He continued to finger the slit of the vinyl blue upholstery in a
vaginal preoccupation. He wanted to feel beyond the hole of malaise
that was as empty as the hollow whistling of a wind through a cracked
door or that numb sensation of lying alone, the fantasy of his
masturbation eluding him, and his semen flowing on his skin in a last
vestige of a river. Using others was as unconscious as a reflex but the
malaise came into the equation when he saw what he had to use. Why
didn't he have money to wine and dine a female in the mating protocol
like any male black-tipped hang fly? Why did he have to cajole, beg,
or charm an avuncular affection from this remote individual who wasn't
related to them by blood?
He began to stare at the driver and a boy who sat near the front
window in a padded hump that went over the gearshift. It was just like
seeing a self in miniature that had gotten lost and ensnared in the
thickets of time: father driving the bus and this boy seated on a
padded metal covering that went over the transmission. At times the
boy touched the clutch hoping to one day guide the mammoth beast like
his father (the boy believing that his father was the perfection of all
things possible). A plastic red container of ice and water was on this
pedestal where the boy sat and from it a straw stuck out of the lid and
he drank and ate fish chips that were in a plastic sack. He just ate
and drank as the bus circled around its route of the city. How drab it
all was but for a boy and yet believing his father to be the perfection
of all things, such self-restraint was possible. Their father had had
such a job when Kumpee was a young boy. For a year or two of such
journeys, sitting there with the highest admiration for a father, he
was filled with the highest love that was initiating him into the
positive dimensions of manhood and responsibility. When his father
lost his job and worked on the street alongside of their mother, he
launched his tirades against the younger brothers who were