Personal Identification

The Concord bus is fine. It’s fine!

It was a look. Late 2000, I think. York Hall, University of Maine.

I beat a rather hasty retreat back to the bus station in Providence that morning. I’d arrived there three nights prior, in order to meet in person for the first time an internet friend at her dorm at the Rhode Island School of Design. We first met online a few years prior, in a chatroom for David Bowie fans, back before it was common knowledge that meeting a stranger online was, y’know. Super dangerous. It was spring break of my freshman year of college, March 2001, I was 18 years old, and I wanted to meet another person that identified as goth. They were in short supply in Maine.

Anyway, she wasn’t dangerous; she was nice. She had short blonde hair, and always wore black military issue pants and a black t-shirt. She had a gigantic “Aladdin Sane” poster on her wall. She studied drawing and painting. She was originally from Texas. She was even more sarcastic than I was. She was great.

We went to see an OK band in a campus multipurpose room. We went to a midnight showing of “Eraserhead,” which was worth the entire trouble of traveling from Maine to Rhode Island. I’m not sure I’d at that point ever felt cooler, in my Hot Topic t-shirt and black pinstriped pants from JC Penney. I was seeing a David Lynch movie with real goths; real art school goths. Should I have gone to art school? Maybe I should have gone to art school. We listened to The Cure and Nick Cave and The Damned. They made fun of me for liking AFI’s “The Art of Drowning.” I didn’t feel bad about it; I took the note. What you listened to, what you wore, what you watched - that’s what told people who you were. Was I an AFI goth? Or was I a Sisters of Mercy goth? Which personality was I trying on that day?

Her friend down the hall asked everyone on the floor if they wanted a fake ID, since she had a laminating machine and a digital camera and was good with Photoshop. She charged everyone $25, which I didn’t really have but coughed up anyway. A few hours later, I was Emily Burnham, 24, from Maryland. I used it for more than a year until I finally got busted by the cops for buying beer at Burby & Bates in Orono.

The last night I was there, we drank so much vodka that she puked in her own bed. I helped her clean it up. She kissed me, and her mouth still tasted like vomit. It was too gross to continue.

Bright and early, back on the bus, home to Maine. In Boston I transferred to the Concord Bus, the rhythms and landmarks of which were already second nature to me. Route 1 outside of Boston, with its colorful collection of businesses, was my favorite part. Prince’s Pizzeria and Spaghetti House, with its leaning tower of Pisa; DB’s Golden Banana, which I would later learn was a strip club; Hillstop Steak House, with its gargantuan cactus-shaped neon sign. Roast beef and liquor; by-the-hour motels and used car dealerships; Hooters and Honeybaked Ham. It felt, at age 18, like ironic distance; ennui. Detached observation of our crass society. David Bowie on the train, gazing out the window. What mysteries did his mind contain?

In Portland, I transferred to the coastal Maine bus; the one that stops in towns all the way up Route 1, and that takes nearly 4 hours to get to Belfast, where I would be picked up by my parents to return to a few more days of sullen exile from my college friends. You will never have a finer tour of midcoast gas stations than when riding the Concord coastal route.

I hunkered down in the back of the bus, headphones in my ears, ensconced in a book, gazing out the window at the slowly melting snowbanks; gray and crusty and depressing. There weren’t many people on the bus, and it was early March, so it would be pretty much dark before 5. Nobody would bother me. I was too young to have a hangover from the heroic amount of drinking I’d done the previous night, despite the fact that I’d aged six years overnight and was now Emily Burnham, 24, from Maryland.

Portland to Brunswick; Brunswick to Bath; Bath to Wiscasset. Riders dwindled until it was just me, one other person and the driver, a genial middle-aged man in the Concord uniform that makes them look like Mr. McFeely from “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.” When we arrived in Rockland, at the ferry terminal, the lone remaining rider other than myself got off.

We pulled out of the parking lot and did the loop-de-loop around downtown Rockland one more time. Then we did it again. Twice, around the one-way. I was used to the Concord bus. This wasn’t the route. I didn’t say anything, thinking maybe he had his reasons.

The bus driver then finally exited the loop and began to head up Route 1, only to pull into the driveway of an apartment building just past the Dunkin’ Donuts. A woman came out of the front door and got on the bus; also middle-aged, with curly blonde hair and wearing a parka a bit too aggressive for the relatively warm March evening. She and the bus driver kissed, passionately. I hoped her mouth didn’t taste like vomit.

She sat directly behind the bus driver, and he pulled out of the driveway and back onto Route 1, her arms around his neck, caressing his face. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to one another. I was frozen. I should have said something. I didn’t. It would be the second thing I’d done that weekend that, in hindsight, was super dangerous. But I wanted to see how it would pan out.

