Just Another Bozo On The Bus

By Samuel Vargo

I had no idea what I was going to do with all the flash comedy and satire that I’ve had published over the past few decades. The stuff kept collecting on my writer’s pages and on the dashboards of comedy and satire `zines I’ve contributed to, all over the Internet. So, I decided to put these little stories - most around 1,000 words or so - into a collection and sell it as a book. I wanted to make "Just another bozo on the bus" affordable; and at a bit more than a penny a page, it’s a pretty good deal.

A lot of the work I completed while contributing to the now defunct National Lampoon Humor Network and these stories cannot be found on the Internet anymore, since the NLHN went defunct years ago and has no Internet presence. The NLHN included roughly 20 comedy and satire 'zines that were linked to the main "National Lampoon" homepage. I’ve redrafted, and even rewritten, much of this comedy and satire that appeared on the NLHN shortly after the turn of the new millennium and quite a few stories from those days are captured in this collection. . . .Everything here has been published online on Internet comedy and satire magazines. So that means everything made an editor's and publisher's cut. One of the main ways comedy and satire is gauged on whether it is publishable is if it's funny or not. So, I guess a few people who know comedy and satire writing thought all this stuff worthy to fly on an untold myriad of Internet magazines. Some of the stories were published as "flash fiction" by literary magazines. Comedy is a relative thing, though, and what some may laugh at, others may frown over. One of the NLHN mags I contributed to heavily back in the day is called "The Frown", in fact!

So why the title? Well, a lot of these little ditties were written when I lived in the Deep South for about a decade - for around five years in Mississippi and after Hurricane Katrina, another five years or so in North Florida. Anyhow, for a good part of that time, my means of transportation was the city bus. Have you ever had to ride a city bus? Well, after many of these bus trips of yesteryear a stop before home was a public library, where I hacked away at stories on public computers. And my own form of "entertainment" was normally preceded by a long workday.

For the price of a couple bucks that included a ride to the downtown terminal and a transfer out to my destination, I had the honor and privilege of riding along with some of the funniest, most fascinating characters I've ever known. Some of their mirth and levity is captured here - although none of the bus riders are represented - except in a vicarious flippant way or voice.

Some people like to put together jigsaw puzzles. Others enjoy penciling in the grids of crossword puzzles. Some knit macramé or cross stitch. Others guzzle down beer and watch TV. I write stories. All sorts of stories. For the most part, I write for myself. I do it as a form of relaxation and respite. It’s cathartic. It’s a way of jotting down daydreams and nightmares. It's a way to expound on wet dreams and get through the dry times. It’s a way of tickling my own funny bone and a way to combat the tears that come all too often by just living and "being there", wherever "there" might be, , , ,

And writing is a way of creating worlds, at least on these electronic document pages - of all sorts. And characters of all types. Funny people. Wise guys. Shady ladies. Good-time girls. Prudes. Phonies. Fools. Outrageous frauds. Sages with an eccentric side. And just ordinary, run-of-the-mill weirdoes.

Anyhow, for a little more than a penny an electronic page - or even much less than this during book sales - I hope you consider it a fair deal, if not a bargain.

Even more, I'm glad we're seeing each other now on your laptop or PC. You're not reading this at work, are you? Well, all I can say is that it's a complete waste of company time! Shame on you!

We'll have lunch again sometime. S

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samuel Vargo
• Release date: Jan 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370689491

Samuel Vargo

Samuel Vargo writes on a freelance basis for a few liberal, online, national magazines that headline daily. He also writes for a few comedy and satire magazines with international readerships that headline daily. Vargo has written poetry and short stories for print and online literary magazines, university journals and a few commercial magazines. He worked most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter and taught as an adjunct English professor for about a decade at a number of community colleges, state colleges, and state universities. He has a BA in Political Science and an MA in English (both degrees were awarded by Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA). These days, Vargo doesn't write much poetry, but instead, concentrates on writing detective mystery novels under the pseudonym Stanley Gladden. His two latest works are "Woodside" and "Welcome to the Horror Show". Vargo was a curator and editor for a string of eight commercial online magazines for almost a year, but a few years ago, he gave this up to work on his own writing pursuits. Vargo was the fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years. A book-length collection of Vargo's short stories, titled "Electric Onion Head and the Rotating Cyclops of the Month", was published by Literary Road and had a web presence for seven years from 2007-.2014.

Book preview

Just Another Bozo on the Bus

- A collection of flash comedy and satire

By Samuel Vargo

Just Another Bozo on the Bus, Copyright 2017 by Samuel Vargo. All rights reserved. No part of this work can be copied or duplicated without the consent of the author.

