Bus

I go straight to bed that night. When I wake up the next morning, I wake up in a cold sweat at nine and I can’t remember why – probably one of those dumb nightmares where I don’t even know what had scared me so much in dreamland. I stay in bed for a good half hour, tossing and turning with my eyes open. There’s not much of a reason for me to wake up and go about my day normally.

It’s not like I have anywhere to be or anyone to talk to.

There’s nothing stopping me from just sleeping all day and continuing my week like I normally do. When I go to work tomorrow, nobody’s gonna know what happened to me. None of the kids are gonna ask me why I’m in such a shitty mood because I’m always in a shitty mood, and the only thing that’ll be different will be the fact that Mercedes will not want to talk to me.

Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? I fucked up last night and there’s really no way I can undo it. I know I fuck up all the time and screw shit up left and right, whether it’s telling Yuma Middle School that I’m only a bus driver as a last resort, dropping most contact with Carrie for four years, or trusting a nameless substitute bus driver with a gaggle of rambunctious dickheads.

Somehow, this time it feels different. This feels pertinent. Like, directly related to me and Mercedes. I was an outright complete asshole to her rather than just ignoring her or letting the situation simmer at its own rate.

I would jump off a bridge, but a part of me wants to die in a more dignified way. The other part of me thinks that part of me is an idiot, and there’s another little nickel-sized part of me that tells me to sit in my underwear and watch TV for the rest of my horrible life.

I don’t listen to any of those parts. There’s a tiny voice in the back of my head that has been with me ever since tragedy struck my life decades ago, giving me directions that seem clearer than anything at the moment. They’re directions that I’ve followed for years, but never to this extent. What I’m going to do is extreme for me.

I roll out of bed. Pull a decent-looking Black Sabbath shirt on along with an old pair of jeans, grab my weathered low-tops and tie them up, throw my wallet in my pocket, and I grab my car keys and keep them in my hand for the time being. When I open up my phone, I see three missed calls from nobody other than Mercedes. I skip over hearing her probably-angry voicemails and instead dial up the number I’ve taped to my refrigerator – my boss.

A secretary answers and tells me that anything I tell her won’t get through to my boss for a few days, but I tell her I don’t care. I request a week off from work. She says she can’t guarantee anything but that I’ll get emailed if I do manage to get vacation time. She doesn’t ask why I’m taking personal days, and praise the Lord, because I wouldn’t know how to answer.

What’s done is done. I’m free from the bus for a week, and my instinct is telling me to go further.

I walk back into my bedroom and grab a duffel bag and stuff it full of clothes that aren’t falling apart or filthy, headache pills, my SkyPod, shampoo and soap, zip it shut, turn off my phone and cram it in my pocket.

I’m going home. Er, the place I think I’m supposed to call home: Duluth.

I don’t know why, and at this point, I don’t care. I don’t want to be in Yuma right now. In fact, it’s the last thing I need – to linger in a city that I’ve never truly liked, to walk among people who just flat-out suck. I’m stuck trying to think of better reasons as I throw my bag in the backseat of my rusted piss-poor excuse of a car, as I buckle up and start the engine to warm up the dry chill that rattles my bones, but I really just…can’t.

I don’t want to be in Yuma right now. That’s as good as you’re gonna get from me.

Duluth is a constant. You don’t hear about it in the news and Minnesota is one of those states where there’s nothing that really defines us other than a few weird accents here and there. However, Duluth has always been there in my life, and I have a feeling that it’s always going to be there. I can’t shake it loose. It was the start of my life and the end of my teenage years, it was the place I fled to get away from high school. As far as I know, Duluth hasn’t been wiped out by a nuclear bomb or anything. Why not go there? Drive across the country or don’t drive at all. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Honestly, Duluth was horrible and filled with shitty people who gave me shitty times all throughout school, and I don’t even have to tell you at this point that it was where my mom and dad both kicked the bucket, sending Carrie and I spiraling into the home of somebody we hardly knew. As painstaking as the whole experience was, in my point of view right now, it looks like a sunny beach with a nice ocean breeze wafting over the cool sand compared to the blustering white-hot hellhole known as Yuma, Arizona.

I know the way to Duluth; I’ve driven from there once before and I can drive to Duluth just as I please. I have a map in my car for all of the times I’ve wanted to go on vacation but never had the effort to put it into action. I drive for a living. I’m not worried about getting lost or getting into accidents because it’s just never happened before, and it won’t happen this time.

When I leave at ten in the morning, I end up driving for twelve hours. I stop twice at rest stops to take a piss and get a bottle of water from the stupid overpriced vending machines, and once night falls around my car and I have to turn my lights on, once I pull right on the edge of New Mexico into a small town with a few hotels, that’s when I call it a night. My mind is buzzing. I’m so far away from Yuma that it’s strange to not sleep in my own bed, but it’s even better to not be stuck in such a shitty atmosphere with clouds all in my head.

