The Punkass KID
It was one of those fall days most people would be shitting themselves over, like “Wow, can you believe how beautiful it is today for this time of year? It’s uncanny really.” Actually wait, anyone who would say something as stupid as that would know what the fuck uncanny means. It just annoyed the hell out of him, the way people tried tomake pleasantries. He probably wouldn’t be so hostile if he weren’t on his way to the god forsaken bus.
He kicked the leaves as he walked, temporarily relieved by the crunch under his Pumas. Walked through his superficial neighborhood to the Park-n-Ride. He and his mom lived on the edge of 6th Avenue Estates, a very in-demand suburban development, oh fifteen years ago or so. Now he just lived in a house paid for by his father’s insurance money and looked rich without actually being rich. He begged his mom to sell the house, to downgrade to something smaller, something more urban, but she refused. The window set perfectly to magnify the chandelier over the monstrous front door, well she loved it, and it made her remember him. How proud they were to move into a home with such an impressive doorway, a dime a dozen light fixture and a big goddamn door. It was so 90s opulence. The sort of rampant materialism that had gotten us into the mess we were in today. That’s why she kept the house. That’s why he had to take out loans for school. He loathed the house. He approached the bus stop, with about five minutes to spare. He glimpsed around him.
True the weather wasn’t so bad. But this is Colorado for Christ’s sake, the weather’s always fucking nice. He was just generally in a bad mood and in his opinion; there was nothing wrong with that. Right on time, the bulky bus lumbered up to the bus stop, he sighed, flashed his pass to the bus driver and climbed aboard. It was one of the few good things an education at goddamn metro state had given him, a free RTD pass. He hated going to a commuter school. But more than anything he hated taking the bus down Colfax Avenue. It always smelled like something, today smelled vaguely of body odor, and with all things considered that wasn’t half bad.
He took a seat against the window, hoping against hope that the seat next to him would remain unoccupied until he got to his piece of shit commuter school. The bus coasted up to the next stop at Simms and Colfax. He was pulling some yellow-orange fuzz from the bus interior off of his pants and didn’t look up to see who had gotten on the bus. His nose did all the looking his eyes needed though as a particular awful smell of disgusting staggered his way to his seat.
The man simply smelled terrible.
It was impossible to tell how old he was, maybe forty. His clothes were a gray-brown-black mixture of rags and again, more smells he wanted nothing to do with. He smirked to himself, of course, just his luck. The bum swayed back a bit and reeled his eyes to the left to give him a once-over. The bum saw the smile on the kid’s face, he could feel his watery eyes digesting it. And for some reason this set him off, breathing audibly in short spurts. All the sudden as the bus slowed to a stop at Colfax and Wadsworth and the kid was minding his own business staring out the window, a faint smirk glued to his face for no particular reason, and bum screamed at him, “What’s your problem, you little smartass?”
That was it. He did not need some homeless asshole yelling at him. This is exactly why he hated the bus, things like this were bound to happen. He turned his gaze from the window and slowly turned to the bristle of gray whiskers overtaking the bottom portion of his face. What was left, what was left that was visible, that is, was the coal black look in his eyes. He opened his mouth and spit the words slowly and callously out his mouth: “Get out of my face, you fuckin nutjob. You fuckin stink.”
That’s all the bum needed to hear to revert into the innocuous bum that was in there somewhere. He slumped next to him dead weight for the remainder of the drive. Around him, whispers erupted behind him, two kids his age or younger, “Can you believe what that white boy just said?” One said to the other. “He’s got some balls, that’s for damn sure.”
Satisfied by the street cred he’d just earned, he returned a smirk to his face and his gaze to the window. The bus stopped again, in a sketchier area than before, and a girl got on. She was vaguely hot and only slightly used up by life. She looked to be tweaking to him. Ha! If she only knew what he had in his schoolbag, if she only knew what errands he would be running after his Intro to Philosophy and Calculus classes. He was taking a random course selection this year, there was no denying that. He didn’t know what to be, what to “do with his life” yet so he was sampling the curriculum, getting his core classes out of the way.
Finally, after what seemed like an egg salad-stinking hour, he exited the bus on Auraria and walked across the three-college campus to get to his first class. To their credit, putting three colleges together on one campus at least made things a little more interesting, the occasional hot girl, it was something at least. His first class was Philosophy, the teacher knowledgeable in a street smarts add book smarts kinda way. Academics, by rule, strictly pissed him off, but this prof, he was pretty all right most the time. He opened the door, giving the “perfect fall day” one final glimpse before letting it close behind him.
