The Long Bus Ride Home

Looking back years afterwards I sometimes ask myself if it only stood to reason that the worst moment of my childhood, an abject personal lesson in where my individual breaking point for public humiliation actually lay, was destined to find its nexus in the intersection between dusty metal contraptions, splattered transmission oil, the obliviousness of a self absorbed father, and a long bus ride.

Growing up I experienced my father as a man who talked his dreams out. To him, sharing his dreams aloud was really a way of both insisting on how they could come true and an affirmation of why those should come true. In the initial weeks after he left Peru to come live with us in Pasadena at age 52, my immigrant father groped through what must have seemed to him like many empty hours, since several months eventually passed by before he landed his first paying job in California.

With all that spare time on his hands he somehow learned that my 12 year old cousin Vicky owned a little store bought portable fan. “Do you remember Vicky’s fan?” he asked me one afternoon, apropos of nothing that he’d been talking to me about right then. “Yes” I answered. “I can make one better” he said. “Really?” I asked, trying to buy even a few seconds worth of additional time to guess what response he wanted from me. “Just watch,” he said.

That same weekend he scrapped together one incidentally recycled electrical cord, a minor haul of spare copper wire, strips of white plastic, and other assorted industrial looking odds and ends. After hours of working with eyebrow furled concentration, he proudly displayed to me the culmination of his minor dream’s creative result: a working miniature plastic fan that blew forward a Kennedy fifty cent coin’s radius of air wherever it pointed. “Es muy bueno” I said to him solemnly: it is very good.

My father’s nano of a ventilating device was exactly as practical as its diminutive form factor suggests. Even so I surmised the improvisationally created fan offered him a necessary sense of mechanical accomplishment. This conviction was likewise reinforced when my clearly restless father spent several weekdays sawing out a chunk of our family station wagon’s plastic dashboard so that he could then affix on to it a rectangular row of five different colored blinking electric lights. Although these painstakingly installed lights served no practical function, at night they lit up the dashboard’s bottom forty percent like the DNA strand of a Christmas tree. My father evidently needed technical accomplishments that made him feel useful, even as these particular dashboard lights and the hobbit scale fan fell completely on the ornamental side of the form versus function divide.

My father did not limit the scope of his mechanical aspirations to his own activities. In a classical paternal posture, he projected his career fantasies directly on to me. One of my father’s first such ambitions for me grew through many mental meanderings from him as we spent hours together on the blacktop asphalt of different Pasadena streets, repairing other poor people’s old broken down, busted ass cars. I mentally traced one specific fantasy take shape as my father morphed into the free lance auto mechanic of last resort for other local impoverished immigrant families.

“You should” he began intoning to me as the months had gone by while we became increasingly immersed in consecutive weekends of fixing jalopies “move to Peru for about two years and learn how to fix diesel truck engines.” He often cleared his throat at the end of similar declarative sentences to me and did so on these numerous occasions. “Then you will come back here a prestigious master mechanic and you can charge what you want to work on diesel trucks.” “Just say the word,” he often added “and I will tell your mother to start making the necessary arrangements for you to travel to Peru right away.” My standard response was to murmur non committal “Hmmm mms” and hoped he would not demand more from me to demonstrate satisfactory enthusiasm for his latest projected fantasy on to my sixth grade existence.

I did think through the implications of my father’s aspirational goal for me. At age 11, under his prospective pitch, I would relocate to Peru alone for two years or so and apprentice myself to work on diesel truck engines. Not knowing a soul in Peru, leaving my entire known family for twenty four months, dropping out of the American educational system, speaking a shaky pidgin Spanish, possessing close to zero mechanical aptitude, and already depressed regarding the whole notion of combustible engine repair as an endeavor to waste away my remaining childhood years to say nothing of having that become an imposed lifetime career choice were all no impediments to my father’s dream calculus.

