Forget sex on an airplane; inveterate travelers (or at least those on a shoestring) know that the really prestigious transit sex is found on the bus. Greyhound grunting and groaning: it's not the mile-high club; call it the eight-and-a-half-foot high club. With the general aversion to airlines following September 11, and behind-the-wheel blowjobs having become a cliche, sex on the bus might be the final frontier for those who want to screw with speed. I'm not saying the Greyhound is going to be trendy any time soon, but clearly sex on the bus is very, very cutting edge.
Much about Greyhound not only suggests sex but actually encourages it: the long trips with little to do; the packed-in, sweat-soaked bodies and accumulation of feral pheromones; the steady, soft vibration that I, for one, find rather arousing; and the implicit erotics of highway travel (glistening buses entering dark tunnels, the focus on arrival, lingering wafts of Ballard . . . ).
The result is that on-bus boffing is not as uncommon as you might think. Furtive handjobs under tented blankets, blowjobs in the bathroom, sex standing in the stall, me twiddling myself up the leg of my shorts these are the surreptitious standards of Greyhound sex. For the more audacious, there's the back row always the back row a just-wide-enough space to get horizontal and stacked. One driver told me he had seen "any number of couples getting it on back there." He wasn't discomfited by the experience, really; he just wondered "if they'd save me sloppy seconds."
I've ridden the bus tens of thousands of miles in the past two decades, and I always try to sit near the back. Those last three adjoining seats the only place on the bus where you have three together in a row are a petri dish for all types of mischief. Who are the people who occupy this space? If they're not single moms with abundant children, they're attempting to get as far away as possible from authority and its embodied figure, the driver.
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Greyhound, like much of New York City, seems to consider smoking a greater crime than public nookie.
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Gang members, hard drinkers with six-packs or hip flasks, just-released cons and young horny couples all make a beeline for the back seat, hoping to get away with whatever they know is not allowed. The funny thing about the back row is that it's assumed to be a blind spot, that the driver's rear-view mirror can't see back there, or, more accurately, the bus driver isn't completely aware that that's the first place to look for people acting up. Invariably, those twin humps bumping under a poncho elicit a reprimanding shout or unscheduled pullover from the Brylcreemed man in charge.
These days Greyhound, like much of New York City, seems to consider smoking a greater crime than public nookie, so sex offenders aren't likely to get thrown off the bus. They're just scolded and communally exposed if their hickies didn't already do the trick when the driver suddenly pulls onto the shoulder and all just-wakened eyes stare to the back.
Ride the bus long enough, and I guarantee you'll hear about it. One trip, I was slithering up the coastline of Maine and found myself within earshot of two people. They were recounting how they'd gotten away with the deed and gained entry into the eight-and-a-half-foot high club. They had met in Florida, he a slick-looking black kid of nineteen or twenty, she a pocky, heavy-breasted white girl, probably faking eighteen, who said she had three nicknames: Ghetto Queen, Speedy Gonzalez, and Mouth and South. Both of them were traveling to Bangor or further north into the pulp lumber. They were sitting in the back talking to a roofer; I was across the aisle, listening intently. The young guy was showing off, proving that he could act shitty to the girl despite their recent intimacies. "Hey, thanks for the ride; let me know next time you're going to Florida." He turns to the roofer: "You can tell she's from Maine tastes just like lobster. Just a little stinkier." Then, to the girl: "Hey, stop moving your chair back, you're crushing my shit."
"I know your shit, and it ain't all that."
"Couldn't have been too bad since you did it twice."
"Well, it ain't large, I can say that. But it ain't that anyway, it's how you use it, right?" she says, rolling her eyes like a front-row vegan as we pull into another McDonalds.
Archetypal as this encounter may be, a friend of mine told me a story that's likely to trump almost anyone's bus experience. She too met a boy in a bus station; they passed through a few cities together, then had a long layover in Denver.
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What do you say when the fortysomething man in the next seat starts masturbating at 2 a.m.?
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They found themselves talking to a guy who was going to sell them some weed, and agreed to go back to his motel room to smoke up a little and party (note: do not try this at home). Things seemed odd when they got inside the motel: the dealer's girlfriend was asleep in the bed. Instead of smoking them up, the dealer pulled a gun on them and told them to fuck. They tried to hem and haw their eight-hour relationship wasn't quite ready for sex at gunpoint and the dealer started screaming at his girlfriend, "Wake up, honey! We've got company!" She barely turned over, seeming groggy and drugged, and he started slapping her in the face while continuing to shout. This continued, with the dealer pointing the gun back and forth from the couple to the girlfriend, until the latter rolled out of bed and started fighting back. She punched at him, he punched back at her, and in the blue-velvet chaos, my friend and her buddy managed to bolt out the door, unfollowed and with their clothes intact.
My own personal experiences on the bus have on occasion also been somewhat Lynchy but often rather comical. I've watched red-faced, Cheshire-grinning rubes emerge from the bathroom and later seen the condom floating in the lav's blue cess. I've heard telltale muffled groans from behind me, half-buried under conspicuous coughs. I've been propositioned in bus stations (by both prostitutes and men) and perhaps sloughed off an onboard offer or two.
But I have to confess that I've never actually had voluntary sex on the bus. On a trip back from Boston, I met a woman who would become a future girlfriend. (She said she was looking for a new beau, eyed the offerings and took the seat next to mine.) I've flirted unabashedly and been flirted with. And, of course, there has been plenty of the aforementioned self-jiggling, but never any happy endings, or even happy middle chapters.
As for involuntary sex, however, I have been an unwilling participant in the twenty-second row. Once I gave a beer to a guy who was traveling from Tampa to Minneapolis. (Should I have been suspicious that he was only carrying a plastic Winn-Dixie bag as luggage?) He sat next to me on the first leg to Atlanta. A few hours into the night, my new friend started shifting back and forth in his seat. He was apparently trying to slip his right hand down the front of his jeans without unbuttoning them.
Odd enough in itself, that, but soon he seemed to have succeeded. I began to feel his elbow jerking back and forth, thumping me lightly on the chest with each retraction. What do you say when the fortysomething man in the next seat starts masturbating in the darkness at 2 a.m.? Is the bumping accidental or most pointedly purposeful, to make sure you know? Do you approach the driver? And if so, what would you say? ("Uh, sir, I hate to interfere with another person's happiness, but . . . ?") Do you hide out in the bathroom till you guess he'll be done? Do you turn on your reading light and nonchalantly pick up your book?
I'm the silent-if-not-strong type, and I opted for a similar approach: I feigned sleep, trying neither to embarrass Onan nor to give him the satisfaction of sharing his wank. Mimicking snoring without sounding like "heavy breathing," I tried to sit perfectly still, not moving a muscle. While he jerked at his johnson, I became an inert sounding board for the thumps of his elbow on my chest. As for the discharge: I don't know and somehow didn't get around to asking. n°
©2003 Jack Murnighan and hooksexup.com
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