The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories by Etgar Keret Page A

basic training. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this”—Uzi smiled, and potted the eight ball right into the left pocket, on a fluke—“but when he got here we were really stoked. You shoulda seen my dad, a guy who wouldn’t bat an eye if you dropped a ten-pound sledgehammer on his foot. Grabbed the kid and cried like a baby, no shit.”

CHAPTER THREE
    in which Kurt starts bitching and Mordy’s had enough
    E ver since I met Uzi we hit the bars every night. There’s only like three of them here and we hit all three each time just to be sure we don’t miss out on any action. We always wind up at Stiff Drinks. It’s the best one, and it stays open latest too. Last night really sucked. Uzi brought this friend of his, Kurt. Thinks the guy’s really cool, ’cause he was the Nirvana lead and everything. But the truth is he’s a big-time jerk. I mean, I’m not exactly sold on the place either, but this guy, he wouldn’t stop bitching. And once he gets going—forget it. He’ll dig into you like a goddamn bat. Anything that comes up always reminds him of some song he wrote. He’s gotta recite it for you so you can tell him howcool the lyrics are. Sometimes he’ll even ask the bartender to play one of his numbers, and you just wanna dig yourself a hole in the ground. It isn’t just me. Everybody hates him, except Uzi. I think there’s this thing that after you off yourself, with the way it hurts and everything—and it hurts like hell—the last thing you give a shit about is somebody with nothing on his mind except singing about how unhappy he is. I mean if you gave a flyin’ fuck about stuff like that you’d still be alive, with a depressing poster of Nick Cave over your bed, instead of winding up here. But the truth is that it isn’t only him. Yesterday I was just bummed out. The job at the pizza joint and pissing the night away at the bars, it was all getting pretty tired. Seeing the same people with their flat Coke every night, and even when they’d look you straight in the eye you’d feel like they were just kinda staring. I don’t know, maybe I’m too uptight, but when you look at them, even when you feel the vibes in the air like something’s really happening, and they’re dancing or making out or having some laughs with you, somehow there’s always this thing about them, like it’s never a big deal, like nothing really matters.

CHAPTER FOUR
    dinner at the Gelfands
    O n Friday, Uzi invited me over to his parents’ place for dinner. “Eight o’clock sharp,” he said, “and don’t be late. We’re having bean and potato
cholent
with
kishke
.” You could tell the Gelfands were from Eastern Europe. The furniture was a DIY job that Uzi’s father put together, and they had these god-awful stucco walls. I didn’t really wanna go. Parents always think I’m a bad influence. I don’t know why. Take the first time I had dinner at Desiree’s house. Her father kept looking me over, like I was some punk trying to get a driver’s license and he was the guy from the DMV who wasn’t going to let me pass. By the time we got to dessert, he was ragging on me—but trying tomake like it was no big deal—to see if I was into getting his daughter to do drugs. “I know how it goes,” he said, giving me that undercover cop look—the kind they give just before they cuff you. “I used to be young too, you know. You go to a party, dance a little, things get heated up, and next thing you know you’re in some room together, and you’re getting her to take a kote.” “A toke,” I tried to tell him. “Whatever. Listen, Mordy, I may seem naive, but I know the routine.” I lucked out with the Gelfands though, ’cause those kids were so far gone that their parents had nothing left to worry about. They were really happy