As it was, I chose a course that won me not useful employment but only continued humiliation, and gained me no reputation except that of a naïve and unhelpful coward, and did not recommend me either to future cops or to cheerleaders, and ensured that at the football games I would be in a marching-band uniform if present at all, and that later I would be unable to attend even one of these predictable routs with a reasonable assurance that hands would be offered mine in friendship and not swung at my nut in contempt. In the end I was robbed of what spiritual consolation I might have taken from the practice of politics and real estate, and afforded no better revenge on that county, or on the people who had so willingly surrendered themselves to it, than this frail and too bloodless composition.
Brief window
Then again, my decision to shun those pills did delay a personal dependence on them by nearly a decade, and it would be evil of me to pretend otherwise, or to ignore how grateful I am for that brief window in which I saw more clearly than afterward and was not always a complete bitch to everyone around me. Said window was small, yes, and painted shut, and itself dependent on what class of pill could be got hold of each day, but that it presented at twenty-three or so, when I could thoroughly enjoy its blessings, and not at thirteen or fourteen, before my pallial palate had fully formed, was a stroke I cannot help but ascribe to the American schoolbus, and all that it threatened me with, and all that it led me to attempt.
How, then, to continue along the path I have thus far hacked out of memory’s bramble? How dare I apply today’s half-remembered hatred to an object that long ago, and without apparent motive, thought to exempt me from its own? By what right do I persist in my claim that this vehicle was, and remains, worthy of a violent and selfish attack?
The confluence of long roads
Let us praise, then, or sing, or at any rate take a wider view of, the great American schoolbus: 450,000 of these behemoths gone out twice each weekday with no more than three or four children slaughtered on or by them in a good year. That is a remarkable record: three or four out of a possible score of 25 million. It is a testament to the restraint of schoolbus and driver alike, especially when we consider that most of these deaths are not fiery, as the rare if dramatic schoolbus explosion would have us believe, but are due either to a child’s being crushed by the wheels of the bus, or to the fact that many of these containers hurtle down the road, in the rural areas at least, at speeds of up to forty miles an hour (fifty on a decent downgrade) without the handicap of seatbelts.
I say again: this is a remarkable record.
We might ask what link could be drawn between the conditions on these moveable villages and those deaths that occur later, in homes (such as the one I was stunted in) where no more than an unlocked closet door ever stands between a child and a rifle or a shotgun or both; or in schools where these guns, which apparently do not kill people themselves, arrive now and then armed with deadly children; or in bars where the prison-like atmosphere of the bus still prevails; or in prisons where the bus-like atmosphere of the bar still prevails; or in cars and trucks whose occupants have just left the bar, or the prison, and know far more about the confluence of long roads and alcohol than they ever will about the confluence of human beings and seatbelts; but we cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that our scholastic transport has made any deliberate effort to erase us from this Earth, or that it has been directly responsible for anything more than its own fair share of preventable murders.
That is why I must now raise my voice in approbation of the American schoolbus. That and the luck that I was not killed on or beneath it myself, nor did I die later in a bar or a prison, or on one of those gray asphalt arteries that seem almost designed to connect these sad termini. My death was more spectacular and, as of this writing, has yet to conclude. The cause was self-abuse, and although I learned a good deal about that subject on the schoolbus I am forced to acknowledge that I might not have survived as long as I did, and might already be confined to a hole in Goochland, or in one of its numerous imitators across this dim continent, were it not for the tutelage I received as we rumbled past those sullen pines and along those irate dirt roads.
Do I regret that my education was not of the sort to be had from books but was more in line with the “common sense” half the nation now believes to be of greater value than the ability to read? Let me answer that I was thankful to have gained any wisdom at all out there, seeing as how little was being offered through the schools. Do I count myself a weaker student of the cornpone philosophy because, by the grace of ruined yet thoughtful parents, I came not to fear and avoid the written word but to fear and approach it? From what I saw, the country child fared no better with the land’s lesson than he did with the book’s. True, he tended to announce a mastery over the former when it was clear that he would fail at the latter, but he napped in nature’s classroom as he did in any other, and sought to get by on good attendance alone, and put the whole of his faith in a glib native cleverness he wrongly assumed was not also available to those possessed of a library card and a paid-up residence in town.
I myself blew nearly every test the weeds administered, but out of horror I did remain awake in that place, and worked through the problem sets as best I could, and spent considerable time on the experiments, and just as I will not recognize as my superior in the field the jean-shirted fool who has removed himself from town for moral or aesthetic reasons (which are anyway the same thing) and now pens tone-deaf encomiums to the dirt, I will not bow down before the baseball-capped, goateed man-child who attaches himself by vacuum seal to the government tit yet insists that the nation’s wealth flows like a river from its pristine source (himself) to condescending town, and who will cast his vote in fury for whichever candidate most convincingly implies that Jesus hates all the tax-exempt town fags too.
He had the same schooling as I did, this patriot, and the same long sentence within that mobile metal hull, and the same chance to observe for himself the limits of a life defined by the conviction that town is the source of all hurt known to man, and that Jesus is not the peaceful town Jew we encounter in the New Testament but rather a vengeful country Christian who attends all the gun shows, and that town dwellers would take their punishment right here on Earth (so that heaven-bound country folk could enjoy it too) were it not for a school-bred habit of liberal terrorism against God’s American law. Some part of science is always Satanism, insists this citizen. Wrestling tickets are a thoughtful anniversary present. A ring around the moon means snow.
Except for the ring around the moon, and that part about science, only the notion of an angry country Christ makes any real sense to me now. Had I been dragged from the comfort of town by lesser beings so as to profit a real-estate scam that would never in turn profit me, and would forever cause town people to assume that I hailed from the weeds by personal choice and not by someone else’s criminal action, I might be inclined toward a vengeful attitude myself. I might raise up an army of ignorant orcs to go against those who had so shamelessly enriched themselves by my removal and then shunned me for my provenance, or I might recognize in the orc’s plight something of my own, and so come to pity him in his victimhood, and so come to despise him for his weakness, and so come to torture him by means of an extended and then suddenly withdrawn favor. Energy permitting, I might also do my best to curse, and to salt with humanity’s tears, the land beneath town and country alike, provided I could find a spot that had not already been cursed and salted eons before by another creature of vast and unspeakable consequence, whose motives I could guess at but never quite discern.