#220

Guess I've told a few stories about myself behaving badly and causing bad things to happen, a few about how the intensity of my emotions makes existence fraught, and a few about how work is hard on me. This is a story about bad things happening to me, which I don't think I've really covered yet.

Well, it's not like I'm the only one. Still, it may make for some unpleasant reading.

*

From the the year I turned eight to year I turned ten, I rode the bus home from my Catholic school in Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and lived for the bulk of my childhood. My uncles on my mother's side went there too; St. Ignatius of Loyola. Jesuits. A strange and rigorous portion of my education, in the classroom and out. Could yarn for days, and someday I will, dear reader.

*

My first impression of the bus driver was extremely on-point. I beheld a hideous gargoyle, a fucking bridge troll with knobbed and venous graspers clutching at the steering wheel. That's all he was; a bogeyman. He gazed at me with one furious dark eye and one misted hideously with cataract, generously older than sixty, his dark brown skin nested with wrinkles and flaps, his mouth collapsed, his swollen gut pooching over a swollen crotch. Yet though his spotted dome was long-bald, the hair around the sides was gray still showing pepper along with salt, voice sharp, movements fluid. But it was the mouth that really told you without ever moving, that you were dealing with a real son of a bitch, a motherfucker that would see you dead without the ghost of sentiment passing through his soul. A downcurved tightened moue of hatred and resentment. His lips looked fleshy, but the iron line between them and the overdeveloped muscles of rage and disapproval around them rendered them hard as the rest.

Clearly I froze at the sight of him, because those lips parted into a sneering of rage, and he spat at me to get on or get the devil away. I was eight, and my mom was right there, but this was not a dude of considerations. Believe me, this dude did not consider. My mom asked him what the hell the matter was with him and who he thought he was, and he snapped right back at her, same rap, bundle your brat into the fucking bus or find someplace else to rot.

For reasons I must chalk up to adulthood mysteries to which I have not yet been initiated, my mom did usher me onto the bus, and because what the hell else was I going to do, I got on a bus piloted by a demon and boarded by the damned.

Kids as young as five--my younger brother one of them, not long after I started riding--rode that bus along with teenagers as old as high school seniors. I guess that kind of thing can go fine sometimes. I wouldn't know the first fucking thing about that state of affairs, though, because the older kids on my bus--all of whom had undergone Confirmation and accepted the Eucharist and did their Mass twice a week and were called young men and young women by priests and teachers--were subhuman fucking devils with hayrope for hearts and dull axeblades to think with.

They terrorized us, tortured us, made us cry salt tears and scream in pain, endless rounds of bullying, insults, and brutalization. Once they forced chimó on us. That's a kind of tobacco reduction; you press ten kilos of tobacco leaves and boil the extracted liquid down into a syrup which dries to a paste--one kilo of chimó, and if one of us little kids had swallowed one of those little black balls--well, it ain't like swallowing chewing tobacco. That shit could have killed us.

Other than that memorable incident, they mostly kept it to stuff that didn't typically leave marks but hurt bad and humiliated worse. Some days they even kept to themselves in the back of the bus. But those days were precious and few, and mostly is not always.

*

Usually the back-of-the-bussers, in their blue middle-schooler uniform shirts and their beige high school ones, would content themselves with tormenting those of us who sat in the middle, the elementary-level whiteshirts. The kindergarten and preparatory (an interstitial grade between kindergarten and first grade) shirts were red, and they sat at the very front. Sometimes, though, the back-of-the-bussers would barrel right past us to get to the littlest kids, who were young enough to insulate themselves in all sorts of ways from what was going on further back. 

The other whiteshirts did their best to avoid notice, tried to ignore what was happening, tried to shrink into themselves for the most part, tried to just wait till it was over, till they got bored. Not me, and to a lesser degree, not one other whiteshirt, a year younger than me, a red-faced, wet-mouthed kid named Raph. We got along okay, and he'd stick up for himself sometimes, and even if not, he screamed. An amazing voice for screaming had old Raph, and if nothing else, it was so piercing that the bus driver (I remember his name, but fuck that cursed word) would sometimes holler at everyone to sit down in their seats and shut the fuck up or he'd stop the bus. Only one time do I remember this threat being carried out, and I admit to some satisfaction--he roared down the aisle of the bus toward the back, shoving and slapping and bellowing like a demented ape. That earned us one afternoon of relative peace, and we had Raph's high-pitched, repetitive keening to thank for it.

