It was late, and I was alone on the bus until he boarded and took a seat across the aisle.  Settling in, he reached into his hip pocket and took out a glossy, digest-sized giveaway guide to the local strip clubs.

Thumbing through, he paused to linger on a two page spread, a series of tacky shots documenting the contortions of an especially limber dancer folding herself up like a mash note on the floor of an anonymous black painted stage.

Catching a glimpse of me over his shoulder, he held the booklet up where he was sure I could see it and pushed out his pale tongue, burying his face in the pictures and pretending to lick the pages excitedly.  He was so shameless, it was impossible not to laugh along with him.

I guessed he could see, but his kept his eyes squeezed shut, as some blind people do; it was apparent keeping his eyes constantly squinted or closed was his nature.  And though he didn’t have a tooth in his head, he managed to resemble the singer Al Jarreau, right down to the performer’s trademark ebullience.  So, a toothless Al Jarreau, blind but ebullient and licking pictures of strippers.

He turned another page, stopping on a picture of a chesty blonde overflowing her bikini top; it was an ad for a topless place in a nearby industrial park.  He gently traced the outline of her breasts with his finger. 

“That’s what I like!”  He announced in a deep, froggy voice, then qualified it:  “But I like ’em when they’re real.”

“Good luck finding any of those at a strip club,” I offered.

“I ain’t ever even been to a strip club!” 

“No?”

“Nope.  I know I couldn’t go.  Because if I did, looking wouldn’t be enough!  I’d have to leave and go home!”  He turned a few more pages.  “White women, black women…  Everybody’s okay with me.  Lord God made all of us!”

He furrowed his brow, thinking hard.  “What’s the name of the place, it’s like a farmer’s market, people buy food there?  That’s where I came from before.  I saw so many beautiful women there!  Women as beautiful as this.”  He pointed to the porn star on the cover.  “I asked one lady, ‘Is this Heaven?  Have I died and gone to Heaven?  Because this is what it must be like!’

“This lady, she was so beautiful.  I went up and I told her, ‘A man could wait his whole life to be with a woman as beautiful as you.  His whole life!’  Her face got so flushed.  She loved to hear that!” 

He continued browsing the pictures before selecting a full-page ad of a stripper in a thong to present to me.  The model was bent at the waist, and the photograph foreshortened her big, round ass to dramatic effect. 

“Look at that!”  He hooted, petting the image.  “I have a girlfriend, but she’s not like this!”  He closed the guide as if it had become too much for him and turned in his seat to better face me.  “I had a girl – Yolanda - she had those great big calves and thick, solid thighs…  Whoo!”  He shook his head.

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know what happened to her,” he said, genuinely uncertain.  He thought a moment.  “I was on medication then, so I couldn’t even fuck her.  All I could do was lick her pussy and kiss her titties.  She would say, ‘Now I know that’s not all you’re gonna do!’  Ha ha ha!  I wish I could find her again.  I’m not on that medication anymore.  Nowadays, I get hard when the wind blows!”

He picked up the book and resumed his admiration of the woman in the ad. 

“I’ve never paid for sex before.  I never had to.  But if it was a girl like that?  I would pay.  I would pay $500 to have sex with her all night.  But,” he insisted, “it would be all night!  I would tell her I was going to fuck her until she was coming out of her ears!  I would say to her, ‘When I leave in the morning, I want to be drained!’”  He seemed very pleased at the notion.

“I think I’d like to be in X-rated movies,” he said.  “That’s the job for me!”

“You think so?”

“I’ve never had any complaints,” he said philosophically.

He wasn’t subtle, but he was clearly so tickled by his own wild fantasies, it was hard to be offended. And we were the only passengers on an otherwise empty bus, after all.

We got out at Hollywood and Highland.

“I need to go to La Brea,” he said, “to catch the 212.  I can get the 217 and get off at La Brea, or I can walk from here to the bus stop there.”

“You know you can catch the 212 here, too,” I said.

“You can?  I didn’t even know that!  That’s perfect.  Say, do you smoke cigarettes?”  He asked.

“No, I don’t have any, sorry.”

“That’s okay!  I just bought a pack of Marlboros, you could have one if you smoked.”  I got hit up for cigarettes by strangers at bus stops every day, but that was the first time I’d had one offered to me. 

He pulled the pack from his pocket and stuck one into his lips, splitting it at the filter.  He held the flame to it, but the air kept escaping through the tear and the light wouldn’t take.  He didn’t seem to notice.

“So what do you do with your days?”  I asked him as we walked together to the stop.

“Well, today I went to see my attorney, about my lawsuit.  It’s a million dollar lawsuit.  I agreed he gets one-third.  I think one-third of a million is three hundred thousand dollars?”

“Close enough.”

“Kleinman and Morris.  It’s a famous law firm.  Have you heard of it?”

“No, but I don’t really know law firms.”

“Kleinman and Morris.  My lawyer’s in charge, he has a bunch of other lawyers work for him.  It’s a whole office full of lawyers, and I get the boss!”  He considered it a minute.  “You know about Jewish people, right?  That’s how I know he’s going to work hard to help me.  Because then he’ll get three hundred thousand dollars!”

“Nobody doesn’t like getting paid,” I said.

“That’s right!  He’ll get that, and I’ll get what’s left over.”

“What’s your lawsuit over?”

