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“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G.
Chapter 11 – Get on the Bus.
A school bus might seem like a personal injury lawyer’s wet dream. A long metal tube on wheels. Very high center-of-gravity. No seat belts for the passengers. Often over-crowded, with three kids in seats designed for two people.
There’s no personal history here; no school bus crash stories. I’m just saying.
I’m also just saying that school buses are driven by people on an odd split-schedule requiring them to be up before dawn for the morning run and then back at work in the afternoon to get the little bastards home.
What do bus drivers do between nine a.m. and 3 p.m.? Well, there are the field trips. Remember, back when you were in middle school, how sometimes you’d be taken out of class and you’d get to go tour a museum, or see some classical music, or take part in a spelling bee, or watch a session of local government? I sure do because school buses are an erotic memory for me.
WTF I hear you say. Yes, erotic, and I can tell you exactly why: it was all because of a girl named Jeanne. I remember everything about her, starting with her name: Jeanne Something. (Okay, sorry, I don’t remember her last name.) But I remember so much else. She was a young boy’s fantasy come to life. Beautiful. Lovely. Smart. How smart? Hey, she came up with The Game.
The Game
All you needed were two players and an egg timer. You know, one of those little hourglass-shaped dealamabobs with sand inside. You flip it over and the sand runs from the top to the bottom. Takes about three minutes. Okay, a watch would also work but there was a kind of classic simplicity to the egg timer.
Anyway, the rules for The Game were simple: One person holds still for the whole three minutes. That’s it.
Oh, did I forget to mention that while one person is holding still, the other person can try making them move by doing, well, anything? Yeah, that makes The Game a LOT more interesting.
There were some exceptions to the rule about holding still. You could turn your head to watch what was being done to you. Or to see what was about to be done to you. You could make facial expressions. You could moan. You could close your eyes. You could beg. You could kiss.
We played The Game the first time I sat next to Jeanne on the bus. From her purse, she pulled a plastic egg timer attached to a rosary. She looped it over the rail of the seat in front of us. After she explained The Game, she told me I could go first. I was very shy. I gently touched her wrist. She didn’t move. I touched her neck. She arched an eyebrow. I slid my hand over to the back of her neck. She closed her eyes for a second. I touched her ears. I touched her shoulders. I slowly ran my fingers up and down her arm. Then I let my hands lightly caress her knees. Just before the sand ran out of the timer, I held her hand.
“For that,” she said, “you’ll get to play again. But right now, it’s my turn.”
She did everything to me that I had done to her, and then went a little further. I am not the smartest guy in the world but even I could figure out that whatever is done by one player is a signal that that’s what that player wants done back.
We sat next to each other on the bus every day. We tried to sit in the very back of the bus so we could kiss. She sometimes got a couple of her tall friends to sit in front of us so we would not be seen by the bus driver in his rear-view mirror. Even so, we were spotted once and the driver announced over the vehicle’s intercom system, “Hey you two in the back. No making out on the bus.” It was the proudest moment of my life up to that point.
Time is Relative
For weeks, those bus rides were the most important part of my day. My week. My very existence. And it’s amazing how brief they seemed to be. Before knowing Jeanne, the trips to and from school were long, dull, boring, dull, uneventful and rather dull. In other words, they were dull. After knowing Jeanne, the trips to and from school were spectacular, exciting, uplifting, stimulating, thrilling, and more importantly, they were over waytoomuchtoofast.
Everything was perfect. Then, one day, suddenly, a shock. Jeanne’s parents were moving! Horror. Terror. Disaster. Apoplexy. Okay, okay, calm down. They were simply moving to a bigger house in a new development in the same town. It was just a few miles away. But here’s the frightening part:
It put her on a different bus route. See above-mentioned Horror, Terror, Disaster, etc.
Wherever her new house was located, it was now very clear that my parents had to move there, too. Unfortunately, they didn’t see it that way. So, understandably, I discovered a sudden need to ride a different bus to and from school. Or at least on the way home. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” said the driver of Jeanne’s new bus. “That’s a four-oh-two,” he said, indicating my bus pass. Yup, it was stamped 402 in big black letters. “This is route one-one-seven, kid. You’re in the wrong line.”
Obviously, I needed a different bus pass, but for some strange reason the school was disinclined to give me one.
My First Brief Career as a Criminal
Funny how hormones can lead to crime. In this case, forgery. And I admit it, I was ready, willing and determined to “falsely make, alter, or counterfeit” a document which I could “present as true and genuine” with a clear “intent to deceive.” Which sounds bad but I am sure you’ll agree that I now was demonstrating strong motivation and dedication, both of which my teachers had been requesting for quite some time. My life now had purpose and direction. It was imperative that I be able to get on the right/wrong bus.
I began doing research into falsifying documents. How did the big guys do it? Again, it’s amazing what you can find in the library. I learned about type fonts, kerning, leading, typesetting, layout, design, types of paper, and more.
Using my own bus pass (the dreaded, antiquated, and entirely useless Route 402) as a guide, I began putting together what was needed to create a reasonable facsimile of a second bus pass (the wonderful, new, and altogether splendid Route 117).
So, I asked myself, what nearby firm had typesetting capabilities? Ah, the local Weekly Shopper newspaper. I never thought much of those rags before but with my newfound interest, I volunteered to help them with their mailing labels, “just to get some work experience for my resume, ma’am,” I told them. Which brought big smiles from the Weekly Shopper staff. “What a nice young man,” they said. “And so movtivated!”
