June 4-20,2011
My Dear Family and Friends,
Greetings from Portsmouth, Va. First, to answer the much asked question from the last missive, well, did you come down with poison ivy or not? Of course-not!!
I’m a WoFeR now and trained to handle all wilderness-related,
life-threatening emergencies, such as poison ivy. Here’s how I avoided
an outbreak:
The arduous carryout of Sister Mary Elizabeth Dumbass
and her broken pelvis costs us all sweat, time and patience since she
had chosen to go way off the beaten path to a spot where a logging
company really was cutting trees. The discarded limbs provided a lovely
selection of poles to choose from for fashioning together her litter,
but the excessive debris also made it a pain in the ass to get her ass
to the trail leading back to camp. We had to lift her up and over downed
trees and tromp through piles of leggy, wilting branches. It’s nothing
short of a miracle that we didn’t piss off a copperhead for crashing its
McMansion in the Brush and have a real, live snake bite to practice on.
My
anxiety level was rising with every tick of the clock, because it
really is true that if I do get a poison ivy rash, it overtakes my body
like a wildfire takes a draughty forest in a 50 mph wind, and neither
Calamine nor banana peels will stop it. An aside: [I know the banana
peel raised an eyebrow or two. My dad swears that eating a banana and
then wiping the inside of the peel over the affected area will clear up a
rash quicker than a duck poot rises to sea level. (He has an
imaginative way of measuring time, doesn’t he?) This is a man who also
believes that he can eat whatever he wants and not gain weight as long
as he chases his splurge with a SlimFast.] So, as soon as we were
marching toward front country, I enlisted a victim with just one broken
arm to take over my hold on the stretcher. Then I inconspicuously fell
to the back of the troops, sloughed off into the woods and sprinted like
hell for the lake. I and my sleeping pad (which was placed under Sis M.
E. in the ivy patch so that she might have something comfy to rest
upon--not my idea!), hit the water like a surfer and her board attacking
a big wave to escape a swarm of bees. The skanky H20 of what is better
called a bigass stagnate pond than a lake, coated my upper body with a
skim of algae and exfoliated my legs with tangles of aquatic weeds. It
was as effective as a spa Loofah sponge scrub at removing my epidermis
and the PI oils along with it. That is a fine example of how a WoFeR’s
uses the natural resources at hand in an emergency. Pretty slick, no
itch.
Poison ivy is old news, and given the delay in getting this
update out, so is the following tale, yet it’s worth the telling. In the
words of my big brother, “That story is some good fodder for your
writing.”
Two weeks ago I left the Holler to travel east after
having invited my homeless ass to stay with my cousins on the Virginia
coast. My life is one big penny pinching adventure right now and in
keeping with that I opted for a nine hour bus ride instead of a fifty
minute flight.
I’ll eat peanut butter and white bread sandwiches three meals a day for a month to avoid ever making that mistake again.
I’ve
traveled by bus in nine other countries over the past twenty years.
I’ve traveled on top of the bus, on the bumper of the bus, hanging out
the door of the bus….I’ve traveled first class, second class, goat class
and chicken class…I’ve been seated by shameless Don Juans, demented
Doñas, snot-nosed squinklings, squalling babes and hung-over,
middle-aged men vomiting out the window--- but I have never had such a
disagreeable bus ride as I did taking a Greyhound from Roanoke to
Norfolk, Virginia.
My first error was in believing anything
someone sporting an anorexic-looking dog on their shirt said. The ticket
agent wrote a big 8 on my boarding pass and circled it in red. I gave
him a puzzled look. I only saw two doors from which to exit the waiting
area.
“Is that my gate number?” I asked.
“Naw, that be your number in line. You the eighth one to pick your seat after the reboarders get back on.”
Wrong. Big fat lie.
I
know I give the appearance of being a hardass because I cuss a lot and
tell it like it is, but when it comes to putting others first and
minding my manners in social settings, especially with strangers, I
always DWJWD. As people rudely cut in front of one another and kicked
their suitcases into the heels of the person ahead of them, I stood to
the side politely waiting for my number to be called. Of course, I let
them go ahead of me, first because I’m nice, and second because I had
inside info they obviously didn’t, or they would relax a little. I
shared my secret with the nice lady who watched my bags while I was
peeing, the very same bags she wanted to use to beat me over the head by
the time we got to Richmond.
The ticket taker never called a
single digit. He opened the floodgate and barked orders, “Come on, now! I
got a schedule to keep! Get on ‘dis bus! Let’s go! I ain’t got time for
your messing around!” By the time I topped the stairs and looked over
the sea of occupied seats the pickins’ was slim and all in the back. I
got to about row 25 and chose as a seatmate an oriental man with an
inviting expression and whose gesturing more than speaking indicated
that I could avoid conversation and labor over the travel log I was
trying to finish. As the bus lurched out of the station, I booted up my
laptop and settled in to work. My best writing happens while I’m
literally on the move and I was looking forward to several solid hours
of production. I reread what I had already written and was starting to
slip into that creative trance when the girl behind me busts out with:
“…she
said she like the boss, nigga, said she like a player.. She said she
like it when I hit it from the back and pull her hair, girlfriend join
in, she like it…..”
