The Big Picture

When I was learning to be a school bus driver, our instructors talked often of the big picture.  It was especially common during on-the-road training.  An instructor would lean across the aisle and point to the windshield.  “Remember the big picture.”  Something abnormal or noteworthy was ahead. 

The big picture was meant to sharpen perception of roadway unpredictability:  low-hanging branches, potholes, lane mergers, road construction, accidents, broken stoplights, standing water, fallen wires, erratic drivers.  We were being trained to avoid problems through early detection. 

I took to dispensing the line to unfortunate souls in my vicinity.  “Think of the big picture,” I’d intone knowingly whenever something didn’t go according to plan.  It wasn’t always as annoying as it sounds.  After I discovered a lump while showering, the big picture became a silly source of relief.  My wife would complain about her workday. 

“Remember my huevos, though,” came the response.  “Big picture.”  

When I complained, she’d say, “At least you have both of your balls.  Big picture.”  

Although doctors declared the lump benign, it lives on as an uncouth metaphor of life’s more pressing matters. 

Then I got an idea.  “The big picture” would make a tremendous self-help book.  I could title it something like The Big Picture:  Life Lessons from Dr. School Bus Driver.  It would be the kind of shlock that corporate media like to promote and that rubes would buy by the boxful.  Potholes are a metaphor for relationship troubles before finding the perfect mate.  Tree branches are unexpected career obstructions on the way to spectacular prosperity.  Lane mergers signify familial closeness or new beginnings.  Erratic drivers are haters trying to disrupt self-fulfillment.  Standing water means a calm, collected soul.  Shit, I could squeeze two or three books out of all the detritus on Northern Virginia’s roadways. 

My wife suggested turning the metaphor into a kid’s book, an even better idea.  A successful children’s series is a goldmine.  For years I helped pay the mortgage on Mo Willems’ brownstone.  Billy the School Bus (or some such) goes on silly daily adventures, teaching the youth unexpected lessons.  My inability to draw would be part of the charm. 

In the end, I just can’t do it.  I’m too attached to the idea of writing as an avocation rather than a source of wealth.  Maximizing earning potential by debasing an art so obliging of catharsis seems, I don’t know, sacrilegious?  Cynical?  Ungrateful?  The point of good writing is to illuminate, not exploit, anguish and vulnerability.  I can’t even bring myself to use Patreon.  And so I proceed as usual in contented stupidity. 

The metaphor can still be useful, though.  The big picture.  Potholes signify the physical damage from oppression.  Tree branches are, let’s say, the security state, always growing and encroaching on public space.  Erratic drivers can represent any number of things:  dippy politicians, social climbers, aunts and uncles, cocky kleptocrats. 

And the standing water?  That’s easy.  Standing water is the near-future of low-lying land on this rotting planet. 

*****

In August I began my second year as a school bus driver.  Getting back into the seat after a nine-week break tested the limits of my fortitude.  I was shocked by my resistance to the new school term.  Summer break was shorter than what I enjoyed as a professor, but more relaxing—no nattering errands to worry about, no residual pettiness cluttering the inbox.  Giving up an enjoyable routine was only part of the reason I dreaded returning to work.  The main reason is because two weeks before reporting I visited South Africa. 

I’m still lukewarm to public life, but when members of the academic freedom committee at the University of Cape Town invited me to deliver the 2019 TB Davie Memorial Lecture, I couldn’t shelve my curiosity.  After sitting on the invitation for a rude amount of time, I finally accepted.  South Africa’s inverted academic calendar eliminated work as an excuse to decline.  I would have to overcome my timidity. 

These days, moving through the sprawling tillage of modernity, I fluctuate between detached contentedness and immobilization generated by moments of tremendous sadness.  South Africa fucked up the equilibrium.  Less than an hour in Cape Town, a geological miracle, and my brain was transforming bad memories into wistfulness. 

