Tales from the Back of a Bus

By John Pivovarnick

It’s 1984 in Los Angeles. Jake Maldemer’s first book, Tales from the Back of a Bus, is a hit. It's a darkly comic genre-bending roman à clef in which aspiring writer ‘Jack Moses’ meets an odd little man name Kobold who keeps randomly feeding him, handwritten horror stories as they travel across Los Angeles in the back of an RTD bus.

Just as the life of Jake’s storybook-self gets stranger and more chaotic, so does Jake’s real life. As he heads across the country to start his first-ever book tour, stories and messages begin to arrive from someone calling themselves Kobold out here in the real world.

Either somebody is playing an amazingly cruel and elaborate joke on him, or Jake Maldemer is slowly going insane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Pivovarnick
• Release date: Dec 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463205952

John Pivovarnick

John Pivovarnick is a writer, actor, and computer geek who you may have seen in the films Paper Heart or Outpost Earth. He is the author of Tales from the Back of a Bus a novel [Herringbone Press, 2018], and co-author, with Dave Sartor, of Theatrical FX Makeup—get the latest news from him about his writing projects at johnpivovarnick.com or his acting projects at masoncarver.com. Or not. You know, whatever. No stress.

Book preview

prologue: 1984

1: bereshit (in the beginning)

2: Ships in the night

3: the wayward bus

4: tales from the back of A bus [1]

5: jack moses’ mind wanders

6: jack in the underworld

7: rat has no control

8: dream sequence

9: beauty and the beast

10: a meeting of minds

11: moses calls his mother from the wilderness

12: north by northwest

13: terminus

14: tales from the back of A bus [2]

15: objects at rest

16: shaking

17: waking

18: things to do

part two

19: advance praise

20: what they really said

part three

21: on and off the air

22: on the outside looking in

23: jake’s mind wanders

24: red light, green light

25: below the frost line

26: do not disturb

27: anima rising

28: on the anthill

29: worshipping the porcelain deity

30: the ledger

31: jake maldemer lies to himself & others

32: raising demons

33: strange interlude

34: Tales from the Back of a bus [3]

35: the rest is prologue

36: dialogue for one

37: on the way to the bus

Afterword

There we were on that muddy road,

miles from any place.

And even the driver didn’t know the road.

Well, just anything could happen.

Anything.

—John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus

prologue: 1984

-I-

The moment Jacob Maldemer had been dreading for months had arrived.

At 1:15 p.m., Pacific Time, an anonymous-looking package was jammed through his mail slot. It slapped the tile floor. The sound of it froze Jake in mid-cigarette: his normal slouch straightened; his black, unkempt hair bounced briefly up in hackles; his cigarette hand hovered two inches from his lips.

Breathing stopped.

He did not move again until two inches of hot cigarette ash dropped into his lap. Sitting back on the sofa, he slapped the ash away and stared unseeing at the television where President Reagan was talking about oil or strategic missile defense—something. Jake wasn’t listening. He wanted to hide. No, he wanted a drink.

Instead, he stood and approached the entrance hall, cautiously. Peering around the doorjamb, he saw it: flat, thin, roughly rectangular, brown; addressed by hand in an elegant script; metered postage in the upper right-hand corner; in the upper left, no return address. The mail slot had torn a corner of the padded envelope open and grey pulp bled onto the tile.

Jake’s heart fluttered as he bent over to touch it, to pick it up. For a moment he thought he might just pass out, the way his vision clouded with bright golden pinpricks. He stood up too quickly and his head swam.

Taking a deep breath, he steadied himself against the door. The package lay cradled in his arms feeling warm and perversely alive.

Yes. It would be warm, he said, holding it away from himself.

-II-

He cleared a place on the cluttered coffee table and set the package down. To the right of it he set a sharp paring knife, which caught the light wickedly. To the left, he set his glass of bourbon (neat) and the bottle. The red wax around the bottle’s neck looked to Jake like fresh arterial blood.

He sat on the floor before this odd assembly of things, realizing that nothing had prepared him for this moment: not his agent’s warnings about anti-climax and post-partum depression; nor his therapist’s warning about insecurities fulfilling their own prophecies. Not even the ever-gathering collection of empty Maker’s Mark bottles made themselves heard, except as a glassy tink as they hit the bin.

The past two years had been all too dream-like: writing fluidly, rapidly over the course of nine months; getting one of the better agents in the business—Constance McKay and Associates—with barely a struggle; having an offer made by the second publisher who read his manuscript; signing a one-shot contract with an option to renew, along with a ridiculously large check. Suddenly he was doing minor revisions in blue pencil on the galley proofs.

Can a dreamer dream he’s dreaming?

Jake reached for the knife and held it, his hand trembling.

What if cutting open the package meant cutting open the dream? Would the glass and the knife and the package disappear as his dream-self shot upright in a rumpled bed and shook off the cobwebs of sleep? What portion of the outer dream would remain?