For my part, I appealed to their better natures, to their Christian faith, raged, argued, tried to placate, tried to hurt their feelings back, tried to fight them when desperation drove me, and the main drive of this desperation was keeping them away from the front of the bus if I could, keeping them away from my little brother. It was all more or less amusement to them, especially the fellow Christian thing--they laughed and laughed. I remember the sound of that laughter, the exact way it contorted their faces. 

Three faces in particular stood out--the Pig, Frankenzit, and the Witch. The Pig was a short barrel of a dude--relatively short, of course. He towered above me, big ole gut, tits out near as far as the gut, heavy slabs of pimply arm, furious little eyes that disappeared to slits when his laughter raised his acne-scarred woodchuck cheeks. He had curly, dense brown hair tending to red, beetled eyebrows, and flecked spit constantly when he talked. A great pincher and kicker was the Pig, and a great laugher. A cackler, really, shrill and sinister, and he was in particular amused by my efforts to engage in reasonable dialogue and by the ineffectiveness of my paltry blows against his padded hide. He threw it back in my face, grinning hugely every time I did try to fight. "What happened to your faith? What happened to nonviolence? I didn't even do anything to you hardly and you broke! Why should I keep my hands to myself if you don't, you little hypocrite?" And a few more pinches and a slap or two, enough to knock me back into a seat, before he retreated for a bit, laughing, his weirdly small ass flexing jauntily in his pants.

Frankenzit was about two feet taller than the Pig, duller, slower, much stronger. He had a massive bulging forehead, spectacularly studded with angry zits. Evil, if not cutting, words oozed from his tiny mouth in a low muddy voice, but they didn't hurt the way the Pig's barbs and jeers and vicious logical contradictions and inconsistencies did. Though if his fingers didn't hurt the way the Pig's did either, and though he never kicked, he made up for it by lifting you above his head and shaking you before tossing you, twisting arms, slapping hard, punches to the belly to knock the wind out of you, jamming the palm of his gigantic hand hard into your face, shoving you back into your seat over and over like he was bouncing a basketball off a wall. His arms were fast and strong in a way his mind could never match, and it was almost impossible to get a hit in on him if you tried to fight back.  

Those two were the worst, technically. The Witch was bad for me in particular, but mostly all she did was cut with her words worse than the Pig could ever dream, and laugh. Bitch loved to fucking laugh, and how it lit her face to see us tortured. Not that she was above joining in a time or two. The Pig and Frankenzit were easier on the girls that rode the bus, not to say that they were safe from their attention, but mostly it was Raph and I who provided them with the bread and the butter for it. The Witch would come forward and spit poison at the girls, and this was like watching a giant wolf whisper dark nothings at a little flock of sheep, huddled together and helpless to avoid hearing, pinned by that lupine gaze. She was tall and well-built with a big handsome cloud of frizzy brown hair, but her voice was harsh and grating.

Except when the boys were done and you sat there, ashamed and broken for the day, tears leaking against your will, nipples sore from twisting and ribs aching from blows above a diaphragm sore from yelling, cheeks burning from slaps, your only consolation that you kept them busy so they didn't get all the way to the front of the bus for one more day. Then she would use another voice, the comforting voice. I'll come back to that.

*

Mostly I was able to hold onto that one consolation, that I had done my duty and kept my brother safe. I never tattled; being a rat was, culturally speaking, worse than being a murdering rapist, so I never told. It was almost impossible for me to even admit that the Vera twins had blacked my eye so bad they burst blood vessels in it when we brawled two on one over a recess dispute, and they had already confessed. A couple of times, though, the big boys would not be dissuaded, and they would get right up to the front and do their devilry not two feet away from the bus driver, and as long as they were relatively quiet about it, the old prick would not say or do a god damn thing. 