Table Mountain is the avatar of a million marketing efforts, but no photo does it justice.  In person it transcends portraiture, an ascending façade of sand- and mudstone, topped during my visit with plush, opaque rainclouds providing relief from a multiyear drought.  Those clouds periodically tumbled down the cliff face, dousing the city with showers before dissipating to reveal the foggy plateau.  The ocean is visible in almost every view, a reminder that we’re at the tip of an enormous continent.  All in all, it makes for a pleasant winter. 

Cape Town isn’t compact.  The metropolitan area covers empty spaces between townships, suburbs, and urban sprawl.  The architecture of colonization, Apartheid, racism, neoliberalism, and resistance is conspicuous in the mixture of abodes, reliable emblems of economic class:  Dutch colonial estates, Tudor bungalows, glass skyscrapers, tin shacks, stucco duplexes, modern condos, shipping containers.  A stunning array of flora envelops the structures:  candlewood, date palms, beech, stinkwood, turkey berry, willow, red pear, and Cape Saffron, a squat but lush specimen with deep green leaves and a rust-colored trunk. 

On the way to the hotel, I remembered how pleasant it can be to travel, how we can reproduce a sense of belonging through provisional displacement.  I was fascinated by Cape Town before arriving on the continent, starting at the boarding gate in Istanbul, where I saw a large crowd of people who weren’t Black.  A day later, I was trying to make sense of social relations too complicated for my range of comprehension.  I couldn’t locate a stable understanding of the place.  I was a tourist fighting a backlog of simulacra, images of land and peoplehood extracted to the North and transmitted to the living rooms, bookshelves, and movie theaters of audiences eager to validate the superiority of their vanilla lives—verisimilitude as a profit scheme standing in for authenticity.  It felt impossible to distinguish between visual immediacy and novelties of the colonial imagination.  In turn, I contemplated my own disaggregation.  Africa once again became the setting for a Westerner’s psychological reckoning. 

With a few hours to spare before obligations, I napped and showered, then popped half an Ativan before heading to the lobby, trying and failing to recall the etiquette of doctoral-level small talk.  While waiting for my hosts to arrive, I stared through a picture window at the hotel garden, its shrubbery and flower beds streaked with rain, mesmerized by these forms of life that insist on growing amid tons of invisible poison.  I could have left in that moment and been happy with the trip.  

My hosts arrived and greeted me warmly.  I was nervous, spastic, but eased into the conversation.  A few hours later, I was satisfied, animated, pleasantly infuriated all over again by the machinations of campus Zionists and their managerial allies.  I liked the company, people who had much to teach me about South Africa and the world more broadly, fast-track friends versed in the magic of Southern hospitality.  I stared at the outline of Table Mountain from my balcony late that night, trying to process a terrible realization:  I had thoroughly enjoyed the evening. 

The pleasure didn’t abate.  The following day, I seized the microphone without hesitation, reading from text I composed over months in piecemeal clauses at four in the morning.  I slept heavily after the festivities.  But in the background was the job I had left behind, and would soon resume, a reminder that the outing was only a temporary revival of an exanimate past.  I began to resent the job, suddenly a tether to unadorned reality, reminding me that no transatlantic fantasy could erase the circumstances that made me worth inviting in the first place.  

I returned to Virginia having forfeited the illusions of freedom I worked so hard to create. 

I spent the next few days in a state of dread.  The parking lot; the streets; the stoplights; the subdivisions; the school bus itself—all were abstractions, no longer emblems of a halting catharsis, but reflections of a trauma I had voluntarily solicited.  Cape Town:  first my respite, now a geography of torment.  It’s bad news when delusion is a form of stress. 

In-service for work arrived, something of a day school for bus drivers.  Five hours of information sessions.  Then we selected our routes for the coming year.  I’d earned enough seniority to not be choosing last.  After route selection:  dry runs.  This is when most of us get on the buses for the first time in two months and figure out where we’ll be going on day one.  I approached my bus as an old friend with whom I no longer care to socialize.  It’s a clunker, dinged and faded, with torn seats and a spiderweb crack on the front window, riding a chassis that clinks and clanks at any appreciable change of speed, but it’s a blessedly reliable machine that I know more intimately than any other inanimate object. 

