“The Greyhound Bus Line is sufficiently menacing…Those
things really must be removed. Simply knowing that they are hurtling somewhere
on this dark night makes me most apprehensive.” -- Ignatius J. Reilly, A
Confederacy of Dunces
Go Greyhound!
(And Leave Your Sanity Behind)
I was sitting at a red light recently,
minding my own business, when a U-Haul truck suddenly pulled up next to me. I
glanced over, and promptly broke into a sweat. As I began to hyperventilate I
feared that I might be having an anxiety attack. No, this was someone else's
nightmare. The man driving the U-Haul looked utterly miserable. No surprise
there. Feeling your pain, dude, I thought, as the light turned green and
the truck drove away. As my blood pressure slowly returned to normal I made a
mental note to call my therapist first thing in the morning.
When I was growing up my family moved
every two or three years, like clockwork. We packed everything up, loaded it
into a U-Haul van, exactly like the one I'd just seen, and off we'd go. My
father drove the truck, while the rest of us followed behind in the family car,
with nothing to look at but the rear end of the U-Haul, the company motto
emblazoned across the back: U-Haul, Adventure in Moving! Occasionally
Mom would drive the truck, but we kids always got the raw end of the deal,
staring at the back of the van, wondering how the words “moving” and
“adventure” could possibly exist in the same sentence.
In the National Geographics
scattered around every house we ever lived in, we read about intrepid explorers
braving the wilds of Borneo or rafting down the Colorado River in canoes made
of tree bark. Wow! How exciting it all sounded. My sisters and I wondered if
someday we would go on an adventure, too. But, according to the folks at U-Haul,
we already had---several times, in fact, and hadn't even known it.
In July of 1976 we were getting ready to
move once again. This move was not that different from any of the others,
except we were older now. The thought of being stuck in a car with Mom and Dad
for 2,000 miles was bad enough when we were twelve, but as teenagers?
Unthinkable.
Normally at each other's throats, for
once Jackie, my sister, and I were in agreement. Our other sister, Ann, the
peacemaker in the family, had moved to Montana with her boyfriend several
months earlier – a masterstroke of genius that we were still reeling from, and
we were now left to deal with each other. As we sat in the kitchen listening to
our parents in the next room discuss the move, this time from Los Angeles to
Louisiana, we pondered our options.
“What should we do?” Jackie said.
“Just deal with it.” A paragon of
reason, this was the best response I could come up with.
“I'm not going,” she said. Like most
teenagers, she was under the impression that she actually had a choice.
My father walked into the kitchen. “Hey,
maybe you kids can take the bus.” The bus? Our father had hit upon the perfect
solution. Clearly, the thought of spending extended periods of time in the car
with their semi-grown children was about as appealing to our parents as it was
to us, although for the life of me I couldn't imagine why it would bother them.
As exciting as this prospect was we
would soon discover that, sadly, there was a down side. At the time, however,
Jackie and I looked forward to our trip with unrestrained zeal. Freedom was
suddenly within our grasp. Although our parents were not as vocal in their
enthusiasm, they too must have looked forward to our upcoming separation with
glee, and were just unwilling to show it.
On the morning of our departure, our
parents drove us to the station in our aqua-blue Cutlass Supreme, a car that,
after several trips across the United States, smelled like hamburger grease and
cat urine and looked as if it were headed for the nearest scrap heap. The fact
that it was still on the road was both astonishing and frightening in equal
measure, a true testament to the miracle of American automobile manufacturing.
When we arrived at the bus station, the car had barely rolled to a stop before
we jumped out.
“Be careful!” Mom yelled as we ran
towards the station doors. “Don't talk to any strange people and CALL US IF YOU
NEED ANYTH…” The door slammed shut behind us. A miasma of strange noises and
smells greeted us as we stood soaking up the ambiance of the Santa Ana bus
terminal. The people we saw before us were sprawled on benches, arguing with
station agents, laughing, and in one case, crying (a red flag that, sadly, we
would not recognize as such until it was much, much too late). We took all this
in with only a passing glance. The intoxicating absence of parental supervision
overcame any sense of foreboding we might have felt at this unsettling glimpse
into the world we would inhabit for the next three days.
