“Who is the artist?” Mongoloid stood at the front of the bus like some sort of inbred Tennessee prosecutor and lifted the drawing so everyone could see. He pinched the evidence like it was a flattened squirrel carcass he’d peeled off the highway. His voice sounded like that of someone straining on the toilet.
“Who is the artist?” Billy and I gave each other a sly look from either side of the back of the bus, where we ruled with an iron grip. Mongoloid never seemed to get the fact that this was the exact sort of public spectacle we strove for.
All of the other kids were completely silent. Of course, the artist was either me or Billy, but nobody would rat us out—whether it was because of their loathing of Mongoloid or fear of our swift and terrible retribution, I couldn’t be certain.
“Who. Is. The. Artist?” Mongoloid quivered. His moustache twitched. He threw off his sunglasses, revealing wild, cloudy blue eyes. He wadded the paper and threw it on the floor. “I just want you all to know, this ain’t true. I will find out who the responsible parties are,” Mongoloid cast a piercing gaze toward Billy and me, “and they will be dealt with!”
Mongoloid returned to his seat and, still shaking, resumed the route.
The drawing was as completely tasteless as two out-of-control 15-year-old delinquents could imagine. And after spending every weekend for the past two years analyzing Billy’s dad’s endless porn collection, our imaginations had warped exponentially to unexplored levels of depravity. It depicted Mongoloid’s son and daughter in the midst of some sex act while Mongoloid hovered over instructing them with a whip. Billy had worked on it during science class the day before and intentionally left it on the bus where Mongoloid would find it during his nightly cleaning.
It was toward the end of the school year and these random stops along the side of the road to and from school were a daily occurence—at least on the days either Billy or I decided to show up, which were few.
“Warren, we’re going to be ‘dealt with’!” Billy said gleefully, breaking the silence.
There were some quiet giggles from the young girls who sat near us—they seemed to enjoy the field of chaos that we naturally generated, but not enough to sit too close. We always offered them candy to sit with us, but they would vehemently refuse, then blush and giggle. I found the dichotomy between their rational minds and basic nature to be fascinating.
I took Billy’s cue and, fueled by the giggling, I shook up a plastic Coke bottle and opened it, causing it to spew all over the girls. They laughed and screamed uncontrollably, I yelled out maniacally, “YEAHHH!! WHOOO!”
The bus jerked to a stop, sending everyone lurching forward. Mongoloid walked briskly toward the back. As he neared us, I could see the tears in his eyes. His pale face had become deep red. His voice quivered along with every muscle in his body as he tried to maintain control, “Warren, I’m sick of your shit. I’m going to recommend to my superiors that you never ride this bus again.”
Billy and I looked at one another and lost all composure. That sentence said it all, we knew. “Superiors”—Mongoloid allowed himself to be an eternal slave… and he was our slave too. We laughed without control. The girls laughed. The chaos had boiled over and taken on a life of its own. All civility on the bus had rushed out the windows and everyone regressed into raving apes. All Mongoloid could do was hope for a decisive response from his Superiors. He returned to his seat, defeated and once again started the bus and drove us all to our destinations. Tomorrow morning, in the off-chance that Billy or I woke up and dragged ourselves to school, the morning announcements over the intercom system would end with their usual, “Would Warren Mann and Billy Lester please come to the office.” The teacher would roll his eyes, shake his head and motion at the door and Billy and I would smile proudly and have another chat with the principle.
But as it turned out, Mongoloid needn’t have worried. It was the last time Billy or I ever rode that bus… and the last time we ever bothered to show up for high school. After two years of complete academic neglect, skipping more than we attended and generally living as though we were in an anarchic society, we simply didn’t show up for the remainder of the school year and didn’t bother returning for the next two years. It was like breaking out of prison—how could we possibly be expected to want to go back to that lame asylum?
That episode on the bus was to be our swan song. Had we known, we probably would have planned something far more epic for our old nemesis, Mongoloid. In the end, he was spared by an unforseen indiscretion at a cemetery.
Five of us had made plans to go out and get roaring drunk that night. One of our friends, Stu, had a car and already had his license. Another had a brother old enough to buy alcohol. Billy and I had enough money to buy a case of beer for everyone and the fifth of our party, Barny, came along as spiritual guidance. The plan was to get the beer and drive to a spot in the hills off of a bluff road. I knew we’d be safe there: my great-grandmother owned the hill and nobody would bother us.
