The Hallelujah Special

very short fiction

Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

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Laid off from my VP job in manufacturing at age 55, I sent out dozens of résumés, failed 13 interviews (including one where the company flew me over 2,000 miles to their headquarters in Miami), lost my condo, and finally, after emptying my savings, I moved into a micro-apartment where all my neighbors were college students. Mostly Asian kids from Asia. First generation immigrants. Future engineers and chemists. Maybe some surgeons. Their youthful ambitions intimidated me and sent me into painful nostalgia for my college years. They cooked unfamiliar food in the shared kitchen. Unfamiliar odors. They must've thought me strange, the unfamiliar white man living among them. But they were polite. They walked a block away to smoke their cigarettes and sometimes shared their food with me. I preferred the Vietnamese and Japanese food but I'd never say such things aloud. Nobody wants their food and cooking to be insulted.

Then, after a year of job searching, I was hired as a school bus driver for special needs kids.

I didn't want the job. I'd purposely avoided marriage and children. And the school district probably wouldn't have hired me if it weren't for the Covid-related employee shortages and if a college friend wasn't on the school board. I confess that I thought the bus would be a rolling One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Crassly, I wondered if they made extra-small straitjackets. And sure, the kids, mostly autistics, were definitely odd. They sometimes saw the world in revelatory ways. One kid, after watching an asshole fly past the bus as we were stopped at train tracks, said, "Slow means love."

I'm not romanticizing the kids. They could also be short-tempered. They  had irritating physical tics and speech patterns that sometimes grated on the nerves. And their social skills were lacking. One kid asked me the same question twice every day.

"Do you like Cheerios?" he'd ask in the morning when he stepped onto the bus.

"Do you like Cheerios?" he'd ask in the afternoon when he stepped off the bus.

Yes, I adore Cheerios. I eat Cheerios all day long. Yes, I love those little wheat circles. Of course. Absolutely. More than anything in the world. 

God, the kids could be so exhausting.

They were the offspring of busted marriages. The divorce rates were high in special needs families. The fathers more often couldn't deal with a kid who was someone other than the child they'd wanted. I imagined a father secretly weeping in the laundry room because his kid would never play tee ball, let alone blast home runs in Yankee Stadium or even hit lazy singles for some middling high school team. I suspect that I would've been exactly like that kind of heartbroken father. So it's good that I would never have children.

The fathers of those special kids didn't much talk to me. I think they felt like lesser men in my presence—in the presence of a man whose sperm wasn't obviously cursed. At least, that's how I imagined those men thought of themselves. They believed they'd begun failing their children at the first moment of conception. But they didn't know my history of failure. They didn't know that I slept in a twin bed where my feet dangled over the edge. They were lawyers, doctors, and bankers but they still avoided my gaze—the penetrating gaze of a reluctant bus driver who wasn't the progenitor of broken children.

Many of the mothers who waited for their kids became single parents. Their sadness was conspicuous. They were only in their 30s but it felt like everything had already been decided for them. I had nothing to say that would've changed a thing for them. My silence was the best way to honor them. I could only disappoint them with my words and they were already surrounded by disappointments that were munching on thistle with herds of other disappointments.

Very few of those moms ever left their kids. Almost none of them. I'd only heard of one mother who ran away. And her kid wasn't at our school. Her husband became a single father raising the boy in the suburbs. But they showed up for city events. Special needs picnics, parades, and parties. That father was lauded. Excessively so. And the mother who'd left was vilified. Excessively so. I'd heard the word "evil" whispered a few times. I imagined a mother curled into a fetal ball on a living room carpet, mourning everything that she thought was broken in her mind and womb.

During the bus rides, I was supposed to play Radio Disney for the kids, if I played the radio at all. But screw that. I played them classic rock. Man, you haven't lived until you've heard a dozen Asperger's kids singing heavy metal.

One early morning, a stern mother stepped onto my bus—she'd always been short on words and long on glares—and asked me if I'd been teaching her son how to sing AC/DC.

Oh, shit, I thought. I'm gonna need a new job.

"Yes," I said.

"'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap'?" she asked.

Perhaps the sexual innuendo of that tune was a bit too much,

"Is that okay?" I asked.

"He's got the whole family singing with him," she said. "It's wonderful. He's never sang before. And now he's learning other AC/DC songs. He says he wants to learn all their songs. He's never said anything like that before."

Tears rolled down her face. I saw her joy and I saw her grieving for the joy that had been missing in her life.

Some of those kids didn't even make eye contact. Can a parent ever get used to a child who won't look at them? That has to be devastating. But now that kid and his family were connected by their singing voices. They were hitting and missing notes together. I'm not a poet but I know that some difficult things are also gorgeous.

I'm sure you're thinking that I'm happy I've lost my corporate job and finally found the true meaning of life while driving a bus. That's bullshit, of course. Even as I sing along with the kids, I still want better work. But it's bizarrely difficult to get a job that pays you $40,000 a year when you used to make $125,000 a year. So I'm still desperate for enough cash to keep my life going—to not become an elderly man eating a single tin can of tuna fish for lunch. I feel prematurely retired. But if I'm meant to remain fallow then thank God it's with these inappropriate children. They're not my teachers and I'm not theirs. We're learning the routes together.