When it was time to leave we ran outside
to grab a quick smoke. The other smokers, a group that included virtually
everyone waiting to get on the bus, were standing in small groups, puffing
away. After a couple of minutes the bus driver ambled over, gave us all a dirty
look, as if to say, “Don't pull any funny stuff, or else…” letting us all know
who was in charge on this trip. Everyone took one more drag, stomped out their
butts and, like sheep on their way to slaughter, followed him onto the
bus.
We found two seats together towards
the back. We didn't realize then that this was pure luck. We spent several moments
arranging our cigarettes, sodas, and magazines. Eventually the bus started up
with a loud belch, coughed up several clouds of black smoke, and rolled out
onto the highway.
The bus was filled to capacity and
stiflingly hot. Boredom set in quickly. For the first couple of hours we simply
stared out the window and complained about the heat. At least we had food to
look forward to. We assumed that without our parents around we would eat
whatever we wanted: pizza, cheeseburgers, hot fudge sundaes. The rest of the
time, we thought, we would just have to make do. If we couldn't stop at a
Denny's or a Foster's Freeze, we might have to eat at a truck stop, but surely
that would be okay. From everything we'd learned about truck drivers – mostly
from late-night movies and old Columbo
reruns –those guys really knew how to eat.
Reality hit when we arrived at our first
stop. The station looked less like a bus station and more like a public health clinic
whose funding had long ago run out.
“Ten minutes!” the driver announced as
we filed off the bus. A large group of passengers gathered near the rear of the
bus. Simultaneously, twenty-five cigarettes appeared out of twenty-five packs
and were lit immediately.
“Ten minutes?” I said. How were we
supposed to eat and smoke in ten minutes?
“Let's go,” Jackie said. “I'm
starving.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Just order me a
grilled cheese.”
I finished my cigarette and climbed back
onboard. There was a woman sitting in my seat.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I think you're
in my seat.”
“You must be kidding,” she said. With
a sigh, I walked up and down the aisle looking for two seats together. There
were none, naturally, and the single seats were filling up quickly. Jackie
walked up behind me.
“Some lady took your seat,” she said,
and handed me a package of peanut butter crackers.
“It's not mine anymore.” There was one
open seat next to where we were standing. A man coming up the aisle had his eye
on it so I sat.
“Where's my grilled cheese?” I said, as
she turned to search for a seat of her own.
“It was either that or an egg salad
sandwich. Trust me, crackers were the better choice.”
We would later learn that in certain
cities Greyhound provided travelers with what they called “Food Services
facilities”, where passengers could find “quality food they like –pizza,
hamburgers, chicken, sandwiches, and salads.” As luck would have it, of the
thirty-odd stops we made on our trip, not one of the terminals had anything remotely
resembling a Food Services facility, or if they did, it must have been towards
the end of the trip when we surely would have ignored it, thinking it some sort
of hallucination.
After two more stops we managed to
again find two seats next to one another. Outside, the sun was going down.
“Maybe now we can get some sleep,”
Jackie said.
Unfortunately, sleep – the one thing
that would have made the trip tolerable – was virtually impossible to achieve.
Our knees were jammed into the seats in front of us, our heads resting against
the hard plastic of the seat backs. Air was coming in through a tiny crack in the
window, producing a high-pitched whistle. When a period of two or three minutes
passed with no noise, or in this case less noise, our heads lolled forward
until they rested on our chests, at which point someone nearby would slooowly
open a bag of chips, then slooowly proceed to eat them, in an effort not to
wake anybody up. Or, they would begin to whisper softly, or get up and tiptoe
to the bathroom. All of this was especially maddening because no one was
asleep.
We had been drifting in and out of
semi-consciousness for hours when, just before dawn, we heard someone
yelling.
“WAS THAT YUMA?”
Jackie and I looked at each other.
“What the…?” I said. From somewhere behind us, we heard it again.
“WAS THAT YUMA?”
“What the hell is Yuma?” I asked.
“It's a city in Arizona,” she said.
