When I got into the bathroom, I saw the man in the suit standing at the urinal. He glanced up at me like a falcon sizing up a field mouse. I stepped into the urinal beside him. It was too late to try to hold it now. The urgency to go was pressing and needed immediate attention.
“You better be careful hanging around with that Negro. He’ll get you in trouble before it’s over. Understand me?”
I didn’t respond. I was dumbfounded as to what he was trying to say.
“This is my stop, and I’m getting off here. I’m just waiting for my ride now. But you better be careful.” I kept quiet as he walked slowly around me to the sinks and began washing his face and hands. His suitcase sat behind us against the wall, unattended. I saw tags dangling from the handle that read SFO. He’d been on the bus a day longer than I had.
Standing next to him at the sinks, I realized now how much he stank of body odor. The back of his suit was wrinkled badly from being stuck against a sweaty seat for several days. As he dried his face with a paper towel, I looked at him quickly in the mirror, hoping not to be seen. I got an incredibly bad feeling standing beside him. I now completely understood what a “bad vibration” was. I’d heard my mother say it about other women all the time, but that was probably different. I tried to hurry and make my exit through the door, but as I reached for the handle, he stepped in front of me and grabbed for his case, brushing past me at the waist. My brain made a mental note that this was the second time he had made a quick and startling movement toward me. I slipped outside and walked quickly, unsure if it was prudent to run.
“Remember what I said, kid.” I heard his creepy voice behind me, trying to reach me now across the distance. I knew I wanted nothing to do with him and that his advice wasn’t good either. Everything about him struck me as wrong. In my mind, I noted what he looked like in the mirror just in case. His face was beet red and covered in acne. He had beady eyes and a thin mustache that looked like a black line under his nose. The bottoms of his tan suit pants were wrinkled and blackened at the backs, where they had been caught under his shoes while he walked.
Before I made it outside, the overhead announcement came on. “1364 to Flagstaff, Amarillo, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh. Platform 4. Boarding now. First call.”
The same folks were all lining up to get back on. The porter was helping a few new riders with their luggage. My eyes settled on an attractive young girl who was by herself. She had long black hair that hung straight down around her face. She was wearing a pink plastic jacket with little zippers all over it and tight blue jeans. As I got closer to the end of the line, I caught a glimpse of her face. Her skin was pale and looked as pearlescent as the crisp white porcelain of the bathroom sinks. I’d never seen anyone with skin that pale. She was beautiful, and doing her best to keep to herself. Even though it was midnight, she was wearing dark sunglasses. The terminal was bright—not as bright as Blythe had been, but definitely well lit. She was among the first group of people to get on. After Monty had examined her ticket absently and returned her stub, she quickly stepped up and disappeared inside. I was hoping that she would sit somewhere near us so I could get another look at her face. I hoped she was going to Pittsburgh. My brain fired thoughts off one after another about how all of us would hit it off.
I waited patiently to board, being the last person in line. I was feeling sleepy again and knew that after a short while I’d probably be dead asleep again. I was excited to open up my Walkman, but I had the feeling Marcus was going to tell me to wait till morning to mess with it.
“Alrighty, alrighty, alright. There’s my boy. What’s the word, traveler?” Monty greeted me in his typical jovial tone, hoping for me to have a good comeback. My brain scrambled for something that I wouldn’t stutter over.
“Daryl Hall,” I replied.
“Oh yeah…now ya know!” he shot back, nodding his head yes. He cackled like a madman as I hopped up and stepped carefully down the aisle toward the back. My eyes quickly scanned the seats for the pale-faced girl, wondering where she’d sat. I was surprised and happy to see that she’d taken the two empty seats directly in front of us. The majority of the riders were still congregating toward the front, and the bus was still far from full capacity.
As I passed her, she caught me stealing a glance with a goofy grin plastered across my face. She returned a smile and went back to putting her purse in order. Her overhead light shone above her, making her appear strange and heavenly. I wondered what her name was, but I knew that I wouldn’t ask. If I had to guess, I would’ve said “Amber.” She looked like an “Amber,” especially in the gold light faintly beaming across her face from the overhead console. I took my seat again, edging past Marcus. When I plunked myself down, he handed me my bag with the Walkman, tape, and batteries. I looked at him quizzically as I took it.
“Go on, then. I know you want to check it out and fire it up. If you hand me the tape, I’ll help you unwrap it.”
“Okay. But you’re not going to be mad that I’m making too much noise or listening to music, are you?” I replied.
“Ha ha, you sure are funny,” he quipped, taking the Hall and Oates tape. “Just make sure you don’t listen to it too loud or too long, or fall asleep with it on. You’ll kill the batteries.”
“Alright,” I agreed, as I slowly began prying open the cardboard and plastic box that held the Walkman’s contents. It was the first purchase in my entire life of something that had any real monetary value. I didn’t usually have the luxury of so much money and the freedom to spend it all at once. As I pulled everything out, I quickly realized that there was a lot more packed inside the small box than I had first thought. A black cloth lanyard was wound up and tied close to the top. The next item out was the Walkman itself. It was just as heavy as I’d remembered from holding Marcus’s. Also inside was a leather carrying case that fit the cassette player like a well-made glove. A small folded piece of paper with minuscule writing was tucked inside the back edge of the packaging, neatly out of the way. Examining the manual briefly, I noted that the nice people in Japan had seen fit to print the instructions in an endless collection of languages, all of which, save one, I couldn’t decipher.
