intellectual properties

on the bus (from “Veronica”)

“The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery.  As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whining sound, like we’re streaking through space.  Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them.  Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around.  More distant green, the side of a building.  The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point.  It sags down with a gassy sigh.  Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor.  Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus.  The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on.  The crabbed door suctions open.  Teenagers stomp through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words.  “Cuz like–whatcho look–you was just a–ain’t lookin’ at you!”  The old lady does not look.  But I can feel her taking them in.  Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine and brain.  Watering the flowers of her brain.  The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap.  Private snack suspended for the public feast of youth.  She would never be so close to them except on the bus.  Neither would I.  For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars.  I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo.  Bits of light fly across her windshield.  I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird.  Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.”

–from Veronica: A Novel, by Mary Gaitskill, the book I am currently reading. i have not read any of her other works, but this one reads, in style and content, somewhat like a female Bret Easton Ellis. slightly more poetic, but at the same time some of the sentences hit hard.  i like it.

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