The bus had an antiseptic smell, processed lemon and ammonium hydroxide, mixed with the balm of stagnant humidity.  I botched the pre-trip, having little recollection of the process I once studied so hard to memorize.  I tucked my left-rights under a dashboard knob and eased into traffic.  The bus was still hot after a few moments.  Air conditioner:  busted.  Heat level:  global warming. 

I pulled next to a highway ramp, sweat dotting my bald head like bubble wrap, and gunned the engine, turning sharply to catch a breeze from the driver’s window.  Wind rushed into the compartment. Sheets of paper flapped into the stairwell.  I barreled toward the flow of cars and grinned at the wonks I had bullied into the center lane.  I was back in the seat.  It felt fucking terrific. 

*****

When I was six or seven, my mom, figuring my bookishness might translate into something useful, bought me a microscope.  It was a pale pastel blue with eggshell finish and a weighted base, a beautifully cheap piece of equipment.  I immediately got to work. 

“I want to look at a penny.” 

“A…penny?”  She shook her head and left the room.  (In retrospect, she was probably looking for the receipt.) 

She returned, penny in hand.  I clipped it under the screen and selected the biggest lens.  Peering through the eyepiece, I saw only darkness.  After tinkering with some knobs and switching lenses, I got the same result. 

I had imagined something grander, a glistening copper plane stretching past the limit of my vision, the dips and ridges of Lincoln’s face a topographic map of honor and prosperity.  Still nothing tangible appeared.  I soon grew bored of the darkness and returned to paperbacks.  I couldn’t comprehend microbes or particles.  The things I wanted to see weren’t visible with technology.  The next day, my mom offered to take me to the library.  I never saw the microscope again. 

*****

Figuring out the radio is one of the hardest parts of school bus driving.  One catches on quickly, but we received virtually no training for it, so proficiency comes through inference and practice.  (Botching a call transmitted to hundreds of people isn’t fun.)  Like every transportation industry, we use dozens of “signals” and numerical codes.  The point is to minimize clutter.  We also want to prevent students from understanding the transmissions, especially during an emergency. 

I’m kind enough to provide translations.  If I see a kid listening to the chatter, I’ll explain what’s happening. 

“Ha!  These guys are gossiping and don’t realize they’re on the main channel.” 

“Ooh, this one is juicy.  Two buses hit each other.” 

“There was a fight at the middle school.  Everybody’s leaving late.” 

“They don’t have enough drivers and nobody wants to volunteer.” 

“Accident on the beltway.  All four lanes are closed.  Ouch.” 

“Somebody’s causing trouble on her bus and she wants the police to come.” 

“This dude doesn’t know how to use the radio.  The dispatcher is about to yell at him.” 

We can receive private calls, too.  A private call is never good:  it means a random drug test, timesheet problems, reminder of a meeting, surprise bus inspection, a request (“request”) to cover another run, a summons to the main office, or some other thing that doesn’t involve being left alone. 

The radio is a specialized lexicon for the supposedly unskilled.  It exists to efficiently disburse information, but most of it is noisy interference subjecting us to public judgment.  It otherwise functions to collectivize individual anxiety.  I diffuse the stress of hearing about everybody’s problems by reverting to previous habits.  Teachers teach, especially with a captive audience.  It’s impossible for me to not translate esoteric verbiage for the benefit of students meant to be excluded. 

*****

A couple of weeks into the school year and I was over the uncertainty of South Africa, although the experience illustrated that no amount of bitterness or cynicism will untether me from my original avocation.  It’s a strange sort of liminality, exile combined with disgust, which distorts my sense of belonging.  The school bus or the campus?  I can function in both spaces, but neither feels comprehensive, permanent; contradiction is the only steady variable. 

I remind myself why I pursued this line of work.  Movement.  Contact.  Anonymity.  No political cliques.  No hermetic architecture.  No dress code. 

