Naked (19 page)

I was cooking spaghetti and ketchup in my electric skillet one night when I heard the pay phone ring outside my room. It was
Peg, calling to say she had rolled away from home.

“Good for you,” I said. “This is going to be the best thing you’ve ever done.” When I learned she was calling from the San
Francisco airport, I modified my statement, saying, “I don’t know about this, Peg. Won’t your parents be worried about you?
What about your education?”

What followed was a lesson that college bears no resemblance to civilian life. Leaving the building involved carrying Peg
up and down five flights of stairs before returning for her wheelchair. The landlord charged me a double rate for having a
guest in my room, and I lost my job when Peg fell against the bathtub, taking five stitches in her head. This was a big city
where people held on to their fried chicken. Nobody cared that we were a young married couple searching for a better life
and not even the buses would stop to pick us up. Fed up, Veronica and I decided to head north to pick apples. I told Peg,
hoping she might accept the news and return home, but she held fast. Armed with a telephone directory, she placed collect
calls to government agencies whose workers held the line when she dropped the phone or took twenty minutes to locate a pen.
Volunteers wheeled her to meetings in cluttered ground-floor offices where paraplegics raised their fists in salute to her
determination and tenacity. She wound up living alone in a brick apartment building somewhere in Berkeley. An attendant visited
every twelve hours to prepare her meals and help her onto the toilet. If a spasm sent her onto the floor, she lay there patiently
until help arrived to dress her wounds. When her parents called, she either hung up or cursed them, depending upon her mood.
Peg’s greatest dream was to live far from her parents and enjoy a satisfying sexual encounter. She sent a postcard detailing
the event. There had been three wheelchairs parked around her waterbed, the third belonging to a bisexual paraplegic whose
job it was to shift the lovers into position. Within a year her health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer
be left alone for twelve-hour stretches. We both wound up crawling back to our parents but continued to keep in touch, her
letters progressively harder to read. The last I heard from her was in 1979, shortly before she died. Peg had undergone a
religious transformation and was in the process of writing her memoirs, hoping to have them published by the same Christian
press that had scored a recent hit with
Joni!,
a book detailing the life of a young quadriplegic who painted woodland creatures by holding the brush between her teeth. She
sent me a three-page chapter regarding our hitchhiking trip to North Carolina. “God bless all those wonderful people who helped
us along the way!” she wrote. “Each and every day I thank the Lord for their love and kindness.”

I wrote back saying that if she remembered correctly, we’d made fun of those people. “We lied to them and mocked them behind
their backs, and now you want them blessed? What’s happened to you?”

Looking back, I think I can guess what might have happened to her. Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came
to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age.
Me, it took years.

The bus from North Carolina to Oregon takes four days, which breaks down to roughly seventy-five thousand hours if one is
traveling without the aid of a strong animal tranquilizer. It was my fate that any AWOL marines, tear-stained runaways, or
drunken parolees would sit so close that on the off chance they might pass out, I was guaranteed to collect their bubbling
saliva on the collar of my shirt. Books and magazines offered no relief. Failing to act even as a shield, their presence attracted
everything from mild curiosity to open hostility.

“You think you’re going to learn something from a book?” the man said, punching my headrest with his tattooed knuckles. “Let
me tell you a little something, bookworm, if you really want to learn the truth, there’s only one place to do it: Chatham
Correctional Institute. That’s the best fucking school in this whole stinking country. It taught me everything I know and
then some. Hell, you’ll learn more on this goddamned bus than you would in a whole…” He paused, attempting to recall the name
given to such a place. “You’ll learn more here than in a whole pyramid full of books. You could fill a racetrack with every
piece of shit ever written, but you’ll learn more right here.”

Having never seen a racetrack full of books, I thought it premature to contradict him. “You could be right,” I said, regarding
the scars that ornamented his battered, sunburned face. “Pretty close to your stop, are we? If not, I can move across the
aisle and give you some room to stretch out.”

“I told him yes,” the girl said, taking the seat beside me. “I said, ‘You’re goddamned right I’m having this fucking baby.’
I said I’d have this stinking piece of shit whether he wanted to be the fucking daddy or not.” She paused to wipe her snubbed
nose with a kneesock she carried exclusively for this purpose.

