“Okay, get me the ticket.”
He already had it and pulled it out of his jacket pocket. “I’ll drop you off at the station. Your bus leaves at midnight.”
“Jesus!”
So. Now I was on a bus with sixty other people and slowly losing my sense of reality. It was like a party where everybody hung back against the wall, didn’t make a sound, and generally feared one another.
This was a four-day ride and my laptop had committed hara-kiri rather than face another minute of Zypho II: Zyphomania – The Return of the Critter from Beyond the Edge of Space. I got the feeling that Monty wanted a long title on the video box to cover up the picture of Zypho’s less than stellar f/x. Hopefully it would edge my name off the credits as well.
I had started out writing in longhand on yellow legal pads hoping to put the time to good use, but reading my own scratchy handwriting gave me motion sickness. By the twentieth hour on the road I was trying to keep myself amused by taunting folks in the next lane to sideswipe us into a guard rail.
It was about two in the morning and I still couldn’t get comfortable enough in my seat to sleep yet. I had no co-passenger beside me, but the extra space still wasn’t enough for me to completely lie down. I had visions of arriving in New York after four days of insomnia and passing out in the middle of Times Square, waking up with no money, no shoes, and only one kidney.
The moonlight lent a blue haze to the darkness, and the bus’ running lights were just enough to allow me to spot her one seat up on the opposite side of the aisle.
She appeared to be a part of the night, swirling, alive, as she turned to look back at me. It wasn’t until I fully concentrated, focusing all my attention on her, that I saw she was a Latina woman about my age, smiling in my direction but not exactly to me.
Everyone else was asleep. She gave me the slow once-over, the kind of prying gaze that was frosty and lifeless but held a promise of distant heat. I tried to give it back to her but she ignored me. I’d never been good at this sort of game.
She got up and silently slid into the seat beside me. I generally didn’t like these kinds of wordless situations. I enjoyed words, and I hardly ever shut up. When she pressed herself to me and rubbed the meaty palm of her hand against my crotch, I began to suspect I should just shut the fuck up.
It was usually a good call.
Sometimes you had to go with the undertow. You fought your need to rationalize and argue and worry about what the real meaning was behind every act. Especially if you were going insane from boredom.
Her ragged breath blew hot against my ear. I moaned and reached for her and felt that slick electrical itch tingling in my fingers.
“No,” she said, “don’t touch me.”
“Uhm . . . but . . .”
“I don’t like to be touched.” She began to purr again, leaning into me, pressing herself into my arms while I held them out to my sides, struggling not to embrace her.
She kneeled and I crouched lower, trying to hide behind the high backs of our seats. It wasn’t really working, I had nowhere to go. She tugged open my jeans and felt me through my briefs, sort of pawing, her nails lightly grazing me. I scanned the blue gloom trying to see if there might be anyone watching us, anybody else alive in the world, but the shadows became deep and edgeless as she worked me free and stroked my cock. The darkness grew heavier, inside and outside of me.
“Oh, look how cute he is . . . your pee-pee . . .” she whispered.
I checked. He didn’t look cute to me at all.
“I’m going to name him Pepe . . . no, Pepito . . .!”
“Pepito? Hey—”
Taking my cock roughly in her hand, she brought her mouth to me and swirled her tongue around the head, slowly working down, her hands on my thighs gently patting like she was trying to urge me to her rhythm.
In the dark, I saw the glint of her eyes looking up as she pushed me farther into her mouth, now shaking her head, no no no, and drawing me out, nodding yes yes, so that her top teeth grazed and tugged at my skin.
Sometimes you want to touch somebody so badly that a fire ignites in your nerve endings and burns away your civilized self. I wanted to snarl and leave bite marks.
I heard the passengers stirring, the muffled sound of cloth on cloth as someone in front of us turned over. My hackles rose. Continuing to pump me, she pulled me forward in the seat and pressed me back again, in control but not taking control, as she rubbed me over her face, swung my prick aside, and tongue lashed my nuts. I was so tired that I watched the scene from outside myself.