Unpredictability was also an attraction.  I knew it wouldn’t be the kind of gig to bog down in stasis.  Drivers deal with youngsters apt to moodiness and rebellion.  A kindergartner can get a random nosebleed.  The entire bus can erupt into a paperball fight.  Students can throw objects at passing cars.  Sixth-graders can catcall a woman sunbathing on her lawn.  People up front can record the driver obliviously singing “Be My Baby.”  (All of these things actually happened, by the way.) 

It’s been a steep learning curve for somebody accustomed to college students.  Middle schoolers are the biggest challenge.  Many drivers have difficulty with elementary school children, but I’m good with the age group, know lots of tricks to manage their attention.  Doing so requires serious energy, though.  High schoolers tend to get lost in teenage drama and/or smart phones.  Despite their reputation as hellions with ill-developed brains, I’ve found them to be polite and thoughtful. 

But middle schoolers flummox me.  Being my normal easygoing self is an invitation to chaos, impossible to curtail once unleashed.  Playing the role of stern bossman hasn’t worked, either.  (It’s an unnatural conceit for me, something I’m sure the students easily recognize.)  After finding numerous globs of gum stuck to the bus floor, I decided to raise the issue before releasing them to school one morning.  I stood at the front of the aisle and addressed them with what I imagined to be a glare and a snarl. 

“Pay attention,” I barked.  “I’ve noticed gum stuck to the floor of this bus numerous times.  Anyone care to guess how the county gets rid of gum on the floor?” 

Most of the students tried to slouch out of view.  “They make you clean it?” one of them finally ventured. 

“Correct.  I get down on my knees and scrape it up, which is as disgusting as it sounds.  So I’m gonna make this simple for you,” I finished, using a line I’d practiced in my head throughout the run, “If you insist on making this bus ride unpleasant for me, I promise that I’ll make it unpleasant for you.”  I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes as they filed off the bus. 

After the PM run with the same students, I did my usual check of the bus.  On the floorboard between the two back seats, like a glistening symbol of karmic putty, was a fresh wad of white chewing gum. 

Beyond the appeal of unpredictability, I liked the idea of earning a living beyond an economy of self-absorption in spaces (academe, journalism, social media) where participants monetize a brand and sell banality to co-ideologues and cultural influencers.  I don’t want to see the world from the perspective of Westerners who travel to sites of conflict in the news (that is, places where the US ruling class is organizing its greed) and put their faces in the foreground of the action.  They become avatars of the story, translating the misfortune of foreigners into self-indulgence, and thus serve as handmaids of the elite no matter how adamantly they claim to inhabit virtuous cartographies.  Information equals extraction.  Content is currency.  Value accrues in service to the content’s producer.  News is birthed from self-invention.  What audiences come to understand as an event exists only because of the interloper’s latent power.  The entire production is a setup for narcissistic grotesquerie. 

How to write in these conditions of exploitation?  Where to travel for stories that don’t bleed the locals?  If I knew the answers, I’d happily share them.  My compromise was to derive material from necessary motion, a new and novel livelihood nearly absent as a setting in both fiction and nonfiction.  I post essays to a basic WordPress design, without worrying over deadlines and editorial politics.  I barely know how to operate the site:  I can upload and edit entries and create a thumbnail picture; everything else is a mystery.  I dislike paywalls and don’t really care about page clicks.  My goal is to create a decent body of writing in a space conducive to experimentation.  That writing will be seen or ignored according to the wishes of its audience. 

Driving frees me from the economic stresses of a putrid industry.  Writing allows me to extract creative value from wage labor.  It might be a stretch to say it’s good, but liminality isn’t altogether bad, either. 

*****

Last June, two days before the end of the school year, we had our final team meeting in a middle school’s multipurpose room.  The period was hectic.  Schools let out at irregular times.  Afternoons were filled with thunderstorms.  Kids were amped up.  We had to deep-clean our buses and submit them to inspection. 

The entire two-hour meeting consisted of a team-building exercise.  (I like my supervisors—they’re bus drivers, too, and that’s important—but a team-building exercise at the end of the year?)  I soon realized it was their first time curating that sort of effort. 

