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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v101) (the December 2011 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This writing also appears in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Perfectly Imperfect” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

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Beauty and the Bus

Ben Leib

    I’d been sober for five weeks and my hormones were raging. I had made a decision to stop drinking and using drugs through winter quarter, and, with five weeks to go, I was coasting right along. After one too many nights saying regrettable things, one too many calls to friends on lamentable mornings after to find out if I’d acted inappropriately, one too many unnecessary meannesses, one too many lost acquaintances, it was time to dry out for a spell. Furthermore, my health was declining. Because of my overindulgence I was gaining weight, I was out of shape in general, I smoked too much, and lived my life short of breath. So one day, snap, that was it, I’d had enough and it was time to pull it together – at least for ten weeks.
    I stopped cold turkey. Because I had no guidance and no idea what to do with my time, my best efforts were spent filling every second of my day with some kind of labor, motivated by the belief that idle hands pick up shot glasses: I wrote a thousand words a day, I enrolled in four classes instead of the standard three, I completed every word of the assigned reading. But I couldn’t balance my social life. I didn’t know how to have fun if I wasn’t inebriated to the point of speech impairment. I was actually afraid to go out, even with friends who were normal, who were untroubled by the thirst, for I knew that my default response to social discomfort was to grab for the bottle. That being the case, I wasn’t getting laid. It’s not like I was Don Juan when I was falling off of bar stools, quite the opposite actually, but without booze my libidinal drives were on overload, my hormones worked double time without a constant regimen of intoxicants to subdue them, and without a social life I wasn’t even speaking to any girls.
    To deal with this surplus of energy, I’d been working out at the school gym daily: I ran five miles a day, lifted weights until my arms failed against the resistance. If it didn’t hurt, I hadn’t done the job properly. It was as if, without booze as a form of self-punishment, I’d opted for the more socially acceptable flagellation of fitness. And it was paying off. I was watching my diet, and in those first five weeks on the wagon, I lost nearly thirty pounds. But looking good only added to my overwhelming horniness. What use was this new body if I didn’t get to put some miles on it? Even at the movie theater where I worked, the girls would ask me, “What plans you got for the new body?” Girls! That was my plan. They were the only thing on my mind. Unfortunately, they were not so forthcoming. Without the drink as social lubricant, as an impulse-control inhibiter, I wasn’t faring well.
    There was one particular girl that I’d had an eye on for months: a petite punk rock chick who lived in my neighborhood. Maybe it was something about her overt rebelliousness, maybe it was her lithe, nimble body, maybe it was her short bob, dyed black, maybe it was the softness of her cat-like eyes, a physical trait skillfully enhanced with black eyeliner, but the girl stirred my appetite. She wore short black jeans and tattered t-shirts that fit just tightly enough to get a sense of her subtle and braless curves. She wore her nipples like jewelry. I ran into her regularly during my frequent forays through town. I lived downtown Santa Cruz, on Lincoln Street, worked at the Nickelodeon Theater, a block and a half from my front door, and my best friends lived two blocks away: not counting the university, I spent my life within a three block radius. Because she was my neighbor and because she was a student, I saw the petite punk rock chick all the time. She lived across the street from me, up the block a bit, and she had to walk by the theater to get anywhere. We often ended up on the campus bus together. I ogled her from afar, dreamed about how uninhibited she must be, how funky and hip and sassy. She must have been an Art major, maybe with a minor in Feminist Studies. She was bound to be interesting.
    I never knew her name, but, particularly during my time away from the drink, I masturbated to her recurrently. I imagined those perky tits, her body, hard here and soft there. I imagined the faces that she might make, the noises, in a state of erotic ecstasy, the tight eyed groans, the screams of endurance on the verge of pain, her cat eyes as they soften, get that dilated, million-mile stare in the receding tides of orgasm. I could make good on these fantasies, I knew, given the opportunity, I’d show her just how it was done. I’d put her to sleep.
    Despite what I would, or could, or desired to do, despite what I knew I was capable of doing, I never said a word to the cute punk rock chick. I watched her from a distance, smiled occasionally, took pleasure in the thought that she probably recognized me, and that was about it. Something about the nature of my unspoken desire was self-perpetuating. The more that I dreamed of her, fantasized about her, the more that image of her would resonate with a deified aura, and the less likely I ever was to speak to her, for she had then become otherworldly. My desire possessed a momentum of its own, that had, in reality, absolutely nothing to do with the truth of this young woman, for, in reality, I had no idea who she was. I possessed only fantasy.