My brother does not remember the Pig, or Frankenzit, and I doubt if he ever noticed the Witch. He remembers his little bus friend, sort of, and that we rode a bus home, but it was nothing to him really, just transit. I did my job. He doesn't even remember the episode I am about to recount, which changed so much in me. 

It was one of those days that the back-of-the-bussers would stick at nothing but that the whole bus was their terror playground, like the day of the chimó. The little kids had been treated with some form of games day, with prizes, and such was their desire to fuck with that, such was their intensity, that for the first time ever I was forced to sit, first right behind my brother, then right next to him. It was of course the Pig and Frankenzit who placed all their focus on the two of us that day, because my little brother, only in kindergarten, was delighted with a prize he had won: a little plastic insect, whose thorax was a hollow bulb you could fill with water and squirt out through the mandible, like little single-shot watergun. It was a cheap, pointless little thing, but he was over the moon about it, laughing and playing with it. Like true predators, the two ogres had honed in on this, as well as my fear over it, and they meant evil, the kind of cut-rate evil their low brand of cunning would support. 

I tried to get my brother to put away his toy and sit quiet, but he did not. I argued, hissing, from the seat behind him, to at least keep it down in his lap where no one could see, but he didn't want to, even got annoyed with me because he thought I was jealous. The Pig hauled me out of the seat and let Frankenzit by him to sit by the window, then pushed me across the aisle without a word. My brother, absorbed with his toy and his friend, did not notice this. I asked my brother's friend to get up so I could sit with my brother, and  he vacated sharpish, because the Pig and Frankenzit were now complimenting my brother on his toy in friendly voices, and he knew that was trouble. 

My brother did not. His is a breezy soul, full of light, gentle and trusting. He was not born with the sense that you need to protect yourself from some people, most of whom love and adore him on sight anyway, and only grow fonder with familiarity. It grew in, kind of, but as a kid, no. No, he ignored my pleading and my stern indications that he was not to do what they asked, and eventually, handed over his toy for inspection. The Pig took it, examined it minutely, nodded as though he had ascertained that it was indeed gold and not pyrite, and handed it to Frankenzit. I watched all this as though from underwater, hatred coursing through me, knowing just as well as you do what was coming. Frankenzit waited three seconds, then twisted my brother's stupid little toy apart in his long thick fingers. I watched their faces split into the kind of laughter reserved for the climax of a professional comedy routine, the really key zinger, and then I looked at my brother. He trembled on the edge of it for a fraction of an instant, then opened his mouth and started crying, one long note of pure grief.

To be clear, I never wanted to fight these guys. I wanted them to act their age, to instruct and protect me as I had always been told it was my duty to instruct and protect those younger than me. When I did fight them, it was from a position of pre-defeat, of last resort, as a holding action, as a compromise. I prayed to God to forgive me for letting them drag me down and I prayed that they would see the error of their ways, prayed fervently that my words would one day take hold and the bus rides could become peaceful.

When my brother cried that day all that shit went straight out the window. I felt something at the base of my skull flex, right above the brainstem, like a snake uncoiling, like a crocodile going from zero to full lunge. Heat spiked from that spot deep in my lizard brain and filled my eyes with a brighter red than any blood. It was beyond rage. I lost my mind.

When the flash of red passed from my vision I was already over the back of the seat and my fingernails were clawing at Frankenzit's mouth, forcing the lips apart, digging into the soft meat below the gumline, trying to rip off his lower lip so I could fucking eat it. Even today I am gratified by the pained surprise in his eyes, and by the Pig's shocked squeals. When Frankenzit was able to finally seize my arms, blood running down his chin, I squirmed the rest of the way over and started pistoning my feet into his belly and crotch like I was riding a bicycle. His grip faltered and I resumed clawing at his face, wanting to rip the whole thing off, hoping for his eyes, hoping to blind the cunt son of a bitch. His fatshit turdfuck friend spared him that by wrapping his arms around me and throwing me into an empty seat so hard I cracked my head against the wall of the bus, but I did not feel this, only tried to jerk myself back up so I could leap back into someone, anyone, whoever. 