And, if not a dream, what was this moment?

Not waiting, not wanting an answer, he plunged the knife into the grey wound and cut outward along the length of the envelope, gutting it like a perch. There was an awful, flesh-like sound of rending, and the package spilled grey dust-like blood across the mosaic pattern of the rug.

The knife and the glass and the package, even reality seemed to remain intact. Grey dust sifted through his fingers, coating his hands and knees and the floor between his crossed legs.

The padded mailer grudgingly released the book: Jake watched himself slide feet-first and mewling from the incision and into his own waiting hand. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.

The jacket photo showed him sitting amiably in Ships Diner, his neck inexplicably tangled in a grey and white scarf that seemed a mile long. On the cover, a big-bellied bus caromed across three lanes of the I-5 North, heading to LA. The ass-end showed a cyclist and a car either sharing the road or about to collide. Above the two vehicles it read: Nowhere, and in smaller letters below that, Express.

-III-

For a long time, he just stared, watching his book-jacket self change as clouds of blue cigarette smoke blew across it, altering it moment by moment.

He drank, too, and that also changed it, making it more of an object of horror and despair—the novel as nightmare, the novel as confessional—but it also numbed him to the consequences of reaching out a trembling hand to take the demon by the throat, and by the gesture of a mere human thumb smeared with cigarette ash

(remember man that though art dust and to dust thou shalt return)

throwing open the cover to the heart of the printed word. An airline ticket and a clutch of clippings seesawed blithely to the floor, but he did not see them. His eye was on the page, the words. These were his words, all of them. All his. None changed, none removed that he could tell. His ashy thumb flipped pages back, back to the beginning, the beginning of the word,

(bereshit beret elohim—in the beginning was the word)

and finding it, he began to read.

1: bereshit (in the beginning)

The telephone rang, thrusting Jack Moses upward from a vaguely sexual dream.

He, a long, black-hairy comma beneath tangled sheets, swung a fist at the snooze button, but knocked over three clocks instead. The ringing continued. He swung again. Two more clocks fell, still ringing—loud, obnoxious ringing in his three-in-the-morning ears. He swung again and, like fabled Jack the Giant Killer, felled seven at a blow, and still there was ringing.

A dozen more clocks were arranged on the shelves over Jack’s Murphy Bed, still more within reach on the arm of the plaid, U-Rent sofa, and still more on the barn-board coffee table. It was a system of his own invention.

In the course of his life, he’d found one clock nearly useless for getting himself, a chronic late-show addict, out of bed in the morning. A lone alarm breaking the porcelain stillness of dawn would wake him for, maybe, a week. But once he got used to its sound he snored right through to lunch—then it was time, as the old joke says, to get a new clock.

Instead of just trashing the old clock, he used it with the new. Two alarms breaking the porcelain stillness of dawn woke him for nearly two weeks. Eureka! he said. So it goes, and so it went.

He had each alarm in his collection set five minutes later than the last, so that, after an hour of solo, duo, and glee-club ringing, all twenty-two would, usually, wake him to a Mormon Tabernacle Choir of chirps, beeps, bells, and buzzes.

Even though all of the clocks within reach were scattered, some shattered, on the bare wood floor, the ringing still sounded. One brown eye, slightly bloodshot, popped open. His cobwebby mind muttered, What the fuck?

Then it hit him: the light. Something wrong with the light slanting through the bamboo blinds—it was too harsh, too fiercely amber. Streetlight. Sodium Arc. A circuit clicked open, a hasty connection made: "It’s dark out…night…not alarms…phone."

His first thought said, It’s Mal, Jack’s older brother Malachi, but Mal called just before Jack went to bed. Can’t be. On the tail of that: Oh, God—something’s wrong at home.…

Immediately awake, adrenaline surging, he unconsciously totted up the list of friends and relations who were old, sick, who may be dead/dying/hurt/ill. Jack’s body responded less quickly. Only his heart worked faster as he groped from bed.

Dragging the polka-dotted sheet and clock corpses behind him, Jack shambled to the hallway where the ringing, plastic demon waited in its gothic niche. He picked it up.

"‘lo?" The word choked him. He cleared his throat and tried again.

Jack? Did I wake you?

Yeah.

Sorry. Listen, I just got in.

His mind fought to place the voice. Chris. Christine Jones, Inigo to her friends. She was saying, I heard through the grapevine that a job is opening up at the studio—nothing fancy, but it’s an in, and you could get your guild card. She worked as a designer for an independent film company, one of many that use the old Warner Brothers’ Studio, now The Burbank Studios, as their base of operations. "It’s just photocopying scripts—the changes and shit for the next day’s filming—the money stinks, but the benefits are rotten. Interested?

Yeah, sure. Where? When? Who?