“We passed it twenty minutes ago.”
We turned to stare as a man appeared
from out of the gloom at the rear of the bus. As if headed into a stiff wind,
he leaned forward as he walked, grabbing onto each seat in an effort to avoid
falling and, presumably, to propel himself forward more quickly. He wore a
rust-colored polyester suit, matching platform shoes, and an oversized pair of dark
sunglasses, which, along with the shoes, appeared to be hindering his progress
considerably.
"Fashion alert!" I whispered
to Jackie. She ignored me.
We heard him muttering as he hurried up
the aisle. "¡Dios MÃo!"
"¡Dios MÃo!", over and over, until he reached the front of the
bus, at which point he began to plead with the driver to turn the bus around.
Clearly he had slept through his stop. Lucky
bastard, I thought. We listened to them argue – “por favor, por favor, por favor”, “Hey, we’re on a schedule here,
amigo” – all the while traveling farther and farther away from Yuma. This
is just so wrong, I thought, as the bus finally slowed and turned.
According to the U.S. Department of
Transportation, bus travel is the safest form of transportation, as compared to
airplanes, trains, and, of course, cars. This fact apparently didn't hold much
weight with the American public the year Jackie and I embarked on our
cross-country journey. According to a federal study taken around that time, Americans
tended to have a rather negative opinion of buses. If only we'd known.
Twenty-six percent of those surveyed rated buses positively, while thirty-eight
percent were thoroughly negative in their opinion of bus travel. The remaining thirty-four
percent did not know enough about buses to give them any kind of rating
whatsoever, probably because they had never ridden on one. In the case of this
last group, ignorance is bliss, as they say.
“These people are pretty creepy
looking,” Jackie said later that morning on her way back from the bathroom. “Did
Mom actually tell us not to talk to any strange people? Has she ever even been
on a bus?”
“Well, we haven't actually talked to any
of them.” I said. “Thank God.”
In a rare unguarded moment, no doubt
brought on by sleep deprivation, she said, “I wonder how they're doing.” I
looked at her in disbelief.
“I can't believe you just said that.”
“Well, at least they're not serial killers,” she said.
“Oh, come on. They can’t be that
bad.”
“Take a look around,” she said.
For the first time since our trip began
I looked closely at my fellow travelers. We were surrounded by fifty of the
strangest people I had ever seen. In Seat 2B, an old guy (our standard
description for anyone over the age of twenty-five) sat cracking his knuckles
and glaring at the bus driver. Every few minutes he would snarl, and mutter
something under his breath. I wasn't close enough to hear what he was saying,
but the bus driver was and he didn't look happy. The woman to his left was
eating peanuts and chewing gum at the same time. Her hair was swept up in a
beehive, a strange sight even in the 1970s.
Two rows ahead of us, a guy (clearly
under twenty-five, so no qualifier needed) with long, greasy hair, wearing a poncho
of indeterminate cleanliness, was playing air guitar. It is worth mentioning
that the Sony Walkman was not yet widely available in the U.S., making the
sight of someone playing air guitar more than a little disconcerting.
Directly across the aisle from us was a
woman dressed in a pink caftan the color of Pepto-Bismol, with curlers in her
hair the size of soup cans. She had a National Enquirer open in her lap,
but stopped reading long enough to look me over. She snapped her gum and said,
“So, honey, whirr you two gals frum?”
“Nowhere,” I mumbled under my breath.
“I'm sorry. Frum whirr?”
“NOWHERE,” I said. “We're from NOWHERE.”
I turned to Jackie.
“Whatever you do,” I said. “Do not make
eye contact with anyone.” She looked at me with disgust. “Well, duh.”
In the brochure included with our ticket
purchase, Greyhound had advised us to observe common-sense safety tips on our
cross-country journey. We were not to leave our baggage unattended, or to
accept packages from strangers. We were not to wander away from well-traveled
areas (since the driver would in all likelihood leave behind anyone choosing to
wander, this seemed an unnecessary piece of advice). And, finally, if any sort
of criminal activity were observed, we were to report said activity to the
nearest Greyhound representative. This list, in Jackie's and my opinion, was
woefully incomplete. What about just plain weird activity? Where did one go to
report that?