Then, by the logic of his same calculus, I would import myself back from darkest Peru and come back as an informally certified teenaged diesel engine “mechanico”, supposedly qualified to rake in a lucrative career selling my services out to all those large truck companies out there just chomping at the bit to hire 13 year old self proclaimed diesel engine mechanics trained in how to service decaying and unroadworthy Third World commercial trucks that in real life the California Highway Patrol would impound as road hazards if a Chip ever actually saw one of those belching monstrosities on an American freeway. Si, Papa. Just tell me right where to sign up for that.

Such were the projected imaginings that I had to endure from my father on an ongoing basis through the balance of my adolesence. Yet, in a very real sense, the fantasies he spent so much time impressing on to me were themselves mere vehicles for his most externally obvious compulsion: his endless need to talk. No matter the place, the social context, or the people he found himself around, the man’s verbosity was a pit that knew no bottom. Talking was oxygen for him, a fact that stayed bedrock true for the thirty years I have known him, despite all the physical and circumstantial changes he has experienced in the intervening three decades.

The content of what he talked about varied greatly, especially in the ‘80s and early 90s when his mental agility was still in its middle age prime, but the one constant was that he needed continuous attention, preferably of the deferential kind, which my mother lovingly gave him and which me and my younger brother grudgingly yielded to him because my mother’s life choices resulted in the cumulative effect of us having been drafted in to doing so. Listening and keeping our mouths shut except to mew several words of passive concurrence were the keys that unlocked the kingdom to my father’s all too tenuous and momentary contentment.

Certainly my dad did not brook actual disagreement from me or my younger brother, preferring us to play the role of a captive audience to his stentorian oratory. In this we were not unlike an ad hoc two child Reichstag assembly charged with genuflecting before our very own Peruvian Furhrer. I suppose this is an appropriate enough metaphor since among other bizarre theories he held, in his opinion Adolf Hitler had been a great man.

So it was that on yet another sunny Pasadena afternoon from my middle school years he and I found ourselves driving to one of our jalopy rigging appointments. My father started talking at length about restoring to road worthy condition an abandoned 15 year old shell of decaying metal and plastic that had once been a cheap Japanese econobox station wagon but which presently had no engine, no transmission, no tires, cracked windows, rotted out upholstery, and all in all no objective reason for being anything but junkyard scrap.

“Do you think we can fix it?” he asked me point blank.

I made the mistake of responding honestly: “No, it wouldn’t be worth it even to try.”

“You’re a pessimist!!!” he roared at me the instant these words escaped from my mouth.

“A man should never be a pessimist!” he bellowed again as he stared at me disdainfully while he should have kept his eyes on the road in front of us. “What kind of man are you? Or are you still a boy?”

I knew enough not to answer this particular question. I was about 12 years old then but I would have risked him (even while driving and all) literally slapping me down as a little smart ass right where I sat if I replied to him the obvious fact that I was a joven, Spanish for youth, neither a boy nor a man. Of course, he wanted only to impress upon me that being a “man” meant agreeing with him about fixing that self evidently defunct vehicle, but now I could hardly say that to him again without agitating him further.

I consequently said nothing more and as he filled the empty air between us with his outrage at the notion of limits on what a "man" should be able to accomplish with barely coherent ruins of metal and plastic, I reflected on the fact that my answer to his question had obviously offended not only his sense of order (he pontificates to me transparent bullshit and regardless of what I actually think in response I then intellectually prostrate myself) but also the power of his life’s vision to will that decrepit bucket of nuts and bolts into something worthy of his ingenuity and applied resources.

When I was a young adult I read a newspaper article that helped me understand my father’s loud ravings that long ago afternoon. This article described how poor people in developing countries often seek to buy American secondhand clothes that start as individual donations to local charitable organizations like the Salvation Army. The article detailed how local used clothing brokers letter grade donations for quality on a scale of A through D.

Only those donated used clothes graded as “A” quality ever actually make their way to local thrift stores. In contrast, donated clothes graded B, C, and D are resold in bulk to international clothing brokers. These brokers in turn repackage, ship, and resell said donated attire to people in developing countries who regard these recycled threads as highly desirable.