Just as I started humping against her cheek, she sucked the length of my cock down her throat. She took me in completely, clenched her lips, stared up at me, and smiled. We all had to find our pride wherever we could.
She slowly pulled herself off until only the head of my cock remained in her mouth. There was too much of a game going on here and not enough actual fun.
I reached for her hair and she growled, “Don’t do that. I don’t want you to do that.”
I made fists and crossed my arms. I leaned back as her head bobbed over Pepito. I was trying to roll with it, to let her take me away from my utter boredom, but somehow even this was only another part of it. I was frowning in the middle of a blow job. No one would ever believe me.
She licked her palm and pumped harder at the base of my cock before taking me back in. I humped her face and lunged at her mouth erratically, and she rested Pepito near her lips and sort of crooned at him. I groaned and pressed the side of my forehead against the cool metal frame of the window. With a bitter whine, I prodded her some more, feeling my orgasm rising.
“That’s it,” she said. “Come on.”
I jerked away and hit the frame again. There was more rustling of passengers. I bit back another moan as she sucked me wildly, her hair alive in my lap. I wanted to take handfuls of her hair and knot my grip in it and hold her in place while I cut loose. The darkness thrummed with the presence of others. I came and nearly howled in relief as she hungrily swallowed, gurgling softly, gulping as drops leaked over her parted lips.
I wondered if she considered my come on her face as me touching her. I did, or thought I did, as I wafted into sleep.
It passed without dreams. I’d only snoozed for three hours but when I awoke we’d made another stop and most of the passengers seemed to have changed again. I couldn’t be sure of anything much except that she was gone and I was being willfully ignored by everybody else.
It took me a minute to realize that Pepito was still pretty much out there and waving to folks. I’d dozed off before zipping myself back up. I didn’t know if anybody had seen or cared, but since I wasn’t already in handcuffs I figured nobody had spotted me or had minded if they did.
Actually, he was sort of cute, I noticed, as I slipped him back home. And he remained my one and true friend in a world of quandary, and was always along for the ride no matter how many miles we covered or where the bizarre journey took us.
II. Gnaw The Glass
I’d been on the bus for nearly three days and we’d pulled into more dustchoked towns and cities of smoke and steel than I’d imagined existed between the coasts. I was so tired, constipated, and restless most of the time that I just sat there in an opened-eye coma, fantasizing that I was trapped in hell. For my sins, St Peter had stuck me on a bus for all eternity. Whenever we stopped I gave a wide berth to the driver and tried hard not to call him “Pete”. I imagined him with the Book of Judgment in his hands.
If there was anyone from LA still on the bus with me, I didn’t know who it might be. Their faces shifted and altered from city to city. Their sighs and snores were the same, the tinny songs in their headsets and the covers of their paperbacks interchangeable. I considered setting my hair on fire just to see if anybody would notice. I was so bored that it was the only time in my life when I thought I might actually be able to stomach watching a mime. I might even join in. Walk against the wind. Pull the rope. Any damn thing.
>
I kept looking around, hoping to make eye contact with somebody, start up a conversation, but everyone was content in their seats, letting the miles flow over them, one after the other. I began feeling as if my skeleton was trying to make a beeline out of my body – every muscle commenced to ache, and my temples pounded with blood. I really didn’t want my obituary to read that I’d died of monotony aboard a New York-bound bus. Monty would use my death as a springboard to fame and sell my scripts for millions. He’d retire to Beverly Hills and I’d only be remembered for the softcore alien brain juice-sucking scene from Zypho II: Zyphomania.
The twilight slowly withered to black and the smell of pine erupted. I had absolutely no idea where I was. I wondered if Steinbeck, Agee, or Kerouac had ever felt such an overwhelming loathing for cars, towns, and people in denim. The only road I wanted to write about was West 4th Street in the Village. I had the sense that once I hit Manhattan I’d never leave again.
