Forget sex on an airplane;
inveterate travelers (or at least those on a shoestring) know that the really
prestigious transit sex is found on the bus. Greyhound grunting
and groaning: it's not the mile-high club; call it the eight-and-a-half-foot
high club. With the general aversion to airlines following September 11, and
behind-the-wheel
blowjobs having become a cliche, sex on the bus might be the final frontier
for those who want to screw with speed. I'm not saying the Greyhound is going
to be trendy any time soon, but clearly sex on the bus is very, very cutting
edge.
Much about Greyhound not only suggests sex
but actually encourages it: the long trips with little to do; the packed-in,
sweat-soaked bodies and accumulation of feral pheromones; the steady, soft
vibration that I, for one, find rather arousing; and the implicit erotics of
highway travel (glistening buses entering dark tunnels, the focus on arrival,
lingering wafts of Ballard . . . ).
The result is that on-bus boffing is not
as uncommon as you might think. Furtive handjobs under tented blankets, blowjobs
in the bathroom, sex standing in the stall, me twiddling myself up the leg
of my shorts — these are the surreptitious standards of Greyhound sex.
For the more audacious, there's the back row — always the back row — a
just-wide-enough space to get horizontal and stacked. One driver
told me he had seen "any number of couples getting it on back there." He
wasn't discomfited by the experience, really; he just wondered "if
they'd save me sloppy seconds."
I've ridden the bus tens of thousands of miles in the
past two decades, and I always try to sit near the back. Those last three adjoining seats — the only place on the bus where you have three together in a row — are
a petri dish for all types of mischief. Who are the people who occupy this
space? If they're not single moms
with abundant children, they're attempting to get as far away as possible
from authority and its embodied figure, the driver.
Greyhound, like much of New York City, seems
to
consider smoking a greater crime than public nookie. |
Gang members, hard drinkers with six-packs
or hip flasks, just-released cons and young horny couples all make a
beeline for the back seat, hoping to get away with whatever they know is not
allowed. The funny thing about the back row is that it's assumed to be a blind
spot, that
the driver's rear-view mirror can't see back there, or, more accurately,
the bus driver isn't completely aware that that's the first place to look
for people acting up. Invariably, those twin humps bumping under a poncho elicit
a reprimanding shout or unscheduled pullover from the Brylcreemed man in charge.
These days Greyhound, like much of New York City, seems
to
consider smoking a greater crime than public nookie, so sex offenders aren't
likely to
get thrown off the bus. They're just scolded and communally exposed — if their
hickies didn't already do
the trick — when the driver suddenly pulls onto the shoulder and all just-wakened
eyes stare to the back.
Ride the bus long enough, and I guarantee you'll hear about
it. One trip, I was slithering up the coastline of Maine and found myself within earshot
of two people. They were recounting how they'd gotten away with the deed and
gained entry into the eight-and-a-half-foot high club. They had met in Florida, he a slick-looking black kid of nineteen or twenty, she a pocky, heavy-breasted white girl, probably faking eighteen, who said she had three nicknames: Ghetto Queen,
Speedy Gonzalez, and Mouth and South. Both of them were traveling to Bangor or further
north into the pulp lumber. They were sitting in the back talking to a roofer;
I was across the aisle, listening intently. The young guy was showing off, proving that he could act shitty to the girl despite their recent intimacies. "Hey, thanks
for the ride; let me know next time you're going to Florida." He turns to the
roofer: "You can tell she's from Maine — tastes just like lobster. Just
a little stinkier." Then, to the girl: "Hey, stop moving your chair back,
you're crushing my shit."
"I know your shit, and it ain't all that."
"Couldn't have been too bad since you did it
twice."
"Well, it ain't large, I can say that. But it
ain't that anyway, it's how you use it, right?" she says, rolling her eyes like
a front-row vegan as we pull into another McDonalds.
Archetypal as this encounter may be, a friend of mine
told me a story that's likely to trump almost anyone's bus experience. She too
met a boy in a bus station; they passed through a few cities together, then had
a long layover in Denver.
What do you say when the fortysomething man in the next seat
starts masturbating at 2 a.m.?
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They found themselves talking to a guy who was going
to sell them some weed, and agreed to go back to his motel room to
smoke up a little and party (note: do not try this at home). Things
seemed odd when they got inside the motel: the dealer's girlfriend was asleep
in the bed. Instead of smoking them up, the dealer pulled a gun on them and
told them
to fuck. They tried to hem and haw — their eight-hour relationship wasn't quite ready for
sex at gunpoint — and the dealer started screaming at his girlfriend, "Wake up,
honey! We've got company!" She barely turned over, seeming groggy and drugged,
and he started slapping her in the face while continuing to shout. This
continued, with the dealer pointing the gun back and forth from the couple
to the girlfriend, until the latter rolled out of bed and started fighting
back. She
punched at him, he punched back at her, and in the blue-velvet chaos, my friend
and her buddy managed to bolt out the door, unfollowed and with their clothes
intact.
My own personal experiences on the bus have on occasion
also been somewhat Lynchy but often rather comical. I've watched red-faced,
Cheshire-grinning rubes emerge from the bathroom and later seen the condom
floating in the lav's blue cess. I've heard telltale muffled groans from behind
me, half-buried under conspicuous coughs. I've been propositioned in bus stations
(by both prostitutes and men) and perhaps sloughed off an onboard offer or
two.
But I have to confess that I've never actually had voluntary
sex on the bus. On a trip back from Boston, I met a woman who would become a
future
girlfriend. (She said she was looking for a new beau, eyed the offerings and
took the seat next to mine.) I've flirted unabashedly and been flirted with.
And, of course, there has been plenty of the aforementioned self-jiggling, but
never any happy endings, or even happy middle chapters.
As for involuntary sex, however, I have been
an unwilling participant in the twenty-second row. Once I gave a beer
to a guy who was traveling from Tampa to Minneapolis. (Should I have been suspicious
that he was only carrying a plastic Winn-Dixie bag as luggage?) He sat next
to me
on the first leg to Atlanta. A few hours into the night, my new friend started
shifting back and forth in his seat. He was apparently trying to slip his right
hand down the front of his jeans without unbuttoning
them.
Odd enough in itself, that, but soon he seemed to have succeeded. I
began to feel his elbow jerking back and forth, thumping me lightly on the chest
with each retraction. What do you say when the fortysomething man in the next seat
starts masturbating in the darkness at 2 a.m.? Is the bumping accidental or most pointedly purposeful, to make sure you know? Do you approach
the driver? And if so, what would you say? ("Uh, sir, I hate to interfere with
another person's happiness, but . . . ?") Do you hide out in the bathroom till
you guess he'll be done? Do you turn on your reading light and nonchalantly
pick up your book?
I'm the silent-if-not-strong type, and I opted for a similar
approach: I feigned sleep, trying neither to embarrass Onan nor to give him the
satisfaction of sharing his wank. Mimicking snoring without
sounding like "heavy breathing," I tried to sit perfectly still, not moving a
muscle. While he jerked at his johnson, I became an inert sounding board for the
thumps of his elbow on my chest. As for the discharge: I don't know — and
somehow didn't get around to asking.
n°
©2003
Jack
Murnighan and Nerve.com
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