The supervisors passed out balloons and asked each of us to take a post-it note.  We were to write down a question meant to illuminate something meaningful about a colleague and stuff it into the balloon. The task required multiple explanations.  “Questions?” everyone asked.  We inflated our balloons with varying levels of success (easy to tell who was involved in their children’s birthday parties).  Some of my colleagues seemed confused, which in turn caused me confusion.  It was obvious what we were getting ready to do.  Academe prepared me well for hot air.  

We stood in a large circle, about 75 of us, and punched the balloons into the middle.  A great mess of them descended onto the floor.  Once we grabbed a new balloon, the supervisors instructed us to burst it and retrieve the note, something most of us performed with glee.  As my colleagues stomped their catch, creating a barrage of popping sounds, I retreated into a corner.  I didn’t want to be exposed when a SWAT team kicked in the door. 

I unfolded my slip of paper.  “Why u do this job?” 

I tried to think of a short, diplomatic answer as we returned to our seats.  “All right, we’ll start over here,” one of the supervisors said, pointing across the room.  A middle-aged woman squinted and read, “When do we select summer routes?” 

The room filled with nods and murmurs.  “We’ll answer that later,” the supervisor responded.  “Who’s next?” 

The person to the woman’s left held up his note.  “Why…not…more…overtime?” he sputtered.  More nods and murmurs, louder this time. 

“Okay, everyone,” the supervisor interjected.  “We’re not looking for technical questions.  We want things that can tell us about each other.” 

“But what about overtime?” somebody shouted from the back. 

The supervisor ignored him and pointed to the next reader. 

“Will we have raises next year?” 

I felt badly for the supervisor as she struggled to repel a facepalm.  “Listen, guys, I’ll answer these questions at the end of the meeting for anybody interested.”  She tried her luck at a different table. 

“In what city were you born?” an elderly man read in halting English.  My question.  I schemed ways to get credit for putting us on the right track. 

“Um, yes,” the man answered.  “I was born near a place called Ho Chi Minh City.  It used to be called Saigon.  When we kicked out the Americans, it became Ho Chi Minh City.  I’m from there.”  I was happy to be on this guy’s team. 

The exercise continued with a preponderance of technical questions.  When it was time to answer “Why u do this job?” I muttered something about choosing a field that seemed fun and unpredictable.  I then stuffed the note into the back pocket of my jeans and daydreamed alongside my coworkers about all that had gone unanswered. 

*****

The little ones like to play show and tell while boarding.  They stop next to my seat and display new shoes, drawings, toys, trading cards, electronics, anything, really, that facilitates self-esteem.  I respond with proper ebullience.  My self-esteem isn’t isolated from theirs. 

I never expected the shy, stuttering boy to upset convention.  He’s the picture of gawky, prepubescent childhood:  grungy hair, patchwork teeth, gangly posture, spindly legs.  “My-my-my father is waiting outside,” he tells me every afternoon. 

“Go say hi to him, then.”  The boy has no idea I’m being rude. 

He stopped in front of me one morning with an unusual contraption.  “An, um, a m-microscope,” he announced.  It looked brittle, more toy than utensil, lovely for the breadth of its simplicity. 

“What do you want to look at?”

“B-b-bugs and stuff.” 

“Be careful with it, now.  Don’t let it get damaged on the bus.” 

He pressed the microscope against his chest and ambled toward his seat.  I mentally walked alongside him, picturing the space from the perspective of its passengers, carried along to buildings that will be much larger in memory than their physical stature.  The little boy had enlightened the middle-aged man.  I wasn’t completely foolish nearly 40 years ago to imagine an item of small value as a grand object; I had merely stumbled into a conception of history that I wouldn’t understand for another 35 years.  An event isn’t measured by size, but by gravity.  Consider the enormity of diseased and emaciated babies, of dead Palestinian children in ice cream freezers, of teenagers conscripted into slavery for the pleasure of wealthy men, of centuries of civilization predicated on abuse and debasement:  amplifying the particles of human life requires no scientific machinery. 

