James Bond At The Bus Depot

James Bond At The Bus Depot

When Jared Dreyfus and I were both at Tam High and he was aware of my professed desire to stop smoking cigarettes, he decided to assist me. This assistance manifested itself during a morning break.

   In order to smoke at Tam High, one had to walk just outside the gate of the back parking lot opposite The Canteen.  As I passed through the gate I took the pack of Chesterfields out of my shirt pocket and gently tapped it, causing about four cigarettes to protrude.  Pulling one out, I then proceeded to gently hammer the end of it on my other hand to concentrate the tobacco so it wouldn't come apart in my mouth.  I then put that end in my mouth, pulled out a book of matches and lit it.

   I tended to imitate the way my father Blackie smoked which was to take a drag into my mouth then let a fair amount of the smoke out before inhaling.

   "Myers!" a shrill male voice shouted from a short distance away. "What are you doing?"

   It was Dreyfus and he approached me in a relentless manner.

   "Put that cigarette out," he commanded.

   Jar was very much a hero figure in my life.  I dropped the cigarette onto the ground and rubbed it out with my shoe.

   "Now give me the pack," said Jared.

   I gave him the Chesterfields.

   He pulled a cigarette out and handed it to me.

   "Eat it," he said.

   I don't remember arguing with him.  I put the cigarette into my mouth and bit into it.  The appalling sensation was immediate.  My mouth burned as I chewed on the tobacco leaves wrapped inside the paper.

   "All of it," said Jared.

   Into my mouth went the other half of the cigarette.  Jar had an audience of two or three of his classmates watching this spectacle and their laughter was barely contained but he managed to remain poker faced.

   After what can only have been maybe a minute he then said I could spit it out.

   "From now on," he pronounced, "Whenever I see you smoking a cigarette, you're going to have to eat it."

   Interestingly I have no further memories along this line.  I did smoke, probably six months out of each of the four years I was at Tam and no repetition of this incident ever occurred nor was it ever mentioned, except by me.

   Jared was someone I looked up to and the thought of telling him to stick it up his backside never even occurred to me.

   Unlike the Myers family the Dreyfus's had money.  Barney Dreyfus was a highly successful civil rights lawyer and his wife Babbie was someone who played the stock market to her advantage.  So when Jar passed his driving test at sixteen he was given a car and it was a silver Austin Healey convertible, a highly exotic vehicle for an American teenager to own.

   Jared was two years older than me and within the age related social hierarchy of Mill Valley, at this time, it was only our family connection which made us friends.  Also there was the shared experience of political persecution which plagued all my family's friends so it could be said that our bonds were deep.

   These bonds, however, did not stop Jar treating me like a second class citizen when it suited him.  Going for a ride in his Austin Healey was always a fabulous experience.  The smell of the leather seats, the totally British dashboard and the wind in your hair as it raced around with the top down made every ride fantastic.

   But fantastic as every ride was it would always end with him screeching to a halt at some pre-determined spot and saying: "Okay Myers.  Out!"

   He always had someplace better to go while I never really had anywhere I needed to be go.  As his silver Austin Healey would speed off down East Blithedale, I'd be left standing on the sidewalk feeling unimportant.

   It's probably the case that I didn't know how to use my time properly as boredom was a regular phenomenon in my life.  Perhaps if I had been a book reader this might not have been the case.

   The aversion I had to reading books as a kid was pretty comprehensive but there were a few exceptions along the way which mostly occurred while I was in high school.

   In the early 1960s Jared had the job at the Bus Depot which I would later inherit from him.  It involved working behind the counter selling bus tickets, books, magazines and candy bars as well as keeping the shelves stacked, sweeping up and keeping the place in order.

   Whenever you sold a Greyhound bus ticket you had to put it between the jaws of this rather large stamping device which you'd then bang on the top with your fist thus validating it.

   When Jar first worked there it just gave me another excuse to hang around the place.  I had, after all, been hanging around the Bus Depot ever since we arrived in Mill Valley.  It was where I bought all my comic books and read the ones I didn't buy.

