Sometimes he would disappear for a while usually because he was jammed up in a little more trouble than normal. We never got the whole story just bits here and there. I don’t know if he understood or even understands today how cool a gesture that was, but it was pretty damn cool. One day he looked back down the bus at us and said, “You want me to read you some of this?” as he flopped the latest paperback in the air. We of course were boring holes through him with fevered eyes because he was the most fascinating thing we’d ever seen. He always had a paperback novel with him, usually of the horror genre, and he would studiously ignore us and read his book. He’d lean back against the window and hoist those boots out in the aisle where we could all admire them. He would always sit in the front and there was always this sweet scent coming off his clothes that later when I went to college and attended my first party I had that ah ha moment. Needless to say he lost his driving privileges for a long, long time. He had been clocked for speeding by the cops and had led them on a merry chase around the countryside until he turned a corner too quickly, hit gravel, and rolled his car.

When I was in middle school I rode the bus to school and every day this teenager with rumpled hair and scuffed motorcycle boots would catch a ride with us. I’d swear it was stolen from one of Kemper’s now famous Rubbermaid container boxes of nostalgic paperbacks, but I gave my midget ninjas specific instructions NOT to take anything from Kemper’s abode, but simply take a look around, so the presence of this book on my shelves is still a mystery. It all started with shifted some books around and finding this ratty well loved copy of The Exorcist that inexplicably found its way into my book collection. I get a wild hair every so often and recently I decided that I needed to go on a 1970s blockbuster horror novel extravaganza tour. ”In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, fallsĭrop by drop upon the heart until, in our own

The exorcist book william peter blatty