To the riders of bus 3077. The gang.
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. Maybe your folks will. If so, they may tell you: “That old bus driver of yours was a bit screwed up.”
Your bus driver showed up on time, acceptably dressed and clean-shaven (most days), so it was reasonable for you to assume I came to you whole. But I was slightly broken when you found me. As an adult, you must take on responsibility. But for much of my adult life until I met you, I had avoided it. I was trapped in a dream of being a writer. I didn’t give a schizz about much else. The only person my isolation would really hurt was me, so who cared? That was my thinking. But my stewardship over you gave me a larger sense of accountability. Collectively, you were wonderful, magical “cargo” that somehow managed to change its carrier a little.
Remember that week when Oliver and Gavin were transferred onto Audrey’s bus? There had been some kind of administrative boondoggle; I don’t remember the details. But it broke up the gang. I remember driving behind Audrey’s bus, and Oliver, you were in the backseat gazing out the window. You kept waving. The next day you ran over to the bus and said:
“I miss you.”
It broke my heart, in the best possible sense. I’d forgotten how it felt to be necessary, even in the smallest way. The confidant. The repository of secrets and crushes and paper-smoking addictions. Big brother. Protector. Someone to be counted on. And of course I missed you and Gavin, so I badgered my boss until he switched the route back.
It was a great year. String together fifteen or twenty years like that and you could call it a pretty terrific life. At some point, driving you went from being a job to a joy. I would have done it for free. You became a needful constant in my life. If I was broken, then the bus fixed me. You guys fixed me. Deep inside I know that’s not fair—it’s a hell of a lot to ask that anyone redeem you—and yet I feel it no less keenly. The physical truth is that I drove you. The deeper truth is that you drove me. Drove me to step out of my own sickened skin, to stop feeling sorry for myself and to see the world for its beauties more than its agonies. Ultimately you drove me back to my computer with a renewed sense of purpose. For most of that year I didn’t write a thing. I wasn’t creatively blocked—I simply didn’t think that I was any good. I could write things down, but why bother? Then, somewhere along the line, I began to feel better about myself. I was convinced I could write some of those ideas down and they wouldn’t be terrible. I gained confidence; but even then, I could have stumbled—I was like a day-old foal trying to stand for the first time. I thought about the stories you told on the bus, each of you spinning your own tale. So I sat down and spun my own. I wrote a book about … well, us.
No, not exactly us; aspects of us. I made up names for all of you (except for Gavin)—the same names you’re called in this book, in fact. You’re all characters. Oddballs and castoffs with tragic histories and secrets. But you are also extraordinary—even though your powers remain unknown at first, even to yourself. It’s your job to save the world. Yes, you’re just kids, and a more ragtag lot would be hard to find. But everyone loves to root for the underdog, don’t they?
So I began to write. I took us on an adventure. Jake always said that’s what readers want: to be spirited away from day-to-day concerns and taken to a place where none of that matters. The reader says: I wish I could be this hero or heroine—have this romance—share these friendships—kiss this girl or boy—commit this act of noble self-sacrifice—be my best self—have an experience that I could never have in real life. I wish, I wish, I wish. And the writer tries to grant those wishes.
I called the novel “The Seekers.” It sat in a desk drawer for years—until I sat down to write this book about our year together. It has been strange to leaf through those old pages again. We’re all there—parts of us, anyway—suspended in time. And I like that. Time is strange and discombobulating. One day we’ll wake up and there won’t be any time left to do the things we always told ourselves we’d do. Time goes on and we go with it, helplessly. It’s weird, because my son (yes, I have a son now) can’t understand that he will get old. If he manages to avoid some of the traps that life has in store, he will grow older, become an elderly person and someday he will die. It’s hard to even write that. He’s only two years old right now. He can’t yet understand that there will be an adolescent version of him, an adult one, and an elderly one. But his mother (yeah, I’ve got a wife too!) and I, we can see him changing. He’s not a baby anymore. When I press my nose to the top of his head and inhale, there’s still a nice smell, but it’s not that newborn-baby-scalp smell. Since our son can’t see himself getting older, I guess he can’t see his mother or me or his grandparents or aunts and uncles—all the people he knows—getting older, either. To him we’re all Han Solo suspended in carbonite. I don’t imagine he can see the minor signs of aging that his mother and I can see in each other—and yes, even in our little boy.
That’s one reason why it felt nice to flip through that old novel again. In it, we’re all frozen. Unaging, unaltered, exactly the way I remember us being at that time. I feel the same way about that year we spent together. I want to keep it sacrosanct, and all of us frozen at that point on our timelines like ants in amber. Perfect in our imperfection.
What do I remember? It comes in flashes—moments, details unanchored from their connective fabric.
Gavin, I see you charging across the schoolyard to the bus, head down, arms a-pumping. Nadja, I’m remembering that list of “Bus Rules” you and I wrote out: Rule #1: Be Nice to Everybody; Rule #7: No Swears Except “Hell” and “Schizz”; Rule #22: No Farting Allowed. Vincent, I hear your stories with their bittersweet happy endings.
Oliver … you’d be an adult now. You could say “Holy shit” and I wouldn’t be able to give you hell for it. That blows my mind. This conversation and a thousand others were so much fun:
“I’m going to call a Lamborghini dealership today. Thinking about buying one.”