I didn’t think I was lucky enough to have another woman peel herself from a section of night and come give me head. I wasn’t horny but the only survival instinct I had left was the will to procreate. I felt very much the way I imagined a fruit fly might feel during it’s twenty-four hour life span. Do the deed and call it a day.
I scanned the sleeping passengers and spotted a blur of movement a few seats ahead.
All I could see of her in the dark was the nimbus of her blonde hair, softly glowing, and the indistinct smear of motion circling before her. I stared and studied her for five minutes before I picked up on the fact that she was masturbating in the shadows.
It got to me, but damn near anything would’ve.
I stood and glided up the aisle to stand over her.
You could get in trouble for doing a thing like this, but the tedium had given me an ounce of assertion. I lightly fondled her hair, then the side of her face, and stroked her neck for a moment. I held my hand out and when she took it, with her wet fingers, I draw her from her seat and ushered her back to my own.
Okay, so now we were getting someplace. At least she let me touch her.
She slid past me and actually said, “Excuse me” as she passed, loosening her skirt as she took the inside spot. She slipped out of her panties and leaned against the window, reached back and clutched at my shirt, pulling me to her.
I wanted to know her name but didn’t want to ask. Maybe St Pete had stuck me in an eternal rolling orgy without intimate conversation.
She kneeled on the seat, opened her legs slightly and wriggled her ass in the dim light. Moonlight swam down and banked across her face, showing me the silver-lit silhouette.
I ground against her thigh, pressing myself tightly to her. I leaned forward and she turned and whispered into my ear, “My ass.”
“Yeah?”
“Butt-fuck me.”
All right, so maybe that could be considered intimate conversation. Maybe not. Sweat bloomed across my forehead and that fetid three-day old stink of my body assailed me.
I eased my index finger into her ass and crouched so that I could lick her from behind. She was wet and streaming, and I used my tongue to scoop her own juices up to her anus.
You could get funky when you had to. I slipped my finger in and worked her ass, listening to her quietly sigh, breathing soft as the sleeping passengers, the silver leaking down her back, her legs, the lovely blunt curve of her buttock. I rose and angled myself behind her, placed the head of my cock against her anus and pushed.
The air surged out of her and she made no other sound. I slid into her tightness and looked past her out the window at all the strange miles that lay behind and still lay ahead. The bus hit a bump in the road and jostled us together even more firmly, painfully, binding, as we grunted in unison.
I prodded forward into her completely, then slowly pulled out, reveling in the sense that I was making, then breaking, then remaking the circuit between us. I became transparent and kind of floated out of my shoes. I thought that this is how schizophrenics must feel all the time, unanchored from the world, lost in their own misfiring neurons and too tired to care. She bucked roughly against me, spiking herself on my cock as she picked up the pace.
“That’s it,” she said. “Harder! Harder!”
“Jesus, be quiet. . . .!” I hissed.
I pressed her into the window even more roughly and she climaxed and let out a titter. It took a second to realize she wasn’t really getting off on what I was doing – it was the glass window.
She was kissing it, licking, even biting at it. Staring into it with love and wanting. She did not care much for me or Pepito at all.
It stopped me, watching her like that. I’d gotten the vapid look in the middle of sex before – the disappointed frown, the girl calling out somebody else’s name – but I’d never been thrown over for a pane of glass before.
This was the kind of thing that could shoot your self-worth to hell.
I tried to bull my way through, but I was hard pressed, slamming my cock into her from behind while the faint ghostly image of her reflection stared back at me. It was new to me, fucking a glass-licker. I suppose there’d been precedent, there always was precedent, but I’d never heard about it before.
She jammed herself backwards and I shoved into her. She moaned and ground her ass against me, thumping, even as she spread herself wider over the glass. It’s amazing what can happen to you, how your guts can be plucked and knotted, but there I was butt-fucking her and growing jealous of the goddamn window.
