On the third floor, a stuffy heat from the vents and a swirling breeze from the windows had replaced the summer air. A large notice on the wall detailed an upcoming restoration: sections of the library would be closed one by one, refurbished, then reopened in the same sequential order. A small footnote at the bottom indicated the Rose Reading Room would be the first to undergo the process. The tables and chairs would be taken out and plastic sheeting laid down; the books also would be removed to another room so structural work could be completed.
The Korean lady and the wordlist man were gone, substituted by a new triad: the NYU student cramming for his finals, the panhandler by the heater, and the bored library clerk staring out from his booth. Pym looked for Lawrence’s books, but after he found them missing he asked the clerk if he could locate them. In Hope We Find This Nation, the clerk said, had been put into storage due to its “low circulation rate” and wouldn’t be available until after the restoration.
School Bus
By David Williamson
The Grungies ran a racket in the back of Chesterfield County School Bus 83. Everyone at school called them the Grungies because they wore combat boots and flannel shirts. I called them that because to me they smelled like zit cream and pus and puberty. There were three of them. Mark Sales and Jimmy Bancroft and Rick Mertzer.
The back three rows were reserved for those who paid. Five bucks got you a seat for a week and the privilege to pass around whatever nudie magazine Jimmy Bancroft had swiped from his older brother. Jimmy had a greasy face and long hair. He shaved the sides of his head so when he pulled it back in a ponytail he was bald up to his temples.
The downside to seeing the nudie magazine was having to sit close to the Grungies, which meant putting up with their smells, their sense of humor, their snot and spit, and the scabs they picked and flicked around the back of the bus. Every day they added to a collection of dried boogers smeared on the back window, like the hive of some mutant insect.
I became involved in all this because the back seats were in high demand and short supply. That week, there were two more kids who had paid for the peep show than there were empty seats. So the Grungies expanded their territory by adding the fourth row from the back for overflow patrons. And since I always sat in the fourth seat from the back, driver’s side, window, I was now in the precarious position of occupying commercial space.
“Five bucks,” Rick Mertzer said through his small mouth, all his teeth crammed to the front. “Five bucks and you can keep your seat.” He sounded as though he talked through a mouthful of marbles.
“I don’t even want to look at your stupid magazines,” I said.
Rick Mertzer leaned over me. His arms rested on the backs of either seat. His Alice In Chains t-shirt, cut off at the shoulders, did little to absorb his thick musk. A speck of lint clung to the hair curling from his left armpit. I turned to the window and breathed through my mouth.
“That’s because you’re a faggot,” Rick said. “And I wouldn’t let you look at the girls anyway because you’d gag and barf up faggot puke all over the place and we’d all get AIDS and die.”
The girls, I thought. As if he ran something.
“Why should I pay?” I asked. I didn’t mind moving to another seat. In fact, that would’ve made my ride to school more pleasant, less odorous. But I had managed to sit in the same seat all year without any harassment from the Grungies and I wasn’t going to write any of them a pass to do so now. It was a matter of pride. In the seventh grade, sitting where I wanted was no small matter.
“Business is expanding.” Mark Sales’s head popped up behind me. He picked at a crop of pimples on his check. The zits on Mark’s face always oozed and bled because he couldn’t stop picking at them. Sometimes he’d lick his finger and use it to stanch the blood. There were always tiny red smears on the cuffs of his shirt or the back of his hand. “You got to pay now.”
“This is my seat,” I said.
“Do you want to die?” Rick asked.
“No.”
“Then bring five bucks tomorrow.”
Mark shoved my head into the back of the seat in front of me. Bursts of anger, pain, and self-pity shot through my sinuses. I wanted to cry, but not because it hurt, though it did. In the moment my head hit the seat, I thought about my parents who loved me in their own weird way, about my dad who gave me five dollars a week and the Super Nintendo they’d bought me for my birthday. All those weird things that made me want to run home and hug my mom and tell her I loved her and somehow express I wasn’t ready to deal with cruelty and that I never wanted to experience the rest of the world.
Even if I thought to tell the bus driver, I wouldn’t have. Mr. Harris was retired—army, postal service, something—and more or less ignored us with our paper fights and our yelling and our clumsy use of profanity. If he knew about the Grungies’ little industry, he never let on. In the seventh grade, the intimidation of my peers had more power than any kind of administrative clout—bus driver or principal or otherwise. If I squealed on them on them to Mr. Harris, the Grungies would have probably tracked me down and done unspeakable things to me.
We all lived near each other, and I knew streets weren’t always safe. The year before, a kid from the high school shot another kid. I heard there were drugs involved, but I don’t really know for sure. It happened a few blocks from my house. I heard another thing about a girl who got raped in the woods where I used to hike and build forts. You didn’t have to live in the inner city to know that people got bored and did horrible things.
When the bus stopped at my corner, I felt the relief of a Grungie-free afternoon. I counted the hours left before I had to see them again. Sixteen. I hated how a few minutes on the bus could stand so tall against my entire day.