I can see why you want to write, Jock-o. You’re so art-i-cue-late.

It’s three in the morning—you want Faulkner, call Faulkner.

All right, all right. Christ! You’re such a bitch in the morning. She was playing with him. Being a bitch in the morning was something he’d accused her of. Midas Filmco, 8:00 a.m. I’ll leave your name at the gate. See Mrs. Reynolds—you can’t miss her—she’s the big, blue-haired beast. Got it?

No. Jack scrambled a pen and yesterday’s paper from the phone niche. Again. Chris repeated it. He scribbled it as best he could in the dim hall.

Well, listen, kiddo, I gotta get some sleep. Be nice, be on time, and don’t let the beast scare you. Good luck.

Right.

Jack hung up the phone and sat heavily on the floor. When he did, plastic splintered, mainsprings twanged, quartz cracked, and Jack whispered: Shit. He’d sat on a clock. He lifted a cheek and brushed the debris aside, checked for blood—he hadn’t cut himself. That was something.

He reached a cigarette from the pack beside the phone and lit it, inhaling deeply. As he smoked, Jack watched the cigarette winking at him in the dark, a come hither wink, like a lover’s. With a blue-smoked sigh, he tore the note from the paper along with most of the date: …ay 15, 1979, went to slip it into his pocket and discovered he was naked.

He wasn’t surprised, not really. He’d slept in the nude ever since he was fourteen, in spite of his mother’s endless tirades against it. In fact, Lydia Moses, nee Nussbaum, set the habit for life when she started quoting anti-nudist edicts to Jack, from the Old Testament, the Torah. Instead of bowing to her, he simply locked his door. Out of sight, out of mind. He was out of sight and she, well, she was out of her mind.

Ultimately, that’s why he was in Los Angeles. Writing, sure. Sun and fun, sure. But to get away from Lydia, mostly, and Mal.

Lydia had always been bad, of little kindness, especially since Jack’s father died, but Mal’s change was recent. Mild at first, only a subtle shift of attitude when he graduated from college, then law school made him worse. Unbending. When he passed the bar, the new Mal crystalized, all fixed and brittle. Malachi Moses became Martin Clarke, and Dow Chemicals hired him as a junior legal clerk. Slowly, as Marty climbed the chemical ladder of success, he shed his past layer by layer and sliced shallow facets into the crystal’s surface, so it threw back blinding light, but Jack knew there was darkness at its heart.

Last night’s phone call was to announce his promotion to Vice-President of Legal something-or-others, with stock-options and full investiture in something else, Jack hadn’t caught what. He never really listened to Mal when he was pontificating, and he never called him Martin, much less Marty. He was Mal, and always would be.

By comparison, Jack could understand—even appreciate—Lydia’s change. She’d never been good with children, and when their father died, she was forced to care for two radical boys, alone, with little money for necessities much less the expensive gewgaws of kid-hood. They became a Catholic cross for a Jewish mother, and something in her snapped. Her love maybe. A love that had only been pencil-thin to begin with.

One day, Jack swore, he was going to write a novel about his battles with Lydia Nussbaum-Moses, tentatively titled: Torah! Torah! Torah!

But Mal. They’d been more than brothers growing up. Mal was everything to Jacky. Eight years his senior, Mal introduced Jack to the madness of the sixties, drafted him into the fight against the war in Vietnam, taught him what to believe in. Once, Mal stripped eight-year-old Jacky bare-assed and painted him Day-Glo paisley. He wrote Napalm Sucks on Jack’s thin chest, and Suffer the Children across his back. Mal even bestowed his beloved peace sign on Jacky, solemnly tying it around his neck on a leather thong.

Mal planned to march him at the head of a protest, but Lydia found out and put a stop to it—fast. She was pissed. Man was she pissed. She tore the peace sign from Jacky’s neck and trashed it, ranting about pins in her heart while she scrubbed Jacky raw with a boar-bristled brush. The paint never really washed off though, not in spirit, and little Jacky picked Mal’s peace sign out of the trash and cherished it always. Always.

Time passed. Wounds scarred over. Mal went to college and grew a beard. When drafted, he was stamped 4-F because of a glitch in his spine, which plunged Mal into deep depression. He’d really wanted to be drafted so he could run away to Canada, write a book, and be seen with Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary on the Today Show. The change began. Depression as cocoon.

He became a pre-law major, vowing to change the system from within. The beard got shorter. The ponytail vanished.

When Mal graduated, the beard had been trimmed down to a pencil-thin Clark Gable mustache. He wore suits all the time. When Mal got a job as a law clerk for the company he’d wanted to blow up for making napalm and killing children, Lydia beamed. Beamed.

A year later, he changed his name to Clarke. The new Martin was all about money, Italian suits, and beating the system, not changing it. The ponytail came back, but it was a pathetic thing now, a brain flagellum to show he was still young (despite the retreating hairline—all they had left of their father) and ‘with it.’ Somebody liked the change. Within six months Mal got promoted, and the company moved him west. Paid for the move, even.

