Another One Rides the Bus

The wheels on the bus go round and round
Round and round
Round and round
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All 'round the town.
—Verna Hills

Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus.
—Ozzy Osbourne

“I know thirty-two thousand dollars is a lot to spend on a Christmas gift for your mother, but…”

I don’t catch the rest of the sentence because I’m busy dealing with the overwhelming flood of cognitive static generated by the words “thirty-two thousand dollars” emerging on a Greyhound bus. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Three days earlier I rolled up to the Civic Center MARTA stop, the strangely gypsy-esque terminal for Megabus in Atlanta. That’s right, I patronized two different bus companies in the space of three days in December, 2018. Am I a glutton for punishment? Yes I am. Give it to me baby. 

I feel like Friar Lawrence when I write about things like this—I believe my intentions are honorable but if you follow my advice you’ll probably want to kill yourself after a week or two. But strangely, people seem to enjoy the curmudgeonly sparks I produce wrenching myself through life like a marathoner with sandpaper undies, so here we go again:

I had to get to Nashville and I wasn’t keen on shelling out a couple hundred bucks to have my cavities searched at the airport. There’s no train between the two cities because America is the richest third-world country humanity has ever seen. We do our drinking behind the wheel, staring fixedly at the FairTax sticker on the bumper in front of us, not in some hoity-toity lounge car. So why not drive? Well, I wasn’t too excited about the prospect of spending four hours as an unpaid machine operator, and anyway I’d have had to rent a car and after paying for gas and gas station pickles, I’d probably have wound up spending as much as I would have for a plane ticket. 

Megabus employs a pricing model wherein riders who can’t make up their minds subsidize those who can. Buy a ticket early enough and you can actually get it for a dollar. Think about that: you can get on a bus and hand-deliver two letters for less than the cost of getting the U.S. Postal Service to do it for you. Unfortunately my capacity for planning ahead has been deeply eroded by digital media, so my ticket wasn’t a dollar, but it was a mere eighteen bucks, which is still silly cheap. Feeling like the top-hat guy from Monopoly I even sprang an extra dollar to get a reserved seat at a table. 

Some of you might have leapt to the conclusion that by “table” I’m referring to something like what you might find in one of those 747s that used to come equipped with a piano bar, but the Megabus definition of the word is chincier. What you really get is a splinter of metal about wide enough to support a plate. A smallish plate. Ok maybe just a cup. Now you get why they’re practically giving tickets away. The glorified cup holder is bracketed by two pairs of seats, facing each other so that you could play a game of bridge if you were so inclined. I chose this particular spot because I fancied I’d put my laptop on the table instead of on my lap like a peasant. This was my dream, hatched in a fevered imagination that insisted the table was large enough that I could, if I chose to, perform surgeries there. 

The day of the trip I got up at the obscene hour of five in order to be at the terminal by six-thirty for a seven o’clock bus. My wife dropped me off with my forty pound backpack, stuffed like a taxidermy seal, in a cold and misty dawn. There were at least a hundred people milling around waiting for various busses—every single one but me Black. That is, of course, one of the nasty racial realities of both Atlanta specifically and busses generally. Not only is Atlanta divided like a half-moon cookie, but the wealth is concentrated in the White half, and wealth doesn’t usually ride busses.

Leave the driving to us.

The bus was late. At seven a guy in a fluorescent yellow vest circulated through the crowd warning those who were Nashville-bound that he didn’t know where the bus was or when it would arrive. This beggars belief. I understand late. I don’t understand completely missing. In spite of the dollar tickets, Megabus is a real company, a subsidiary of Stagecoach Group, which took in about five billion in revenue as recently as 2017, so I reckon they could afford radios. They could buy them off of eBay, from erstwhile CB enthusiasts. But they don’t. I can only assume it’s easy to justify having no idea where your busses are if your customers have no other options. 