Just another Bozo on the Bus is dedicated to the writer’s nephews and nieces, and now, even his great-nephews and great-nieces. You’re all over the place these days, even in other countries! You all flew the coop! I never get to see you much these days, but as long as Uncle Sam’s around, you can’t say you don’t have a really good friend. Hey, call me once in a while, will you? Even an occasional postcard would be nice!

Index

*) Introduction

1) Heavy Compulsion

2) The Chamber of Commerce of the Gateway to Death's Bus Tour in 2025

3) Mid-Management Recruitment

4) Big News Day Hurray!

5) An Urban Fable, It’s All in the Name

6) The First of the Old Cowboys

7) A Sad State of Affairs

8) The Meanest Misfit in the Tenements Just Got a Grizzly, a Tiger, and Three Alligators

9) How to Make it Big in the Music Business These Days

10) Waiting for a Tow is Like Waiting for Gadot

11) Ohio University Changes its Mascot to a Party-Friendlier Biker Dude

12) My old English Comp Professor Feducious T. Flynt is working on a S/F novel rooted in the world of real science

13) That’s Not My DNA, Maury!

14) The Headless Hillbilly of Pickleville Hollow

15) Bigfoot and I: Are We Off to American Idol?

16) My neighbor and friend Jacko gets diagnosed with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

17) Mr. Dump was a real ratfink!

18) Don’t Let Them Put Flora and Fauna on Your Head and Call You a ‘Hippy’ or a ‘Yippy’ Little Feller!

19) The Retail Test

20) NASA, a Mosquito-Sized WMD, a Dulcimer Player, and the Shooters Girls

21) Absinthe: a drink with so much kick it'll drill holes in your brain

22) Early Man’s Version of Beer Pong was Different, but the Results were the same

23) Climbing the College Dating Ladder: Start at the Bottom, in the Pits of Hell!

24) Alabama Crimson Tide become NFL's newest expansion team

25) I Just Bought My Own Drone, And Man Is She a Pretty One!

26) Give up Fox News for Lent? No, never! Not this Troglodyte!

27) Here are 25 things you never want to say on a first date

28) Wendy's Redhead Lady to Anchor 24-hour-a-day Sharkfest Channel

29) Phil & Si & I Get Attacked by a Rougarou in a Louisiana Swamp

30) Change the name Redskins?! Get the hell out of My Office, it’s nap time!

31) Vape Rape provides consumers vaping with atomic punch

32) Mama Kardashian Bemoans a Slow News Week

33) Who said it? Sarah Palin or the Crazy Cat Lady just released from the Juno mental hospital?

34) Destroying Donald Trump by ring, ring, ringing the phones off the hooks

35) Twenty ways you can tell if your man is going Gropensteinian

36) Twenty-Five Signs Your Girlfriend is Having an Affair with Donald Trump

37) Here are some of the tweets Donald Trump punched into his cell phone that were deleted

*) About the Author

Introduction

I’ve had to ride the city bus for years in my life. Not continuous, mind you, but there have been periods of weeks, months, yes, and even years, when I’ve had to get around without a car and the city bus was my only alternative. And although I can’t give you an overall time allotment of how long I’ve been stuck on the bus or the bus stop, just suffice it to say it’s been far too long. . . .

Riding the city bus isn’t the best way to get around. It can take several hours to arrive at a destination that could take a half hour, or even fifteen or twenty minutes, by car. There are normally long waits at the bus stop downtown if a transfer is needed. A transfer is when two, or sometimes even three, buses are required to deliver you to your final destination. Most people, no matter where they’re going in any city, require at least one transfer to arrive at their destination. Sometimes buses run every ten minutes, others for a route may arrive at the bus stop every hour, sometimes even every two hours. Hypothetically, you can be at the bus stop outside your residence in five minutes, catch the bus going downtown, and wait at the bus stop for more than an hour. This is normally not the case, thank goodness, and most people can get their transfer bus out to their final stop in under twenty minutes or so. Bigger cities normally have more buses traveling each route so the bus traveling that route arrives quickly at the bus stop. Middle-sized cities usually have less buses, and this means longer wait times for a transfer.

One of the biggest hassles about riding the city bus is that if you have a job that starts in the morning, your morning must begin a lot earlier than if you had a car to drive. So, if you begin your job at nine in the morning, and you need 45 minutes to drink some coffee, prepare a lunch, get dressed, then walk to the nearest bus stop, you must tack onto this time the required bus time. And most morning bus riders have to wait for a transfer at the downtown bus station, which could take a few minutes up to over an hour.

