The summer I turned 11 I discovered the bus. There were no transfers involved, I just walked a mile and a half to the main road that wraps around Saint Louis and hopped on the bus marked SOUTH. I gave them some coins and kept quiet and got off the bus when I saw the place I wanted to be.
No one questioned me. I think it must have been after puberty, which ravaged me for a week, and after that I had 32 C breasts that came with a bus pass, evidently.
Usually the place I’d go was Northwest Plaza. The window shopping let me fantasize spending adult money, and that was unsatisfying. What satisfied was buying whatever food I could afford. There was a fast food place there, but I preferred the Magic Pan Crepe restaurant where I could buy soup and pretend I was independent. Then I would get in the bus marked NORTH and get back before my parents got home from work. As if I needed them. I could get soup ten miles away if I had to.
When my parents discovered I had been taking the bus — I think I just told them casually, hey, I can just take the bus to Grandma’s, she lives by Northwest Plaza — they blinked a few times, looked at my breasts, and agreed.
At the end of the summer they sent me off in a bus to visit my other Grandma, the one who lived a hundred miles away. on that bus I sat next to a man in gauze pants who said I had pretty skin and asked if he could touch it. Obviously I said no. I am still alive.
There was a long gap in bus rides, because after that summer I had a new school and new friends with siblings who had cars. I don’t think I rode the bus again until I went 30 miles SOUTH on the same bus, this time with a transfer, to buy a sword for my first serious boyfriend. This time mom was shocked, I don’t know why, maybe it was the transfer, more probably it was the devotion to the boyfriend.
Then she sighed and said, “Well, you seem to be fine, I guess I don’t have to worry about you.” I think she should have stopped worrying after I told her about Gauze Pants Man.
I suppose there’s just a moment in life when you have that magic combination of independence and time and breasts and bladder control to take a bus, but if you lose any one of those it’s not an option anymore. I wonder what the senior bus is like. Is it full of independence, like my pre-teen bus? It’s coming, I can tell you that.
4 responses to “Pre-teen Bus”
My mom was very pro-bus (no more kid-shuttling for her!!!). I think she would have been significantly less pro-bus if I had told her about some of the creeps.
Buying a sword for your first serious boyfriend is definitely something!
KC – yeeessh, what is it about the bus that draws creepy men? I don’t remember any creepy women on the bus.
There were a lot of people on various parts of society’s fringes when I took the bus; it’s just the women were never a problem and the men were. (and commuter buses were drastically different in terms of population)
Okay, there *was* that one woman one time, when I returned to my home city after years elsewhere and was walking past a bus stop. She got up in my face and called me a b****, which was a first for me. I think either plain mental illness or a severe case of mistaken identity, since I’d never seen her before? But she wasn’t actually on a bus at the time. Also, uh, one woman one time is… different… from the stats on the bus males.
That said, the bus drivers were all either neutral or straight-up excellent, and a couple of them saved my bacon at a couple of points. and there were a lot of harmless bus males. Just… a *lot* of creeps.
(no gauze pants, though! that’s really something.)
KC – props to the excellent bus drivers.