In the summer of 1975, I and three of my college friends decided to each buy one of those $175 Greyhound Ameripasses available then. For that price, one could ride anywhere in the system over the course of a month. We had seen those ads with Fred McMurray, of all people, urging people to Go Greyhound. So we did.
Except, with all of that traveling power in our hands, we over-planned the trip. We left New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal on July 1st. After that, we took a hugely circuitous route that eventually brought us to Yellowstone, then Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Three times we rented cars to go to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon.
Of course, that gave us way too much time on the buses and not enough at our various destinations. One doesn't realize how large this country is until one is slowly, painfully crossing it in a land vehicle. And unlike a train, there was nowhere to go inside a bus. There were meal stops, usually three of those per day. The rest of it was hours traveling along roads, mostly interstate highways.
My three companions, aged twenty and twenty-one, and I had interesting romantic situations that summer, namely that we had no romance at all. I had broken up with my girlfriend that spring. Jeff had the same problem. I don't think Frank had ever had a girlfriend at all. As for Dave, he was very mysterious about his own past.
Somehow my three friends thought they had a chance for some one or two-night stands with whatever girls they might meet along the way. That seemed completely unrealistic to me. In fact, they met no girls at all that month. We were hardly in one place long enough to run into any.
Then, after the Grand Canyon, in Flagstaff, Arizona, we had a dilemma to solve. Unless we rode straight through to New York, our Ameripasses were going to expire. The other alternative was to stop someplace, probably in Missouri, stay in a motel, and buy new tickets for the final leg. Being young and foolish, we chose the first option.
Now we were really going to find out how big this fucking country was. After a night and a day, we had crossed New Mexico, northern Texas, and by late in the afternoon of the second day, we were mostly across Oklahoma.
At Tulsa, two girls did get on and sat just in front of us. They also had Ameripasses, and they had decided on Tulsa as the break point. It turned out that these two were nineteen and they attended Queens College.
New York chicks!
Obviously, we tried to chat them up as we rolled down I-44 towards the Missouri state line.
I'm not sure what my friends were thinking as there were three of them and only two females to deal with. In any case, one of them, Jenny, was short, plump, and had glasses and dark hair. The other one, Martha, was taller and slender. She was wearing shorts and she stretched out her long legs as if to tease us.
Yet she quickly decided that she wasn't interested in any of us, and she went back to reading her book. Frank let out some of his frustrations by joking, "We're all gay you know." Martha frowned at him and then continued reading.
I could see that Jenny was the one with the personality, and she was friendly and interesting to talk to. Also, to my eyes, she wasn't plump, but rather zaftig. Her blouse was scalloped in the front, and the tops of her ample breasts were visible. She had a denim skirt, which was short enough to show off her pale, juicy thighs.
Jeff, Frank, and Dave didn't seem to appreciate the sweet joys that a zaftig girl could provide, and they started to ignore her. Jenny, however, picked up on that I was the one who liked her. She stood up and tapped me on the shoulder. "Let's sit back here."
A couple of rows back, there were two empty seats, and we went to those with Jenny sitting at the window. Outside, the sun was getting low in the sky; we were somewhere between Claremore and Vinita at that point.
We chatted for a while, and I found out that she had broken up with a boyfriend that spring. We commiserated with each other about our lost lovers. Then she told me that she lived in Forest Hills, Queens.
She revealed a fact to me. "I do have a car now, a 1966 Skylark." That seemed to be a rather large hint to drop. I thought,
hey, a chick with her own car. This just seems to keep getting better.
For a little while, we held hands and she affectionately squeezed mine. Then she pushed her glasses to the top of her head, and she leaned forward. I guessed that she wanted me to kiss her, and I was right. Soon we were having quite a passionate little smooching session going.
I could have done that all night, and I assumed that was as far as things were going to go that evening. However, I was wrong about that. Our bus was less than half full, and Jenny looked towards the back. She said, "You know, if we go to the very last row, I think we can do it back there."
I knew what she meant, but I still said, "Do what, exactly?" It was a way to tease her, and also, I was trying to determine if she was bluffing me.
She laughed, "Come on, you know what I mean." Yet I looked closely at her, and she seemed to be serious.
"All right, how do you expect for us to get away with it?"
I was still half-wondering if she was joshing with me, but she had a reply. "It's easy. I'll just sit on your lap. Then I'll raise my skirt, and I'll do a reverse cowgirl on you."
I know I heard that correctly, but I still had trouble believing it. Jenny smiled at me and said, "I hope you don't think I'm too fast."
I had a comeback, "Baby, I don't just think you're fast, I know it!"
She found that funny.
This girl is both good-natured and hot as hell.
I decided to act on what I knew and see what happened. "Okay, I'll go back there and you meet me in about five minutes."
