Autumn Itch: Travels by Coach and Predictions of Pyre
For the length of time it takes you to get through this, you are a woman. You are a young woman and if you can’t shake some sort of unshakable manliness and just experience something different for the next few minutes, stop reading now or you’ll be displeased with the litany of emasculations to follow.
So, here we go…
You are a young woman. You have dark red hair and you are riding on a Greyhound bus, a coach, and you are looking out the window. We see you from outside the window, and this song is playing:
Fake Yer Death [Plays in new window]
You’re looking, now, out this window, past the camera, as the coach barrels down the highway at about sixty-eight. It’s autumn; the trees have turned and the sky is a cold gray. Your forlorn expression would suggest that something grave has befallen you within the past, say, forty-eight hours, but that’s slightly inaccurate and is nothing compared to what we’ll see over the next sixty minutes.
A few notes on your immediate environment, where we sit with you now. Directly in front of you against the left-hand window of the coach sits a high-functioning male retarded person, late teens and in a du-rag, who in a moment will ask you if you write poetry. Across the aisle from you are a middle-aged Puerto Rican playboy and the meaty prize he befriended on his layover last station. They’re taking it slowly—no touching yet, just close talking, her voluptuous carriage cocked severely under a ribboned cowboy hat, her assets cascading toward his nonchalant slump. Halfway up the right side of the aisle a large, sweaty man in a red windbreaker fights to maintain his balance and sanity as he watches his two large, sweaty boy-and-girl twin children showcase a pitiable but equally annoying anxiety as they negotiate arrangements that will seat them together, a task that, despite the promise it holds for everyone’s enjoyment, is too difficult to imagine because everyone aboard this coach is large. Everyone, that is, except for you, which makes it so much easier to travel undetected.
There. The kid ahead of you…poetry…you know. Yes, you occasionally write poetry, but more often stories. He hates poetry, he says, and would like to write stories but he’s too stupid to come up with one. No, you say, and point out that life itself is a story and you’re sure he comes up with stories every day in his head. You suggest that perhaps the video game he’s been playing for several hours could inspire a story. True, he says, he never thought of that.
The bus pulls off into a rest area, and you consider for a moment going to the bathroom to sit on the toilet and weep over what’s just transpired between you and your young coachmate. He breaks out into a beatbox and the feeling passes, a relief because germs from a public toilet seat have an unshakable weight. After a second or two you think that you should probably try and pee (your words, not mine) as a precautionary measure. We know all this not because we can see inside your head, but because we see it in your alternating glances between the front of the coach and out the opposite window toward the building, just before you stand and step out of frame.
Once you’ve peed, you decide you want to smoke a cigarette, which you get from the Operator of the Coach. You don’t really smoke, but you like to and it feels right today. You and the large, cocksure driver with some sort of athletes-foot behind the lobe of his right ear make small talk beside the cargo hold as we watch you from your seat inside the vehicle. From here we don’t know what you’re saying, that you’re telling him you’re headed home after a year of working a kiosk in a Jersey City mall, selling skin care products made with salts from the Dead Sea, and that you really could have stayed another week or so into the Holiday Season and gone home quite a bit richer; but the expression on his face signals genuine satisfaction, and we can tell that he’s asking for your phone number and that you’re obliging—truthfully or not—and that a second later you’re returning to the coach as he slaps his phone shut and looks off into the distance with feigned modesty. All in a day’s work.
As you take your seat, the Operator of the Coach mounts the stairs and illustrates his command of a few general announcements which have become routine at this juncture on this route: It’s a daytime trip, so cell phones are okay as long as they’re set to vibrate and you keep your conversations short and quiet. Walkie-talkie style phones are under no circumstances permitted. Use a earplug [sic] if you brought a listening device. Lastly, with irritation and disgust, he scans the crowd and informs each and every person (except for you) that the one thing that he—as a passenger trying to rest on a bus or a train or what-have-you—hates above all else is people poppin’ gum. Do not pop gum under any circumstances. He winks at you just before he turns, sits, and releases the air brake with that unmistakable screech, shifts the anxious coach into gear, and you glide away toward the hills.
by Rt. Hon. Yr. Fancy, your Special Friday Treat
**Next Friday, the conclusion—Winter Pyre: Travels by Foot and Your Devious Death
