I wish my old school-bus drivers would start minding their own business and stop slandering my good name. That's right, my beef is with bus drivers — the crushers of little children's souls. I had three bus drivers throughout the course of my public education, and I thought their reign of weekday torture and Gestapo maneuverings had come to an end with high school.
I was sorely mistaken.
For reasons of which I am unaware, former bus drivers are always running into people I know and telling them how bad of a child I was. In the interest of fairness, I was a really ornery kid, and the only reason I say "ornery" is because the word I want to use can't be said out loud on most television channels.
I am the very reason Milton-Union schools equipped their buses with surveillance cameras, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Normally, when bus drivers talk smack about me to others, it doesn't faze me. Most of the time, I figure it's because they're just jealous of my rebel good looks. Except my old bus drivers keep running into my girlfriend, Christine's, mother, whose name I have been directed never to use in this column.
Yes, my girlfriend's mom will soon become my mother-in-law — to answer any lingering questions about last week, Christine said yes! — so it's important to me that her mother thinks I am an upstanding citizen. Unfortunately, She Who Shall Not Be Named keeps running into people I know who would make disastrous character witnesses should I ever be indicted on vehicular manslaughter charges.
Possible manslaughter charges are a smooth transition into what was by far the worst crime I ever committed on a public bus.
It took place on a bitterly cold day back in February of 1995.
While I waited for the school bus at the corner, I hot-boxed a Marlboro Red as I crafted the perfect snowball. In essence, it was a solid brick of ice, and in theory, some poor, unsuspecting fool on the bus would soon have it launched at his head.
I was sitting at the back of the bus just minding my own business when this girl named Amy, who was seated in the middle of the school bus, started turning around and sticking her tongue out at me, as if to say, "Throw that tennis ball-sized ice chunk at me."
I always like to imagine how baseball play-by-play announcers would phrase what happened next: "Leading the league in detentions per semester, Sanders stares down the batter and awaits the call. Here's the wind-up, the delivery, and ..."
At the last second, Amy ducked, but it hardly mattered. The pitch was off by just a hair, clipping the top of her green vinyl bus seat and ricocheting — with frightening velocity, I should add — toward the front of the bus like something that had shot out of a homemade potato gun.
I'm not proud of what happened next, but for the purposes of journalism, I'll forge ahead. My snowball smacked into the noggin of a blind kid sitting behind the bus driver. He never saw it coming.
But that's not the bad part. Yeah, it gets much worse than assaulting a poor blind kid. In fact, it's not even in the same ballpark.
On impact, the snowball splintered in two, and one of the pieces proceeded forward and struck the bus driver in the head — the same bus driver that recently ran into my future mother-in-law.
Now, that's bad enough, but the ice ball held steady and bounced around in the bus driver's cab for a comically long period of time.
That wouldn't be so bad, except the bus driver slammed on the brakes.
And it didn't end there.
Because the weather was such that it allowed me to craft a snowball, the road conditions on the day in question were icy and slick. Through a miraculous summoning of bus-driving intuition, nobody died that day. Not even that girl named Amy, sadly.
Once we reached the school, the superintendent boarded the bus as if zombies were chasing him and gave us his best Matlock impression. One week later, to ensure something like it never happened again, all of the busses had cameras in them.
But for the love of God, if you run into my girlfriend's mother, don't tell her any of this.
To contact Will E Sanders, visit his website at willesanders.com, or send him an email at wille@willesanders.com. To find out more about Will E Sanders and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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