A few hours of work and it was a simple matter to express my new newfound interest in the typesetting department. “Say, that’s interesting!” I told them. They let me try it. I did my name in Courier, just like on my bus pass. “Oh, why don’t you try something more creative,” they suggested. “Good idea,” I replied and then typeset all the rest of the info on the bus pass, which involved Times Roman regular, bold and extended, not to mention Helvetica light, bold, compressed, rounded, and extended.
A little time in the Layout and Paste-Up department and quite a bit of the fake pass was all set. The big problem for me was the oversize one-one-seven; the numerals were nearly a half-inch high and printed in a mottled pattern.
“Wow,” I said to one of the nice ladies at the Weekly Shopper. “This is a strange type font on my bus pass.”
“Looks kind of like a rubber stamp,” said the nice lady.
Suddenly, I had a new, new, newfound interest. This time in rubber stamps. Hmm, they were blocks of rubber. Like a big rubber eraser. Like the big block erasers in the art room at school. If I had one of those, I could carve a one and a seven to make the big bold one, one, seven. Suddenly, I developed a new, new, etcetera, interest in art. Of course, my interest lasted only long enough to purloin an eraser and some Xacto blades.
Real vs. Fake
Working under the brightest light bulb in the house and using a magnifying glass to check my progress, I cut, whittled, carved, and sanded the eraser until I had the numbers I needed. Then, borrowing an ink pad from my dad’s desk, I added the all-important one-one-seven to my fake pass.
I was so proud of my creation. I laid it on my bedside table and put the real one next to it. Oops, big problem. They were not the same. The fake one was too good. Too new. All bright and shiny. Hell, the real one probably didn’t even look that crisp and sharp when I first got it.
Well, how did the real bus pass become a bit worn-looking? From being carried around in my wallet while I sat on it. So I put the one-one-seven in my wallet and sat on it. And bounced on it. Every so often, I pulled it out, fondled it, and then returned it to my wallet and sat on it again.
Nope, still not “used” enough. So it was back to the library for more research on forgers and their creations. I read a little from a lot of books. And then I found the solution and raced home to try it.
I took a small paint brush that had previously been used to paint model airplanes. Then I poured myself a glass of iced tea. Very carefully, I coated the back of the pass with the tea, then blotted it with my wash cloth and dried it in front of a house fan. And it was soon just as good as old.
“What in heaven’s name did you get on your wash cloth?” my mom asked later.
Next afternoon, I was back on the bus with Jeanne. And therefore The Game could continue.
Play House
Turned out that going with Jeanne to her new house had a tremendous advantage. Both her parents worked and her sister hung out somewhere else until about 6:30 when she came home to change for work.
My plan for the end of our “date” was to walk to the nearest library and call my folks, saying that I had needed to work on a school report and only that branch had the reference books I needed. But it turned out that Jeanne’s sister, who was old enough to drive, could drop me off a couple blocks from my house on her way to the IHOP or Burger Emporium or whatever mall store was employing her that month after the previous place had fired her for shoplifting or absconding with some of the funds in the cash register.
This meant that Jeanne and I had the house to ourselves from 3:30 to 6:30. Great! Now, do you see any potential problems with this set-up? I mean, what kind of trouble could we get into while playing The Game alone in the house?
As it turns out, we could get into quite a bit of trouble. In fact, we got into trouble on the couch. On the chairs. On the floor. Up against a wall. On top of the TV. Wait, what? Yup, they had one of those monster long cabinets that held a TV, stereo, books, and records (as in vinyl 33-1/3 rpm platters, which are just like compact discs only bigger and cooler and more fragile but heavier). This piece of furniture weighed a ton and easily supported us.
We would turn on the radio or TV or hi-fi, dance a little, do The Game a little, and turn ourselves on. Naturally, we sometimes ended up atop the appropriately-named “entertainment center.” During those times when I was on the bottom, I noticed that some of the areas of the unit were warm from the electronics and tubes and fans and whatnot inside. Not that it mattered that much because our bodies made all of it warm rather quickly.
Speaking of warm, one afternoon, she led me into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Kitchen utensils,” she said. “You can use this one on me here.” She demonstrated it for a minute that seemed like nanoseconds. Then she stopped and shrugged. “It’ll work a lot better once these clothes are off.”
“I’ll bet.”
“But you have to warm it up first.”
“Well, I don’t seem to have any trouble warming you up.”
“Not me, silly. I’ll get undressed and you take care of this.”
Here are a few handy tips in case you find yourself in a similar situation: You can warm up kitchen utensils by blowing hot air on them, holding them in your hands, clasping them between your legs, wrapping them in a towel and putting them in the oven for a few minutes, submersing them in a pot of hot water, laying them next to the toaster, and so on.
As long as we ended up together, I was okay with this new variety of gaming, although call me old fashioned, I preferred the version where it was just me and her without the implements.
Still, speaking as a boy, I’d have to say that everything about this whole situation was absolutely and astonishingly perfect in every way. Right up until I found out Jeanne was also playing The Game with someone else.
• To read the next chapter or pick up where you left off, visit the main index at: https://enewschannels.com/tag/secret-sex/ — or visit the Table of Contents for “Secret Sex” at: http://johnscottg.com/secret_CHAPTERS.htm
“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: JSG.