   Jar, like my sister Nell, was an avid reader of books unlike me who wouldn't read anything without pictures attached.  He read culturally highbrow material with the same enthusiasm that he devoured pulp fiction and his current passion at this time were the James Bond books by Ian Fleming.

   Bond was, in Jar's opinion, the epitome of cool.  He told me in great detail about the guy: the handmade cigarettes he smoked with three golden rings on the paper, the vodka martini shaken not stirred, the double-O prefix which meant he was licenced to kill.

   Jared had read all the Bond books which had been published though author Ian Fleming was still churning them out annually at this point and his output had become a worldwide publishing sensation.  President Kennedy was one of his biggest fans.  Signet had published all the books with a uniform design for the covers.

   At this stage Jar did not know of my aversion to book reading and it was not something I was proud of.  I would love to have been thought of as well read but I simply wasn't.  I was, however, fairly intelligent, articulate and more than capable of debating things political and artistic so my guess is that he mistook me for well read and insisted I read a Bond book.

   Jar was a hero figure in my life and I was not about to disappoint him so I purchased a copy of Dr. No, the title he suggested to start me off.

   It certainly was not dull though I couldn't help but notice Ian Fleming's tendency towards subtle racism and misogyny.  He seemed to delight in designing elaborate torture sequences and giving the reader a physically realistic account of his hero's survival of these scenarios.   

   How Bond knew it was a centipede crawling up his body in the Jamaican hotel room in the dead of night I'm not sure.  It was, however, an evaluation he made entirely from the physical sensation of the creature crawling slowly up his leg without the aid of seeing it.  Once he'd decided that was what it was, he ran through the risks based on information he had, at some point taken into his consciousness.

   It was details like this which Fleming excelled at.  There was a particularly gruesome encounter which Bond had with a giant squid in Dr. No and again the hero summoned up vital information about the beast which was about to devour him in an almost academic way.  As the massive tentacles weaved their way out of the swirling depths, he clung to a meshed fence and ran what he knew about the giant squid through his fevered mind.  A fifty foot monster with two long seizing tentacles and ten holding ones. They had a huge blunt beak beneath eyes that were the only fishes' eyes that worked on the camera principle, like a man's.  Their brains were efficient and they could shoot backwards through the water at thirty knots, by jet-propulsion.

   Naturally Mister Bond defeated the giant squid but not before Fleming took us to the precipice of his demise.  One could feel the pain of each of the tentacle's suckers as they slapped onto his exposed flesh and exerted a super human strength around his limbs.  The suspense was killing and the author spared us no detail of the battle which was literally life or death.

    I went on to read From Russia With Love next and again found the same scenario in his fight with Nash, the blonde haired agent of SMERSH.  As Nash had told Bond he was going to shoot him through the heart as the train entered the tunnel, our hero managed to sandwich his cigarette case and a book between his heart and the gun at the moment of impact.  Then, playing dead on the floor Bond desperately tried to remember simple anatomy.  Where did the main artery run in the lower body of a man?  The Femoral.  Down the inside of the thigh.  His next challenge was to release the flat-bladed throwing knife from his attaché case which was only millimeters from his right hand.  The first violent stab of the knife had to be decisive.

   And decisive it was but not before Fleming had taken us through every tiny detail of Bond's ordeal right up to Nash's body suddenly relaxing once the ten pints of blood had drained from his body.

   The third book I read was Goldfinger and I believe I did so on Jared's advice.  Interestingly it was these three which were the first Bond films in that order.

   Once the film Dr. No starring Sean Connery came out the actor became the character in my mind and I never read another Fleming book after until years later.  It was also years later that I told Jared about my childhood book phobia and he was amazed. 

   I loved those first three Bond movies but the fourth, Thunderball got on my nerves as it seemed to be all gadgets and wise cracks so I never saw another until Connery came back in Diamonds Are Forever.

   I don't believe that James Bond was a subject I ever discussed with Jared again.