In reading this article I was struck by something an African secondhand clothing retailer said in response to the question of why anybody would want clothes as faded and careworn as the castoff materials received there from here. “In America, you waste so much,” he was quoted as saying. “In Africa we use everything there is. We do not waste a thing.”

This man’s words still resound in my memory. We do not waste a thing. The Peru of the Great Depression years my father was born into and raised in had been the geographical embodiment of those words.

My father’s life experience in this regard was partly illustrated by a story he related to me several times about the day before he was scheduled to start the second grade in Peru. In my father’s narrative, his godfather (who raised him when my paternal grandfather died prematurely) took him aside that morning before his first school day and decreed to him words along these lines: “Here is exactly one pencil. This pencil is the only one I have money to buy for you, so you have to make it last the entire school year. Take excellent care of it. God have mercy on you if you lose it.”

My father recounted that later the same day he contemplated this solitary pencil alone by his 7 year old self and was struck by the thought that he had to safeguard it for the nine months of the upcoming school year. The questions bubbled anxiously in his head: “What if I lose it?” “What if it gets stolen?” The proverbial light bulb then lit up inside his grade schooler noggin. A way to insure himself against the prospect of losing the pencil had occurred to him. He promptly snapped the pencil into two roughly equal halves, whereupon he congratulated himself on having figured out a way to improvise a “backup” half of the pencil in case he lost the “main” half.

His self congratulatory mindset lasted until the following day when his godfather demanded from him that he produce the pencil. “Show me the pencil,” his godfather growled. “I want to see how well you are taking care of it.” My father had no alternative but to hold out the cracked pencil for direct inspection. “OH MY GOD!! And AFTER I just told you that it has to last you for a whole year!!!” was the verbal part of his godfather’s response. The physical response followed shortly thereafter. It constituted a beating my father could still recall with gallows humor forty years later.

It was in part against this autobiographical backdrop that my father railed to me about what an offensively unimaginative pessimist I was for not seeing how or why the decayed station wagon he trumpeted could not be salvaged and worse, that it was not even worthwhile to try. The deeper truth for me was that I did not care one way or another if he or anyone else wanted to resurrect automotive corpses, except for the fact that I understood in advance one specific consequence like I knew my own name: that my father would expect me to spend every minute humanly possible next to him for God knew how many hundreds of hours trying to salvage that wasted shell of a vehicle.

Every degraded lug nut, rusted out bolt, worn connecting wire, every drop of muddy engine oil, every breath of oxidized gasoline smell, every single little derelict thing about that derelict shit piece hulk would become my temporary universe writ small. Worse, I also knew that every second of every minute of attempted vehicular resurrection would be performed to a noxious soundtrack dominated by my father’s temper tantrums, conceits, and bullying. I furthermore understood that my father placed exactly zero weight to even the possibility that I could or would have an independent thought or feeling about having to sink my own time and life in to this or any of the junkyard salvage operations that he so profoundly lusted for.

As events turned out, my father never did try to fix up that particular old station wagon carcass. My father’s auto resurrection mega project fell by the wayside as his time and energy became consumed by other jobs and work circumstances that came along. I was grateful for the reprieve from this particular dead project. I wasn’t always so lucky.

Three years and countless car repair projects later, by which time I had turned 15, my relationship to my father largely still took place through the prism of those jury rigged fix it jobs. One July summer morning my dad drove me out to an all day assignment in a distant western quadrant of Los Angeles. This particular job involved changing a truck’s clutch, which due to the nature of the work involved was always one of the grimiest and smelliest kind of undertakings that we could attempt on a vehicle.

Six long hot hours under the L.A. summer sun later, the transmission job was complete, as was my physical transformation. By the time my father said we were finished for the day I had turned into a walking urban scarecrow. My face, hands, arms, jeans, and shirt were streaked with engine and transmission oil grease. I reeked of gasoline, engine rust, human sweat, and nothing short of a twenty five minute shower was going to have me looking and smelling like a normal person again.