“You know where Hollywood Boulevard and Western is?  Down there?”  He pointed.  “That’s where it happened.  It was on Hollywood Boulevard at Western.  I was hit by a _____.” It was a noisy night and his missing teeth made the word completely unintelligible.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You were hit by a what?”

“A ambalence,” he repeated.

“You were hit by an ambulance?”

He nodded.  “My lawyer says I was lucky; because I’m a forty-six year old man, I didn’t have to be wearing a bicycle helmet.  If I had been eighteen or under, it would have been against the law to not have one on.  I wouldn’t have a case.”

“Was it racing off somewhere?”

“No, she just wasn’t paying attention, because she was talking on her cell phone.  Six people saw her and wrote down the license plate number.”

“She hit-and-runned you?”

“She hit-and-runned me.  I don’t think she knew she even hit me!”

“What happened?”

“I was riding my mountain bike along on Hollywood Boulevard.  I was trying to get up on the sidewalk, and she came around the corner and hit me.  I spun around a bunch of times and cracked my head on the concrete.  My head was split right open.”

“Man!” I said, picturing the scene. “Well, at least people saw it.  And they all took down the license plate? That’s six angels, right there.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “God was with me.”

He bent forward, blinking at the traffic. “Look at that!” He cried, squinting at a beautifully maintained Dodge Charger from the late 60s that was paused at the light.

“When I win my lawsuit, I want to get a 2007 Bentley.  But I like those cars, too!  Muscle cars.  Those old Chargers, or a Camaro, or a Chrysler Columbus…  I know a lot about cars.  You know the Lamborghini, the new Lamborghini, has a jet engine in it?”

“A jet engine?” I asked skeptically.

“Oh, maybe not a jet engine, not the same size as the planes have.  Those are really big.”

“Maybe it works the same way?”

“Maybe that’s what it is.” 

He surveyed the trendy clothing retailers in the mall behind us.  “You know, these stores around here, they’re expensive.  You go shopping in them, and pretty soon you won’t have any money left!  That’s not where my money’s gonna go.  I’ll invest in property!”

“That sounds like a smart idea.”

“I’ll go to government auctions, buy a property there.  Then fix it up myself!  You know how Mexicans are real good with carpentry?  What I’ll do is hire a bunch of Mexicans to fix it up with me.  And I’ll take real good care of them!  I’ll pay ’em good, and have good lunches for everybody.  I’ll buy them cigarettes.  I’ll say, ‘What kind of cigarettes do you like to smoke?  Marlboros?  Camels?’  I’d treat them like they were my own brothers!  Because you have to treat people the way you want to be treated.”  He suddenly noticed an average looking mocha-skinned girl in jeans a few feet away. He walked away from me and up to her without hesitating.

“Hey girl,” he said.  “You really got it going on, you know that?  What’s your name?”  She ignored him.

He tried to adopt a casual attitude, staying near her and leaning back against the post that held the buses’ timetable; but the thin pole wasn’t wide enough to provide any real support, and his shoulder slipped off.  He had to catch himself to keep from falling.  Recovering, he walked back to my side.

“She knows she’s fine,” he told me.  “She’s probably got a man she’s going home to, that’s why she won’t give me any action.”  He was very understanding about it.

“You gotta try,” he told me.  “You see a pretty girl, you gotta talk to her.  Women like to talk to me.  They’ll flirt with me and play, but then you want to say, ‘Let’s go home and get out of these clothes.’  It’s got to work sometime!”

“It’s a numbers game,” I offered.

“Ha!”  He laughed.  “You’re a playboy, too!  I can tell!  You probably got some good pussy waiting on you right now!    His closed eyes affected his sense of personal space, and he tended to move in closer each time he spoke.  I didn’t mind; it meant he didn’t notice me politely stepping back, either.

“I have never been with a white woman,” he continued, “but I would like to!  I think all women are beautiful, I don’t care what color they are.

“Sometime, I want to go to the clubs, like the clubs here on Hollywood Boulevard.  When I win my lawsuit, I’ll get all dressed up in nice clothes and go to the clubs and meet some of those big, beautiful white women.  Mexican women, black women…”

His eyes didn’t need to be open for me to see a faraway look in them.

“That’s the 217 coming now,” I said, looking down the street.  “You gonna take that to La Brea or wait here for the 212?”

“I’ll get on and ride to La Brea with you,” he said.  It was only about three blocks.

There weren’t many seats open, but we found two by the back door.  The evening buses always seemed dirtier at the end of the workday, and this one smelled of foreign takeout and homelessness.

“You smell that?”  He asked me, putting his nose in the air.  A few seats down and across the aisle, a heavy, noticeably unshowered white man wearing several layers of clothes glanced back over his shoulder, as if awaiting an insult.

“Somebody,” my companion sniffed, not even noticing the other man. “…Smells good on this bus!”  He took a deep breath, analyzing it.  “That’s ‘Eternity,’ by Calvin Klein.  Somebody’s wearing ‘Eternity.’  I like that!”

La Brea came up quickly, and he rose to go.  He offered me a handshake and I took it.

“It was nice to meet you,” he said.  “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.  And if I do, we’ll go to a strip club!” 

He leaned in, eyes squeezed shut, still holding my hand.  “Don’t worry,” he assured me, lowering his voice.  “I’ll treat you.”

Probably he winked.

copyright,  © 2007 Wyatt Doyle

for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.