It takes 200,000 dollars to raise a child. A school bus can seat 48 children. How much waiting to be wasted potential is kept under my authority? I’m pretty well a poor and poor respected vault manager. Maybe if I sat behind a desk, if I had been born to a man who’d wipe my ass and assign my nameplate, if I had gone to a school half as nice as the yuppie bug-box that these children are cartoned and coddled away in every day—well, I might not be happy, but I’d sure as hell pay away all the things that turn a good man sour. Not that it’d take a fortune to clear this bus of misery. All it’d take is a steady hand on the wheel making a little push for a little too long.
They’re not even proper mean like boys used to be. All micro-passive-aggressions, slippery and snide. It’s pathetic. Makes me sick right down to my insides. I ought to be fuming like an animal, ready at any moment to snatch one of their tiny little under-developed osteoporotic skulls in my fist and pound it against the sheet metal wall of my bus until their overstimulated brains are a dripping smear slipping down the windows. The anger should show on my engorged, blood-pressurized face; in the click of my white-grip cartilage gnarled knuckles curling ever tighter around the wheel; in my every movement and seething breath. There should be a mutual understanding between me and them, something that keeps the peace. But there isn’t. Can’t even piss me off right. Instead I just get an unitchable irritation and sense of displacement. Like a word said wrong, over and over and over again. Like a sticking mucus under your eyelid that your finger is too thick to pick. Like a beetle writhing under my skin, legs all frantic for purchase, scrambling my nervous system so that when I reach for it I always say the wrong thing or move in the wrong way.
They all act the same way. Each tumbling over another to ride the wave of the current concurrent counter-culture before it washes away on the shore of dry, dull reality. Every high tide falls low and every boy grows old. In the end the beach is left littered in the fortune-refuse of those who thought that they could coast forever. Enfeebled men laid end-to-end waiting, wondering when the tide will take them away, never to realize that they could simply stand.
The first up the steps and onto the bus is always the one who learned too fast the rhythm of when to smile, when to laugh, when to demand and when to command. He’s surrounded by suck ups and sycophants. A social assembly line ecosystem of little moldlings oozing embryonic, still mid cast. As they age, the semi-permeable viscous pre-people form into proper bastards. The upper crust of society. This year though, the bus schedule put a kid on my route that didn’t belong. He was spineless, bullied, and wore glasses.
Glasses cut class from time to time, sat idle on the bus waiting patient until I got tired of driving around and kicked him out. First couple months he stayed rooted to his seat the whole time. Then, after all the other kids had left for school, he’d come up to the front booth to watch through the windshield and see the oncoming road pass. That was a fine routine. Then he started talking to me.
“Do you like being a bus driver?”
Can’t recall what I told him. Something bitter probably. That I’d rather have been anything but a bus driver, and that if I were anything but a bus driver I’d want to be anything but that. Because what we are is what we’re made to be, and whatever we’re made to be we have to lose something to become. That when we question what we are, who we are, we’re really being questioned who we’ve been forced to become, and what we’ve been forced to lose. Glasses didn’t say anything. Though the days following he kept sitting in the front booth next to me and he kept asking me his questions.
“Will I ever get a girlfriend?”
All women are whores—ah, except your mother of course. Oh? Well then her too then. It seems you understand. There’s something intrinsic, something essential, that makes a woman what she is. Much the same as you or me. Watch them and you’ll see what I mean. It’s clear as day once you have your eye out for it. There’s a viciousness in all of us, something that comes out as anger when we’re wronged. It’s no different for women. You’ll see. The cruel comments, the misleading lead-ons, every little pointless petty bitch thing. Ah. So you do understand. So you know, don’t you? That people are cruel. And I’d kick him off my bus, say something nice.
“Why do the other kids single me out? Why do they have to be mean to me?”
You might think it’s because you’re different. That’s not quite right. It’s because you’re the same. The same as their expectations of you. You’re a worm kid. Don’t flinch, look me in the eye. You know it. They do it because they know what a wimp is, they know that you’ll take it. And you know that you could do something about it. I’m sure you can figure it out. I know you’re not stupid.
“What’s the difference between anxiety and paranoia?”
Anxiety is the first step. It’s asking the question. It’s when you start to feel that something might be wrong but you don’t know where it is. It looms over you. It stays just out of sight. Paranoia is the next step. Paranoia is the ability to notice what is wrong. To make it real. To identify it and to have the power to fight it. What do you think the next step is after that? No, don’t give me an answer. Think on it. You’ll figure it out
Now, I’d tell you more, but there’s not much more to say. Haven’t been working recently. School’s decided to close for the season. You know, what with the tragedy. Shame. We hear about it all the time so why’s it a surprise when a shooting happens in our city? Ridiculous isn’t it?
The world is spared another classroom of teenage pregnancies. How many cascading chains of nepo-baby inheritance claims have been broken? If one life costs $200,000, how much is lost over a generation? Over two? Every child is a drain that perforates into the future. A bullet is an accountant’s wet dream but I didn’t even need that. In fact, I hardly did a thing. Yet if you ran the books, you’d find my impact makes me damn well a millionaire.