As I gathered and cleaned up the usual wide flung nebula of dirty repair tools strewn over the isolated concrete slab where we had been working, I was looking forward to that shower when my father unexpectedly handed me a five dollar bill. “Take this,” he said. “What’s this for?” I asked. “I don’t have time to drive you home,” he replied. “Its late and I have to drive straight to work from here, so you will take the bus home.”

My mind raced when I registered his words. It was about 4 in the afternoon as we had this conversation. My father worked a swing shift from 5 to midnight as a janitor in Northridge, which was about a half hour drive from our current location. He was correct in saying that he had no time to drive me back to Pasadena. So the bus, that most public of moving wheeled rectangles, would indeed have to do. And there was the rub: I needed to undertake the two hour bus ride across 20 miles of Los Angeles county all the way back home while unshowered from the day’s work, still wearing soiled ripped clothes, and smelling like a vat of used Pennzoil.

“You can’t be serious, you punk of an old man…” I thought as I tried to mentally picture taking the bus home in my disastrous physical state. “…I look and smell worse than a homeless person!” Of course, not being a mind reader, my telepathically transmitted thought failed to penetrate my father’s brain. In fact, he did not so much as turn around to say good bye as he promptly climbed into his work truck, keyed the ignition, and rolled his vehicle off the driveway to start heading for Northridge.

And with that I was left to make my way home alone.

The sun still hung high and bright above the horizon in the late afternoon hour as I started walking to the nearest bus stop, some five long city blocks away. This being July, no timely dusk would creep over the landscape to help see myself way home in a less visually conspicuous way. I fixed my eyes on the concrete sidewalk beneath me as I started walking but I still felt people’s eyes on me as I passed them by.

While I navigated the sidewalk, I was grateful that I was in any one person’s line of sight only for a handful of seconds. But I knew the two impossible to avoid different bus stops and bus rides awaiting me would offer no similar respite from bystanders contemplating my physical state. I only hoped to make it back in the least humiliating manner possible.

About an hour later I had just boarded the second bus and taken my forward facing seat when a young adult man with fair skin and a mustache sat down some six feet away from me in the front section of the bus where the seats were traversed and face each other from either side of the bus. He seemed nice enough and his presence did not increase my already heightened anxiety level, so I was grateful for that.

An elderly white lady with watchful eyes who was already sitting when the young man took his seat started talking to him. At first the words of their conversation did not register with me, but then I heard the old woman distinctly say “I remember when this city used to be clean.” She paused for a brief second during which I physically and mentally cringed.

“I remember,” she continued with her face now turned directly toward me and her eyes fixed on mine “when this city didn’t have so many dirty people walking around in it.”

I felt the bottom fall from underneath my stomach, stayed silent, and looked away. The young man stiffened and didn’t say anything in response. The old woman started talking to him about something else. When my bus stop came some 20 minutes later, I slinked off through the rear doors to avoid having to walk past either of them.

I finally arrived at my destination. The last sun rays from the evening dusk still filtered through the window curtains of my grandparents’ house when I sat down to eat dinner. My mom and grandparents had made it home before me. The minute I walked through the front door I took my desperately needed shower. I successfully washed off the oil and grime but several minutes later, when I sat down in the dining room and tried to eat the plate of Nona’s food she had prepared for me, I started showering tears of my own right onto my dinner.

The flowing tears burned from the public shame and humiliation of the day, the countless other days before like it, and the unimaginable number of future similar days awaiting me.

As I sobbed over my dinner plate I glimpsed through the corner of teary eyes my grandfather, my papasito, the most dignified man I had known in my entire life, take a seat next to me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked intently and calmly.

“You don’t look like you are enjoying your dinner,” he added wryly.

I let out a small laugh but my body was still wracked with sobs. “What happened to you?” he asked.

I couldn’t bring myself to explain anything to him, so I buried my head in my hands and didn’t respond.