Marcus showed me how to put the batteries in, plugged in the headphones, and then explained what the buttons did. He told me about ASF, Dolby, the Hot-Line button, and Auto-Reverse.
“If you’re listening to music and someone says something to you, you don’t need to hit stop,” he said, looking at me for recognition. “Just hit the hot button right there,” his long black finger was pointing out a square metal button on the top of the player, “and their voices will be amplified in your headphones, and the music volume will dim, allowing you to catch what’s being said. Got it?”
“Wow, that’s pretty cool,” I blurted.
“Sure is.”
I pressed play and sat back to absorb my new Hall and Oates tape. When the second song came on, I listened to it intently. “Sara Smile” was one of the songs that Marcus and Monty had mentioned. When it finished, I rewound the tape and listened to it again. It took a while to find the beginning of the song, but it sounded incredible and worth listening to more than just twice. I didn’t know much about singers, but they were both right: Daryl Hall could sing. I’d never heard anything like it. The music reverberated softly in my head and quickly put me at ease. The music was so close, it felt almost alive. Listening to the song over and over made me think of being at my grandma’s, listening to her clock radio at the kitchen table. There was really a world of difference, and I was trying to wrap my head around it.
The bus pulled away, leaving behind another station and letting off even more people in the process. The man in the suit was gone now, as was the old lady who had kept herself busy with her knitting. It was hard to see in the dark who had taken their seats, as no one had his overhead light on and only the dim, yellow marker lights on the floor were illuminated. I wanted to take some notes about the Walkman, “Sara Smile,” Phoenix, and what th
e man in the suit had told me in the bathroom, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone, especially Marcus or “Amber.”
Through the space in between the seat and the window, I could see the top of her head resting against a small pillow that she had put between herself and the large piece of cold glass.
The lights, streets, buildings, and traffic of Phoenix slowly began to evaporate behind us as we wound around on the dimly lit roads and back out onto the interstate. Maybe Charlotte and Dick were now married and somewhere in San Francisco, out getting drunk and smoking cigarettes instead of face down in that stream as I had imagined earlier. Any thought of Dick angered me. Maybe it was because I knew that my mother had successfully transmitted the message that he was more important, and probably always would be, by shuffling me out of the picture. She had stopped talking about my sister, Beanie, or even mentioning her name after Beanie refused to live with her last year and stayed firmly put at Grandma’s. It had been just over a year since I had left for California, and it was the longest time that Beanie and I had been separated. Beanie didn’t trust Charlotte’s intentions or her sincerity, as all of my mother’s promises usually meant nothing after a few days back together or after she’d got her way. Beanie and I both knew that our mother only wanted her around to watch me when she left for work, for the bar, for the next man, or whatever else was more important at the time. I had the impression that the only reason she wanted us around in the first place was to hold up appearances with everyone who knew her. A single woman is one thing, but a single mother with no kids in sight is another, and exactly what it looks like—suspicious. A single mother with children could at least claim welfare, but a single woman with no children probably went hungry and had to do “other things” to get by and eat. New dresses had to be bought. New shoes were always needed. How else could she trap a man?
I didn’t blame my sister at all for not wanting to be anywhere near her, but it only made me focus on the “why” more often than I should have. It was bad enough never knowing my father, but dealing with a flaky mother too was tiring. I was getting a headache thinking about them. Hopefully my mother and Dick would be happy together, and Beanie and I would never hear from either one of them again.
Marcus tapped me lightly on the shoulder to get my attention. I hit the Hot-Line button as I looked over.
“You still awake?” he whispered.
“Yeah, I guess I was just daydreaming or something.” I got the feeling that he wanted to talk for a bit, so I shut the Hall and Oates down and took off my headphones.
“Soon, this bus ride will be all over. I’ll be back in New York, you’ll be at your grandma’s house, and all this will be just a vague memory.”
“Two days away,” I said.
“Almost three for me, but not much longer for sure.”
“Did you talk to your dad on the phone yet?” I asked. What possessed me to ask that question, I had no answer, but Marcus seemed to be thinking hard about his reply.
“Y’know, Sebastien…I didn’t tell you before, because I really didn’t know you, and it’s not just something a man goes around advertising, if you follow.” I didn’t, but I nodded regardless. I didn’t know much about talking openly with an adult and had never had any experience, but I had been told enough times not to interrupt my mother while she was talking.
He cleared his throat. “I haven’t seen my father in almost eight years,” he began again. “We were always pretty tight, but y’know…things happen. Sometimes…” Marcus stumbled, searching for the right words. “Sometimes, the choices you make may not seem important at the time when you’re making them, but too often they are. My pops died five years ago. I wasn’t able to go to the funeral. Something came up, got in the way. Understand?”
