The schoolbus was, I have no doubt, a servant of that creature, and oftentimes I took it for, or beheld in its dun and green innards, a physical manifestation of the creature’s great animosity toward me. It ought to count for something, though, that at one point or another I suspected every vehicle and building and plant and person in Goochland of the same, which opinion time has not softened any (and time in town has only ossified), and that none of these entities ever educated me so thoroughly as my schoolbus did, nor showed me so intense a concern, nor suffered from me so grave an insult. I know full well that I owe this benefactor a debt whose principal I will never be able to touch. By my gestures here I hope only to pay down the interest.
(Gestation)
Here, then, is what I learned on, or because of, the American schoolbus:
(I should make it clear that what follows is but a sample of the ore I struck there. The lode itself stretched back for acres behind the self-pleased grins of the tormentors on the bus, and for fathoms below the excuses they or their playground counterparts gave on the rare occasion when one was solicited (“We was just playing” or, if there was blood, “He told lies on my momma”), and for light-years beyond the calm with which these overused lies were then accepted by the adults who settled such matters with what at first appeared to be an uncommon laziness of mind and morality but eventually showed itself to be a perfectly common inability on their part to free themselves from the contexts of their own childhoods, which were likely as rude and odiferous as the ones they now failed properly to police.
(Few moments can compare with the realization that one’s state-salaried protector, who stands before one in physical maturity, with children at home, and perhaps another in gestation at eye level, is in fact a huge and brutal child herself, with humiliations to avenge or to reenact so that her bitterness might be alleviated or heightened. In particular I recall an elementary-school teacher who refused to see my mother at a parent-teacher conference because I was “in jail,” by which she meant that I had been suspended from school as a result of my having been stalked, before her rheumy and delighted eyes, by an ambitious classmate who assumed that an initial victory in a playground scuffle entitled him to score additional points on me by insults to my panicked yet conference-attending mother until (it was actually scheduled, this fight) bloody snot issued forth from our nostrils, and saline from our eyes (or was it the other way around?), and we were both of us “jailed” not for our crimes but in order to end the entertainment on a note that promised, to an irresponsible and nostalgic audience of grownups, the best chance of a recidivism.
(Among these spectators was a gym-teacher-cum-recess-monitor whose vanity was such that the sound of his own voice, and even the smallest indication that it could still intimidate children of eleven or twelve, was enough to distract him from the severity of our mayhem as he pimped across the blacktop and took account of who took account of him. Now and then, to his credit, he did realize that a football game had been arranged on the field below between a team of brown students and a team of pink, at which point he would stop and yell, “Mix it up down there,” though as soon as the brown team sent over its worst player, and we sent over ours, he seemed satisfied that his authority had been recognized, and he never troubled us again. To my disappointment, and eternal shame, I hoped always that he would look down and record the fact that I had not myself been traded, as this was an occurrence rare enough to invoke in me a pride almost as blind as his own.
(This fraudulent adult was complemented by a math teacher who struck me as a sane and serious gentleman disinclined to notice what ugly plot lines we children wove all around him but who reputedly (I did not see it myself) took a boy out into the hall one day and beat him without mercy, the boy having reputedly (I did not see it myself, nor, I am sure, did the math teacher) raped a young girl. Across the hall from where this alleged beating took place, over an expanse of waxed tile where many others certainly did, there taught, or pretended to teach, a woman whose enormous flaps were supported by stems so thin I thought the whole of her flower sure to collapse one day and crush me in my chair. Her subject was history, or geography, or some apt American amalgam of the two, and her method was another apt American amalgam: of outright violence and the delusion that she was somehow a star. She was forever throwing erasers and chalk at us, lest our attention wander briefly to our studies and we forget to study her. When that approach failed she would bellow out, “I’m a go blerk!” which promised the physical deployment of her bulk against one or more of the children in her care, a situation much feared but of course out of boredom encouraged. (“Blerk” may have been a rural bastardization of “berserk”; that is certainly how it behaved.)
(I remember too, a few years later, a biology teacher who answered someone’s inane or mischievous question with an impromptu lecture on the subject of circumcision, which in her telling involved the removal of a layer of epidermis from the penis and scrotum, so that the entire apparatus was essentially skinned. At first I took this to be a brilliant joke on her part but soon came to realize that it was an actual tenet of her belief system. When I then challenged her interpretation of the procedure, and asked how a person could become a certified teacher of biology in the Commonwealth of Virginia when she could not answer so basic a question about the human anatomy, she explained that she was a married woman and should know. I countered that I was a circumcised man and should know better. (I was not: I was a circumcised boy, the son of an uncircumcised man who could not be bothered to cover, as he stumbled down the stairs toward the stinky little bathroom in which we were all of us forced to empty ourselves at night, an enormous piss erection we would certainly have seen less of in town.) When I went further, and suggested that her husband might have been mutilated in a farm accident he was too ashamed to recount with any accuracy, I found myself in the principal’s office, seated across from a man who for all I knew had forfeited the whole of his genitalia, as he could not be convinced to dismiss this teacher and so spare us the damage of her continued instruction.
(Worse even than these failed chaperones, yet somehow more glorious, was the preacher’s wife who operated, and acted as if she owned, and by any practical measure did indeed possess, our schoolbus. Held in this woman’s compacted frame, and apparent in the herniated vessels of her eyes, was all the western Goochlander’s disappointment and suspicion and rage, concentrated by troubled years out there into a single beam of arbitrary judgment upon everything she thought she saw. When that beam found me in the elongated mirror just above her worried brow, and swept across my face, and probed me for signs of earthly misconduct and spiritual stain, I did my best to remain still, whether I had sinned recently or not, though I could never quite quiet my eyes, which focused alternately on her stare in the glass and that from the trees along the road just beyond. Ultimately this vegetation would show me less kindness than did the woman, but in the moment it could be counted on at least to provide a constancy in its belligerence, whereas the woman seemed almost to flirt with my future, and to play the demiurge with my destruction or survival, and to amuse herself with the question of whether, by her petty rewards and institutional punishments, I would come to recognize her dominion over me and every other terrified creature on the bus. I will allow that I did.