Thu, 19 May 2005

Rissa’s Old Job
Rissa used to have the punk-rock problem. This was back after she graduated from college, not long after her band, Buddy Holly’s Drummer, went the way of so many collegiate bands and parted ways, with Ana wanting to concentrate more on school and sleeping with Rissa’s little brother Owen and Trenchcoat Larry itchin’ to join underground luminaries Biomorphic Feedback Performance. Thus it was that Rissa moved across town, got really into sedatives and found work as a busdriver, the worst part of which was the monotony. There was no getting off the bus whenever you felt like it, like all the guests could; you were stuck on the bus until the end of your shift, with occasional breaks at the main station, nothing more than blank gaps. After months of this Rissa knew more than she ever wanted to know about the migratory patterns of construction crews, drifting along the highways like nomads who had forgotten they ever had a homeland. The ebb and flow of traffic throughout the day, pulsing past increasinly-tempting traffic accidents. The regular guests, running to and from work, the confused and lost, the sleeping, the daytripping students, the buisnessmenchen with eyes scrubbed so bright the predatory glimmer used to baffle their fiscal prey shines through, a crazy poet guy who would give out copies of his chapbook called The Mellonberry Cantos during the cab strike, the secret performers waiting for drama and constantly switching seats in order to find a perfect alignment like some lysergically-damaged story problem, the blind and their dogs, the children with notes pinned to their sweaters and money growing clammy in their tight fists, endless numbers of people who took the seat right behind hers, right up next to the yellow line, and asked Rissa about her increasingly-elaborate mohawk. It could, and did, drive a person to drink, the promise of nightly reward of a few fingers of the cheapest scotch Layne the grocer could obtain legally, each day the drinking hour moving a few minutes closer to dawn, roaming within the veins of the city, looking for an edge to fall upon. Rissa hadn’t been sick for months, but kept taking the medication, which helped to blur the faces of the passengers and swallow up the hours, blotted out of her memory, the days a haze of browns and greys. Tival must have noticed the filling up with emptiness, the rings around the eyes, as he moved her to a route without bridges. The last thing she wanted was attention, was someone watching, wondering. Alas, it wasn’t one day on the new route before she met Mrs. Patricia Martin and her grandchildren.

“Excuse me, ma’am? The children, they have a little song, if you don’t mind them singing it or anything.”

“Honestly, I’d really prefer if they —”

“OOOH, we all love to ride the bus

There’s no seatbelts to harness us

The people smell like piss and rust

And soon they’ll go to join the dust

The bus takes us all over town

From libraries to the playground

Over the lake where kids are drowned

And sink beneath without a sound.”

“That’s, that’s super, kids, that’s just—”

“Do you want to see my doll? My mom says it’s okay that if you find most of an aborted fetus and you love it enough it will come back to life because God loves fetuses. I put mine in a jar!”

“What?”

“Jamie’s messing with you, dear. She’s like that. Jamie, tell the bus lady you’re sorry.”

“I’m not sorry! Death to tyrants!”

“Jamie, you want the ice cream?”

“I cannot be bought! Nobody understand me but my half-baby and zombie Jesus!”

“Jesus was not a zombie! Just because you come back from the dead does not make you a zombie!”

“Sure it does! He even left a ghost to do his dirty work after he went back to heaven! I had to explain this three times to the half-baby, because most of its brain is missing. It needs extra love!”

“Is this your stop?”

“Oh…um, no, we’re still a ways off.”

Only Patricia Martin and her creepy charges never got off the bus until my shift ended, and soon as I took over for Rick on Monday morning, there they were again, waiting for me.”

“Hooray, buswoman! We have a new song for you!”

“Your little brother doesn’t seem to sing. He’s a nice boy.”

“His organs are deformed. He can only sing through his eyes.”

“Sing through his eyes.”

“Yeah, listen. Joey, sing that one song.”



“I don’t hear anything.”

“When you remember today, the singing will be in your memory. Joey is a remembersinger.”

“Stay behind the yellow line. And no talking to the driver.”

“Listen, ma’am, I’m sorry about the kids. They’ve been through a lot lately.”

“I’ve got polaroids I took of my dad after he killed himself. You wanna see?”

“She’s making that up. Her dad is in Evansdale.”

“A fate worse than death.”

A guy in a Meet This Year’s Evil t-shirt spit in “Hey, I’m from Evansdale, and people talk a lot of shit, y’know, but it’s not bad like people say. And besides the CDC says it’s nearly 90% habitable now.”

“Motherfucker, get behind the contanment barrier NOW!”

“But I still have some hair and teeth! Look at my teeth!” “NOW! NOW! GET BACK NOW! NOW! NOW!”

“Fuck you anyway,” he muttered, staring down at his lesions and fading back from the conversation.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you creepy evil chldren to be quiet or I’ll drive us right into that wall.”

“Do it! Do it! Joey, tell her to do it!”



“Quit it!”

“Kids be quiet for a while and I’ll give you honey-pollen. You want the honey-pollen, right?”

“YAAAAAAAAAAY!”

This went on for nearly two weeks, during which Patricia told Rissa about her plan for a sitcom called Nostalgia-Man, with a superhero who moves in and out of cancelled sitcoms tying up loose ends and messing with the plotlines, bringing together the casts from shows which haven’t been on for ages and setting them up in lookalike sets, which creepy Jamie said would lead to plots of sitcom limbos where washed-up has-been characters sat around Beckettlike playing the laugh-track tapes over and over and over, at which point Patricia thwacked Jamie on the back of the head. Joey stared blankly at the other passengers until they’d get up and move to the back seat, eventually creating a ten-foot vibe zone around the front of the bus, adding to the confidential nature of Patricia’s endless family revelations.

