Read Apathy and Other Small Victories for Free Online

you have a sexual relationship with Marlene Burton?”
    “No way.”
    “What, you don’t like girls?”
    “I like girls. She was married.”
    “Don’t like married women huh?”
    I immediately remembered my landlord’s wife, and I hoped there wasn’t more involved in this than I first thought. Things suddenly didn’t seem so funny anymore.

  Chapter 3
    I didn’t know what I was doing in that city. I never know what I’m doing anywhere. I only know how I’ll leave. It’s always on a Greyhound. It’s almost too easy. They go everywhere cheap and all you have to do is sit back and look out the window and pretend that motion and direction are the same thing.
    The drivers are nice to you as long as you’re not obviously drunk or touching people when it gets dark. Sometimes they’re funny and friendly. They tell jokes like, “Why are Tigger’s paws always dirty… because he’s always playing with Pooh!” and “What’s the worst part about having sex with a three-year-old girl… the fact that you have to kill her afterwards!” Nobody laughed at that one but me, and I was mostly being polite.
    Sometimes they bark out a list of rules when you get on the bus and they try to be hard about it because they really wanted to be a cop or join the army but they couldn’t pass the physical and became morbidly obese bus drivers instead. Sometimes they say prayers for a safe journey, but it never feels like they’re violating your civil liberties. For the most part they just drive and leave you alone. They’re all right. Even that lady who told the joke about the three-year-old. She was just lonely.
    It’s not the worst way to go once you know what to expect. There’s a baby crying on every bus, and a couple is always fighting. Teenage girls are going to visit their boyfriends and teenage boys are going to live with their stepmothers. There’s an old woman with huge novelty sunglasses and a pinwheel who won’t stop talking to everyone, and somebody’s car broke down and they have no other way to get home. There’s a pair of nuns up front who don’t speak English. Women with creased faces buy one-way tickets and men in camouflage pants eye you up because they think you want to steal their bags. And there’s an old man sitting on a bench and looking down at the ground outside every bus station in America.
    It’s all the people who aren’t rich enough for Amtrak or airfare and aren’t bothered enough to care how they get to wherever it is they’re going. And when they start talking, and they always do, you find that each of them has a story they want to tell. Everyone, no matter how old or young, has some lesson they want to teach. And I sit there and listen and learn all about life from people who have no idea how to live it. Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.
    The bathrooms are tiny and filthy and you have no choice but to piss all over yourself when the bus swerves, but the streetlights look like blurred stars exploding in the window when it rains at night, and you can sleep knowing that if there’s an accident and everyone on the bus dies it wasn’t your fault. Someone fat and snoring will sometimes sit beside you and sweat on your shoulder even though it’s twelve degrees outside, and someone else with a big head shaped like an onion and dirty hair that smells like fish sticks will sit in front of you and recline their seat into your lap. And you’ll be trapped and sleepless and sad for the entire ride. But then other times you get two whole seats to yourself, and when that becomes your idea of luxury you know you’ve found something that no one else is even looking for, and if you gave it to them for Christmas they’d return it the next morning as soon as the stores opened. And then you get to think of yourself like the little drummer boy, playing for Jesus even though he’s too young to understand, even though nobody in Bethlehem really likes percussion