“I said, ‘I already took four years of this shit from Big T, and if you think I’m going to stand here and take any more, you
can bend down on your knobby knees and lick the hairs on my shit-scabbed asshole, motherfucker.’ I told him, ‘I’m through
fucking around with a white-faced nigger too busy chasing bush pussy to get up off his fat fucking asshole and find his self
a motherfucking job.’ I let him have it, I really did.

“I said, ‘Motherfucker, you haven’t got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church mouse. You crawled out of your mama’s
tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her milk-stained titties, and you ain’t never looked back, mother-fucker.’ I said, ‘If
you don’t want this baby, then I’ll find some son of a bitch who does, someone who don’t look at the world through the slit
of his shit-blistered, faggoty-assed, worm-sized dick.’ I said, ‘This baby might be a bastard, but I can guaran-fucking-tee
you it won’t be half the bastard its daddy is, you motherfucking bastard, you! You can suck the cream out of my granddaddy’s
withered old cum-stained cock before I’ll ever, and I mean
ever,
let you look into this mother-fucking baby’s wrinkly-assed face, you stupid fucking shit-head.’ That’s exactly what I told
him because I don’t give a shit anymore, I really don’t.”

Having shared this information with a complete stranger, the young woman proceeded to rummage through the pocketbook that
rested upon her swollen belly. She pulled out a brush and scowled, gathering the captive hairs between her fingers and pitching
them down onto the floor of the bus. “I said to him, I said, ‘And another thing, dick stain, after this baby is born, I’m
gonna take one look at its shit-covered face and if it looks anything like you, I’ll have the doctor saw its fucking head
off and use it for bait. I swear to God I will, and there’s not a goddamned thing in the world you can do about it.’ After
all the stinking shit that bastard put me through, he had the nerve to ask what I was planning on naming the baby. Can you
believe that shit? I can’t. I said, ‘I can’t believe this shit, shithead.’ I said, ‘Motherfucker, I’ll name it whatever the
fuck I fucking want to name it.’ I said, ‘I got a good mind to call him Cecil Fucking Fuckwad, after his daddy, you ugly fucking
fuckwad.’ I said, ‘How do you like them apples, you jism-stained, cocksucking sack of stinking, steaming, blood-speckled shit.”

She wiped a trace of spittle off her lips and settled back in her seat. The child kicked and shifted in the womb, and she
responded, calling out in pain before batting her stomach with the flat end of the brush. “Motherfucker,” she said, “you try
that again and I’ll come in there with a fucking coat hanger and fucking give you something to fucking kick about.”

This was an America conceived by Soviet propaganda chiefs, a brutal landscape inhabited by hopeless, motor-mouthed simpletons,
drifting from a bad place to somewhere even worse. If you’re lucky, people on the bus will wake you in order to borrow a cigarette.
The man occupying the window seat is likely to introduce himself with the line “What the hell are
you
staring at?” Due to the volatile nature of their passengers, the bus drivers are trained in the art of conflict management
and frequently pull over to mediate a disagreement.

“He keeps taking my candy!”

“Sir, I’m very sorry, but you’ll have to return this gentleman’s nougats.”

The bus crawled, stopping in towns I felt certain we’d passed not more than fifteen minutes earlier.
Let’s get on with it,
I thought.
These people are more trouble than they’re worth. Let them walk the twenty-five miles home to Wrinkled Bluffs or Cobbler’s
Knob or whatever godforsaken stand of cacti they call home.
Unlike the rest of them, I had places to go, real places. People were waiting for me to enrich their lives. Couldn’t anyone
see that?

“This bus will be running express from here to Odell, Oregon,” I imagined the driver announcing into his microphone. “Anyone
not
going to Odell must disembark immediately and form a line on the edge of this forbidding desert.”