The doors screeched closed and the bus rumbled off, a gray and vaporous tail spinning from the exhaust pipe. I could feel that cruel world drift farther and farther off, as a dream that loses its vividness when you wake up. I walked home. The houses and the familiarity of my street pushed out the fear and trembling I had felt in the presence of the burly half-developed bodies of my bus mates.
Isaiah Wentz was in my gravel driveway when I got home. A deflated soccer ball bounced off his knees. Isaiah was being home schooled. He woke up at 9:00 and got all his work done by lunchtime. He always waited for me, and in the remaining hours before I got home, he painted Civil War miniatures. I slipped the book bag off my shoulders.
“Do any drugs today?” he asked. The ball got away from him and he kicked out his leg, made contact and the ball soared to the left.
“Tons,” I said.
Isaiah always made cracks about public school as if the building itself was a warehouse of kids who engaged in controlled drug use and overt sexuality between classes where teachers taught atheism and watered-down history. I don’t know if he actually believed this or if he just parroted the misinformation his parents fed him in a kind of mediating irony. His parents always talked about the New Age movement. They were convinced that even the way the public schools taught math was New Age.
Isaiah’s parents didn’t let him do a lot of things. They didn’t let him watch movies rated PG-13 or listen to anything but Christian rock music. They didn’t let him go in my house when my parents weren’t home and they didn’t let him watch MTV, period.
The kids on our street used to all play together in elementary school. We would organize massive games of hide-and-go-seek with kids from neighboring streets. Because Isaiah’s front porch was a huge wraparound, it was base, and our boundaries reached out to a half-mile radius.
But as each of us graduated to junior high, we played together less and less. Soon, everyone kept indoors except for Isaiah. I suppose the transformation for him was less pronounced. He moved from fifth grade to sixth grade without ever leaving his house. As the rest of us fumbled with locker combinations, changed classes, and grappled with the growing disparity of the two sexes, Isaiah continued to ride his bike and pai
nt Civil War miniatures.
“You want to kick this around?” Isaiah kicked the ball high up and ran under it to catch it.
“No,” I said.
“You want to ride bikes?”
“Nope.”
“You want to get high?”
“As a kite.” I sat down. “You ever see a Playboy?”
He stood on the ball. The air hissed through a hole. He stumbled off and the ball sat on the gravel, a rotten dinosaur egg with the top caved in.
“Yeah,” he said. “Once.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“No you haven’t.”
“Seriously,” he said. “During the fall youth retreat.”
Isaiah went on these trips with his church. They’d go to the beach in the springtime, and to a campground in the fall. I never went to church with him, but god, did he ask me to. I thought it would be cult-like and weird. My parents were hippies when they were young. That’s how I imagined Jesus. Just without the drugs.
“And you looked at it?”
“I saw it.” Isaiah said. “I mean, I didn’t read it or anything. I’m not a pervert.”
“Why not? Are you gay?”
“No. I’m just not a perv.”
“How does looking at a Playboy make you a perv?”
Isaiah bugged out his eyes and made a low droning noise in his throat.
“So someone brought a Playboy to your youth group?” I went over this as if I was understanding irony for the first time.
“Youth retreat. It’s like a really cool camp—”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve told me.”
The ball now was completely caved in on one side. Only a hemisphere left intact. Isaiah capped it onto his head.
“James Bancroft brought it. He goes to your school, right?”
“Jimmy Bancroft?” I jumped a little, as though Isaiah had dropped ice down my shirt. “He goes to church?”
“Yeah. James.”
A sudden thrill welled up. I thought of grungy Jimmy Bancroft sitting in a pew and wearing a sweater vest, his hair combed over and kept in place with its own grease.
“He got caught though,” Isaiah said, and then made a face. “You know... touching himself.”
I rolled onto my back, clutched my belly and laughed. I was hysterical.
“It’s not funny,” Isaiah said. “It’s gross.”
I sat up and wiped my eyes. “Are you kidding? That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I only heard about it. I don’t want to gossip.” Isaiah balanced on the deflated soccer ball again, hands out to the side. I picked up a pile of gravel and lobbed one at Isaiah’s head. He lost his balance and fell off.
“Stop,” he said.
If only I had been there when it happened. I cursed myself for not going on the stupid retreat when Isaiah had asked. I wanted it on film, to watch over and over the moment Jimmy got caught looking at porn at church. I lobbed another rock at Isaiah.
“Cut it out.”
“I’ll keep throwing them until you tell me.” I threw another.
“I don’t know. All I know is he got caught. Someone told on him and Pastor Evans had a talk with him. He didn’t do anything else with us the whole weekend. Just sat there.”
“What was the talk?”
“I don’t know,” Isaiah said. “I’ve never done it.”
“You’ve never done it? Or you’ve never been caught?”
“That’s disgusting. You’re a pervert.”
“And you’re a douchebag.”
“What is that?”
“It’s you.” I threw another rock.
We spent the rest of the afternoon at Isaiah’s house playing video games. I kept asking him about the incident with Jimmy Bancroft. Isaiah swore that he didn’t know anything else, but I found out that no one talked to Jimmy at church. That he always sat on a chair and looked bored. Like he was better than everyone else, Isaiah said.
