The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney
Holt, 288 pages, $25
Usually, when embarking on a quest, the young man — and it’s almost always a young man — mounts his trusty steed, or shiny Harley, or tricked-out pickup, or what have you, and sets out. Not Jonathan Mooney. His trip, which crossed the country, lasted four months, covered 35,000 miles and was at heart a journey to find himself, was made in a remodeled short bus.
Yes, the kind of bus used to transport kids with physical or mental disabilities to and from school. The one that inspires cruel jokes and snide labels. The very sort of bus that was all too familiar to Mooney, who as a child struggled with dyslexia (he was 12 before he learned to read) and with the profound restlessness and inability to focus that has become known as attention deficit disorder.
“Jon, what is wrong with you?” exasperated teachers would groan, in front of the class. “Try to act normal!”
But he was acting normal — for him.
By the end of “The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal,” Mooney will have you wondering just where the deficits lie: with kids so labeled, or the labelers themselves.
Mooney got into Loyola Marymount University because of his soccer skills and then transferred to Brown University, from which he graduated with honors. He went on to win a Truman fellowship for the study of creative writing and disabilities and to co-author, with college pal and fellow learning-disabled student David Cole, the book “Learning Outside the Lines,” an informative yet irreverent guide to college for the learning disabled. He now is president of Project Eye-to-Eye, a non-profit mentoring and advocacy organization for students with learning disabilities.
Mooney packs a lot into his long trip on the short bus. We learn a great deal about his family in California, which was not so much dysfunctional as far outside the suburban box; about the ways teachers can destroy or save learning-disabled kids; about the medicalization of eccentricity; and about the slipperiness of that common term, “normal.”
He pilots the short bus across America, with us as passengers, to visit men and women who do not, cannot and never will “fit in,” and are all the more talented, frustrated and fascinating because of the far-from-ordinary ways their brains work.
They include Butch from Alabama, who has created a “museum of wonder” in a shack on his land and claims to have a telepathic chicken to boot; and Kent Roberts, a college classmate of Mooney’s. A comedian and co-author of the book “A Portrait of Yo Mama As a Young Man,” Kent is exhaustively “on,” 24/7, not always with positive consequences.
We also meet Ashley, a deaf and blind girl who uses sign language to curse out her teachers; Katie, who has Down syndrome, a job, a boyfriend, a kind heart and sharp intuition; and Cookie, born Coleman, who would rather go by the name Dominique.
Cookie, who lives in a Maine town whose residents look out for him, tops 6-foot-5, is built like a weight lifter, wears 6-inch heels, a blond wig and women’s clothing, and paints canvases best described as outsider art.
Then there is Jeff, a compulsive listmaker perched somewhere on the autistic spectrum, whose introspective ideas about how and why he is different are touching and illuminating.
The same can be said of the way Mooney tells their stories, which are intercut with his memories of growing up different. Although many of those recollections are sad and discomfiting, Mooney uses self-deprecating humor to diffuse anything that smacks of a pity party. Most important, he celebrates the immense diversity of human minds, reminding us that there is much to be learned from those who make their home somewhere beyond “normal.”