Onward we pushed, northward into the mild March night. The bus driver and his lady friend cooed at each other. I was slumped down in my seat, headphones off, just barely able to see what they were doing over the back of the seat.

The lady friend arose from her seat, unzipped her massive parka and squeezed in next to the bus driver, who gamely attempted to keep his eyes on the road. She knelt down next to his seat and reached over to his crotch. The bus driver swerved a tiny bit.

“Ahem,” I said. “Ahem.”

They didn’t hear me.

“Hello?” I said, more loudly.

The lady friend shot up like a cannon. The bus driver swerved again, and she fell backward into the stairwell, catching herself on the handrail.

“Hello? Who’s there?” the bus driver demanded.

“Hi, I’m just sitting back here. I’m going to Belfast,” I replied. “Are we going the right way?”

The bus driver chuckled in the panicked way only someone that’s been caught can chuckle.

“My goodness, miss, I’m so sorry to miss you! I didn’t see you there! I thought everyone had gotten off the bus!”

“Nope, I’m still here. Are we still going up to Belfast?”

“Yes, of course! We’ll get you right there. No problem.”

The lady friend had sat back down in a seat, clearly deeply flustered.

“Ma’am, you’re going north too, right?” the bus driver asked her.

“Uhhhh…yes,” she responded. “Yeah, I’m going north.”

“Great! You just sit tight, miss. We’ll get you right home,” he said, his anxiety barely contained.

“Sounds good,” I said, and settled back into my seat.

The last 30 minutes or so of the ride was silent. We arrived at the Belfast Big Apple over by the McDonald’s around 5:30. A light rain had begun, thickening the night air. My parents were sitting in their Toyota RAV4, illuminated by the gas station lights, waiting for me.

I grabbed my backpack and made my way down the aisle. The bus driver stood up and pointed the way off the bus, thanking me profusely for choosing to ride Concord Trailways and wishing me the most pleasant of evenings. I tossed my bag into the backseat and plopped down behind my dad; my mom was driving.

“How was your trip? How was your friend? How was the bus?” she asked.

“It was really cool. Providence is really cool. She was really cool,” I said, a master of understatement. “The bus was fine. It was the bus,” I added, deciding that now was not the time to tell my parents that the bus driver’s girlfriend was about to give him a blowjob while he was driving. I would tell them the whole story years - actually decades - later.

“Yeah? What did you do that was fun?”

“Just hung out. Went to see a band. Went to a really cool movie. ‘Eraserhead.’ Have you seen it?”

“I haven’t,” she replied. She paused for a moment. “Your father had an interesting weekend too.”

I could hear my dad roll his eyes.

“Oh, Phil, she’s gonna see it.”

“See what?” I asked. “What will I see?”

“You know how your father went to visit Tommy and Ann this weekend? She convinced him that she could dye his hair and get some of the gray out,” mom said, clearly reveling in what she was about to tell me. “She thinks she’s a beautician.”

“Jesus, Nancy,” my dad said.

“Well, you can see how it looks,” she said, and clicked the overhead light on.

My dad’s hair was a violent shade of auburn; like if Bozo the Clown hired a colorist to give him a slightly more natural look. The silver hair that had been spreading from his sideburns and up the side of his head was now particularly vibrant. I’d had a similar color on my hair not that long ago, but I used Manic Panic.

My mother screamed with laughter. My dad didn’t.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s really funny, Nancy.” He turned back to me. “She thinks it’s hilarious.”

“I mean, it’s pretty funny, Dad,” I said. “If you grew it out you could be Pippi Longstocking.”

“I guess it was more red than it was brown? I don’t know what she got. She went down to the drug store. Tomorrow we’re going to go get a darker shade and cover it up and that’ll be the end of it,” he said. “I didn’t know that was gonna happen.”

“Hopefully that works!” my mom said. In our family, we show our love through mockery. “He looks a little like Danny Bonaduce, don’t you think?”

We crossed the bridge into East Belfast, nearly home to Searsport. I could feel the cool art school goth I had transformed into a few days ago shrinking; retreating into my imagination, tucked away in the back of my mind, only allowed to come out when I had my headphones in, or when I hung out with the handful of weirdos I knew at school.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my wallet. My alternate identity was safely in there: Emily Burnham, 24, from Maryland, in leather pants that actually fit and shredded t-shirt, perfect hair, best taste in music, read everything, mysterious and sexy and cool. She’d live that life for me; at least for another year and a half, until the cops took it away.