cityscape
On the Bus with Kathy Jo
Kathy Jo Kramer
Before leaving to lodge with eight different people I met on my Internet newsgroup, alt.fan.dirty-whores, I bought some new socks and drawers. Pink drawers. I had no idea just how pink they were until I saw them laying on the bathroom floor of a strange man s house...
And I had no idea I would go into full wigdom the first night of my journey. However, I now have an official definition for wigdom: It s when your stomach hurts and you *think* you re scared but since there s no visible reason to be, you figure you re just crazy.
Moving in with people for a few days is the polar opposite of getting to know them on the Internet. Each piece of e-mail they sent made me feel like I knew them a little better. In person, the more of their lives I saw, the more I realized how much I didn t know. It was wildly disorienting.
Bob, my friend in Rochester, looked like a CMU student. I expected a Bruce Willis type. He s a playful, 39 year-old librarian. Bruce Willis? I don t know why. Cyberspace is a funny place. Anyway, as I walked around his house, through rooms of magazines and comics, I was amazed at how little I knew about him. I had no idea what he was really like. Especially when I heard him yelling at his cats.
We had some tea if you know what I mean and he showed me a movie where Megan Follows (who played Anne of Green Gables) is a prostitute at a Greyhound station who says sex is a big fat whore. I knew I had entered the JoZone at wigdom speed.
I heard a voice wild with vibration and certainty saying: She boarded a bus on the Information Superhighway, not knowing it led smack into a wall. Or into a pit until Jodi Foster shows up wearing cheap shoes.
But I m not crazy. Something strange had started. Bob was wiggling his toes under my leg while we watched TV. I m used to dirty bastard yinzer poopies so I of course thought he was hitting on me. Plus I kinda called this the Whore Tour. But I m a sexless, penniless whore. The humor-impaired don t understand. And men are notorious for missing subtleties like that. Like no. Like oh dear God I m begging you not to hurt me I ll do what you want let go of my throat.
I didn t know he was just an affectionate man trying to show me he was glad I was there, but of course I didn t realize that until a few hours after the all-honest Jo told him not to touch me. I saw him touching his friend in a simular way and felt like a sack of cybershit. Man.
Yeah, and before you read my stories, I want you to know that although things can be so distorted and strange out here, there is one thing I knew about everyone they were trustworthy. Seems that quality isn t limited by form or technology. I assure you that I was never in any danger. Although I imagine a cannibal misogamist would have to be rather charming, eh?
So that first night, while struggling against sleep under the suffocating blue bedroom walls in the strange house of a man who was doing who-knows-what downstairs (like cutting carrots for Jo Stew), I m sorry to admit I was really scared. In the soft horizontal dark, I realized he could do anything to me. Visions of Henry the Serial Killer danced in my head. But after 12 hours in transit, two of which were spent counting gum stains on the floor of the Cleveland Greyhound terminal, I drifted off. I figured I could trust him. Well, I had no choice.
We did have a blast. Visited Dan, a friend who designs film for Kodak. Ate fried bologna at a place that serves scoops of butter on French fries. Went to Niagra Falls, drove everywhere and his odometer turned over the 100,000 mark so we did a few kamikazes. I did get the feeling that he was a very lonely man. I started thinking that was the common thread among the thousands of people who read my netposts (a new literary genre) on mine and the Counting Crows groups (hey, Adam Duritz is on line he will have my baby yet). Anyway, well, I think we re the loneliest people who ever lived. At least we re all together in that.
After four days of wonderful surprises and tiny disappointments, I was psyched to continue on. I m proud that Bob and I parted wigdom-free and better friends even though it was exhausting.
At 6:30 a.m., I left Rochester on a virtually-empty bus. Even at that early hour, the air-conditioning was a cool relief. I realized I was alone again and the slight ache in my stomach, that I had for days before I even left, was gone.
But not for long. Oh the Internet we weave...
(Psst, that s the irrelevant but deep-sounding type ending to lure you into picking up the paper next week. Until then, you can read the details of my trip on my newsgroup and testimonials of the people I'm staying with on my World Wide Web page the URL address is
http://sunsite.unc.edu/mal/KJK/ This is the big time, baby)
copyright 1995 kathy jo kramer
all rights reserved and shit