I didn’t know what I was going to do about the Grungies the next day on the bus, but that night I counted my money. I had 20 dollars saved up for a new Super Nintendo game. If I paid the Grungies off, I’d never save enough. My dad was helping me out every week, and every week when he gave me five dollars he’d ask, “How much more you need now?” I’d tell him and he’d say that saving up was important. If I paid the five bucks, my dad would know. Then I’d get grilled about what I spent it on and I’d have to tell him that I had to pay off the school bullies to leave me alone.
I folded the dollar bills and slid them back into the envelope, dog-eared, creased, and frayed from overuse, and tucked it under my socks in the dresser and shut the drawer.
At first, the only thing I had at stake was social standing. But now there was something more at stake: not only my seat and my pride, but according to the Grungies, my life as well. At fourteen, masturbation ranked somewhere on the humiliation scale between having a visible boner and having everyone call you a faggot in the locker room. No one owned up to it, even though we were all doing it. At least that’s what I assumed. I thought exposing Jimmy Bancroft’s sexual blunder could get the rest of them off my back.
I imagined outing Jimmy Bancroft right in front of the other Grungies. I’d call him James. James. When he asked for his money I’d say, “Sorry, James, I don’t have it today.” And then I’d shout for the whole bus to hear, “James, how was youth group last night? Oh wait, I forgot, no one likes you. Not even at church because they caught you whacking it one holy night during a camping trip!” Then the attention would be off me, and Rick Mertzer and Mark Sales would cover their mouths and turn to Jimmy and point in his face and laugh their heads off, never mind if they thought it was true or not, and between doubled over belly laughs, the kinds that burn fat and give you cramps, they’d take a breath to call him a faggot. They’d turn to me and say, “You’re all right, kid,” or something corny like that, something only the Grungies could get away with saying. Maybe Jimmy wouldn’t be able to take it anymore and have to move to another bus because of the humiliation. The pain and suffering. Which would be fine for me. One less Grungie on the bus. Mark and Ricky would mostly leave me alone, but would also give me high fives in the hall at school now and then, and people would see this and ask, “Is Steven a Grungie?” and someone more astute would say, “Nah, he’s just cool with them.” Over the years, I had a lot of fantasies. None of them ever played out as I imagined.
The next day my confidence waned. The only money I had brought was the dollar fifty my mom gave me for lunch, and I intended to eat that day. I got on the bus, slid my hand in my pocket and muted the loose change that jingled there. I walked down the aisle and eyed the empty rows near the front. In the back, the Grungies slumped in their seats. Mark Sales snored with his head cocked back. Rick Mertzer wore headphones. Jimmy Bancroft just stared out the window. Maybe it had all blown over. I passed the empty spots and sat in my regular seat: fourth from the back, driver’s side, window.
After the bus got rolling it took all of twenty seconds for Rick Mertzer to slide into the seat opposite mine.
“Five bucks,” he said.
“What?”
“That seat costs five dollars.”
Jimmy and Mark made their way to the seat behind me. I was a one-man show.
“What are you even talking about?” I asked.
Mark flicked the back of my head with his knuckle.
“Cut it out,” I said.
“Five dollars,” Rick said.
“No.”
“Are you retarded?”
“Are you retarded?” I asked.
Marked flicked me again. The surge of self-pity and anger and all that I felt when my face crashed into the seat in front of me the day before all came back. But I had leverage now. So when he did it again, I yelled. “Cut it out, dickhead.”
“Hey.”
I was surprised to hear Mr. Harris’s si
xty-something-year-old gargle issue from the front of the bus. I looked up and saw his eyes in that wide catchall rear-view mirror. No matter how old and decrepit, it seemed that all bus drivers had that weird omnipotence.
I turned my head back to the window.
“Steven,” Rick said to me. “Stevie. Hey. Faggot. Do you hear me?”
We were almost out of the neighborhood, I figured if I could put up with it for five more minutes, we’d be in the bus loop of the school and I could get lost in the crowd. Putting up with that kind of abuse had to be pared out in small portions.
But Rick kept talking. His voice, low and controlled. “Hey, faggot. You are dead. I will kill you.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Five dollars. Now, Stevo.”
“Shut up.”
“Five dollars. Ten dollars. Steven. Hey, fuck-up.”
Five more minutes was too long. If I was going to do it, I was going to do it. I stopped thinking and blurted out, “James got caught whacking it at church youth group.”
Jimmy’s head popped up behind me.
“What did you say?” he asked.
I looked at him. “James Bancroft.”
Jimmy reached over and nudged my head. “What did you say?”
I tried to dodge his hand, but my head kept hitting the window.
“What did you say? Say it again.”
He pushed harder. My head cracked against the window. I leapt up and grabbed his oily face and squeezed. I lost my grip. It was all over then. Jimmy’s fists went to my head, knocking it hard against the window. He grabbed my collar and threw me out of the seat.
I flashed back to the day before, when I wasn’t face down against the bus’s grimy floor but upright, sure of myself and the place I had secured with the leverage of Jimmy’s folly, now my folly.