by Paul Feig
Mrs. Black was our most recurring victim. Every year she would emerge and drive us around for a few months. Then, someone would usually throw gum in her hair or hook the tail of her shirt to the bottom of her driver’s seat, so that when she stood up to yell at us she’d rip her blouse, and after that she’d be gone again for the rest of the year. We figured she would either go crying to her husband, who would forbid her from returning to work until the district put some sort of “prison guards on those buses to keep those damn animals in line,” or else just check back into the psychiatric ward for her yearly batch of reconstructive mental therapy. However she refreshed herself, her faith in the youth of today must have been strong, because come the first day of the next school year, there she’d be behind the wheel with a new plastic seat cushion under her ample bottom and a freshly lipsticked smile on her face. But her eyes were her weakness, always showing the riders she was about one illegally smoked rear-of-the-bus cigarette away from snapping back into unemployment. And for the freak girls on my bus route, there was a great pleasure in knowing that the beginning of the school year meant a new chance to break an old record for driving Mrs. Black back to her husband.
One year, they tried to put her out of commission on her very first morning back. It was when the first “boom box” portable radios had been introduced on the market. The burnout girls got on the bus carrying one. Mrs. Black gave them a “let’s put our old problems behind us and start anew” smile and greeted them warmly.
“Good morning. I hope you girls had a pleasant summer,” she said in a singsongy voice that already had tremors of strain in it.
“We did until we saw your face,” countered Sue Clark in a tone that made me glad the insult wasn’t hurled my way.
But Mrs. Black just gave them an “oh, those kids” chuckle and put the bus into gear. My friend George and I exchanged an impressed look. Maybe Mrs. Black was going to be all right this year. She seemed to have shaken that one off pretty well. But, in retrospect, I guess anyone can absorb an initial blow gracefully.
Once we were on the main road, the familiar smell of cigarette smoke began to waft up to the front. I immediately saw Mrs. Black’s eyes pop up into the long mirror over her visor that helped her overlook her rolling domain.
“Girls, you know this from last year. No smoking on the bus. Now, put out the cigarettes, please.”
Nothing but evil laughter from the back. A more frightening and unsettling sound does not exist. Because when teenage girls laugh like that, you can bet they’re not laughing with you. They’re laughing at you. Their laughter went on a little too long and a crack started to show in Mrs. Black’s armor.
“C’mon, ladies, I said put those cigarettes out.”
The only response from the back of the bus was the sound of their portable radio turning on. “Black Betty,” a very popular song among freak girls back then, performed by a band called Ram Jam, blasted out of the radio and up to the front of the bus. “Whoa-oh, black Betty, bam a lam! Whoa-oh, black Betty, bam a lam . . .”
“Turn that radio off!” shouted Mrs. Black, thrown by this new weapon in the girls’ arsenal.
The girls all started clapping and dancing in their seats and singing along. These girls were out for blood. I think there was money riding on the prospect of getting rid of Mrs. Black on the first day of school. Girls who were not helping the cause were quickly enlisted.
“C’mon, Bev, get into it,” urged Sue’s extremely loud friend Rhonda to another freak girl across the aisle.
“Whoa-oh, black Betty, bam a lam! She really makes me high, bam a lam . . .”
“I told you girls to turn that radio OFF!”
“What?” yelled Sue, hand to her ear.
“I said to TURN THAT RADIO OFF!!!”
“What? I can’t hear you. The radio’s too loud.”
I have to admit, that one made me laugh a bit. But not Mrs. Black. Her resistance was quickly disappearing, months of mental preparations crumbling like stale cookies. The next thing we knew, she sharply pulled the bus off the road and slammed on the brakes. We all flew forward, almost knocking our teeth out on the seat backs in front of us.
“God, kill us, why don’t ya?!” Rhonda yelled indignantly.