We waited two hours for the mislaid conveyance to be located, or manufactured, perhaps conjured. I read all the way to the bottom of Twitter, twice, before the double-decker coach finally emerged from the gloom like the Mary Celeste. I boarded to find the tiny table and a conversely mammoth woman already occupying a seat on the far side of it. The woman’s legs filled the miniscule space in front of both her own seat and the one opposite. I could only sit in the seat diagonal to hers, and I could only rest my backpack in the seat next to me—the overhead bin was Lilliputian and there was no way I could contort myself sufficiently to get it under my seat without tearing a muscle or breaking a few ribs.

Fortunately the dollar surcharge for reserved seats was apparently too salty for the rest of the riders, and once everyone boarded, it was still just the two of us. My companion turned out to be very friendly and generous—not long after we left she offered me a bottle of apple juice. 

Some while later I was compelled to stagger down the rocking aisle in search of a place to put the apple juice once my body was finished with it. Bus bathrooms are all of a kind: a box containing a stainless steel chemical toilet, a roll of toilet paper, and a wall-mounted container of hand sanitizer. In this instance the wall mount had been vandalized—forcibly removed, leaving nothing but a shard of broken plastic screwed to the wall. There was no toilet paper. I lifted the toilet lid and was greeted by a pool of dark blue liquid, wherein bobbed the paper roll, brand new by all appearances. 

To understand why a community would commit such violence against itself, you have to understand the community of bus riders, which consists largely of people from the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder—lots of broken families and public college students, neither of which present any kind of trouble on their own, but who are compelled by circumstance to share space with broken people—folks that have drifted out of institutions of various sorts, people with physical and mental issues and without much in the way of support. It’s a gumbo of innocents and malcontents, often sad, sometimes frightening, always very human. 

We stop in Chattanooga to swap out a few passengers. Among those boarding, a human freight car, six foot six, probably three hundred pounds, encased in form-fitting black denim and a black t-shirt emblazoned with some complicated design like coleslaw spattered on the street. Wrapped around this ensemble is a black trenchcoat large enough to drive a first-rate in the Age of Sail. He’s White, as was the mousy girl sitting across from him, in whom he takes immediate interest. 

“I’m trying to get the best possible job so that I can support my girlfriend.”

He’s delivering a monologue to the girl, who is perhaps eighteen. Berating her really, in stentorian tones usually reserved for Parliament. A moment later he begins quoting rap lyrics loudly enough to be heard in neighboring automobiles. My attention completely zapped by the impromptu performance pervading the bus, I begin taking notes instead of whatever it was I’d been trying to do prior. Mousy Girl tells him she’s a musician. Ignatius replies that success in music is all about marketing. 

“Seriously. Trust me.”

He’s probably barely out of his teens himself. Maybe twenty—otherwise how would he feel qualified to give the hapless target of his wisdom all this valuable advice? He tells her he’s got “connections.” Perhaps because he’s clearly treading on what little territory she possesses for herself, she brings a wall down. Her face goes blank and she stares fixedly forward. To the surprise of the audience, he seems to notice; he backs off a bit and attempts to solidify his position. 

“Sorry, I know a lot of audio majors in college.”

Definitely twenty. A tumble of words fly across the aisle like starlings. 

“...contracts are the worst thing I ever did. To be free and to be an artist…”

Pointing his laptop at her in order to call up various videos: “...just to give you an idea of my animating skill…”

“I used to be a one-man singing group, but now my voice is shot.”

He roars about how many Facebook notifications he has.

Bus people are fantastically varied—much more so than airplane people, numbed by CNN and Cinnabon. I should know, I’ve often been one of them. When I was around eleven circumstances to which I have alluded before—death, divorce, Ronald Reagan—conspired to strand my mother, my six-year old sister, and myself in Tucson, Arizona with barely enough cash to Greyhound our way to my grandparents’ house in Michigan. It was a long, grueling journey—three days in which I was often separated from my mom and sister due to the exigencies of seating. Busses are good teachers; they promise the adventure of travel but always with a soupçon of the melancholy revelation of the world we inhabit that makes Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” simultaneously sad and compelling. I’ve heard that song in the faces of Amish children waiting at the Chicago Greyhound station, confused and curious time-travelers. 

