She said, “You serious?”
“Yeah, why not?”
She clapped her hands and said, “Hot damn.”
Which was a bit dramatic.
We finished eating our expensive pizza and went back to the bus.
We sat next to each other. She had a funny shit-grinning look on her face. She was really happy. She had been in prison for four years and in less than a day she was breaking a law by finger fucking on a bus.
I slipped my hand in her pants.
She slipped her hand in my pants.
I pressed my fingertips to her vagina.
It was shaved. I imagined her shaving her pussy in a prison shower with a cheap plastic razor. I could see her telling some of her fellow inmates that when she got out she would get some dick and they would love her shaved pussy.
She cupped my penis, then rubbed it up and down.
Her vagina became wet. I slowly slipped my fingers in.
I had not had sex in so long that I had forgotten what a wet pussy felt like. There's something magical about a wet pussy. You can't help but think, “Her pussy is wet for me.” It instills a sense of pride and one's self-esteem can't help but rise a little, at least for an hour.
My fingers were in her pussy swirling around in her wetness.
Her hand pumped my penis. I looked down at her hand in my pants and wanted to laugh. But I decided that was impolite and laughed inside my head.
She giggled and said, “Maybe you should get off the bus with me.”
“I don't know. I have to meet friends there.”
She looked sad and said, “You don't think we can fuck?”
“It doesn't seem like it's possible, it's still daylight outside.”
She looked sad again, “Well, I'm happy you're finger fucking me.”
“It is good.”
Eventually I grew tired of finger fucking her and of her touching my penis. I just didn't care. She wasn't attractive and I didn't even know her name. She was a sad old woman and I was a sad young man. It made me depressed that we were both so sad we had to finger fuck and give hand jobs on a Greyhound bus to feel okay about life.
I took my hand out of her pants and she took her hand out of mine.
We sat together for a while.
Her head was on my shoulder and my hand was on her leg.
It was emotional but in a real pathetic way.
I went back to my seat and pretended to sleep. I wasn't good with women. I used to be a long time ago. I had confidence and a will to assert myself on others when I was in my early twenties. I would go to the bar and meet women. I would talk with women about things like music, books, and philosophy. We would get drunk and go home together. Sometimes I would date one of them. Then we would break up and I would have drunk sex with women again. But time passed and life beat me down. My brother killed himself, I never saw my parents again. I didn't have health care. I didn't have a good job. I didn't know what to do with my life. My life had no focus or clarity and wasn't very satisfying. I lost confidence in myself. Women like confidence. Women like men who have some focus in life, even poor women prefer men who want to get promoted at the beer can factory. I didn't even care about being promoted at a pizza shop. The world finds lazy people like me who want to write alone in rooms and cry to blues songs somehow an affront to the social contract, to the state of affairs of society.
The bus arrived on the border of Jersey. The woman and I both got off the bus to smoke. We didn't even say goodbye. We didn't even tell each other our names. She lit a cigarette and walked to another bus and I stood outside the bus smoking. She was gone. It was anonymous sex. Everyone on the bus was anonymous. The bus driver was paid to drive me across America and I didn't even know his name. I was in an anonymous town. And to everyone else I was anonymous. No one knew me standing there outside the bus on the border of Jersey.
I was going to be in New York soon. There were people there waiting for me. Tom White, the publisher of my first book, would be at the bus stop. Tom White was 50 years old. He was short with long hippy hair. I don't think he was a hippy. I think you had to be older for that and I don't recall him ever mentioning Janis Joplin or taking acid. He was from Bakersfield, California. He grew up in the desert. His father ran off when he was little to become a physicist. Hu Chin's father was a physicist also. I was surrounded by men with physicist fathers and my father was a meat cutter at K-mart. It was daunting knowing that they came from the penis of a physicist and I came from the penis of a meat cutter.
Tom was raised by his mother. She was a narcissistic high school teacher of English. She didn't spend quality time with little Tom. She would let him do what he wanted. Sometimes she would enter the room he was in and talk about things that did not concern Tom. Tom's mother eventually had several more kids with several more men that she did not concern herself with.
Tom White, his brother, sister and mother all lived in the same house barely communicating with each other. Tom would walk around the yard trying to find something to do but there was nothing to do. Sometimes he would sit in the summer on the brown baked grass and stare at his shoes.
He would walk down the street and look up the giant sky that hangs over Bakersfield and feel incredibly small. He knew there wasn't another real town for 500 miles. There wasn't anything but desert for ten hours of driving.
He would lie in his bed on hot summer nights when it was 110 degrees and cough on the dry air wishing he was dead he felt so suffocated by the endless nothing that was Bakersfield. He lived a loveless, alienated, heartbreaking life in the desert. His father had left. His mother was concerned with other things. A desert isn't like a forest, where a person can escape amongst the trees, creeks, and escape at the sight of a deer or an animal scurrying up a tree. It isn't like living on the edge of the ocean where a person can swim, see waves crashing in, and look at the sun rising or setting on an endless blue stage. It isn't like growing up in the Midwest amongst farms where one sees endless corn and beans being grown to provide sustenance for humanity. The Rust Belt even though it has its streets of rusted factories, cities full of empty houses, it is still wooded and a short drive by car can get you to the forest, large rivers and to The Great Lakes.
The desert offers nothing but a barren wasteland. To an outsider the desert might seem like a beautiful and wondrous thing to drive through. I drove through the American desert many times going out west and back. And each time I enjoyed gazing at the endless rocks, small mountains standing in the distance and the strange bushes at the rest stops. But it never occurred to me that it was a place to live. That my soul would flourish in such a place. And I especially did not ever think that growing up there would be awesome.
But Tom White grew up there. He grew up in the desert.
Tom escaped to Berkeley College and found friends and a life where he wasn't tortured by his mother or his peers. He enjoyed life at Berkeley but realized in his early 20s he wanted completely out of California. Most people believe that California is the apex of the American way of life. That to live in California is a dream come true and if they can just get to that sunny liberal place heaven will grant them happiness, security, and a meaning in life. Tom didn't find California to be that place.
Tom went to New York City. It was the early seventies and things were still happening. He moved into a small apartment on Saint Mark's. He hung out with writers, artists, and musicians. He worked in record and bookshops. Bakersfield was gone. The big endless sky that his life took place under for so many years was replaced by the corridors of skyscrapers containing offices with storefront restaurants and clothing shops. He liked the congestion, the rampant pace, people everywhere, walking around in a hurry. He liked all the different races he could see and how they got along better than one race could in the small town of Bakersfield. He eventually got a job working in an office doing invoices and found a way to make money.