here is a portion of some story i'm working on. this is wildly rough and is going to be split so the bus encounter is much later (in an already-updated version, they're on a bus only to go unicycle across the golden gate bridge. this encounter is going to happen on a different bus, much later, or perhaps it will be edited out completely). it is also going to be more serious than this suggests. and whatever. enough excuses - i got a very tender yellow note asking what was current in my writing, so i thought maybe i would share this scrap roughness thing. take it for whatever.
we were so excited about our book club!!! we met every sunday, and also whenever we felt like it, and sometimes we didn’t actually meet on sunday, if we were too hungover. also, our book club didn’t involve books – not any more so than a conversation between friends might turn to, like, “hey, what you been reading lately?” and they would talk about literature for a minute or two, until everyone was reminded how boring it was to talk about literature, and then discussion would turn back to more interesting things, like sex. we talked about sex a lot in our book club – it was one of our rules. in fact, while we’re at it, here are the rules of the book club:
1. the book club must involve an exploratory trip into the city;
2. the book club must involve alcoholic beverages, preferably consumed out of our minnie mouse flask;
3. members of the book club must giggle profusely at any ironic self-referential mention of the term “book club”;
4. members of the book club must talk about sex a lot.
me and justin were in love and we felt it more and more all the time, so we called these trips “bein’ in love trips,” but that description doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and so the book club was born. tonight we were in classic form; justin had poured rum into a hole in minnie’s forehead (it was actually a figurine which he converted into a flask with some nifty drill tricks), and i donned my american apparel sepia shirt-dress (“shress,” coined by myself, much easier to pronounce when drunk than sober), and we were on the bus passing minnie back and forth, when we saw something that instantly turned this into The Best Book Club Meeting Ever: oprah winfrey.
oprah fucking winfrey! and some little kid next to her who was probably underprivileged, in some way. justin tapped me on the shoulder: “sasha.”
“yeeessss,” i said, in that half-assed russian accent i use whenever he says my name, because sasha is a sweet name that deserves to be accompanied by at least mock russian-ness.
“what’s oprah doing on our bus?”
“i don’t know! probably enriching that kid’s life.” we looked over together, where oprah was in the process of giving the kid a playful rustle of the hair, the kind a dad might give his son after he got the winning hit in a t-ball game. this was cool, i guess, to have one’s hair rustled by oprah winfrey, especially while she smiled her big oprah-smile, but he seemed a little too old for the gesture. but he didn’t shake it off begrudgingly or anything. i guess it is pretty hard to begrudge oprah winfrey.
“i gotta talk to her.” this is what justin says. justin, it should be noted, is notorious for initiating all of the stupid shit the book club ends up getting into, like last year when we were trying to learn to skate and i ended up running into a cop car. (it is really hard to skate in a shress.) but come on – it’s a known rule that you don’t bother celebrities in public. especially when they’re in the process of enriching some kid’s life. actually, why was she out here? chicago was her territory, and she looked ass-backwards lost on a bus in san francisco. i posed the question to justin, if only to divert his attention away from starting a conversation. he said it was probably, like, “this kid’s life dream” to live a day with oprah, san francisco style. “ public transit, all that shit. eat at his favorite restaurant.” justin is trying to remain cool, with all the obscenities and such, but he looks so giddy his head might be about to explode. he takes a sip out of minnie, calms down for about two seconds, and then reverts back to near-explosion state. which is when the best thing ever happens: the kid, who is probably paralyzed from the waist up, or the shoulders sideways or something, can’t pull the stop cord on his own, so he says: “we have to get off at the next stop.” and oprah, assuming the bus will just stop itself, she says: “okay.”
ahhhhh! ahhhhhh! clearly there is something missing here. in about three milliseconds, justin springs up and pulls the cord in the back of the bus. very loudly, and somewhat slurring, he says: “gotcha covered, ma’am.” oprah gives him a big oprah-smile, and he freezes up into a statue, because he realizes what an idiot he’s just made of himself. he’s quiet until oprah and the kid get off. then we turn to each other.
“i just pulled the stop cord for oprah winfrey. holy shit. this book club rocks.” then, in accordance to the rules, we start to giggle profusely. moral of the story: join our book club. it enriches people’s lives.
for those of you who thought i died or something