“They can be pricey, Oliver.”
“Well, I’ve got a paper route.”
Jake. We spoke our own language, didn’t we? I could say:
“Let’s stop at Yummy Yummy on the way to ferny dell with Carl the Poisoner and Jimmy Jogger, you jelly-brained gimboid!” … and you’d know precisely what I’m talking about. I’m thinking about you reading that sentence right now and laughing that breathless laugh of yours, the one where you go: “Stop it, please! I’m dying!”
Your father, Calvin—a tough man himself—summed it up simply: “Jake isn’t having an easy life of it.” Which, okay, you’re not. Yet you’re somehow tougher than life. And I was such a cynic that I had to meet you to believe such toughness existed.
I remember one winter afternoon when it was minus twenty-five outside. Everybody was piled into the bus but the lift was giving me fits. And you were wearing a tee-shirt, Jake. You’re the toughest sonofagun I’ve ever met, but surely not the sanest. The wind was blowing needles of snow at us and you had your eyes closed with your hair pushed back from the wind but damn it all if you weren’t smiling. I was shivering, dumbfounded at the sheer existence of anyone so wild and vital.
The author Joan Didion wrote: Writers are always selling somebody out.
As a writer you tell yourself that you need to be accurate and tell a true story but the reality is: you were all kids in the process of becoming who you are today. Years have passed since I drove you. I suppose it might seem weird to say this—and maybe it is weird. But there are days when I wish we could build a machine and shuttle back through time. I’d fire up unit 3077 and drive the old route again. Pick you up and welcome you on board. The same jokes, that old familiarity. But we can’t do that, I know. There’s that old saying about the people you meet in life. You can’t take everyone with you. You’re probably discovering that now, if it wasn’t clear before. Time gets away from us. It rips some of our friends away. People come together, they fall apart. But what I’ve realized, and what I hope you understand too, is this doesn’t mean the memories go anywhere or are any less essential. They are more essential than ever, maybe, because you’ll never build new ones with that particular group of people.
My deepest fear now is that I may have underestimated you in some critical way. I realize there’s so much that I do not, and cannot, know about you. Not only about you personally, but about your possible futures. You’ll run into many overly sympathetic boobs who don’t expect anything exceptional from you. I don’t want to be one of them. I hope to God I’m not.
Oliver, you often said that you wanted to head to Hollywood and make action movies—at least on those days when you didn’t want to shack up with your girlfriend and be an electrician. I hope you do both: become an action star who does some electrical work on the side.
Nadja, I hope to see your artwork in a gallery some day.
Gavin, perhaps you are a voice-over actor—okay, okay, not that. But a small engine mechanic? Sure. I can picture that.
Vincent and Jake … although there are days when I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, you could end up as writers.
When people find out that I used to drive a bus for students with special needs, the common response is: “That was noble of you.”
I don’t bother telling them that I took the job because I was poor and nobody else would hire me. Nobility had nothing to do with it. But sometimes a person can be ennobled by circumstance.
That year taught me that none of us is perfect. Perfect body, perfect mind: the biological arithmetic stands against that possibility. I’m not even close to perfect. I have bad eyesight and prostate trouble. My son has a lazy eye and a heart murmur. Albert Einstein had Asperger’s. Charles Dickens suffered from epilepsy. Tom Cruise has dyslexia. None of us is built to spec. We’re all imperfect in some way, inside and out. But it’s a dangerous road, aspiring to some impossible ideal of perfection. We’re imperfect from the moment of conception—and so what? Those we love don’t care about those imperfections, or love us more because of them.
When some people read drafts of this book, they said: “I was waiting for Gavin to speak,” or “I wanted Jake to get that girl.” This is a manifestation of our hopeful human nature—and of our desire for stories to have happy endings. I wish I could write those things. But Gavin won’t speak, probably ever. Jake never did talk to that girl in social studies. These are the realities. And I have my own, far less serious realities to deal with. I likely will never be a mega-bestselling writer. I am okay with that now. I’ve discovered that your dreams aren’t quite what you expected anyway, even if you catch a piece of them. I am a semi-successful writer. I make a living at it. Having achieved that, I can’t say it’s made me happy. At least not the kind of happiness I’d anticipated. Perhaps that’s why people can make billions of dollars or cure diseases or entertain millions of fans and still feel depressed. Maybe they say to themselves: I accomplished everything I set out to do, so why don’t I feel the euphoria I’d expected? But had they known how they would feel reaching the mountain peak, would they have even committed to the climb? That feeling—or that expectancy of feeling—is the carrot on the stick. It’s the heat-shimmer on a summertime road that you chase but never catch. You don’t want to catch it, do you? Better to chase it forever and die never reaching it.
So for me, having snatched a small piece of that dream, I can say that the joy in my life comes from the places where it had always resided. My family and friends. The woman I love. Our son. Little things, but they feel like big things. You go all the way around the horn, spending years in the wilderness, to come back to the place you always were. But at least you can appreciate it now.
Driving the bus was a small moment in the larger scope of my existence. Four hours a day, every weekday for one school year. But it could not have been bigger for me. It was immense.
Gavin. Vincent. Nadja. Oliver. Jake.
Every moment I spent with you was a privilege.
Thank you. I love you.