She had two children that she named Jean and Rudolph and tried to let her beautiful movie star death go at that, but now, thirty-one years later, she still blushes when she passes the bus station.

Craz y Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today

For Marcia Pacaud

There is one of them sitting behind me right now. She is wearing an old hat that’s got plastic fruit on it, and her eyes dart back and forth across her face like fruit flies.

The man sitting next to her is pretending that he is dead.

The crazy old woman talks to him in one continuous audio breath that passes out of her mouth like a vision of angry bowling alleys on Saturday night with millions of pins crashing off her teeth.

The man sitting next to her is an old, very little Chinese man and he’s wearing the clothes of a teen-ager. His coat, pants, shoes and cap belong to a fifteen-year-old boy. I’ve seen a lot of old Chinese men wearing teen-age clothes. It must be strange when they go to the store and buy them.

The Chinese man has scrunched himself up next to the window, and you can’t even tell he’s breathing. She doesn’t care if he’s dead or alive.

He was alive before she sat down beside him and started telling him about her children that came to no good and her husband who is an alcoholic and the leak in the God-damn car roof that he won’t fix because he’s always drunk, the son-of-a-bitch, and she’s too tired to do anything because she works all the time at a café, I must be the oldest waitress in the world, and her feet can’t take it any more and her son’s in the penitentiary and her daughter is living with an alcoholic truck driver and they’ve got three little bastards running around the house and she wishes she had a television because she can’t listen to the radio any more.

She stopped listening to the radio ten years ago because she couldn’t find any programmes on it. All there is is music and news now and I don’t like the music and I can’t understand the news and she doesn’t care if this fucking Chinaman is alive or dead.

She ate some Chinese food twenty-three years ago in Sacramento and crapped for five days afterwards and all she can see is one ear facing her mouth.

The ear looks like a little yellow dead horn.

The Correct Time

I’ll do a bubble the best I can and perhaps a few more. Not that they are overly important and would change things, except for the one that got hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus. That’s another story.