After travelling with our parents for so
long we were under the impression that any journey without them would be like a
vacation. Seeing the people on the bus, however, we were forced to realize that
Mom and Dad, while irritating, were not even in the same league. I turned
back to Jackie.
“Yeah. I kinda miss ‘em, too. Wonder
what they’re up to.”
Somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico – we
weren't sure which since both states looked virtually identical – things went
from bad to worse. We looked up from our magazines as the driver made an
announcement over the intercom.
“Unfortunately, the air conditioning on
the bus is broken. We will now be returning to Tucson,” he said. “We're sorry
for the inconvenience.” He sounded insincere.
From all around us came a slow, steady
stream of obscenities. As the bus turned once more and headed west, back the
way we’d come, we resigned ourselves to the fact that the misery we were
experiencing was, in fact, only just beginning.
When we reached Tucson (again) we got
off the bus, lit up, and looked around. The driver made a beeline for the
terminal. I wondered if we'd ever see him again.
“Well, at least now we can wander if we want to,” Jackie
muttered sardonically, referring to Greyhound's suggestion that we stay close
to the station.
Inside, all the benches in the station
were filled. We walked back outside. Most of the passengers were milling around
grumbling and (of course) smoking, bonded through shared adversity and a
newfound loathing for the Greyhound bus company. We hovered at the edge of the
group, listening to the various mutterings. Apparently it would be a few
minutes before they found an available bus. So we began to wait. And wait. And
smoke. And wait.
Eventually the replacement bus arrived.
We stared in shock as it rolled to a stop. What we had somehow missed in Santa
Ana, on that first glorious day of freedom, were the words painted in large
letters on the side of the every bus: Greyhound’s world-famous advertising slogan,
ten simple words that taught me, for the first time in my young life, the true
meaning of irony: For Pleasure…Go Greyhound! And Leave the Driving to Us!
Just as U-Haul had forced us to reexamine the concept of adventure, so it was
with Greyhound. Pleasure? On a bus? How could that be?
We climbed aboard the new bus – one with
a fully functioning (read: asthmatic) air conditioning system, and settled in
once again, a degree or two cooler and happy to be heading towards our
destination once more.
The miles rolled on. We watched,
slack-jawed, as town after small town passed by outside our window. As we
pulled out of one of the stations we saw some children playing in a vacant lot.
“Oh, isn't that cute.” Jackie said.
“Some kid is waving at us.”
“I don't think he was waving,” I
said, and turned back to my magazine. An eight- year-old boy making an obscene
gesture at a passing bus seemed to me a bad omen for the entire trip. We didn't
look out the window much after that.
Sometime during that second day we
returned to the bus after getting off to buy sodas. I took the first open seat
I saw, and found myself sitting directly behind the driver. I could see the
beads of sweat on the back of his neck. His uniform was two sizes too small. He
had hair growing on the backs of his hands. In the rear view mirror I saw his
eyes scanning the bus for troublemakers, or any passengers that might try to,
in desperation, hurl themselves off the bus. He needn't have worried. None of
us had the energy.
My thoughts were wrenched away from the
driver as I caught a glimpse of my reflection. I stared in horror. My hair was
flattened against my skull on one side and a mass of tangles on the other.
There were black circles under my eyes, and every visible inch of my skin was
covered with dirt. I looked like an emaciated raccoon. I looked down. One of my
flip-flops was gone and my left foot was bleeding. Silently, I wept.
Exhaustion and a steady diet of potato
chips and Marlboro Lights had finally taken its toll. It was now thirty-six
hours since we’d climbed onto the bus. We were malnourished, sleep-deprived,
and by now, traveling through Texas. (I only know this because I happened to
see a sign: You Are Now Entering Texas).
“I just sat in someone's gum,” Jackie
said at one point, snapping me out of my stupor. We were somewhere outside El
Paso. Better you than me, I thought. I had been ‘reading' an article on
new spring fashions from a three-year-old old copy of Seventeen that I'd
found under one of the seats. Suddenly something outside the window caught my
eye.