*****

It’s rare that school bus drivers make the news, unless one has been negligent or unlucky, but a few weeks ago I read about a 71-year-old driver in Minnesota who declines to greet his Central American passengers with a customary “good morning.”  A devotee of Donald Trump, the driver won’t confess to racist inclinations.  He instead cites tradition, language, crime, demographics, and economic anxiety—all the things, in other words, that incline people to racism. 

Although the story lacks the sensationalism of a multivehicle accident, exotic roadkill, or missing children, it gets at something fundamental to the peculiar culture of school transportation.  It’s not normal in most professions for a perfunctory greeting to symbolize competence.  For school bus drivers, though, the banality of a mechanical “good morning” is deeply important. 

The act conveys meaningful information to students:  I acknowledge you; I care about your safety; I won’t judge you by language or appearance; everyone deserves a platitude; you are welcome here.  The act can subtly do more complex work, too.  I don’t want your day to be filled with unhappiness; I’d like to help put you in the right mood to learn; I too dread this journey to school; (try to enjoy it); I’ll be waiting for you at the end of the day.  That simple greeting, so often a formality, can be a critical lesson in the tacit power of everyday communication. 

The greeting is different in the shadows of a street side than it is in the lobby of a commercial building because we’re not carting children to random destinations, but to places entrusted with their welfare, capable of producing both happiness and trauma.  And we’re largely invisible.  The conveyance, not the driver, attracts and occupies attention.  The act of speaking, then, reassures the children that they aren’t anonymous organisms in a mechanized apparatus. 

Withholding formalities can be disorienting because we’re attached to them as social conventions (nothing becomes conventional without a meaningful origin).  The driver in Minnesota fails the children he’s entrusted to safeguard because his silence excludes them from the dignity of a civic life.  He communicates a politics through that silence, one the children easily understand.  They begin their school day anxious that they don’t belong, that they’re aliens and interlopers, unwanted, distrusted—feelings added to extant barriers of class and language.  This stuff cultivates insecurity and self-doubt.  There’s your achievement gap, articulated in the silences of vulgar nostalgia. 

The driver’s version of that nostalgia is especially toxic.  He’s beholden to myths of progress and forward motion—he can’t do his job without creating movement—and yet he’s immobilized by visions of an archaic past, one that can be remembered as utopian only by people who enjoyed its malignancy.  I don’t feel sorry for him.  The children he ignores deserve whatever empathy we’re liable to offer.  The driver is good for one thing:  he reminds us that no matter its salary or status, nobody’s job is unimportant in a world structured by inequality. 

*****

It used to take me four or five weeks to learn names in classes with small enrollments, so there was never much hope of learning names in a busful of rowdy children.  The only logical option was to give them nicknames. 

I began with myself. 

When I started driving last year, younger elementary kids wanted to know my name.  Fourth-fifth graders and up didn’t seem to care.  It was the same at the start of this school year.  On the first day, they mostly rode in silence.  They didn’t know what type of person I am, volatile or laidback (I’m both, but I don’t like expressing volatility), and they’re preoccupied by traveling into new environments.  When they’re comfortable enough to ask questions, I provide silly answers so they’ll know it’s okay to cut loose.  One of the pleasures of my job is turning over a gaggle of maniacal children to their teachers. 

So this year when they asked my name, I knew I would lie, but I was too worried over staying on course to have concocted a lie in advance. “Bus driver!  What’s your name?”  I started thinking about things in the news before exclaiming, “My name is Mister Fried Chicken Sandwich.” 

Immediately they all wanted to be named after food items.  “Guess my name!  Guess my name!”  The chorus reverberated throughout the bus’s sticky interior. 

“Let’s see…you’re Macaroni and Cheese.” 

“You’re Vegetable Lasagna.” 

“And you’re Supreme Pizza.” 

On it went until I ran out of dishes that I imagined would sound familiar.  I realized the problem I’d created for myself the next morning when they asked me to repeat their names. 

“That’s not my name!  I’m Spaghetti and Meatballs, remember?” 

Sure, kid. 