As I thrust she reached down and fingered herself, her juice dripping between her thighs and splashing me each time I dug in. I tried to help, but she kept tilting the wrong way, angling as if she might dive headlong out of the bus. I think she climaxed but I couldn’t be certain. We lived in a puzzling age. My nuts tightened and I felt no need to slow myself down and let the act linger. I’d lost her before we’d even begun, and the glass was covered with dried smears of her spit, the outline of her lips.
She murmured to the window and told it how much she loved it, shoved herself back onto me and held herself there, letting me hammer away until I came. I didn’t even need to bite down on her shoulder to stifle my grunts. I had no sound to make.
She told the window, “That was wonderful. Oh God, I needed that. You were terrific.”
I tried not to sigh. She dropped her skirt and passed me again saying, “Excuse me,” and returned to her seat. I was a mess and didn’t much care. I zipped up, sat back down, looked out on the American night and made an attempt to curb my paranoia. The glass looked on.
As soon as I caught my breath I’d head to the lavatory and get some wet tissues and wipe clean the signs of an affair I had only a minor part in. I wondered what the Book of Judgment would have penciled in about this particular incident. Pete would not be happy. My reflection stared at me until the face of the moon grew obscured with clouds and I was thankfully left in darkness.
But the glass kept looking down at me – arrogant, vain, and somehow sated.
III. Authority
We pulled into the Port Authority bus terminal on West 42nd Street in Manhattan, about nine a.m., and while I was scrounging up my belongings the driver came back and grabbed me by the collar.
“That’s unsanitary, what you been doin’ right there, buddy!”
I realized then that, of course, he’d known all along what had happened, or thought had happened. “Look, Pete, nothing like this has—”
“My name ain’t Pete!”
“I’m sorry, really, but—”
“Why don’t you and that damn Pepito of yours get the hell off my bus before I call the cops!”
“But Pete!”
“I told you, my name ain’t Pete!”
I took my satchel, my wavering self-esteem, and my damn Pepito and dragged myself into the terminal feeling like I had detached from humanity and might not ever get back into it.
I was so heavy with fatigue I could barely move as I lumbered among the crowd. I
threw myself down in a seat and listened to the roaring bus engines outside, the thrum of the people, and tried to breathe in all the open space. Normally I’d be tracking folks all over the place, my head buzzing with dialogue and camera directions. But now I could barely remember my own name. I got up and pulled my luggage along after me like an angry child, and headed to the men’s room.
It had been a hell of a trip so far, but that doomed feeling you get when serious grief is waiting around the corner hadn’t left me yet. I’d had it since I was about fifteen but that didn’t change matters much.
I used the urinal and spent ten minutes at the sink washing up, staring in the mirror, trying to remember what I was doing on this side of the country again. Hollywood had somehow faded off my back after five days. I felt stripped of most of the things that had kept me going day to day: ambition, desperation, fear. I was aching and exhausted but felt somehow cleansed. I was having a Zen moment of tranquility.
I saw her in the mirror and thought, okay, so this is the capper. I’d been waiting, and afterwards, I could get back on the right rail.
She came up out of the stall like the ghost of all my sins given form, and she swept behind me in one fluid motion as if she’d been meant for this and only for this. I didn’t turn but stared at her reflection, trying to make eye contact. She barely acknowledged me although now she was brushing against my back. I’d described women like her in my scripts before as innocent, virginal, snow white, and the girl next door. Her bobbed blonde hair smelled of daisies. I’d never smelled a daisy before, but there it was. She was a homespun beauty that made you think of every Norman Rockwell painting, fireside family moment, Christmas morning, and endearing image that didn’t actually exist in the world and probably never had.
“Spank me,” she said.
I blinked a few times. I tried not to go, “uyh,” but I did it anyway. I kept wondering if I was ever going to visit the good ole missionary position again with somebody I cared about.
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