“I think we just passed a Stuckey's.”
“No!”
We both craned our necks to look,
watching in misery as the familiar blue roof faded into the distance. We had
given our mother immense grief over the years for insisting on stopping at
every single Stuckey's in every state we passed through. We cringed as she
bought bags of peanut brittle and cans of mixed nuts, sneering as she said by
way of explanation, “Well, honey, Stuckey's always has such clean bathrooms.” I
sat back, sure that somewhere I could hear my mother laughing.
The bathroom on the bus was frightening.
We had quickly determined it was to be used only in the most dire of
emergencies. The latch on the door was broken, which meant that when the
bathroom was not in use, which was most of the time, the door would swing open,
revealing the interior, and any smells therein, to everyone in the vicinity.
After a few seconds the door would then slam shut with a bang. As one might
imagine, the seats closest to the bathroom were the last to be filled, avoided
like the plague until the bus began to move. In a demented version of musical
chairs, the seats farthest away from the bathroom were quickly taken, leaving
those left standing to suffer their fate. The fact that no one attempted to fix
the door, or indeed to complain very loudly, was an indication of the apathy
that had settled over the passengers. It was just one more thing to be endured.
As we lumbered down the highways of
Texas, the hours slowly passed. Later, as we settled into what would surely be
another long, sleepless night, I again looked around at my fellow travelers,
slumped in their seats. I felt not aversion or disgust but, rather, a kind of
warm glow. These people
aren't strange, I thought to myself. They're…my friends. We're kindred
spirits. We're all in this long, strange trip…together. My mind had finally
begun to slip.
By the time dawn broke on day three Jackie
and I had lost the capacity to put words into sentences. When one of us managed
to say anything coherent, usually by accident, it was met with a blank stare.
Verbal communication was simply not worth the effort. We weren't at all sure
what planet we were on, much less which state we were in. So it was with some
amazement that I happened to look out the window and see a highway sign that
read Baton Rouge, 3 miles. For a moment I struggled to comprehend what I
had just seen. It was like waking up from a nightmare and finding myself in a
meadow filled with wildflowers and butterflies.
As we rolled into the station, I looked
over at my sister. Incredibly, she was asleep. Curled into a fetal position,
unlit cigarette in her hand, she looked as if she were ready to bolt off the
bus at any moment so she could take a few puffs. Her gum had fallen out of her
mouth and into her hair. I nudged her shoulder.
“Jackie, wake up.” She woke with a
start, arms flailing.
“Get away from me,” she said and turned
over.
“Jackie, we're in Baton Rouge. BATON
ROUGE. We can GET…OFF…THE…BUS.” No reaction.
“Oh, look. I think I see Mom and Dad.”
She sat up. We peered through the window and saw our parents standing next to
the Cutlass, cheerfully waving. They looked remarkably refreshed. Seasoned
veterans of the open road, they had made the trip in record time. We stumbled
off the bus and lurched towards them. As we climbed into the back seat our
father said, “Why don't we stop at Denny's? You girls must be starving.”
With the benefit of hindsight it is
easy to see now that Jackie and I had survived what our mother liked to call a
character-building experience. And while it may be true that riding a bus for
over two thousand miles with nothing but our purses, our cigarettes, and large
quantities of warm root beer may have helped us become the fully-adjusted
adults we claim to be today, it has also true that it's been over thirty years
since either of us has stepped foot on a bus.
# # #
Sandy Ebner lives and writes in Northern California. Her essays cover a variety of topics and have been published, or are forthcoming, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, and other publications. Her essay, “The Clothes I Was Wearing” was named a finalist in both the 2012 Press 53 Open Awards and the 2012 Glass Woman Prize, in addition to being nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from Cal State University, and is an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She is working on her first novel.
Just finished a review of Rob McLennan's The Uncertainty Principle and it will appear soon at Necessary Fiction.
I'll also be finishing up a review of Michael Kimball's upcoming book Galaga, out July 1 from Boss Fight Books. It will appear in The Small Press Book Review at some point. Hint. It is hot as hell good. 