Another thing about being on the city bus route is that you’re outside a lot. The main bus terminal downtown may have shelters, but they have wide openings in them and are open air buildings. Like they say, when it rains, it pours, so when it’s raining like crazy, it’s raining like crazy in the bus shelter, too. And although the bus is heated and air conditioned, most of the time riding in the bus itself is either cold and drafty in the winter or hot and stuffy in the summer. I don’t think there has ever been a poem written or a song sung about how comfortable the city bus ride is, from here to there and sometimes, to nowhere at all.

And another thing about being on the bus route is that you meet some of the strangest characters imaginable. Every type of crazy individual, from the bi-polar misfit to the irrational paranoid schizophrenic is on board. There are stark-raving serious people who you know, just by looking at them, that exchanging a little nicety like a small or a hello is a real faux pas. There are others you don’t want to say anything to simply because if you do, they’ll talk your ears off all the way to the next destination. Then, they might turn into the thing that won’t leave, stand in your transfer-bus area for the final stop bus you need to catch, and continue their one-dimensional, one-voice dialogue telling you everything you don’t want to hear. Normally, these types squawk on and on about mundane banalities that nobody in their right mind would have one inkling of interest in – and they talk about such stuff with animated excitement.

Yes, there are all sorts of bozos on the bus, and yes, yes, yes, when I’ve been denigrated to having no wheels of my own, I’m such a character, too. Riding the city buses in an array of cities throughout my adult life, I’ve learned both humility and humanity. I’ve developed an open mind and now I accept that each and every person is one of God’s children. Oh, I’ve learned a lot about this sort of thing from other things I’ve had to cope with in life, too, but being a longtime city bus traveler has definitely added a thing or two to my personality and my character. Not to leave out my sense of humor.

I have had the pleasure of talking to, and associating with, some of the funniest people I’ve ever known by having a monthly city bus pass that normally cost me twenty or thirty bucks. Or, just having two, one-dollar tickets, one for the trip for the bus stop closest to where I have lived, and one for the transfer from the downtown central bus terminal. Sometimes, such a low fare has been much more entertaining than a pricy ticket to a movie theater to see a comedy.

Just Another Bozo on the Bus was indeed written by a writer who has been deeply affected by these wild, wonderful, hilarious souls. And in many of the stories in this collection of comedy and satire, all those voices from having to sit in a cramped bus, or having to wait at a freezing bus stop, have been captured. A little bit, anyhow. I knew a guy in Florida who always used to say, "I’m just another bozo on the bus. Now I know this guy always drove a pretty nice car and he probably never rode the city bus once in his life. But I liked his little saying and I snagged it from my memory file to attach as the title of this collection

To tell you the truth, I had no idea what I was going to do with all the flash comedy and satire that I’ve had published over the past few decades. The stuff kept collecting on my writer’s pages on the dashboards of comedy and satire `zines all over the Internet. And believe it or not, I still most likely have enough material to complete a second volume just like this one, but I think I’m going to wait a while before doing so. Yes, I’ve been writing flash comedy and satire for decades. Looking back, it all started when I was working on public computers at city libraries and I usually got to these libraries by riding a city bus. I guess having these little ditties hanging out there on my writer’s pages is okay, but I recently decided to put these little stories, most around 1,000 words or so, into a collection and sell it as a book. And there’s nothing wrong with throwing them all in one collection and charging a price for this work. Yes, I am a big fan of capitalism and I’m living the American Dream.

I wanted to make Just Another Bozo on the Bus affordable, and for the price you will pay for this work, I’d have to say you probably couldn’t buy an ice cream treat or a couple of tacos with the coins you’ll spend on my little collection. At roughly a penny a page, it’s the bargain of the day. For expediency’s sake, it’s all captured here and there’s no need to fish around on the Internet and find the stuff that’s posted. Yes, quite a bit of this material can still be found on the Internet, but there is a lot here that isn’t available, too. A lot of the work I completed while contributing to the now defunct National Lampoon Humor Network cannot be found on the World Wide Web, but I’ve redrafted, and even rewritten, much of this comedy and satire and sent it to other comedy and satire e-zines, where much of it eventually found a home. Anyhow, dead comedy and satire writers like Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mark Twain, and even Erma Bombeck hardly need any royalty money, but this writer sure appreciates you spending some of your loose change on this collection. I really do, and as I’ve already mentioned but will state again, for a little more than a penny an electronic page, I hope you consider it a fair deal, if not a bargain.