“I want you girls to turn that radio off and put out those cigarettes right now,” Mrs. Black said in a controlled tone, never turning around or getting up from her driver’s seat. I saw her eyes make contact with Sue’s eyes via the mirror over the front windshield. This would be a mental crossroads for Mrs. Black, I realized. She had never taken this sort of authoritarian chance so quickly before. Compliance would make her a rock. Rebellion would send her back to Mr. Black. We all held our breath and waited. “Girls? Did you hear me?”
Sue Clark was silent as she locked eyes with Mrs. Black in the mirror. Sue’s stare was hard to read. Had Mrs. Black actually caught her off guard and infiltrated this year’s rebellion before it could become effective? The silence in the bus was thick with anticipation.
Sue finally took a long drag of her cigarette, fixed a soul-piercing stare at Mrs. Black, and uttered the following words: “Why don’t you just drive the bus, you old cunt.”
CRACK! You could actually hear Mrs. Black’s mind snap. Her eyes sunk into her head, her shoulders trembled, and the next thing we knew, she literally flew out of the driver’s seat. I’ve never seen anyone over fifty pull a move like that before or since. Within seconds she was down the aisle and in the back of the bus. All the freak girls started laughing and screaming as Mrs. Black went nuts. She started pulling cigarettes out of girls’ mouths and trying to grab the radio. The girls kept screaming and tossing the radio back and forth, subjecting a frothing Mrs. Black to a desperate game of Monkey in the Middle. Mrs. Black was screaming, too, but no one could make out what she was saying. It was some unholy mix of religious references and imagery with a hearty dose of what I can only interpret, looking back on it now, as speaking in tongues. We kept hearing the word Jesus but couldn’t put it in context.
After what seemed like minutes of sheer pandemonium, suddenly Mrs. Black had the radio. The advantage had shifted and it was quickly reflected in the screams of the freak girls. Laughter had been replaced with indignation as the radio continued to blast.
“Hey, that’s my radio, fat ass!”
“Whoa-oh, black Betty, bam a lam!”
“That’s personal property, you whore!”
“Black Betty had a child, bam a lam!”
“Give it back, you fuckin’ witch—”
SMASH! Mrs. Black, in a feat of unbounded strength, had cocked her arm back like a major-league sidearm pitcher and smashed the radio into a metal partition between the windows, shattering the boom box into an explosion of debris. Plastic shards flew everywhere as we all ducked. The freak girls screamed in terror. Ram Jam and “Black Betty” evaporated as Mrs. Black hurled the broken remains of the radio out the window.
Silence.
Mrs. Black stood breathing heavily. Occasional cars zoomed by us on the main road, shaking the bus slightly.
More silence. Only the sound of Mrs. Black’s breathing could be heard. After what seemed like a few years, she took a deep breath and looked at Sue Clark.
“When I say turn down that radio, I expect you to turn it down.”
Her voice was perfectly calm. We were truly terrified. She turned and started to walk slowly to the front of the bus. Zoom. Another car passed. The bus shook again.
Silence. No one dared say a word.
Mrs. Black’s plastic seat cushion sighed as she lowered herself back onto it. Zoom. Another car passed. Again the bus shook. She ground the transmission into first gear. Normally, that would have brought on a chorus of “Grind me up a pound” and “If you can’t find it, grind it,” but now no one even breathed. Mrs. Black revved the engine, eased the bus into gear, and we pulled silently back onto the main road. In a low whisper from the back of the bus, I heard Sue say, “She’s gonna have to buy me a new radio.�
� She was immediately shushed by the formerly loud Rhonda. It was the first time I had ever seen any of these girls look scared.
When we arrived at school, Mrs. Black opened the door and we all filed silently off the bus. When Sue started through the door, Mrs. Black said in a frighteningly sweet tone, “Have a good first day of school.”
When the bus came back at the end of the day to take us home, Mrs. Black was not behind the wheel.
And we didn’t see her again until the first day of school, one year later.
While Mrs. Black was our most famous victim, she was not the most intriguing. In junior high there was one driver with whom I had real interaction. More than that, I was partly responsible for her demise.