Lydia didn’t like that, but said she understood and presented a supportive face. Jack still didn’t understand, not really, not why, but he clung to Mal’s peace sign as a talisman against the forming dark. He rationalized away his brother’s transformation by saying it was all an act, a big, fat, tasteless joke, and when Mal was ready, he’d kill the brittle Martin Clarke and come home, napalm cluster-bombing a huge swath of corporate America on the way.

It hadn’t happened, not yet. But Jack had hopes. Even now, four years and a handful of days since the Vietnam war ended.

Jack stood, brushing carpet fuzz from his ass and ambled back into his bedroom/living room. He wanted to get moving, get geared up for this interview and finally get a job so he could cut the ties that bound him to his mother and brother, but he could not muster the strength: the sight of all his wonderful, cheap plastic clocks lying belly-up on the floor like so many dead goldfish made him weep inside.

‘The time…’ he sighed, ‘the time is out of joint. Would that I was never born to set it right.’

Slowly, working only by the orange, slatted light from the street, Jack picked up the shattered measures of his life and dropped them, bit by bit, in the trash.

Woof, he said.

2: Ships in the night

-I-

It took Jack longer than he expected to clean up the debris of his morning bout with time—he’d managed to drag the wounded about the room on the tail of his polka-dotted sheet, leaving a trail of clockwork breadcrumbs throughout the forest of his life. He looked like a cartoon Caligula in battered Adidas and a polka-dotted toga, cleaning up after the fall of Rome.

He’d been at it more than twenty minutes before he realized why he was making no headway and shook his sheet-toga out into the trash. Then, retracing his steps with broom and dustpan, he began again.

It was a depressing job, all those poor dead clocks—only two survived the holocaust—but, finally, he finished and thought he could snag a few more hours of sleep. Jack kicked off his sneakers and pulled down the bed. The cool sheets sang to him of sleep and dripping, cavernous dreams. They called him back for just a minute, only a minute more of rest. Polka-dots polka-danced before him, holding him close and whispering, We’ll be gentle with you, Jack, just lay back and enjoy the ride. He was about to succumb, about to lay back and wallow in seamy sweatiness when his sensible-self muttered, … job… money… Burbank… beast… and catapulted him to his feet.

If he wanted to get to the Burbank Studios by 8:00, he’d have to begin the fabulous trek by bus before 6:30. Barring any misfortune with transfers and connections, he’d have just enough time for a shower, shave—even a quick something to eat at Ships if he was lucky, but he didn’t count on it.

And, as expected, things turned immediately worse: there was no hot water for showering or shaving, just an awful rumbling in the pipes. It made him shower faster, though. He plunged into the spray and leaped back, lathered, and jumped back under it just long enough to rinse. That improved his odds for breakfast, but it also made shaving the incredibly painful chore God must have meant it to be.

He had a rabid dog look as he shaved, wincing and scowling, growling and rolling his eyes like a spooked horse. His brow creased with each scrape of skin and hair, and he sprayed the mirror with generic foam with each explosive fuck! as the razor edited his chin.

Later, while he stuck wads of toilet paper to his bleeding lantern jaw, he declared to the mirror, Tomorrow I start a beard.

He went to the closet in the hall and dug a tiny gold Wanamaker’s box from his sock drawer. He opened it, peeled back the crumbling layer of cotton and lay Mal’s peace sign, still flecked with Day-Glo orange paint, across his palm. The leather, black and limp with age, cut across his life-line and dangled. He venerated it, this bit of pressed tin, by fingering it tenderly and thinking of the real Mal, then he tied the thong around his neck as a rabbi would place a shawl.

(bereshit beret elohim)

If you’ve ever brought me luck, bring me luck today—I think I’m going to need it.

Ten minutes later, cleaned, dressed, and with his good luck charm tucked inside his shirt, Jack was ready to face brisk, pre-dawn LA. He went in search of food.

-II-

Ships, the all-night coffee shop on the corner of Glendon and Wilshire, stands on the fringe of Westwood Village like the only artifact of an ancient people. Its fab-fifties curved lines, polished wood, and tile stand in sharp contrast to the Bauhaus behemoths that choke the sky around it.

Easily Jack’s favorite place on Earth, Ships was famous for its Shipshape burgers and personal-sized deep-dish apple pies à la mode. Jack was famous, in Ships at least, for eating there at least once a day. Every waitress in the place knew him, if not by name, at least by face or by his reputation as a reasonably good tipper. That was no small feat. The melted plastic, orange-flecked diner—trapped between Art Deco and chrome modern—was split in two large, curved sections, each half boasting an armada of waitresses. These waitresses all seemed to have been popped from the same vacu-form mold: the