“What came up?” I asked with a blank expression. “Were you stuck in L.A. or something?”
“Stuck in Los Angeles?” He pondered my words. “I guess you could say that. A lot of people I know are stuck out in L.A. at the moment. It’s a pretty messed-up place,” he added, pausing on his thoughts.
“Prison,” I stated. “Not jail.”
Marcus looked at me and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you ain’t got no smarts, understand? Prison it was.”
He told me the whole story—how he had been in the room with his cousin when the white man had tried to burglarize their house. He had called the cops, but they were both arrested. His cousin received a thirty-year sentence for manslaughter. He had received ten years as an accomplice but was released after eight years for good behavior. His cousin wasn’t so lucky. They went to separate facilities, and he had a harder time adjusting to being locked up. Mostly because they thought he was mute as he never spoke. One day, in a fight during a meal, Elias killed another inmate in self-defense. That was now two people he’d killed that way, and the state didn’t look too favorably upon him at all. He was given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He had written Marcus a few times over the years, but eventually the letters stopped coming because, as Marcus explained, prison shaped Elias into something else.
“He became bitter, angry…he wasn’t the same. He slowly became a monster in there.” Marcus was clearly bothered by what he was telling me. “But that’s how it is if you’re a brother,” he admitted. “You get caught up in the system, and they own you. Believe me when I tell you this: they don’t ever have to let you go if they don’t want to. So do whatever you have to do, but don’t ever get caught up and get sent.”
“How did you get out then?” I wondered aloud.
He contemplated what I said for a moment before answering. “They released me on good behavior. I never did drugs. I never got into no fights or brutalized another inmate in any way. I worked in the mess hall morning, noon, and night, and I never missed a day. I guess they thought I’d be alright back in the real world.”
“What’s the mess hall? Sounds dangerous.”
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, shocked at the depths of my naïveté. “You can make a person laugh, that’s for sure. The mess hall is the kitchen. I was a cook. After five years, I was promoted to the head chef, and I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the warden and the top screws.”
“I’m not going to ask,” I replied sheepishly.
“A few of the head prison guards and sheriff’s deputies.”
“You missed your father’s funeral?”
He sighed. “I did. They wouldn’t let me take an escorted furlough to go see it, which can sometimes happen if you got some juice, some pull. But it was out of state and out of the question. The toughest day of my life in prison was the day I heard he died. I always knew I’d broken his heart by going in, but he knew how it was.”
“When that man broke into your house…” I began.
“Where was my pops? You were gonna ask that, weren’t ya? It’s okay, it’s a fair question.”
I shrugged. “Mmm-hmm.”
“He was down at the bar where he usually was, with his friends playing pool. My old man loved playing pool. He was like a duck in water on the table. Couldn’t be beat. He was just late that night. It wasn’t his fault, y’know. It’s just another one of those choices that I was talking about earlier. Got me?”
“He must’ve felt bad about it.”
Marcus gave his answer very slowly. “Yeah…he felt real bad about it for a long time. He didn’t forgive himself for what happened. My guess is that it ate at him until it finally consumed him. He loved me more than anything. Me going to prison was tough on him.”
I looked away, rubbed my eyes, and crossed my arms. I guess having a messed-up life like Marcus’s or my own must’ve been a part of something bigger, or rather something smaller. Something I didn’t quite understand. I kept thinking about the word choices over and over, as if it was being whispered in my ear.
“You gonna see your pops back in Altoona?” Marcus asked, somewhat changing the subject, but in other ways furthering it.
&
nbsp; “I never really met my father,” I answered. “I mean…” I struggled for what I was trying to say again. My head was in a maze of words.
“It’s cool. I understand,” he replied, trying to diffuse some of the pressure.
“No, it’s not like that,” I spoke, trying to move my brain into place. “I’ve seen him once, but I can’t say that I ever really met him, because I don’t know him at all. Does that make any sense?”
“It makes perfect sense,” Marcus answered.
“One time, my grandma and my aunt took me to go see him where he lived in Pittsburgh with his new wife. She had three sons, and when I got there he didn’t seem very happy to see me. He acted like I was intruding and the other boys were more his sons than I was. At least that’s what I saw.” I looked over at Marcus, who was now listening intently but with a concerned expression and a raised eyebrow.
“So what happened?” he interjected.
“Well…that night…” I coughed nervously.
“It’s cool. Just between us and the bus.”
I breathed out a sigh of frustration and lowered the volume of my voice. “That night, I peed the bed. In the morning, I didn’t know what to say about it because I definitely couldn’t hide it. He acted insulted and embarrassed about it, even though I felt really bad. I’d wet the bed before, and it was just something I was going through at the time. When the other boys teased me, he didn’t say anything or try to stop them. He had a hard time even making eye contact with me at breakfast.”
“That’s pretty damn cold, man,” Marcus uttered bluntly. “That ain’t right by a long shot.”
“My grandma and my aunt took me back to Altoona after we ate. I thought that I was going to stay, because we had brought along two suitcases with my stuff. But it didn’t work out that way, and he didn’t even say goodbye when we left. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that day.”
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