Her name was Sally. Sally was strange to us because she wasn’t an old lady. She was fairly young, probably in her late twenties. Back then it was always hard to tell how old an adult was simply because everyone was older than we were, and, for us, people tended to fall into two categories—kids and adults. Sally was an adult, but she wasn’t a member of the beehive-hairdo set. Sally looked more like a young Billie Jean King, and I have to admit that, for a few moments when I first met her, I had a bit of a crush on her. The crush, however, proved to be very short-lived.
Sally was a strange person. None of us could figure her out. I think the first day we had Sally, the burnout girls thought they were going to like her because she was young and had a former-freak-girl quality about her, which I’m sure scared them. A cool bus driver who understood them meant no bus driver to torment on the way to school. And that scared me. Because if those girls couldn’t torment the bus driver, they’d torment other riders they didn’t like. And for some reason, they didn’t like me. I don’t know why they didn’t like me, but they didn’t. I think it was because they could pick on me, since I was harmless both in looks and in nature. And pick on me they did. I could never wear a knit cap to school because they’d always steal it. I’d be sitting in my seat in the morning and one of them would always pull my hat off my head as she passed by. This would make my thin hair stick straight up, because the combination of cold weather, knit caps, and getting-your-hat-pulled-off-your-head friction always turned my hair into an electromagnetic nightmare. Then, playing keep-away, they’d throw my hat all over the bus, and it’d usually end up flying out the window where it would spend the rest of its life being run over by cars and frozen into the slushy road, waiting to be found months later, black and crusty, in the spring thaw. So, for the sake of my hats and my sanity, I really hoped some tension would build between the girls and Sally.
My prayers were answered. A couple of days into Sally’s tour of duty, she yelled at the girls in the back of the bus to “put out those stinkin’ cigarettes.” Someone threw a snowball that had been smuggled onto the bus and it smacked Sally in the back of the head and the feud was on.
I never could figure Sally out. One day, she’d give you the biggest, friendliest smile as you got on the bus because she knew that you weren’t one of the troublemakers. Then the very next day she’d stare at you with death in her eyes as if you were one of her worst enemies. You never knew day to day how you were going to be greeted, and it became very unsettling to me. On the days Sally decided she liked me, she’d tell me to sit in the front row so that we could talk. Our conversations usually ended after she’d ask me, “What kind of crap do they make you guys study these days, anyway?” and I’d launch into a description of my classes that lost her interest in about five seconds. She’d always respond with a distant “huh” and that would be that. But at least she was on my side.
That is, until one day, when Sally smashed my lunch.
I was sitting in the front row of the bus, right behind the door. Between the front seat and the steps that led off the bus, there was a three-foot-high metal partition that I always assumed was there to stop you from tripping kids who were getting on and off the bus. Also, the doors folded up and swung into the partition whenever they were opened, so I guess it was supposed to protect any front-row riders from getting their knees and feet whacked at each bus stop.
Well, that morning, the girls were giving Sally a pretty hard time. She had to pull the bus over twice and scream at the top of her lungs, and this was making her grow quite agitated. She started complaining to me.
“What the hell, you know? I mean, what the hell?” she kept saying over and over.
Always willing to lend a sympathetic ear, I sat forward and leaned on the partition to listen to her. Chin on my arms, I hung my lunch sack over the little metal wall.
“My dad would have kicked my ass if I had acted like that,” she said, shaking her head. “He kicked my ass for a lot of things that weren’t half that bad.”
Sally’s words soon turned into mumbling. I tried to understand what she was saying but couldn’t really hear her, between the noise of the bus engine and the yelling of the girls in the back. I kept nodding, however, worried that if I didn’t seem like I was listening, she might go off the deep end. Well, as soon as we pulled into the school parking lot, Sally glanced at me as I was leaning forward, then quickly reached over, grabbed the lever that opened the door and angrily yanked the doors open before the bus had even stopped. Before I could react, the doors flew toward me and smashed my lunch flat between them and the partition. I pulled my face back just in time to avoid getting my nose broken. I looked over at her and she was staring straight out the front windshield, tapping the wheel with the smallest hint of a smile on her face and acting like she had no idea she had both destroyed the lunch that my mom had packed for me and almost altered my face. Too stunned to say anything to her, I extracted my pancake-thin lunch and got off the bus. That day in the cafeteria, I sadly ate my flattened ham sandwich and exploded Twinkie and tried to figure out why Sally had chosen me to be her scapegoat that morning.