Stu flashed the high-beams, “This road is a dead end, man. Where are you taking us?”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “I knows these bluffs like the back of my hand. There’s a path that leads through a tobacco field and to a rock quarry. It’s perfect.”
Everyone in the car was nervous. All that beer, Stu had just gotten his license, a world of shit awaited us if we got busted.
“I don’t like this,” Barny’s nervousness had gotten the better of him. “This is Pat George country!”
Pat George was a local psychotic. He’d escaped from jail and was living in the woods somewhere. He wrote insane letters to the local paper threatening to burn down such-and-such barn if some bizarre political action—the significance of which only Pat himself could comprehend—weren’t taken. Sure enough, the designated barn would be reported burned to a crisp a week or so later.
“Pat George doesn’t give a shit about us getting drunk,” Billy pointed out.
“He’s crazy,” Barny became animated, terrified, “he’ll kill us all! He loves these woods!”
“Man, my great-grandmother owns these woods! Fuck him.”
“You guys don’t understand. Pat George is fucked up!”
We listened to Barny rattle on about Pat George. My mental image of the eccentric woodsman, fueled by Barny’s paranoia, was taking on absurd proportions. I imagined this 8-foot tall, hairy, bearded freak with yellow glowing eyes and strings of bloodied white flesh snagged in the gaps of his rotting teeth, bursting from the woods with a torch and exterminating us all in an orgasm of cleansing flame.
Stu eased off the gas, though in that enormous lump of olive-green metal it was difficult to discern, “Yeah, I don’t like this. Maybe we should go someplace else.”
I opened another beer, resigned to the fact that our well-laid plans were crumbling into a chaos over which I had no control—I’d seen it happen a million times on the bus and in the acne-filled hallways of the high school. “Yeah, well, you guys figure it out,” I slurred, “we’ll just sit back here and get drunk. Stop by the Workingman’s Friend, I need some smokes.”
We drove to the gas station off of highway 92. I could see Fort Leavenworth lit up on the other side of the river. When I was much younger, I used to stand in the sliding glass door at my grandparent’s house and imagine that Santa Clause lived in that bubble of light across the river. It was a source of wonder and magic that sort of gets pushed further and further away as you get older. Until you’re left looking for it in yourself… with the help of something like beer.
It was an easier time to be delinquent back in those days. They’d sell a pack of cigarettes to a 15 year-old for 90 cents, no questions asked. I stumbled around the side of the building to use the bathroom and, much to the delight of my drunken teenage mind, there was a condom machine on the wall. I bought one, much for the same reason I bought cigarettes I didn’t inhale at the time.
When I finally managed to wobble back to the car, it had been decided we’d go to the cemetery to party. Everyone concluded there was no chance we’d be bothered there—it was well outside Pat George territory—and rumors had been circulating that a gathering was to take place that night.
I was getting a bit dizzy and spasmodic in the stomach. That cemetery had only one meaning for me, “Man, my grandmother’s buried there.”
There was a short silence, then Stu replied, “We’ll be up by the caretaker’s shack. Nobody will bother us.”
I tried to make sense of the non-sequiter as we headed for the cemetery. In the end, I could only shrug and open another can.
When we arrived at the cemetery, there was already a large bonfire burning with a cluster of kids standing around it. Billy and I were in a state of delirium at that point. All of the beer had gotten mixed together in the trunk and none of us had any clue how many we’d each drank. I have no doubt Billy and I had consumed the most. The others were at least able to stand up straight.
As we approached the fire, I began to vaguely recognize some of the faces. I didn’t know any of the people very well—I remembered maybe passing some of them in the hall at school. Except for one on the opposite side of the fire. Her name was Jackie. She had moved into town about two years ago. The first time I had ever seen her, I was waiting in the car while my mother and grandmother went into the local grocery store. A car pulled up next to us and the adults got out while someone remained in the back seat. I glanced at her through the window and gasped. She looked almost exactly like Brooke Shields, but with braces. She turned and glanced back at me and I looked away.