    Because I was going to the gym every day, I’d bring my workout clothes to class with me. I caught the bus up to campus each morning, hit up my lectures, and by early afternoon I was done with my school day. I’d run over to the gym, suit up, and torture myself for a couple of hours before heading back home to read and write and generally avoid the populous at large. I always wore my sweaty gym clothes during the bus ride home. I didn’t bother with the school showers. I figured that I lived a block from the bus stop, it was easier to clean up at home. So every day I was riding up to campus in jeans and some plaid shirt or another, and I was riding back from campus in polyester track suit pants and a sweat stained t-shirt. Occasionally, when the bus was crowded, I got a bit self-conscious about my informal attire, my sweatiness. But I never worried enough to change my habits, which, in sobriety, had the comforting function of structuring each waking moment of my existence.
    So there I was, five weeks sober, hormones alight, shod in my sweaty gym clothes, boarding the six pm bus off of campus. Dinnertime and it was one of the most crowded lines of the day. Oh well, fuck it, I gotta get home and shower and read and write and, shit, they’re just gonna have to deal with touching a sweaty guy on the bus today. When the university bus lines got crowded, students packed onto them like it was the last ride out of hell, not an inch of space was wasted. As I boarded the bus, as I was jostled and crowded into the available standing room, who did I find myself crowded against but the cute punk rock chick who had recently been monopolizing my erotic fantasy life.
    It took a moment to set in. I turned my head, and there she was, nipples erect, cute as ever, smiling at me in nonchalant recognition, smelling of femmy BO and some kind of natural body wash, of the restless dreams of thirty five sleepless nights, tantalizing my nostrils, driving my thoughts in a very specific, impure direction. She was short, and stood there grasping one of the rubber loops with both arms raised to keep her balance. She was facing the front of the bus, and therefore facing me. I stood toward the outside window, the right side of my body close to this fantastically beautiful woman. Unfortunately, I was also crowded into uncomfortable proximity with the person seated in front of me, my crotch pressed dangerously close to this poor kid who’d been lucky enough to get a seat, and unlucky enough to find me standing beside him.
    As the bus filled up, I found myself pressed more snugly against the delectable punk rock chick. Students continued to pile on the bus. There was no room to move, no room to shift around. I was hovering right above the innocent kid sitting there in front of me. The punk rock chick nestled closer. Her little body pressed unyielding against my flank. I felt the slight curve of her chest, the bony sharpness of her pelvis, her firm thigh. I felt her sultry breath against my elevated bicep. When the bus bounced, shook, I felt her nimble little body shift against me, my newer, tighter, harder muscles accommodating the bit of tension and resistance she needed to stay on her feet. My heart clamored with the thrill of physical and human contact that I’d been so starved for. I willed myself to stare out the window, over the dude sitting in front of me, but, with this stranger beside me who I’d constructed as the embodiment of sex, my eyes couldn’t help but wander. They had a will of their own.
    My body began to react before I was aware of my own innate responses to such intimate contact. My penis stirred in the loose fitting sweat pants. Terror set in. Blood was circulating. The body was enacting its natural responses to such stimulation. I felt movement. I wasn’t hard, but I was engorged and well on my way to fully erect. I looked down at the poor guy sitting in front of me. I’m sorry, I thought silently. Now, I’m not claiming superhuman physiological endowment, but, were I to get hard in that position, the guy who I was facing, who I was standing against really, wouldn’t fail to notice. And no one wants to feel a stranger’s erection while riding Muni.
    I began to sweat. Panic loomed. The pheremonal call of that little body beside me, my starvation for the intimacy of human contact... I was losing control of my bodily reactions. I looked at the punk rock temptress. Her face was turned to the side. She stared out the window, her head gently brushing my shoulder. Was she doing this on purpose? I looked down discretely. The outline of my cock was visible through the thin material of my workout clothes. Was this some kind of a game to her? Embarrass the lusty-eyed neighbor on the crowded bus? I closed my eyes. I willed myself flaccid. But, with every movement of the crowded bus, my penis stirred, my body conspired against me. I imagined things un-sexy: fat, shirtless clowns juggling hatchets, old women in purple hats playing craps and neglecting to tip the dealer, gristly and overcooked steaks, grease traps, foul and ghastly smelling human excrement. I fought that boner with every firing synapse of my conscious will. My own body, my own erotic urges became a mortifying enemy, and I fought back with stout perseverance. I fought back against the desperation of the lonely and the scared and the neglected and the sexually starved. But I won.
    We got off the bus at the same stop. I endured twenty minutes of delightful and dangerous proximity to this perfect little body without embarrassing myself. She gave me one glancing smile before trotting ahead of me to her own apartment, a block or so up the street from mine. I went back home kind of sad, adrenaline still astir. I was scared of what I desired. That depressed me. Near powerless in life, what little agency I could exert was exemplified and exhausted through this internal struggle with my own bodily reactions. I was a peeper, a voyeur in my own imagination, incapable of functionally interacting with the world at large. The drink started to sound pretty good.

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