Not to be. First Frankenzit, looking crazed and cursing like a thwarted devil, used his fists on me in earnest for the first time, screaming that only a faggot goes for the eyes. Blood filled my mouth and the wind rushed out at me but I didn't stop kicking at his stomach, clawing and punching at his arms, trying to bite. He went at me for a bit, the the Pig took a turn, then a few others. I passed out. I came back to under a rain of slaps, one of the blueshirts, who called back to the back of the bus. Frankenzit loomed over me, I saw red once more, but he slapped me on the face hard enough to spray my mouthblood onto the seat and I went slack. Another blank in my memory. Then Raph, helping me sit up. I ached all over, all over, every muscle, couldn't breathe through my nose, and my guts felt like they had been scraped out of my body. The hollowness that follows untrammeled violence. 

Checked on my brother. He was trembly and red-faced, but fine.

*

After things had wound down, after the smoke cleared, The Witch usually slid into my seat. She would use her soft voice, her after-voice. She would come up to the front and sit by me and soothe me, try to calm me, her right arm around my shoulders, head leaned forward and over me a little so she could whisper that it wasn't so bad, that I was okay, giving me little pet names, the fall of her long hair obscuring me as her left hand first rubbed my thigh in a passable gesture of comfort, then explored further. What was there wasn't substantial, but what there was, she, in the wisdom of her seventeen years, found. 

I let her. Didn't really understand what was happening, and I always froze. I remember the rigidity that would grip me till her questioning got more urgent; she always wanted to hear me say that I was okay, that I was fine, and if I wouldn't say anything, she might squeeze. So I said I was. Then she'd let up and go back to the back of the bus before her stop rolled around. Either with one last harsh invective punctuated by her raucous laughter, or with a caress on my cheek. With her left hand.

I let her that day, and I'd let her before that day, and I let her again after that day. 

Like many kids abused in like fashions, my eating got out of control and I put on a belly. I was sensitive about this, and teased roughly for it (I come from a very fat-shaming culture). My first round of depression followed shortly after, which I am pretty certain contributed to a stomach problem that laid me low for three months. Stories for another time.

Once I was over this illness, and feeling more like myself, I returned to school, and to the bus. Things picked up just where they had left off. The Pig and Frankenzit were as bad as ever; worse, because I fought all the time, fought harder, but they were only taken aback by that once, and made sure to always carry the advantage of numbers as well as the use of their size and reach--brave dudes, you know. 

The last time the Witch slid into my seat I froze as ever, until she murmured a pet name that triggered the red flash. "Gordo" is a term of endearment, an exception to the fat-shaming reserved pretty strictly for children and husbands. All the women in my family used it, but since putting on my extra pounds, I was made uncomfortable by it. When she used it, my paralysis broke, and I told her, in the most ferocious and ugly voice I had ever used in my life, that she was a black toad and to get the fuck away from me and never touch me again. Her eyes shot wide open and her mouth went into that big long "O" of surprised outrage. This time when she got up she slapped me in the face hard enough to cut my cheek against my teeth. It hurt, but she had used her right hand, and this satisfaction evened the deal nicely. 

That slap was indeed the last time she ever touched me.

*

So. All that shit fucked me up really fuckin bad, poisoned my faith, left me off-kilter, made my eyes crazy, drove me to drink, all that good shit. Cool. Yes. Good stuff.

Other trauma no doubt compounded and informed my reaction to that trauma and the trauma to come, but I think most of us can identify the big bad ones, the watershed trauma. That's mine, folks. 

There's other stuff to say, of course. Another time. That should be more than enough for the two hundred and twentieth post. Next post I'll write about something more cheerful, and make a list of books. Everybody likes that.

Have a good day.


--JL

p.s. I have not gotten a new computer yet. I'm just going to resign myself to my computer going all tabula rasa on me every time I load it up. This machine is now basically a blog typewriter. I'm going to write other stuff longhand till I get a computer that saves documents. No new books for awhile, I guess.