Blue Eyes and Bitterness

   The night that Mike and I sat at Biba's talking about the song “Behind Blue Eyes” - I realized that the song not only takes me to freshman year of college and the desk with the words of the title carved into the desktop, but that it then takes me to another memory. A more uncomfortable memory.

     It was a few years after college. I was working at a lab on Main Street in Buffalo, almost downtown. And I was living in an apartment in Buffalo, near the border of Cheektowaga. I took public transportation to and from work every day. The Number 12 bus. The Number 12 route began on Main Street and wound its way through east Buffalo to the edge of the city and then to the suburb of Cheektowaga. One day I was on the bus heading for home when an elderly man got on the Number 12. He paid his fare, so I guess he was lucid enough to some extent, but he was talking to himself, and at times he was even raving. The bus was crowded, but we gave him some space, as best we could. After a while, the crowd thinned out, and people moved further and further away from the old man who continued to talk to himself. And finally he was sitting all alone in the front of the bus in one of those seats that faces the aisle. I was then the closest one to him, in a seat a few rows away that faces the front of the bus. The bus was empty enough at this point for me to make out the words that the man was saying.

     He stared out the window across from him to the people on the city sidewalk outside, and he said, “All the white people gonna die!”

     And a chill when through my body.

     A mother and her child got on the bus. The old man's eyes followed the little boy as the two walked past him in the aisle. They took seats far behind me, and the man said, “All the blue-eyed babies gonna die!”

     And then his eyes locked onto mine, and he said, “All the blue-eyed white folk gonna die.”

     He was crazy. What he was saying was crazy. There is nothing more to make of the incident than that.

     But after sharing the memory something was still digging at me.

     Something I did not want to surface, but here it is.

     This goes all the way back to junior high and high school. There were several kids who shared many of the same classes that I did for the six years combined of junior and high school. Of course we didn't know in seventh grade that we would be in so many classes together for all those years. And in that very first year, seventh grade, some of those kids let me know real quick that I did not belong. They were a clique – every bit identical to the cliques depicted even in movies about high school today – every bit as ugly and uppity. They made me feel that I had the wrong looks, the wrong clothes, the wrong economic status, even the wrong address – and it was futile to act like a peer – I would never belong, and they laughed behind my back.

     So I decided, right there in seventh grade, that I did not need them. I would not waste my energy trying to get them to like me or include me or acknowledge that I existed. I shunned them, stuck my nose up at them, would not give any of them the time of day should they maybe have even asked. I hated them for six years.

     There was one boy in particular I singled out to funnel all my silent rage onto – he epitomized all that I despised in their high and mighty snootery. He was the one laughing behind my back that day in seventh grade when he did not know I saw him. I enjoyed hating him and I loved blaming him for my miserable high school experience.

    Then on Senior Day at the end of our senior year, that very boy actually came up to me and asked if I would sign his yearbook....he asked very nicely. He passed me his yearbook, and I gave him mine.

     What did he write in mine? He wrote, “don't ever turn in your homework early or people might think you are a brown-nose”.

     This was in reference to a joke I had made in chemistry class a couple of months earlier. He had heard my joke? He had acknowledged a joke that was made by me? He would have had to acknowledge my existence if he heard my joke. And he must have liked it – enough to want to share it with me permanently in my yearbook! Why couldn't we have been friends? Well, it was his own fault that we weren't.

…. Of course I was writing in his yearbook while he was signing mine – so I did not see what he wrote until later.

     What did I write to him? Well, I wanted to pen something that would reflect our entire six years together – something that would encompass the mood. Yes, I could still seethe with seventh grade bitterness after all that time. I wrote.....”you have pretty blue eyes; but I can't think of anything else nice to say about you.”

     It actually took until several years after high school to realize that I was the one who had been an ass all that time!

     It is amazing that anyone ever sat next to me on the number 12 bus! The mirror finally showed me who is the raging lunatic – the idiot behind hazel eyes!

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