Some people like to put together jigsaw puzzles. Others enjoy penciling in the grids of crossword puzzles. Some knit macramé or cross stitch. I write stories. All sorts of stories. For the most part, I write for myself. I do it as a form of relaxation and respite. It’s cathartic. It’s a way of jotting down daydreams and nightmares. It’s a way of tickling my own funny bone. It’s a way of creating worlds, at least on these electronic document pages, of all sorts. I can create characters. Characters I did not want to know, characters I know or knew, and even characters I never want to know or really want to know. Although I don’t buy into that old ruse that God never makes two of the same kinds of snowflakes, I honestly believe he never makes two types of the same sort of person. We’re all unique. So I try to breathe life into the characters that I create and although they’re all very flat, in comparison to God’s creation, I at least try to make them come alive on these electronic pages that come and come and never stop coming. I try to create settings, themes, and plots that are sometimes believable and at other times, unbelievable and outrageous. Hyperbole and ridiculousness have their comedic and satiric values, after all!

I heard a university professor one time say something to the effect that strict comedy is something that is funny. Hopefully, hilarious. When the element of satire is sprinkled on this formula, it creates a target. Something that is bad and something that needs to be changed. Satire is very direct and can be very biting. Normally, there is a target in the form of a person, institution, or place that is that target. Those who comprise this target do not like being targeted, and a good example of this has been President Donald Trump’s vitriol he has tweeted out concerning the skits on Saturday Night Live that have made him a target. Hey, Mr. President, those SNL Not Ready for Prime Time Players are just doing their jobs. You’re a bull elk in a field of geese and gophers. Everyone’s going to be shooting their comedic and satiric cannons your way, as long as you remain President, so keep a stiff upper lift. Furthermore, if I was a gambling man I’d put a lot of money down on a wager that you’ve never had to ever ride the city bus.

- Samuel Vargo, Jan. 20, 2016

Heavy Compulsion

TENSION AND TEN heavy girls play Barbooth in the projects while it rains in unholy sheets outside. The shooter casts two miniature dice and throws two threes and wins. Mona Lisa’s pet cat crawls underneath the furry olive-colored table and snuggles up to Boot Baby’s leg.

Boot Baby kicks the feline, furious that Harley Charley didn’t throw a one and a one, or a two and a two, or a four and a four, or a one and a two; because if he had, she would have won. Like the others, Boot Baby had five dollars on that stupid roll and if only those two little cubes would have revealed something good.

A two and a two would have been great, she thinks, as the rain pounds against the window. Waves of water rush down the window like in one of those monster movies. Boot Baby doesn’t know any of the other girls and she doesn’t care. She knows they all live around here somewhere, and after the game, they’ll all go back to where they came from, most likely busted, disgusted and not-to-be-trusted.

The game’s dice man, Harley Charley, allows Mona Lisa to bring her black-and-white cat to his daily Barbooth game because he doesn’t mind cats and it makes Mona Lisa happy.

I aim to please, is his motto and Harley Charley doesn’t own a Harley-Davidson motorcycle — but he looks like he might — that’s how he got his neat nickname. He has a beard and always wears a leather jacket and chaps to his dice games. On his right hand, he even wears a weathered leather glove with little holes at the end of each digit sleeve cut out. The tips of his fingers poke out of the ugly thing, making Harley Charley’s right hand appear to be similar to an ugly spider. Yes, he wears the over-worn glove- just like some old-time real bikers of at an earlier time used to wear a solo glove on their acceleration hand. And this helps Harley Charley roll the dice, too, since he’s right handed.

So Harley Charley throws another round, a six and a six, and he wins again. Boot Baby takes a snort of her absinthe and lets out a huff. The other nine heavy girls also lose. The roller has thrown wins for himself over a dozen times in a row and the ten heavy girls are beginning to think his Barbooth game is rigged.

Do you have somethin’ in those dice? Mona Lisa asks him.

Nope. It’s all in the wrists, the dealer says.

You’ve got loaded dice, Harley Charley, Mona Lisa complains.

Harley Charley wheezes, takes a toke off his unfiltered Pall Mall, and shows his ochre-colored teeth, not in a benign smile, but an evil grimace. His smile’s more like a rictus—and Boot Baby cringes at Harley Charley’s unholy-looking physiognomy.

It’s an old Middle-Eastern dice game and almost anything can happen, Harley Charley explains. It really helps if you’re Jewish or Greek. None of you ten heavy girls look like you’re part of either ethnic group.

So, the girls all get out their little pocketbooks and each fishes around for another five to throw on the table. A stack of fives growing like a skyscraper of currency is now situated in front of Harley Charley. His weekly dice game is a hit around Barleycorn Estates, a place filled with heavy girls, their heavy kids, along with their heavy significant others (it’s amazing how heavy Barleycorn Estates is with heavy people).

Bones to the loan, let 'em roll, Harley Charley wheezes, and spins a 6-5 and he wins again. He stretches out his long skinny arm and like a net, waves it over the fuzzy green table top, pulling in all the fives.

Bones to the loan, go to fucking hell Harley Charley! Boot Baby screams.

"Cool down