Tuesday, September 18, 2007 | by nathan

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

When I was in the seventh grade we lived in a sort of ghetto-ass neighborhood off of south Shields Boulevard in Moore. My bus ride home was full of thugs and fourteen year old girls who smoked and had tattoos they’d given themselves with pens and clothespins during algebra class.

One girl in particular stands out in my mind for her decision, one afternoon, to leap from the emergency door on the back of the bus.

Her name was Linda. She looked exactly like a young Susan Sarandon, with the smirking mouth and bug eyes. Our bus driver was a red-headed Pentecostal minister named Lewis. Linda’s territory was the last seat on the bus, the hidden one, next to the emergency door. You sat there, you got pounded, as I saw more than once. Lewis was a fire and brimstone preacher, you could tell; his theology was clearly informed, at least in part, by his fiery temper.

It was bound to happen.

One day Linda was wearing a hippie-hoodie, one of those striped Mexican jobbies like you see Woody Harrelson in all the time. The song on the radio was "Free Your Mind" by En Vogue; it was 1993.

She was dancing around in the very back to the song, flicking her cigarette, which I’m sure she thought she’d carefully concealed, out the window. Lewis yelled at her to sit down. Again, and again.

Eventually Linda wrapped the hood of that sweatshirt around the top of her head real tight, so that the top was sticking up in a perfect point. She looked ridiculous. She began bobbing her head back and forth, calling out in a loud, high-pitched voice:

"Lewis!"

"Lewis!"

She’d bob her head back and forth each time; between that and the hood sticking up in a point on the top of her head, she looked like some kind of maniacal sock puppet. The buggy Sarandon eyes only added to the effect.

Lewis’s face grew red; I was in the middle of the bus. As a short, unathletic nerd, I’d long before learned better than to sit anywhere but the middle, and that I should always keep my head down, down, down, and avoid eye contact even with people who were my friends at school.

"I’m writing you up, Linda!" Lewis screamed. He spit when he yelled; by now the bus had grown silent, and everyone was suppressing laughter.

"You can’t write when you’re driving, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang.

And then, bam. Lewis stopped the bus cold on a residential street in a ghetto-ass Moore, Oklahoma neighborhood. He slammed on the brakes, turned off the bus, and stood, facing Linda, fire burning in his eyes, little foamy triangles of spit at the corners of his mouth.

"Get up here, Linda!" he shouted. He knew her by her first name because of how many times he’d already written her up for smoking.

"No, Lewwwwwwwisssss!" she sang back. He took a couple steps toward her, and, like a flash, her hand was on the emergency door handle.

"If you open that you’re going to be expelled!" Lewis’s face was as red as an apple now.

"You can’t expel me!" she hissed at him. Then, like a flash, she threw the door open and leapt out the back door, running up the street. God knows if we were even anywhere near her house.

"Everybody just stay right where you are!" Lewis shouted, digging around in her now-vacated seat for - evidence? A scent?

Lewis returned after a moment to stand in front of all of us, then began barking out a lecture about how things were going to change on "his" bus. No more disrespect on "my" bus, he said, no sir, you’re all going to sit quietly from the moment you get on until the moment you get off. You’re all going to have assigned seats on the bus. I run a tight, tight ship, he said, and I’m through with all this foolishness.

Then, he sat down in the driver’s seat and STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD for probably five minutes. Looking back on it now, the kind of neighborhood it was, the kind of kids we were, all ghetto and dirty and adolescent, I like to think that perhaps Lewis was stroking a Glock, wondering how many of us - if any - would be able to take him down once the shooting started.

But, having worked with junior high kids - and been fired after only a single day on the job - I realize that he was probably catching his breath. Finally, tired of waiting for him to collect himself, my only friend, Will, and I followed Linda’s lead and began moving toward the still-open emergency door. At this point everyone on the bus was either afraid or angry, and there was a line toward that open door like the bus was on fire.

Which, in a sense, it was.

I never saw Linda on the bus - or at school - again. But I got back on the bus the next day. Lewis’s eyes didn’t meet mine as I boarded, or as I got off that afternoon. He only drove the bus a couple more months, and then - weird coincidence - the guy who replaced him had been my bus driver in Weatherford, before we’d moved to the city. But I never forgot Lewis’s red, spitty face, or that hoodie, and every time I drive through the intersection of NW 27th and Shields in Moore, I find myself compelled to start screaming, "Lewis! Lewis!" So, I make it a practice to avoid that intersection altogether.

I Have A Story, School, Oklahoma