Kick Me (22 page)

Walter drove me back to my house and pulled up in our driveway. My stomach was in knots the whole way home, since Cathy kept throwing looks at me that said she wanted me to kiss her. I had been able to hold her off, even as Sandy was kissing Walter as he drove. On top of everything else, their mobile necking made me feel like I was in one of those driver’s training films I had to show to upperclassmen during my A/V hour. I just knew that Walter and Sandy’s kissing was going to lead us right into the path of an oncoming train as the narrator says, “Was it really
worth
it?” The whole time Cathy was staring at the side of my face, trying to get me to turn toward her and dive in. Between nervously watching the road whenever I knew Walter was distracted and pretending to be fascinated with every business sign along the boulevard on which we were driving, I was a mess by the time we reached my house.

“Well, thanks for the ride, Walter,” I said jovially, as if he were my Little League coach dropping me off after a game. I turned to Cathy and she gave me a smile that said, “Now it’s time for you to kiss me.”

D Day had arrived.

Up in the front seat, I saw Walter and Sandy start making out. How people could just start making out in front of other people perplexed me. When I had seen Cathy and Dan doing it for the last year and a half, it looked cool to me. I guess I hadn’t ever considered all that went into making out—the exchange of spit, the physiology of pressing your face against that of another living human being, the consequences of your partner’s food intake, the matter of germs and contagion. Not to mention that kissing and making out were supposed to be highly personal activities, performed out of love and affection for your partner and not to be used as some status symbol to lord over those less fortunate or more discreet than you. Displays of affection were supposed to be private matters, not spectator sports. And now, with Sandy and Walter making out in the front seat like two primal beings whose libidos made them unable to sense my utter discomfort with the entire situation, I started to feel mad. I looked at the front of my house and, through a space between where our curtains came together, I could see my father sitting in his chair watching television in his pajamas. This was the time of night that he and I usually watched
Benny Hill
reruns on the local VHF station, channel 50. I saw my father laugh and knew that Benny was probably hitting his little bald sidekick on top of the head, something that never failed to crack my father up. I turned and looked at Cathy, who had shifted herself closer to me but had leaned back against the seat so that she was braced for me to lean in and kiss her heavily. A montage of the evening ran through my brain—the beer, the vomit, the stinky dinner, and the mocking laughter between Cathy and her dancing friend—as I prepared myself for what I knew I had to do. It felt like a gateway moment to me, the door through which I would pass to leave my childhood forever. Once you’d kissed a girl—
really
kissed a girl—you left your innocence behind, I thought. You’d no longer be able to enjoy simply holding hands, you’d no longer feel a hot flush at getting kissed on the cheek, you’d no longer feel your heart pound uncontrollably as you danced the box step with a girl at a wedding. Only physical acts beyond openmouthed kissing would provide you any thrill. No, I was standing on a cliff looking down into the darkness of adult pleasures, and peer pressure was forcing me to jump off. I wasn’t sure if I could do it.

But
I knew that if I didn’t, I’d always be judged for it.

And
I knew that if I blew this opportunity, I might always feel that I’d made a big mistake.

And just like that, it was decided. I was going in, whether I really wanted to or not.

I took a deep breath, tried to put my visions of the inside of Cathy’s mouth out of mind, and slowly leaned forward to kiss her. That is, in my mind I was slowly leaning forward. In reality, I lunged forward very rapidly. I immediately made contact with Cathy’s lower lip and the better part of her chin. I tasted what I knew had to be makeup and quickly dragged my lips upward. In doing so, I got an even bigger blast of pancake base. With my mouth now directly on top of hers, I felt her tongue start to move in toward mine. In a panic, I quickly thrust my tongue at hers and firmly pushed it back into her mouth like a Hong Kong subway worker shoving riders into a packed rush-hour train. Finding my tongue was now inside her oral cavity, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do in there. I had heard one of my teachers use the phrase “tongue wrestling” once when he yelled at two burnouts to stop necking. And I recently overheard a jock say he was going to stick his tongue down his girlfriend’s throat. So I did some quick math and figured that I’d better move my tongue around and try to engage something. My tongue snapped upward and immediately hit her teeth. Feeling the sharpness of them pressing down on my taste buds, I pulled my tongue back so that the tip of it was now pressed against her front incisors. Not knowing what else to do, I proceeded to run my tongue sideways across her upper teeth, then down and back the opposite way across all her lower teeth, then back up and across again until I had completely licked the front of every tooth in her mouth, turning my first French kiss into a full-fledged dental-cleaning session.

I quickly pulled away and looked at Cathy. She had a look of surprise on her face that I could only interpret one of two ways—it was either the best kiss she’d ever had or the absolute worst. Her eyes had a look of shock that was impossible to read. The only thing I knew for certain was that for me the kiss had been the most disturbing moment of my life up until that point. I fumbled out a “good night,” halfheartedly thanked Walter again for driving, and quickly made my way into the house. I entered the living room as my dad was laughing at the fast-motion antics of Benny as he was chased around by several girls in bikinis.

“How was your date?” he asked.

I quickly moved past him and headed down the hallway. “Fine,” I called back and ran into the bathroom. I closed the door, grabbed my toothbrush, and proceeded to brush my teeth and tongue vigorously for the next fifteen minutes.

I went into my room and looked around at it sadly. My posters of Steve Martin looked back at me, his smiling face the same as it had been before I left for my date. I stared at Steve’s mouth and lips as I changed into my pajamas. Did Steve French-kiss? Had he made out? Did he have sex? Would a person ever be able to be funny again, to be happy again, if they did any of this? I didn’t know, but at that moment, I didn’t think any of it could be possible.

