Once An Asshole

Randy Mills was an asshole from day one. In the delivery room the doctor probably knew he had just brought another asshole into the world because it was a messy horrible birth that left the whole staff shaking their heads and wondering if all the effort had been worth it – for this baby was clearly going to grow up to be a Grade A asshole. Even his parents seemed to be annoyed that he had arrived.

But now, miraculously, I’ve heard that he is no longer an asshole.

Randy was born to Floyd and Edna Mills in 1961 in the middle of a heatwave. They lived at the end of a gravel road in a house that was little more than a shack, an hour outside of Kansas City. His parents were illiterate, had junk all around their property, were dirty and smelly, and no one liked them. They would have been hillbillies, but they lived in Kansas and were not musically inclined, so they were just white trash.

I knew Randy because I grew up nearby and we rode the same rural bus to school. He and his little sister Lisa, who was three years younger, always sat in the back and kept to themselves. Nobody really knew Lisa, except that she was Randy’s little sister, and everyone on the bus just left them alone.

Our bus driver was a microscopic seventy year old woman who had been driving the same rural bus route nearly her whole life. Every morning Randy got on the bus and greeted her with “Fuck you old lady!” and every afternoon he got off the bus at his house with another “Fuck you old lady!” She really didn’t like Randy very much and never intervened when fights and arguments broke out that involved him. On more than one occasion she handed him a pink slip and suspended him for a day or two because of his bad behavior.

Mrs. Evans, the microscopic bus driver, wasn’t sad at all when Randy got a car in his senior year of high school and stopped riding the bus. His new car was a used 1965 Chevy Impala convertible with white paint and a tan, faux leather interior. It was a bit of a piece of shit, but it was Randy’s first car and he loved it. He thought it was way cooler than everybody else’s cars at school. And when he was at the wheel, look out, this asshole owned the whole county. He had a particular dark spot in his heart for Mrs. Evans, who had shuttled him back and forth to school in her dusty yellow bus since he was five.

Randy knew the bus schedule, and every morning on an empty stretch of gravel road he would come roaring out of nowhere, pull up beside the bus, and he and his little sister, with their sunglasses on, would coolly drive alongside flipping us all off. Then he would pull in front of us, choke the bus in his dust, and speed off.

We all hated Randy Mills, but no one more than Mrs. Evans. She was a woman of few words, and though most of us kids on the bus didn’t even know the sound of her voice, we all knew how she felt about Randy. It didn’t take more than a couple of Randy’s morning harassments for her to silently take her revenge.

One morning when she saw Randy’s Impala coming up behind, she drifted into the center of the gravel road choking his convertible with dust. We were all delighted and cheered as she used her giant yellow bus to mock and annoy Randy at seventy miles an hour through the dusty rugged backroads. None of us thought much about Mrs. Evans before, but now we all loved her, and hated Randy even more. Suddenly our bus route was the stuff of legends.

Then one morning Jay Fletcher got on the bus with four dozen eggs from his farm. Mrs. Evans didn’t say anything as he passed them out to all the kids on the bus. Right on schedule, when we got to the long empty stretch of gravel road, Randy’s Impala appeared, rumbling up behind us. Mrs. Evans played it cool and let him slide up beside us, then she moved over squeezing Randy toward the edge of the road, boxing him in.  It’s is quite possible he had a fleeting thought that would have changed the trajectory of his whole life, but more likely he was thinking of all the damage dozens of eggs would do to his paint job and faux leather seats. We all cheered “Fuck you Randy!” as egg after egg splatted on his pride and joy. I think I personally managed to hit him squarely in the face.

That was the most epic bus ride ever, and word of it spread like lightening around the school. We were all heroes after that. I don’t really remember much more about Randy Mills, except that he stopped harassing the bus.

I had pretty much forgotten all about Randy in all the years since high school, until I was reminded of him the other day by an old friend. He told me that after high school, Randy had moved to Fredonia, Kansas, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, where he sold insurance and lived alone in a shitty little house in the woods. My friend said that one night Randy went to a strip club at a crossroads south of town and somehow pissed off one of the strippers. A fight broke out and the stripper punched him right in the nose. He fell backward and hit his head on the corner of a chair, and right then and there, he died.

And that is why Randy Mills is no longer an asshole.