Eve Babitz on high school:

"Squashed into acquiescence by the weight of Le Conte, I tried to behave like you were supposed to and to keep from peering around for real life or clear focus, though I must have secretly prayed for the fire that would come from somewhere and burn off the prairies of dreary pastiche, burn them naked."

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Reading Babitz on taking the bus to the beach as a teenager, I remembered Selma telling me about her bus trips around London after school. She was broke, but her free bus pass took her everywhere, which was all you really needed at 16 years of age, the freedom to look at people and places, to see how far you could really go.

Maybe taking the bus for the first time on your own is a rite of passage. That first bus ride was super confusing. The whole affair was illicit; adrenaline rushed through me as I paid with quarters scrounged from the pockets of my dad's jacket. I didn't know where I was going, I just wanted to get away, and see the world, even if it was the same world I saw when my mother drove me to school.

One summer, I took a sociology course at a community college in Downtown, which required taking the bus two times a week. After class, I'd skulk around downtown, wandering into shops and looking at people. I fell in love with secondhand bookshops during this time: I could malinger for ages, thumbing through books, absorbed by passages in this or that novel, and no one would say anything to me. I'd stay downtown as long as possible, flexing my brief freedom.

I couldn't imagine the life I have now. If I dared to imagine the future post high school (really, Post Living With Mom), I thought of it as more like that summer: long journeys on buses through unknown realms, taking classes not for grades but because I was curious, looking for books and interesting faces, for gestures to interpret, the fascinating detail. In hindsight, I was rehearsing a future as a loafer, a ne'er-do-well; an ambition in its own way, something I've never really relinquished. Apparently that was what a bus trip could reveal to a teenaged girl in San Diego.

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