“Hey, you said I’m Mashed Potatoes!” 

I did? 

And yet I can’t get high schoolers to interact with me.  The other day I overheard a conversation tailor-made for my intervention. 

“Is Harvard in Pennsylvania?” a boy asked. 

“Pennsylvania?” another student laughed.  “It’s in Connecticut, dumbass.” 

“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” I piped up, “but Yale is in Connecticut.  Harvard is in Massachusetts.”  They sheepishly glanced in my direction and returned to their conversation.  I wanted to add, “I’ve given talks at both places,” but it wouldn’t have commanded their interest.  I’m mostly nonspecific to them, although almost to a person they thank me when exiting the bus.  It’s a decent arrangement.  The environment mitigates any professional identity crisis I’m apt to experience and the students can discuss their futures without worrying about the kind of example I set. 

Self-invention on a school bus isn’t the glamorous stuff of elite academe or globetrotting punditry, but in its own humble context no less pronounced.  For instance, I’d rather eat thumbtacks than a fried chicken sandwich. 

*****

Amid a hot, dry fall, the landscape in Virginia is disoriented—bare trees without the preceding foliage, an autumnal atmosphere subsumed to summertime haze—so driving is more difficult because of persistent mugginess and the fatigue it generates, but I think of the condition as just another surreal feature of a new life I still don’t recognize (“am I really driving this big-ass school bus?”) after spending years picturing a profuse future of ideas and accolades and interchange, a specious concept of accomplishment trying to pull me away from the safety of a glass and metal enclosure into an unreality I badly want to leave behind. 

*****

“Look, the kids on the bus in front of us are waving.” 

“I’m not waving back.  I don’t want to encourage them.” 

“They’re still waving.  It’s bus number six.”

“Did you know that their driver is named Teddy?” 

“Nuh uh.  Do you call him Teddy Bear?” 

“I’m not sure he’d like that.  When I was a kid, my barber was named Teddy Bear….  Seriously.” 

“Is he still your barber?” 

“Do I look like I need a barber?” 

*****

It’s been nearly a year since I started this job, nearly three years since I last taught a college course.  I wish I had useful advice for people who experience midlife career transitions, but I’m still not sure what I’ve learned.  There’s a large body of work about leaving academe, known as “quit lit,” and inconsistency is its most notable feature.  Some people left because they were trapped in adjunct purgatory, others because job security made them miserable.  Some were fired.  Others were bullied out.  It’s a bitter genre. 

Ambivalence is always evident in these pieces because no matter how much the authors hated it, academe isn’t easily expunged from the mind or body.  Getting a doctorate requires a long gestation period predicated on persistent acculturation.  Self-worth is coterminous with status.  Much of the learning happens off the books—developing the indispensable skills of sycophancy and artful supposition. 

But there’s also something beautiful about working with students, trying to inhabit the world in abstractions and sharing epiphanies with like-minded people.  The ideal of campus provides meaning and yet the same ideal so adeptly produces exasperation, self-loathing, and alienation.  It’s a heavy feeling to discover that the university is a corporate organ wherein the life of the mind is less a regime than an ad campaign.  That realization produces a hard kind of disappointment, the disappointment of existing in a fallen world. 

My transition into school bus driving has intensified the feeling.  I’m more skeptical but less misanthropic.  I don’t know how to integrate what I miss of academe with what I enjoy of no longer being an academic.  I want to say that both spaces are fundamentally the same, but they’re not.  The world looks different when you’re the source of extraction.  My only advice to fellow ex-academics is to be resilient because a part of you will always yearn to revive the same fantasies you decisively rejected.  Academe is a scar impervious to cosmetic surgery. 

The influence of my past life conjures intense loneliness and a persistent sense of disbelief.  I can’t listen to credentialed voices any longer without envisioning opportunism and manipulation.  It’s both an overcompensation and a statement of class solidarity.  The bitterness and negativity I supposedly exhibit, so distasteful to guardians of rhetorical etiquette, are byproducts of freedom.  These days saying that I want West Bank settlers to go missing is merely chitchat, the language of storefronts and cafés in hundreds of cities.  I can use the word “Palestine” around my colleagues without internal dread or fear of retribution.  It’s people with microscopic vision who transform the mundane into a national emergency. 

