with permission
slips they refused to show anybody, until John and I persuaded Melanie Rice to
let us read hers. We read it and learned that the girls were going to see a
film of some sort about a word we’d never heard. So the next morning we asked
our mentors: “What’s menustration?” (Yes, that’s how we pronounced it.) Mike
and Homer looked at each other and Mike finally said “Boys—you’re going to have
to ask your moms about that one.”
⦿ This one is just weird. I was riding
home one day in high school when some goofy junior high kid started calling
people a “mothersucker.” And then, when they took offense, he would say “No,
no, mothersucker. Like we all did when we were babies.” I don’t know why
he thought that would placate anyone, but I do know he thought it was pretty
clever.
By far the worst experience I ever had on the school bus
happened when I was a freshman. I was riding home, minding my own business,
when I felt a sharp pain in my ear. Not a Paul Anka “Having My Baby” kind of
pain but a someone-behind-you-has-decided-to-flip-an-imaginary-bug-off-your-ear
pain. Who would do this? I looked around to see who was playfully engaging me
and saw a sophomore named Jim, with whom had I never had a single interaction
in my life. Why was this the first such interaction? I had no idea, but I shot
him a grin—ha ha, you got me—and turned back around. Seconds later, another flip
on the ear, harder this time.
Now, I was a fairly scrawny 14-year-old. No brawn
whatsoever. Wrists I could encircle with thumb and pinky. I had never hit
anyone and assumed I never would. But the second ear flip made it clear that Jim
wasn’t just goofing off. He was trying to hurt me. So I swung my left arm
behind me without really thinking where it was going to land but assuming it
would be interpreted as a move made by someone who wasn’t to be messed with.
That ship, of course, had sailed. I was on the mess-with
list. Jim caught me by the elbow, squeezed, let go, and said “Turn around,
pussy.” I did. And for the next year and a half I lived in fear of Jim—on the
bus, in school, everywhere. I planned my route to each class based on which
hallways I knew he could be found in. I tried to make sure there were two seats
between us when I got on the bus in the afternoon, but that only worked until
he got in trouble on the bus and Stan Austin made him sit in the front seat. At
that point there was no avoiding him—I had to walk past him when the bus came
to my house every single day. Sometimes Jim surreptitiously hit me, sometimes
he didn’t. The uncertainty made the fear worse.
On top of that, I still didn’t understand why it was happening,
unless it had something to do with me being a teacher’s kid or Jim just being a
complete bastard. The psychology of bullies is probably pretty fascinating from
an academic standpoint, but personally I neither know nor care what was missing
from Jim’s life. I just know I wish he’d ridden a different bus home.
Epilogue
I detasseled corn with Jim’s brother Jeff in the summer of
1976 and found him as likable as Jim was hateful. Jim himself grew up to become
The Ultimate Warrior, and died of a heart attack in 2014.