“And Pammy, well, Pammy’s jealous because her sister Shiela had cervical cancer. I mean, is that just the stupidest thing or what? It’s like she’d get the cancer herself just to have the attention and feel like she’s been through something, like she’s proven herself by being in pain or something and not even have to have any scars because you know how vain she is, but she’d just look like a copycat if she did that, which she is, you know, I mean it kills me to say it but it’s true.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do! And what with Shiela, I mean, she’s still taking the medication they gave her even though it’s been a year since she was done with the surgery, but who’s going to say anything, right? She just sits there, and then when the family gets together, I mean I love those girls but they just can’t leave each other alone, they just pick and pick and pick at each other, I mean it’s Pammy’s this, Shiela’s that, Shiela’s a junkie, Pammy’s a lesbo, I mean — I didn’t mean to, If you’re one of…”

“I’m not offended, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I mean, people can do what they want, that’s what I’ve always said, but it’s just that people are so *touchy* these days!”

“You should probably tell Jamie not to eat things off the floor.”

“Jamie! Spit, spit it out, here in this kleenex, just, that’s right, here, have a mint, sweetie…”

After two weeks of this the phone calls began. Calls asking for advice with what cd’s young people like, what the lastest dish on Jerry’s new maybe-Jewish girlfriend is, maybe she’d like some of the banana bread left over from the holidays, did she happen to see any of Joey’s buttons because when they got off yesterday there weren’t any on the sweater and maybe if they’re not on the bus they got swallowed so maybe they should call the hospital. Meanwhile, Jamie had taken to cutting out pictures from 18th century autopsy manuals and making collages to get sent as postcards, the organ block removed, the cavity filled with unborn birds curled beneath each other, their eyes like well-bottom silver. The phone unplugged, the mail refused, and all her remaining sick days used up in one eight-day stretch, Rissa hoped the Martins would forget her, go off to bother some other poor sap, but thermoses of soup and homemade cookies left at her doorstep with instructions for battling flu, cold, hypothermia, diphtheria, malaria and nerves made it clear that no quick-change escape act was going to sway away Patricia et al. A high-noon showdown was inevitable, and the morning commuters heading to the office-banks along Kienholz Blvd. were treated to every last comment, wondering if the windows would open wide enough to squeeze through, wondering how long they had before CNN reporters were reading their names over live feed from overhead helicopters.

“Patricia. Jamie. Joey. I expected to see you here.”

“Are you over your sick, dear? Did the mandrake root help?”

“Listen; I know you’re a witch. I know these children are not really children at all, they’re your flask-formed homunculi, your dirty-faced Golems, abominations Eleazar of Worms never dreamed in his most demon-driven hours. And yet you can be so foolish to enter my lair!”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Rissa, but you’re scaring the children…”

“HA! Double-HA! Scare your irreal undead necrotech servants, I think not! But you, sorceress-hag, you know the fear you feel in your hollowed uterus is the fear of your destruction, for I am Rissa, Engineer of Hidden Mirrors and the Universes Carried Therein, which includes the Endless Hallway of Two Facing Mirrors! Step into my circle, devil-enchantress! Stay you behind the yellow line!”

“Enchantress? How do you figure I’m an enchantress? I just capture people’s irritations and uncomfortableness and nervous energy for my…aw, shit.”

“AHA! And now that you have revealed your evil plan to me you are powerless! Right? Isn’t that how it works?”

“It…we haven’t gotten that far…Jamie, what’s the verdict on that?”

“If you have to ask, Grammie, the gig’s up.”

“You’re not a black-boned witch at all, are you?”

“Sure I am, hon! Watch as I call up powers beyond your comprehension!”



“Grammie, Joey says the triple goddess duesn’t really have time for this kinda nonsense.”

“This is perfect, this just figures, I’m gonna flunk the class and get kicked out and the kids, I mean Susan has to be wondering, I think maybe I should sit down.”

“So what, then, am I like your semester project? Aren’t you a bit old for schooling?”

“It’s at the home. At Methusela’s Empire Retirement Home. I’ve been taking this Grey Witchery class, oh, I’ll be all the talk around the circle when this gets out.”

“Your coven is all octogenarian Wiccans? Isn’t fucking with public transportation employees kinda heavy for that scene?”

“That’s what I kept telling myself, but I saw you, and you just had all this negative energy, and it seemed such a shame to just let it hang in the bus, I thought maybe if I could, oh, I don’t even know anymore…”

“Listen, it’s okay, don’t cry, Jamie, get your grandmother some kleenex out of her handbag—”

“—mind the satchets, sweetie—”

“—there, now just relax, I won’t tell anybody anything—”

“—only I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I thought maybe if I brought the kids along, because you look like one of those girls who gets nervous around kids, I mean, no offense or anything, you were just so mad at everything all the time, expecialy when you were drunk, so, I’m sorry, I’m terribly…”

And so, while the bus was parked underneath the I-218 overpass, Rissa and Patricia and her grandchildren (who were initially thrilled to get that much time off school but after so long on the bus they were pretty fed up with the whole gig, even with getting to be weird to people in public) worked out a backup project involving some of Rissa’s abnormal Islamic optics, Angelica mash and faux-foetal tissue (which, in all truth, was really a carved and dyed potato in a jar of mouthwash and mosses), which apparently got high marks and a key spot in the macrame’ knotwork project which gave aid to coven member Kingsuk Nevi, who was battling hyperthyroidism at the time. Rissa, obviously, was fired, and moved back in with her brother Owen, who by this time had been dumped by Ana (who dropped out of school and moved away to ‘get herself together’, or something, Owen said, but he’s not really a trustworthy source on this subject), leaving the two plenty of spare time to think about saving the world.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #