Buses, Trains, and Lorraine Roy by Guest Writer Jim Ryan

I remember years ago being on a crowded train. People were standing and holding those straps they used to have. One guy, who was standing in front of a seated pretty girl, would sway his crotch almost into her face at every turn. She was pretending not to notice, and he kept swaying closer and closer to her face, all the while staring at her, almost daring her to look up at him.

I also vividly remember when I was a teenager, and taking the public buses back and forth to high school. There was this greasy looking businessman, who would always take the bench seats in the very front. He would position himself opposite the most attractive woman. He would have an obvious erection, and he would look down at it, then at the woman, or her legs, over and over. He desperately wanted her to notice his dick. I don’t think they ever did, but I got a real kick out of watching him. I observed this dance many, many times.

There was a black woman who used to ride these buses also. She wore a long blonde wig, thick ‘white person’ makeup all over her face and neck, colored stockings and white gloves. She thought she looked white I guess, but her features most definitely weren’t.

There was sometimes an older businessman, who wore a light coating of powder, blush and pale blue eyeshadow, just on the tips of his eyelids. Creepy. Almost made up like a corpse.

And when women had those bouffant towering hairdos, I remember a blonde with her hair teased and sprayed  about ten inches high sitting in an aisle seat. People could smoke on buses back then, and a black girl behind her was smoking and blowing the smoke directly into the teased up hair. So when you looked back at the blonde, she had smoke coming out of her hairdo, like it was on fire, she didn’t know what was going on, and nobody told her. I KNEW her, her name was Lorraine Roy, and even I didn’t ever tell her.

Lorraine once got her picture in the paper. It was daylight savings time, and some photographer took a picture of her with a clock nestled in that hairdo, to remind people to reset their clocks.

Lorraine’s house had no rugs, just linoleum with a carpet ‘print’ on them, like that would fool people into thinking it was carpet.

I still have many snapshots of Lorraine from my teen years. She was two years older than me, but her porch was where everyone hung out. One time Lorraine and I found a stash of liquor hidden in a wooded area. We sat there and drank ourselves silly. Both of us pissed in our pants, and we both got our asses handed to us by our parents. I was banned from her porch for a full summer.

Lorraine married a dentist. Nobody liked him, but she wanted to be married more than anything in her life, and he was probably the first guy who asked her. Some years later I ran into her in a five and ten. She had been crying. I didn’t ask why. I never saw her again.