It’s perhaps not the sort of social and intellectual unfolding I think most people would wish for their children however. The back seats of the busses we rode were riddled with graffiti expressing in no uncertain terms how this couple or that had soiled the upholstery on some prior trip. Certain passengers seemed to be working up to leaving graffiti of their own. 

On the other hand, there is the kindness of strangers. During the trip I made two brief friendships—one an opulently dressed Chinese woman sequestered in a cloud of perfume scent, and the other a middle-aged cowboy sort who boarded the bus in Dallas. He wore snakeskin boots and a ten-gallon hat—unironically. In the course of both those legs of the trip I managed to fall asleep on each of their laps, and they generously treated me as would any doting aunt or uncle. Bus riding is hard enough without a strange kid cutting off the circulation in your legs.

Unfortunately—and you can take this for whatever kind of life lesson you wish—I turned out to be allergic to the Chinese woman’s perfume, and on day three the skin on my chest and back broke out in a matrix of itchy hives. My mom was concerned, as we prepared to board the last bus of the trip, that the driver would spot my infirmity and prevent us from boarding on the grounds that I was a leper. At her direction I turned up my collar and boarded the bus with my head down and my shoulders hunched. 

We needn’t have worried. Bus drivers are congenitally blind and will allow you to board a bus with a goat or a rifle or a duffel bag full of heroin. No questions asked. 

At exhaustive lengths we reached my grandparents and began the task of rehabbing our life. Things have, in most respects, turned out alright—I am, after all, writing these words on an expensive laptop computer like I work for NASA or something. Was that bus trip a horror? A reminder of a time when I lived on the margins like the Free Artist or Mr. Thirty-Two Thousand Dollars? Does the fact that my family had no choice other than Greyhound make us something inferior, something to be pitied?

Well, I am often pitiable, such as when I’ve eaten too much rich food and have to lie on the floor and concentrate on my breathing. But our bus days are just one of the many threads that make up the strange and plush carpeting of my life. It’s easy in the era of Facebook to fall prey to the idea that life is a carefully cultivated set of achievements, aimed like an arrow at some putative future in which your time is spent vacationing on Greek islands with windshield-wiper fluid blue waters and sugar sand beaches. Really it’s an inexplicable series of events and people crashing into us in unexpected ways and we struggle to build narratives from this random Brownian motion. We have no control over what comes; only what stories we tell about it when it’s over. That’s the beauty of life, and for all its many discomforts, busses will bring you things to talk about. 

Coming back from Nashville the bus is nearly full and keeps getting fuller at every stop. I’m determined to avoid a seatmate, as once again there’s no place to conveniently stow my bag. Perhaps as punishment for my selfishness, the universe has decreed that neither the electrical outlets at my seat nor the overhead lights should work, and my various devices are all but a few electrons from death, so most of the way home I sit in the dark, peering out the window at the black highway. It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity or indeed the inclination to sit quietly and think, so I do my level best to enjoy it. 

In Marietta a half dozen more riders board, and I’m forced to relinquish my bag storage. The guy that sits down next to me seems to lack any borders whatsoever. Within five minutes I know that he’s ex-Army, that he boarded with a provisional ticket because the Marietta office is closed for the night (“Do you think they’ll give me a ticket in Atlanta?” he keeps asking me), that he’s on his way to South Carolina to see his family, and that he’s excited and they are excited and it’s going to be a great Christmas and he’s gotten his mother “a very expensive” present. A thirty-two thousand dollar present.

I’m tired and try not to encourage him. Eventually the bus drops us in Atlanta, and before I head out into the maelstrom of strip clubs and bail bonds establishments that surround the Greyhound station, I catch a last glimpse of him showing a crumpled and mismatched sheaf of papers to the booking agent. No doubt he’s telling the agent that price is no object. 

Thanks as always for reading and be sure to like, share, comment, and all that jazz. My four cats live in breathless anticipation of your responses. This piece was written gradually over a period of several years and many, many bus rides. I have no recollection whether the events depicted actually occurred in this particular order or in anything like temporal proximity, but for sure they all occurred.