My fellow passengers would moan and grumble, reaching into the seat pockets to collect their lint-specked dentures and half-empty
pints of Old Spaniel. I would watch them step down onto the dusty highway, shoddy suitcases in hand, and shake their fists
at the unforgiving sun. When the last of them had been evacuated, the driver would close the doors and turn in his seat, touching
his fingers to the bill of his cap to say, “We’ll have you in Odell in no time, sir. In the mean-time, I want you just to
sit back and make yourself comfortable.”

Having spent close to twelve hours explaining the inconvenience of his work-release program, the man seated beside me finally
reached his destination. The seat was taken by a morose, chinless smokestack of a woman wearing an ash-colored sleeveless
turtleneck sweater. She never engaged in formal conversation, rather she jabbed me periodically, pointing with her cigarette
at whatever she imagined I might find meaningful. “Refrigerated truck,” she would whisper. “Filling station all boarded up.”
She never visited the toilet or shifted her position, not even during one of her many naps. Sleep seemed to overcome her without
warning. “South Dakota plates on that Duster,” and I’d turn to find her gently snoring, the cigarette still smoldering between
her fingers.

It was almost midnight somewhere in Utah when a young woman boarded the oversold bus carrying a plastic laundry basket stuffed
with shoes and clothing. Having wandered the aisle, searching in vain for a seat, she planted herself beside me, shifting
her weight from foot to foot and clearing her throat with painful regularity. She acted as though I were hogging a pay phone,
rambling on about nothing at all while she waited to report a round of gunfire coming from the local preschool. This made
me feel uncomfortable.

“Here,” I said, “why don’t you take my seat for a while.”

She accepted without comment. A
while,
to me, meant anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes. If we hadn’t reached her destination by then, perhaps someone else might
offer her
a
seat. We could all pitch in, forging that unique bond wrought only by common sacrifice. Two minutes into my seat, the young
woman was fast asleep, her slack jaw tightening every now and then to mutter what sounded to me like the word “sucker.”

I moved to the front of the bus and took a seat on the stairs until the driver shooed me away, citing regulations. These were
his only hours of privacy, and the man was determined to enjoy them. Come dawn, he would have his hands full with the old
cranks who tended to commandeer the front seats, ignoring his DO NOT DISTURB sign to pepper him with questions like “Have
you ever found a black snake curled up inside your dryer?”

I returned to stand beside my seat, hoping that someone might be leaving sometime soon, but there was nothing to stop for.
The passing landscape offered no signs of life, just a fathomless, cold-hearted world of stones. I crouched for a while until,
overtaken with leg cramps, I lowered myself to the floor and crawled beneath my former seat. Old Smoky sat with her legs outstretched
before her while my greatest living enemy tended to thrash and fidget, literally busting my balls every chance she got. The
couple seated behind me took up the rear, alternately kicking my head and spinal column with the pointed toes of what I identified
as steel-tipped cowboy boots. I told myself that I’d seen worse, but try as I might, nothing came to mind. The bus’s colossal
engine lay just beneath my head, providing warmth for the countless bits of misplaced candy that melted to form a fragrant
bed of molten taffy. Somewhere along the line something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. Why was I, the most important person
on this bus, forced to spend the night curled, not on but
beneath
his rightful seat? This sort of thing would never have happened on an airplane.

“Oh,” I’d said to several of my former seatmates, “you should try it sometime. It’s nice, flying. They serve dinner and drinks,
and you can leave your bag on the seat when you go to the bathroom.”

“Really?” they’d said, “and don’t nobody fuck with it?”

The look of wonder upon their faces was the reason I’d taken this bus in the first place. Having spent the last nine months
washing the dishes of well-to-do college students, I thought I might get a real kick out of the Greyhound crowd, but I hadn’t
meant it literally. There had to be an important lesson involved in this, and one day, with any luck, these shiftless idiots
would figure it out.

I lay there until sunrise, when the bus took an incline and a bottle of chocolate soda rolled across the floor, smacking me
in the forehead. Crawling back toward the aisle, I stepped into the bathroom to battle the many wads of chewing gum fused
to my scalp. The passengers awoke, one by one, all except for the young woman occupying my seat. A good, sound sleeper, she
rose at ten, asking me to save her spot while she went to brush her teeth.