CATEGORY: Memoir
AUTHOR INTRO: If a grown-up Bee Boy should happen to read this, it might help him to know I came to be a pariah of sorts, in time.
When I was 14 years old, I saved my little sister from an attack by Bee Boy at the Greyhound Bus station in Philadelphia. We were there on alternating Saturdays throughout 1962, catching a Baltimore-bound bus to fulfill court-ordered visits to our father.
In those years, east coast Greyhound bus stations were repositories of ancient filth. Like the accumulation of mankind's history stored
at the Library of Alexandria, the grime at Greyhound told stories. You could read the myriad substances produced and disposed of by human bodies. These stories were authenticated by odors trapped in the building for decades, like ghosts doomed to haunt the place their earthly life ended.
"Don't forget to go to the bathroom NOW," I'd remind my sister before we left home.
I was determined our very first visit to the station rest room would also be our last. It was the thick-textured dirt climbing my toilet stall like jungle vines that convinced me.
Unfortunately, my sister was not fastidious by nature. At first, she was not willing to hold in her pee just because I said a plague might invade her panties if she used the station toilets. The word 'cooties' had lost its terror for her - my fault for overusing it when we were much younger.
For this occasion, then, I made up some convincing-sounding disease names. Mackolepsy. Chronic Nostrilitus Lympasematic Syndrome. The former resulted in drowning, because you became unconscious, slipped off the throne, twisted your body around, hit your head, and fell face-forward into the toilet bowl. The latter caused the paramecium viral form of bacteria fungus to enlarge in your blood stream and be excreted from your armpits or unravel from your nostrils, several days after exposure. This would happen in your classroom or the playground, and for the rest of your school years you’d be shunned.
Thank God we had no Internet back then. A kid today would have googled my homemade medical conditions and realized I was lying. Instead, wide-eyed, my sister finally agreed not to use the Greyhound restroom ever again. She was over 30 when she learned the truth. She said she was tempted to stop speaking to me until I reminded her I once risked my life to save her from Bee Boy.
Who was Bee Boy? He was a kid about my age, headquartered at Greyhound. I learned something from him: until then, I thought only in India did the homeless live without homes.
There was no doubt he was without family or home according to station employees. He was in and out of the place at all hours, and he slept there. He lived on burgers and fries customers left on their plates at the station’s restaurant counter, scraped off and saved by waitresses who felt sorry for him. The newsstand owner threw a couple of peanut butter cracker packs and and a mini-carton of milk at him every day, in exchange for a guarantee he wouldn’t come close and bother the customers. Though he was universally pitied throughout the station, the stronger feeling he evoked from others was revulsion.
Now I realize Bee Boy was mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, nutritionally malnourished, physically disabled - you name it. He suffered from everything but mackolepsy and nostrilitus. In retrospect, it breaks my heart no one thought to alert social agencies about him. Not even the cops on the Greyhound beat did. Deep down inside, no one believed he was ....human. A smallish hunchback perched on his short, chubby torso and the way he rubbed his hands together (and his feet, while sitting) made him resemble a bee. It didn’t help that his only vocalization was a humming, increasing to a sizzle like food burning on a grill when he was angry. I didn’t create the name Bee Boy; the Greyhound crowd did, and it stuck. But I wasn’t nice to him, either.
My sister and I weren’t the only passengers in the waiting room who Bee Boy harassed. We just made it easy for him by appearing like clockwork every other Saturday at 8:30 am for the 9:15 express to Baltimore. Some cunning survival instinct he possessed, registered that fact.
Originally, I assumed he just wanted to frighten us. Soon I realized his goal was to sting. The first few times he buzzed around, we shooed him away with our hands. After that, we came prepared. I armed both of us with a low-tech piece of equipment, the fly swatter. Just a handle with a rubbery flapper at the end to keep him further at bay.
We employed a defense strategy too: usage of a protective wall by sitting in the midst of the maximum number of people available. If our human wall got up to leave on a bus earlier than ours, we changed seats to a population cluster of newer arrivals. Our maneuvers around the station infuriated me because I could see he enjoyed the chase.
One Saturday morning we were earlier than usual because the schedule to Baltimore had changed. There were hardly any people around. Fortunately, Bee Boy wasn’t there either. My sister was nodding off, more asleep than not. Suddenly, I had to pee so badly I briefly fantasized about doing it off in a corner, like Bolivian women who squat everywhere, their act hidden by voluminous skirts. That way, I could simultaneously avoid the bathroom cooties AND be able to keep my sister in sight in case Bee Boy materialized. But I was wearing jeans.
Unfortunately, this time, I had to use the bathroom. I just had to. I figured I would run and be back to my sister well before Bee Boy could reach her, even if he walked in right NOW, I reasoned. The bathroom and my sister were on the far end of the station, seemingly miles from Bee Boy’s Market Street entrance. Possibly I should have awakened her, but I didn’t want her to know I was violating my own rule. Once you lose face in front of a younger sibling, the balance of the entire relationship is knocked off-kilter, forever.
I took a deep breath, ran to the bathroom, and emerged a minute later, still holding my breath. I was pleased with myself for being so swift - until I saw Bee Boy hovering above my sister, who had just that second awakened to the nightmare sight of him about to sting her.
“Leave her alone,” I screached. I sprinted toward them, just as a can of coke catapulted out of the newsstand and bounced harmlessly off Bee Boy’s hump. The surprise of it slowed him down just long enough for me to reach his side and to push him as far away from my sister as I could. “Get away from us you ugly, disgusting insect,” I screamed.
I was shorter than Bee Boy and skinny. What I didn’t expect was to push him with such force that he fell. I don’t know whether he was hurt or not, but he cowered there on the floor, crying. Sobbing, truth be told. My sister was crying too, so I turned to comfort her. I walked her away with me, leaving Bee Boy in a humming heap on the floor.
I steered her over to the newstand and the owner handed us two Hershey bars. “Is she all right” he asked. “I saw what was happening and threw a can of pop at him.” My sister was sniffling while unwrapping the candy bar, and I concluded she was just fine.
No one went to Bee Boy. He laid out on the floor for a long time, and no one went to him. People walked around him, but no one checked to see whether he needed help. Our bus was announced, eventually, and he was still there.
Sunday evening upon our return, I half expected him to see him in the same position, in the same spot. But we never saw Bee Boy again. No one knew anything about what became of him, either.
The newsstand guy retired within a few months and sold his small business. The restaurant closed down because a McDonalds and other fast food places had moved in on the block. The cops we knew were rotated elsewhere. Soon, my sister and I were the only Greyhound regulars who wondered about Bee Boy. It didn't occur to me at age 14, that someone's existence could be forgotten.
Last night before posting this, I searched on the Internet for “Bee Boy” (and Beeboy and beeboy and even beboy). Would he turn up in anyone else’s memoir of the Philly Greyhound Bus Station in the early sixties? Nope. I’m the first to capture him on paper.
Though my own heartlessness back then pains me now, it's understandable. And I'm willing to bear that pain and bear witness to it, if it means Bee Boy will be remembered.