“Everything is going to come out well,” he said to me. “You will see.” This was ten more words than my legendarily taciturn grandfather sometimes said to anyone in whole entire days. He shook his head sadly, patted me on my shoulder, and left the table.

Several minutes later my mom and Nona walked into the dining room and hovered over me. Having raised me, they knew I hardly ever cried.

“Que paso, hijito?” my mom asked me gently, as she placed her hand on my heaving shoulders, what’s wrong, my son?

“I-I-I took the bus all the way home dirty.” I stammered, with my head still locked between my arms. It hurt too much to even look up. “All the way from Los Angeles.”

“Your father sent you home on the bus from Los Angeles after working all day?” Nona asked. Nona and my mom knew what I looked and smelled like after a full day fixing cars.

I nodded my head yes.

“Its too much, mama.” I added, turning towards her. “Its too much.”

Her eyes locked with mine in response. She understood. As much as I loved her, which was more than anyone in my life, my mother and I both knew all the nightmare moments from my father that had culminated in the emotionally shattered state she now saw me in had one necessary precondition: her capitulation.

After protecting me and my younger brother to the best of her ability for the first ten years after we had been born, from the day he walked back into our lives my mother had given our father complete license to treat us exactly the way he wanted. This resulted in there being barely any aspect of our world that our father had not denigrated or otherwise devastated from the relentless ferocity of an alpha personality that asserted itself through interpersonal intimidation, was larded with immigrant rage, and deeply saturated in a paternal guilt that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with our half siblings he had effectively abandoned in Peru.

Our grandparents, uncles, aunts, family friends, even our adolescent cousins knew who and what my father was. Everyone saw the blatant and demeaning verbal and emotional violence he directed towards us. They all understood that as his children we were defenseless from his cruelties and his utter indifference to our mental and emotional well being. They all had at least an idea that the hot, dirty, unending vehicle repair work he had tasked us with for five years by that point in time was a mere external metaphor for the ways his applied notions of fatherhood devoured our lives outward from within our very insides.

In spite of this universal family consensus, my mom was the one person who could have decisively protected us from any or all of it. She and she alone could say the necessary words and take the necessary actions to shield us from the worse angels of our father’s nature. But incredibly to everyone who knew what a committed and loving mother she was, she had not done so. Leading up to that July evening in 1987, she had not once raised her voice in protest against our father’s malice.

“Its going to change,” she said quietly as my cascade of tears finally subsided. “Its going to stop.”

I wanted desperately to believe her words but I could not see how she would be able to stand against what had become nothing less than a force of nature. I intuitively understood that her and my grandparents’ graceful presence constituted the salve that was cauterizing my emotional lacerations from the harrowing day and I was grateful to them for this. What I could not see was my mother finally asserting herself to protect us from him.

Even through the doubts swirling in my mind I knew something else that I didn’t yet possess the ability to put into words. What my mother, Nona, and Papasito had poured into me all my life—their dreams, care, decency, compassion, and love—had solidified into an inner foundation of personal resilience that though incredibly stressed still held true, even under the total weight of my father’s depravities. But I needed my mother's help. I had needed it all along.

True to the promise she made me, my mother stopped capitulating that day. In her own determined and resolute way, she started standing up to my father on behalf of myself and my younger brother. In doing so she showed us all a love tough enough to take on an old man’s rage and a toughness smart enough to overcome his disbelief at being defied. It was the beginning of a long and brutal battle of wills between them and merits a telling all its own. The stakes were high because my mother was fighting for our ability to forgo the endless car fixing so that me and my brother could focus on our educations, which is another way of saying my mother was standing up for allowing us to take ownership of our future instead of being held hostage to everything in my father's past that made him the way he was.

Today, on the other chronological side of that epic struggle between my parents, my mother and grandparents rest in peace at a cemetery not far from where I live. They each lived long enough to see that the triumph of their legacy over my father’s gracelessness was total.