Bus Ride to Badajoz

Extremadura, Spain. 1995

Twenty-three college students, each occupying his or her own seat on the luxurious bus, behaved like the computer-generated crowds in the Lord of the Rings movies; each individual, though outwardly similar, was programed by an unseen force to take action in his or her own way. He might be chatting with her. She might be staring out the window. He might be listening to a discman. She might be reading a book, while he might bob his way up the bus aisle to the front, grasping on seat backs the entire way, to give the bus driver a mixed-tape.

Because the college students have learned that culture shock and homesickness are real, visceral things, they latch on to symbols of home, like a mixed tape of James Taylor. There is no James Taylor in Spain. James Taylor is the stuff of your mother and her macramé. James Taylor makes you want to dance in the kitchen with River Phoenix in Running on Empty. James Taylor does not match the rhythm of Spain but it soothes an ache in the college students' collective mind; an ache that they did not know they had until they put on the tape and they all started singing, in collective, analog, unison.

Some of the digital college students are programed to look out the window and stare at the red-covered hills. The hills are red from the earth, but also red from poppies. Red poppies, red like a new t-shirt from Joe's Rent-A-Boat, cover the hills and the students know that they are not at home. The students also look out the window and notice stork's nests, like spittle bug foam but with sticks, huge, high up on telephone poles and lamp posts. Storks mean that they are not at home. The students are on a red planet where they push in their side view mirrors to pass on the street and the driver lets them play James Taylor, even though they know that he doesn't listen to James Taylor, he listens to Oasis.

The bus rumbles down the incongruous, macadamized road, wide, black, smooth, and new, a defilement of the red earth. It goes fast because there are no narrow cobblestone streets on the wide autopista, no almost-head on collisions, and no reason to press in the side view mirror to pass a car.

Although the bus is luxurious, there is one problem. No head. It does not have a toilet. And although a digital student would not have to go, a real student would. The real students start yelling in unison for the bus driver to find a bathroom, to pull over, anything, they are dying.

She crosses her legs.

The material in her pants is thick between her legs, and it rubs against her pussy. She tightens her legs, and squeezes and holds, for a long time, because she has to wait until the bus driver stops, but a familiar feeling comes over her.

Fuck, she is going to come.

She is not digital, she is real. And she is going to come while on a bus with 23 college students. While the digital students around her act in their random ways, she chats with him and tries to chat with her, and the bus rumbles smoothly on down the black top road.

As the motor from the bus goes and goes, she comes, not once, not twice, not three times, but an uncountable number of times, the pressure in her groin unbearable, the pressure on her bladder unbearable, with nothing to do but to hide the fact that she is orgasming around almost two dozen people. None of them know this.

She hides it and she hides her smile and she hopes that the bus driver will find a rest stop soon.

The bus driver, finally sick of the yelling, in English and Spanish, from the students, pulls over to the side of the road, at a poppy-covered hill along the autopista. The students run off the bus. There is nowhere to go, but they all have to go. So, one by one, dotted on the hill, twenty-three California college girls and college boys, real, not digital, pee, laughing, while the cars drive by, honking.