A greyhound romance

Before I knew America wasn’t for me I would transverse across it on the poor man’s limo. On one of these journeys heading west out towards the plains of Montana I met a girl. In the dark neitherworld which is the back of the bus, beyond the transvestites and the worlds straightest homosexual, she lay. She lay like some ’30’s diva sipping at a coke with pouty aristocratic non-chalance.. She was the Queen of white gangbangers, or wiggers’ as my friends in school had like to call them. She had perfect porcelain white skin and a wave of black mall rat hair flying about like an unkempt brush fire. Something about her intrigued me and so, uncharacteristically ballsy, I joined her in the back of the bus and struck up a conversation. She had two kids in Florida, she told me. She had left them with their father who enjoyed hitting her from time to time. That’s why she had left. She would come back for them, she said, “as soon as I can take care of them”. Meanwhile the least favorite daughter by her account probably lay sleeping in the closet for some petty offense. She was going to Washington to meet her other boyfriend, the twin brother to her children’s father in Florida. “I’m gonna have both of ‘em,” she giggled. I told her why not as long as the kids were looked after. Conversation died having very little common interests to fuel the fire and so I just lay there with her. Hormones, intrigue, and my craving for adventure had taken the best of me. ‘Hell who knows’, I thought, ‘maybe the perfect kiss lays in all of that Mall rat splendor’. It didn’t, but who knows. As the bus sped through the night I held her and petted her and dreamed of her in the most ideal of situations. My tenderness seemed to set her back. Later she would even admit to me that she thought I was gay. I held her and kissed her smoky hair and played games reminesant of high school. She just lay there, purring and smiling. She would stare at my grin like an addict transfixed on junk and then ask repeatedly why it was there. As dawn crept in from the tinted windows I finally graced her with an answer. “This is just so strange. Strange for me is fun”, she just laughed, probably thinking I was a bit strange as well. I suppose I am.