I’d seen her a few times since then at school. She was a grade above me, probably sixteen now. In any event, I had no doubt she was completely unaware of my existence and I swayed quietly in front of the fire. Everyone chatted and laughed and I tried to stay conscious with an unlit cigarette in my mouth.
I was roused from stupor when I felt a presence next to me. Jackie brushed my arm with her hand, “Are you going to light that thing?”
I remembered the cigarette and tried to muster a response. All that would come out was a goofy giggle. I was petrified into a state of shock.
“Can I have one?”
“Oh, sure.”
I gave her a cigarette and reached into my pocket for my Bic lighter. I was far too numb to make any sort of precise, coordinated movement and ended up scooping out everything in my pocket, including the unopened condom.
I picked through all of the crap in my hand, knowing I was looking for something but not being able to associate the intent in my head with the confusing shapes I was seeing. Coins fell to the ground along with wads of paper, some lint blew away in the night breeze. Jackie shook her head, smiling, and took the lighter from my hand. She lit my cigarette then her own and returned the lighter.
“What’s that?” She pointed at the condom package with her cigarette.
“Uh…”
I opened the small square package and unrolled the green contents. My fingers became slippery with lubricant. I held the condom up—I had managed to turn it inside-out—and looked at it with some degree of skepticism. I probably would have been embarrassed if my emotional machinery hadn’t been in such a degraded state at the time.
Dear God. The girl is probably wondering what manner of deranged personality she’s stumbled across.
“Jesus,” I laughed awkwardly, and threw it at the fire. Except it didn’t burn. The fire was dying and the condom had splatted against some unburned wood at the outer perimeter.
With the fire dying and the night air chilling, Jackie stood quietly next to me, huddled into herself. Neither of us spoke, because I had no idea what to say to her. I knew I couldn’t converse with her on the same level as I could with Billy. He and I were both completely anarchic. We understood one another. Our social interactions with the girls at school were limited to lewd suggestions, groping and leering. I had no doubt if I said anything to this tall, gorgeous, skinny girl she’d kick me between the legs and push my greasy ass into that sputtering bonfire where it belonged: The Bride of Pat George.
She shivered and I gave her my jacket and sat down. She smiled and thanked me and sat next to me. I blacked out immediately. It was the best response I could muster.
I have no idea how I got back home, but when I awoke, I was in my bedroom. It was Friday morning and I had missed the school bus hours ago. Mongoloid had gotten a free pass. The phone rang and I knew immediately Billy had stayed home too.
“Hey.”
“Warren, we’re in trouble!”
“What do you mean?”
“Rosie found your damn glow-in-the-dark condom at the cemetery. And your report card, you damned fool! What were you thinking!”
Rosie was a friend of Billy’s family. He worked at the cemetery, along with several other odd-jobs around town. He was sort of an outcast, as only a man with a girl’s name could be.
My head was filled with a toxic sludge of confusion, “What’s the big deal, it was all F’s anyway.”
“Your name was on it, you dumb-ass!”
“Fuck. That thing glowed in the dark?”
“Goddamn. We’d better lay low for a while. I’m not going to school.”
I hung up the phone and my mind explored every disastrous consequence. We’d left beer cans, cigarette butts, condoms… the fire… was that legal in a cemetary? Jesus, the FBI would probably be called in. It was over. Had I done something to Jackie? I was finished in this town.
Billy and I psyched ourselves out good. We had entered uncharted territory. Up until then, our debauchery had been limited to the bus or high school. It was Mongoloid’s problem, the school faculty’s problem. This latest escapade could involve the unsavory likes of the local police department. I imagined getting banished into the woods, to live a life on the edge of civilized society with nobody for company except a dangerous, meta-human pyromaniac.
We stayed holed-up for days. Both of us had it easy: when everybody in the house works while you’re supposed to be at school… well… you tend to develop a somewhat independent attitude.
Eventually, the Fear evaporated, but it was almost a case of momentum. One week turned into two and that turned into three months and…
Billy moved to Indiana that summer and I couldn’t bear the thought of returning alone to face the scorched battlefield of my academic world. I never signed any official forms or sent any letters or anything of the sort. I simply never went back to school. A stunt I would pull again later halfway through my second semester of college.