Take the “working class” of leftist punditry.  It’s a formation invented in classrooms and boutique periodicals.  Those who inhabit the category don’t want the luxuries our well-bred champions promise.  The promise, in fact, is an insult, a way to justify the pundits’ upper-class predilections, for them to consume at our expense while maintaining credibility as People of the people.  No worker I know looks to these People for guidance, information, or analysis.  It’s only because I’m a lapsed academic that I even know they exist. 

The working class I inhabit is skeptical, heterodox, and international, in many ways a reflection of academe’s self-image without the comfort or pretension.  My coworkers exhibit a roughhewn understanding of what struggle means beyond the insipidness of affectation and sloganeering.  Professional analyses of the demographic rarely comprehend or reproduce the sensibility.  I’m sure some of my coworkers have reactionary opinions, but they’re largely tucked behind our interests as county employees hustling the necessary hours to survive an expensive region.  The troublemakers among us are also furtive, but not difficult to identify when they feel like talking.  Even the most conservative bus driver behaves more radically in relation to management than the typical Marxist professor.  Loyalty to the group is baked into the culture, evident the moment a newbie walks into the training center.  Nobody needs to discourse about it. 

*****

I entered the hotel room.  With a cream color scheme and baby blue trimmings, sleek appliances and brass fixtures, the space managed to look both contemporary and traditional.  I turned on the bedside lamps and pulled my laptop from the desk drawer.  It had been a long but satisfying evening.  I wanted to relax on the balcony before lying in bed. 

Fog lingered on the other side of the railing, draping the roof of a squat building across the courtyard before elevating into a canopy over Table Mountain.  The air smelled of damp wood and seawater.  It was quiet in this part of the city.  A car whooshed in the distance every few seconds and bursts of wind crackled through tree branches, but otherwise nightfall had asserted its supremacy.  Only my frenetic energy disturbed the peaceful atmosphere. 

I scrolled through the speech I would give the next evening, steeling myself to revive a skillset I had murdered.  I didn’t know if I could anymore read while making eye contact or go off script during question and answer.  It had been a long time.  I wanted to make good on the opportunity. 

I remembered what one of the hosts, Elelwani Ramugondo, had told me before bidding goodnight:  “Say a prayer.  You see, in the end you’re not trying to reach people’s minds, but their spirits.”  I didn’t understand her meaning at first.  On the balcony, engulfed in the luminescence of a foggy landscape, I realized that Elelwani had decoded the structure of my ambivalence.  I loathe economies of talking, in which opining acts as an economic incentive, because their fundamental goal is to get the wrong people to listen.  Our objective, so rich in South Africa’s history, is to strengthen humanity from below as a continuous repudiation of injustice.  Those in power will necessarily hate the effort. 

It was late.  Tomorrow would be busy.  I went inside and undressed for bed.  In the back-left pocket of my jeans, pressed against the room key, was a slip of folded yellow paper.  I opened it and read, “Why u do this job?” 

Dread engulfed me.  In two weeks, I’d need to be back in the seat, but the prospect was inconceivable.  I thought about the moment I originally held the note, at the end of a seemingly interminable schoolyear.  How could I start again at the beginning?  I balled up the jeans and tossed them beside the entertainment stand.  Bus drivers aren’t conditioned for luxury accommodations.  Professors aren’t accustomed to the maladies of physical labor.  I needed sleep. 

The task proved difficult.  I played the question repeatedly in my foggy brain, struggling to see the big picture.  The attempt created a lot of noise until the final seconds of consciousness.  I woke up a few hours later and stumbled onto the balcony with a cold cup of coffee and a pack of smokes.  It’s not really a job, I realized, gazing into the pitch-dark ether, cleared of its overcast by a chilly wind blowing down the cliff face.  It’s more of a spiritual occupation.