What the hell brought that on? I peeped
between the seats to see a gangsta’ girl with headphones on and a metal
rod running through her chin like Cupid’s arrow piercing a heart. She
was swaying her head back and forth, with a hand out in front of her
making that Italian gesture of animated explanation, minus the elegance.
She seemed to have passed through her fit of sharing and was only
mouthing the rap. All returned to quiet with the exception of the hum of
the motor and a few muffled conversations. I again reread the two pages
of text on my screen and start to type when…
"I don't even
care... certified game spitting nigga and that's how I got it for real
She like it, she like it, she like it. She like it soft, I like it hard.
She like it when I sit on her back…”
There is no school to issue
it, but I also hold a U-WoFeR’s certification and know how to handle
urban wilderness emergencies. In this case, with earplugs. I advanced a
few paragraphs when a strong wiff of hard liquor reached my row. Now
what? Gangsta’ Girl was traveling with some of her homeboys (I acquired
this vocabulary during my 11 years in Dallas Public Schools), but up
until that point they were just talking noise, without making a
disturbance. As soon as Jack and Coke joined the group the volume went
up exponentially.
The issue was not that it was rap, nor that it
was vulgar. The problem for me is the assumption that everybody else on
the bus wants to hear an off-key cover of a song without a band backing
it. She could be singing Streisand’s Don’t Rain On My Parade or Christmas carols in Chinese and it would still irritate the shit out of me.
We
were not taking Interstate 81, the fasted and most direct route to the
coast, but rather route 460, which I am guessing started out as the
settler’s wagon trail and thus, logically passed through every Podunk
town where goods were traded and a doctor could be found. Aside from an
initial slathering of tar at the turn of the century, it hasn’t been
maintained. Bump, swagger, stop, go, stop, go. This constant sloshing,
not only stirred my innards, but also the contents of the toilet just a
few rows behind me. At first it was just a urine smell that mixed with
the vapors of liquor and I thought, oh great, I’ve picked a seat in the
vicinity of incontinence. As the bus continued to cha-cha-cha with stop
signs and traffic lights, I realized we weren’t dealing with an
overactive bladder here. Pickled poop and T-5 (the chemical responsible
for the unmistakable aroma of portapotty) were mingling with the mixed
drink of Cuba libre spritzed with piss and the smell morphed into an all
out gagging stench. It spread through the bus like a hefty splash of
Pinesol slowly overtakes the toilet bowl in a bellowing cloud of white.
Gangsta’ Girl wrote her own rap of protest and performed:
“Gotdamn
something be stinkin’. That shit be making me sick. I’m allergic to
shit and piss. I’mo throw up. This fucked up. Somebody go up there and
tell that drive to let us off this damn bus. I ain’t puttin’ up with
this shit.”
Her lack of rhyme and rhythm birthed a new
appreciation of rap in me. Maybe I underestimate the talent it takes to
write a monotonous, repetitive string of lyrics posing as poetry.
My mute seatmate waved his hand under his nose in agreement. I nodded and added, “It’s terrible.” “Yes, terrible,” he repeated.
Of
all the days to wear a v-neck! I had no collar to tuck my nose into,
which is what I usually do in stinky situations, for example, the ill
fortune of a one stall bathroom with no ventilation and the person
before me did number 2. In a slow motion crowd wave, passengers covered
their noses and mouths with anything they could find. I had at hand a
polar fleece sweater. I covered all susceptible orifices with the chest
of it and tied the sleeves tight on the back of my head. I looked like
an Arab crossing the desert in a dust storm.
Gangsta’ Girl sent a homeboy to talk to the driver. He returned with very bad news.
“He ain’t gonna do nothing. He don’t care. He said we had a stop soon and we could breathe then.”
By
this time anybody seated in row 6 and higher was bellyaching and there
seemed to be a conspiracy brewing. I rallied the troops knowing that if
enough people complained, something would be done. Everybody agreed,
we’re not putting up with this! I was to carry the message.
Remember
how nice and polite I was in the station? Fuck that. Before the bus
stopped rolling I was pushing my way to the front door and confronted
the driver as soon as I got off. I looked over my shoulder expecting to
see a mob with raised fists. Huh--not a damn one of them was supporting
me. Screw them. I’ll lobby on my own. I told the driver this was
absolutely unacceptable, it was a health hazard, something had to be
done and I would not continue on in this bus. Homeboy was right. Mr.
Driver didn’t care and he wasn’t gonna do nothing.
TBC….tune in next log for part II of Go Greyhound and Leave the Gagging to Us
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