In fact, my mind is clear tonight. It’s crystal-clear as I fall asleep that night and wake up on my own time, ready to drive again, and when I set off the next morning at the same time, I don’t stop when twelve hours pass. I keep driving for six more hours even though my eyes are drooping and the energy drink in my cupholder is almost empty. It’s not even so much about getting away at this point – I have a goddamn destination in mind, and the more time I can spend in it, the better it will be. I know it. I can feel it. I taste it in the freezing air that fills my car when I roll the window down, wanting to wake myself up.

I end up in Duluth in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. I’m barely conscious when I pull a halfassed parking job in a hotel parking lot, clambering to the front desk and requesting a room, and by the time I haul my bag up to my room, my soul is exhausted. I don’t even take off my jacket when I slam face-down on the bed, kick off my shoes, and sleep like a thousand-ton rock on a bed that’s nowhere near mine.

~~~~~~~~

I wake up Tuesday at noon. After a hot shower and a foam cup of shitty hotel coffee, I pull my jacket back on and unwrap the earbuds from my SkyPod. My car keys in hand along with the key card I need to get back into my room, I leave the hotel for the day.

When I start up my car, the heater barely works and it takes ten minutes for it to even become room temperature. I pound the dashboard with my fist and it doesn’t do anything; it doesn’t even rattle around the radio, but I sigh and continue on driving. I’ve made a mental note of where my hotel is so that I know where to drive back when I’m done doing…whatever it is I’m doing.

Well, I don’t really know what I’m doing in Duluth. I came here to get away, but now that I’m here…well…now what?

I zoom past sidewalks in the city, past buildings I visited as a little kid in grade school. People are bundled up in their winter clothes, in scarves and puffy jackets, and here I am in a zip-up hoodie and jeans. I welcome the cold. Yuma never gets too chilly – it’s a nice change of pace to shiver.

I haven’t seen this place since I was eighteen, and fourteen years later, there’s something about it that just seems…off. I don’t have an ingrained map of downtown because I lived in the suburbs, so maybe that’s the reason why I find myself staring at vaguely iconic landmarks for seconds at a time, trying to place a memory to an object. There’s something familiar about it all. Yet somehow, nothing seems the same as it used to be.

I saw Duluth as a launch pad for me into a life of despair, despite my relative happiness when I was thirteen and younger. You don’t choose to be born somewhere; your parents didn’t ask you in the womb if you wanted to be born in a bathtub or in a hospital. So why do we hold on to such a trivial thing as a hometown?

If I had a say on my birth from my adult point of view, I probably would’ve chosen to be born straight into a dumpster. As a kid I’d probably want to have been born in Detroit or something. Why Duluth? Why the hell did my parents settle here of all places? There’s nothing to do, nothing to see. I’m practically in Canada, for Christ’s sake. A few miles north and I’d need a passport.

When people ask me what my hometown is, I’ve always said Duluth, Minnesota. Lake Superior in my backyard, the Twin Ports, the huge-ass aquarium. Stuff that’s been drilled into my head as a kid as landmarks that I’d always be proud of, things I’d brag about seeing firsthand whenever someone asked where the hell Duluth even was. Way back when, right after Sal got killed and I inherited his stupid apartment, I even hung up a badly-printed photo of the skyline on the wall. Years later I took it down. There was no reason to keep it up if I hardly ever thought about Duluth anymore.

I guess I can understand why I don’t really think about Minnesota anymore. Everything that has happened to me in this city has been for the worse. It has never treated me kindly. It was only when Sal offered his companionship in Yuma that things have ever really been slightly positive. Even when I visited Carrie for her graduation, it still happened when I was living in Yuma.

I’ve learned how to be even more independent and thrive as a single person despite the whole fucking world insisting that I group up with anybody who’s remotely like me. I realized that being a cashier at Mal-Wart and having to act like I give a shit about the rudest assholes on earth was far less than I deserved, despite knowing that I’m a piece of shit and I hardly deserve anything. (As far as I’m concerned, nobody deserves that unless they’re one of those rude assholes.) I learned that even though children are the scum of the earth, I’m a decent bus driver and I haven’t gotten in too much trouble yet.

Duluth is my home. It’s the city I came from. So why does it feel so foreign, and why am I getting lost downtown? Why the fuck am I driving in circles just trying to get back to my stupid hotel since that’s where my headache pills are?

Maybe I don’t have a home. Maybe none of us do. Your birthplace means nothing. You make up your conceptions of “home” as you grow up and realize that every place you’ve ever been in is made of everything toxic. You pick and choose bits and pieces of everywhere you’ve ever lived in order to come up with a mosaic of comfort that you can’t truly experience ever again without leaving your own mind.

I never considered seeing Yuma as my home. There’s nobody for me there, even though it would be different if Sal were still here and if I didn’t fuck things over with Mercedes. I have a stable job doing one thing I do best – drive – and it’s a trade-off, having to deal with the little shits I chauffer around. Even the dinky apartment I’ve lived in for fourteen years seems like just another hole in the wall, despite knowing the weathered walls like the wrinkles in my fingers.

You can come from a place and you can know another place better than your own self. It’s something completely different to actually like a place.