However, I soon found out that my new role as her whipping boy, upon whom she could alleviate all the frustrations of her job, was officially my new full-time career. During the next week, she’d knock her elbow into the back of my head while returning from a cigarette-gathering mission in the back of the bus, make me miss the bus several times by pulling away when I was about ten feet from the door, and on numerous occasions lurch the bus forward when I was walking down the aisle looking for a seat, making me fall flat on my face. I had become Sally’s punching bag and had no idea what I had done to deserve it. And I had no idea what to do.
It all came to a head one day as we drove home from school. The bus was unusually calm. That day in the general assembly, they showed us a VD film and I think we were all deeply disturbed by it. The pictures of large open sores and lesions had stunned even the freak girls, who could occasionally be heard muttering, “God, that was so gross.” And the result of all this was that no one was hassling Sally. And I don’t think she knew what to make of it. She seemed really nervous, as if she thought we might be formulating a plan to pounce on her or for some time bomb we planted under her seat to go off. I guess, like a professional soldier, she had just gotten so used to fighting with us that her mind didn’t know what to think in times of tranquillity. I watched as Sally became a twitching, fidgeting mess. Her eyes kept darting up to the mirror to look at us, then her head would snap around, as if she thought she was going to catch us doing something below the mirror’s view. But there was no such intrigue afoot. Visions of giant syphilitic sores were still too fresh in our minds for any of us to do anything more than think about what a life of celibacy would be like.
As we started arriving at the bus stops, Sally seemed to grow more and more impatient for everyone to get off. She started telling departing students to “hurry up” as they headed down the aisle for the exit. She’d pull up to a bus stop, slam on the brakes, and say “c’mon, c’mon” as people got off. This made the girls in the back start to wake up.
“God, have a cow, why don’t you?!”
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Sally started to look more p
anicky. God only knew what kind of scenario she was unraveling in her head. Next stop. Screech! “C’mon, c’mon, hurry up!” She was making all of us nervous wrecks. I couldn’t wait to get off that bus but was now filled with a feeling of dread that I, Sally’s scapegoat, was not going to get off unscathed.
Finally, we arrived at my stop. Everyone from my street got up and filed out. As my friend George, who was walking in front of me, stepped onto the doorway steps, he dropped his notebook. Papers fell all over the street. He stepped off the bus and bent down in front of the door to pick everything up, blocking my exit.
Well, that was apparently more than Sally could take because all of a sudden, I felt her hand grab my back and push me hard. I flew over the top of George and landed headfirst on the pavement. I saw a flash of white, then a few seconds of black, as if I’d just received an uppercut from the world heavyweight champion. As my eyes came back into focus, I saw the last kid jump off the bus as Sally yelled “Jesus Christ, get OUT!” The bus screeched away from the corner as we stared after it, some of George’s notebook papers getting sucked into the air by the bus’s sudden departure. As the papers fluttered to the street, I touched my forehead and felt a small rock that had embedded itself into my skin.
When I got home, I told my mom what had happened and she proceeded to call the school and report Sally. The next day, Sally was gone. We found out a week later that Sally had been stoned the entire last week she was driving our bus and had lost her driver’s license because of it. That was a major notch for the freak girls. Because not only had they gotten rid of another bus driver, they had completely wrecked her life, too.
And then, finally, there was Steve. Steve was a hippie. I always imagined that when he went in for the job interview, he told the bus company, “Hey, man, being that I’m a young guy and into rock and roll and have long hair and stuff, the kids’ll really be able to relate to me.” After hearing the stories about our dreaded bus, he probably figured that he would be the guy who was going to perform a miracle and crack the unruly crowd on the Wendell route and possibly have a TV movie made about the experience.