I went out into the living room and sat on the couch.
Benny Hill
was just ending, and I felt a wave of sadness wash over me, realizing that I had missed what would have been a fun evening watching TV with my father for a misguided desire to make out with a girl, an activity I was now sure I was not cut out for. My dad looked at me with a concerned expression.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. From the look on his face as he studied me, I could tell he knew something had gone wrong. I looked at the TV and grew more depressed as I saw the final producer’s credit flash on the screen as Benny and the bikini girls disappeared from the frame and the picture faded to black. The evening was over. I had blown it.

“I was gonna go to bed,” my dad said, shifting in his seat. “But I was looking through the
TV Guide
and it says they’re going to show some Laurel and Hardy shorts next. You mind if I stay up and watch them?”

I looked at my dad, who gave me a fatherly smile. At that moment, the thought of watching Laurel and Hardy shorts with him was the only thing in the world I wanted to do.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’d be cool.”

And as we sat there watching Stan and Ollie trying to move a piano up a very long flight of stairs and laughed our heads off, I remember feeling extremely happy that I was only fifteen years old and wouldn’t have to French-kiss anyone anytime soon if I didn’t really want to.

HAIL TO THE BUS DRIVER

I
’ve never liked to judge people, especially when it comes to their jobs. We’ve all done terrible things for a paycheck at one point or another. And our reasons for doing so usually have more to do with that annoying need to eat every day and have a roof over our heads than with any burning desire to start a lifelong career as, say, a clerk in a dry cleaning store or a busboy at a children’s pizza restaurant. We live in a capitalist society and, like it or not, we all have to pay the bills somehow. And so, to anyone who is struggling to make ends meet in a less than exciting career, my heart and admiration go out to you. But, having said that . . .

Anyone who would voluntarily take a job as a school bus driver has to be either a masochist or just plain out of his or her mind.

Even as a kid whose idea of the perfect job was to be a waiter at a Farrell’s ice cream restaurant (home of the Zoo and the Pig’s Trough), I would look at the shell-shocked unfortunates piloting those black-and-yellow, smoke-belching behemoths and think, Oh my God, I would
never
do that. No other career in the history of mankind ever invited so much disrespect and downright hatred as that of school bus driver.

Or, at least, this was the case in
my
neighborhood.

I’m not exactly sure why so many of the kids who lived around me hated our bus drivers so much. I guess the main reason was that bus drivers were the people who transported us to the one place on this planet where none of us wanted to go. If you were driving us to the amusement park, you’d be our best friend in the world. But once an adult, no matter how nice or cool or friendly he or she was, sat behind that giant black steering wheel, switched on that rickety little fan, and started grinding those gears for the express purpose of taking us somewhere to learn things, then he or she might as well have been Mussolini as far as the gang on my bus was concerned.

My neighborhood was quite famous throughout the school district, if not the entire state of Michigan, for our bus etiquette nihilism. The Wendell Avenue route was an assignment that immediately struck terror into the hearts of experienced bus drivers. I used to imagine that they’d all sit around in their break room and trade their personal horror stories with one another like old sailors after years on the sea. Young, inexperienced newcomers would be warned of their impending peril by the older seasoned salts, with stories that always began, “It started out as a morning just like any other . . .”

The strangest thing about all this rolling rebellion I witnessed over the years was that the guys on my bus were never the ones who misbehaved. The torturing and tormenting of our drivers was the sole work of girls—more specifically, the burnouts or “freak chicks.” In retrospect, I guess it really wasn’t that surprising. During my ninth-through-twelfth-grade tour of academic duty, I learned the hard way that high school girls who decided they didn’t want to play by the rules could be far more terrifying than even the toughest high school guys. This was because these girls had the ability to get completely out of control. They could scream and yell and hurl insults with cruel unbounded energy and nobody ever really tried to stop them. Who in their right mind would? Society isn’t set up for this kind of thing. Guys, no matter what age they are, have all been taught to be nice to girls, and, on a deeper psychological level, all men are essentially terrified of women—or at least of women who clearly don’t like them. And a woman who is looking to make trouble can very easily destroy a man’s psyche with an insult regarding his physical appearance or by the simple act of laughing at him. Teenage girls looking to rebel throw out the Geneva Convention–approved rules of engagement and do things that guys who are the worst of enemies would never dream of doing to one another. Any unfortunate male teacher who dared to attempt to control a group of anarchistic girls would find himself having either his nose, ears, hair, skin, stomach, ass, breath, or any combo of the aforementioned items referred to as either “big,” “gross,” “dorky,” “hairy,” “ugly,” “fat,” “stink-ass,” or “retarded” by his female adversaries. If he was strong enough to survive this first onslaught, the inevitable accusation of his having a “small dick” and being “a fag” was usually enough to finish him off. And any female teachers who tried to step into the fray were simply written off as turncoats and dismissed with a venomous “Get away from me, bitch,” which would stun the usually mousy teacher long enough to allow the marauding girls to head off down the hallway in search of an illegal place to smoke their cigarettes. No, girls who wanted to be mean pulled out all the stops, and heaven help you if they aimed their guns in your direction. And the freak girls on my bus always had their sights aimed directly at the driver’s seat.

We always seemed to get Viking-esque women as our drivers, types that my father would refer to as “sturdy” and “no nonsense.” They were the kind of ladies who had small, compact beehive hairdos and wore electric blue Team Cobra racing windbreakers over their polyester blouses and green Kmart stretch pants, women you knew were married to garbage men, truckers, and janitors, and for some reason always wore earrings and red lipstick on the job. I was always aware that they were probably somebody’s grandmother and could never figure out why a family would ever let a loved one take part in this horrible profession. But then again, I’m sure they simply saw it as “the perfect job for Mom, now that the kids are all grown up and out of the house.” Perhaps in Mayberry, but not in Mount Clemens.

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.