The Wheels On The Bus
I really hated riding the school bus as a kid.
From the vinyl seats that stuck to my legs when it was hot outside to the overcrowded conditions that left me shoved against a window like a Garfield the Cat suction cup cling-on (or worse, left me sitting in the aisle), the school bus was a festering pool of unwanted social interaction.
If it was the bus itself that I hated with it’s noxious smell, bumpy ride and broken windows, though, it was the people inside the bus I despised. There were the older kids — bullies who played keep away with my books or threw my pens out the window. There were the obnoxious bus drivers — always insisting on playing the same sappy tejano music day after day and dispensing inappropriate advice like they were a fortune cookie with a drug problem.
Worse then the bus and worse then the people, though, was the length of the trip itself. For some reason no matter where my parents lived, our house was always the last stop on the bus ride home. In elementary school, it would take over an hour just to get to our neighborhood — putting me in the position of missing my favorite after school cartoons.
Poring salt on my transportation-induced wounds, there were few ways to pass the time on the bus. Electronic devices like Gameboys or Walkmen were outlawed. There wasn’t enough room to read without risking the wrath of a seat neighbor with an elbow in his face. I didn’t have anybody to talk to because none of my friends rode the same bus. The best way to pass time, sleeping, was a risky choice.
A heavy sleeper, if I dosed off on the bus, there was a good chance I would miss my stop and wake up as the driver was pulling into the bus barn. It happened more then a few times — despite the fact that my neighbor was sitting next to me and could have very well have woken me up as she got off the bus.
It’s no wonder, then, why I decided to start walking home.
My mother didn’t like the idea of me hoofing it home instead of riding the bus. I guess she thought I would become the plot line for an episode of “Law and Order: SVU” or something. Or maybe she simply knew that if I got home too early I would stuff my face with junk food from the pantry. Looking back, maybe she was on to something.
Despite her concerns for my safety, I walked home every chance I got. I didn’t do it alone either. By the third week of my homeward pilgrimage, I had become part of a caravan of like-minded neighborhood boys. A group of us had started to make the journey together, taking the mile-long hike at a leisurely pace and B.S.ing one another as young boys are apt to do.
We would roughhouse, crack wise and tell the dirtiest jokes our fifth-grade minds understood (which are, to say, not as dirty as the jokes today’s fifth graders can recite). It was by taking these trips home that I made a friend named OJ.
The two of us, having lived on the same street for about a year, had encountered each other before. My interactions with OJ, though, were rarely civil. Between beating each other with steel construction bars and making fun of each other’s mothers, we were fast becoming archenemies.
Our friendship was born of three chance encounters with canines.
