Greyhound (3 page)

I straggled nervously around the terminal, trying to kill time, feeling weird and out of place, before I realized I needed to go to the bathroom, which was located at the far end. In front of the men’s toilet, a man and a woman were arguing and shouting. The woman kept pointing her finger at the man and calling “ass hole,” “shit-head,” and “fucking retard.” I had heard much worse at home many times before. I was no stranger to arguments or even knock-down, drag-out fights. The man just kept telling the woman to shut up and called her a “fat cow.” I laughed as I walked by them and slipped into the restroom. I glanced behind me a moment later, concerned that they might’ve heard me.

I wandered into the low-lit, dark green–tiled bathroom and went pee. The bald man in the suit from the bus had come in right behind me. He saw me as he slowly walked past and closed himself into one of the stalls. After I finished, I shifted over to the sinks to wash my hands.

“Hey, boy…” I heard him speaking softly. He was whispering from the other stall, but I didn’t respond.

“Hey…can you get me some paper from the stall? This one’s out. It’s all empty in here,” he beckoned. I didn’t know why he was whispering. Maybe he felt embarrassed. I wiped my hands on the towel roll on the wall after forwarding the cloth to a would-be clean spot. I wondered where all the dirty towel went, as it seemed to disappear back inside the plastic housing. I slowly walked back toward the stall to check out what he wanted.

“C’mon, kid. Help me out, would ya? I could use some paper,” he pleaded. He was in the third stall down, the very last one in the row. I opened the door to the first empty stall and saw a full roll sitting on top of the holder. I grabbed it and turned to head back out of the stall, but he was immediately behind me at the stall door. I was surprised that he had moved so quickly. Another man came into the bathroom at that same moment; the door squeaked loudly on its hinge.

“Sorry, kid, I thought that you’d left me hanging. Thanks, though.” The bald man smiled, took the roll, and headed back into the stall and locked the door. He started coughing nervously and clearing his throat. I shrugged the whole thing off and left.

“1443 to Los Angeles platform 7, now boarding. Five-minute call.”
The music came back on after the announcement. I had heard the song before. It was “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” The song reminded me of the waitress. Walking back to the bus, I began to notice a lot of people sleeping in the terminal. It made me think back to all of those nights at the YMCA, stuck sleeping on a cot next to my older sister, Beanie. I had too many of those nights to forget. My mother always called it “rock bottom,” but I never knew why. The security guard was asking different people to show him their tickets.

“Can’t you see I’m trying to watch TV? I’ve paid for it!” The obese black man from before was angry and yelling at the guard. I quickly walked back outside hoping to get a good seat on the bus and not miss my ride. I didn’t want to end up getting stuck here. As nice as Jenny was, I thought it might be uncomfortable if I had to see her again and explain that I was stupid enough to miss the bus. Everything with her seemed perfect. I didn’t want to mess it up. It was the beginning of a good memory, and it was something to take note of in my journal.

I stood at the back of the line of people who were reboarding the bus. It didn’t seem as if we had picked up many more riders. When I climbed the stairs, I saw Jim staring down at me with a smile and a cigar in his mouth.

“Here he comes, the luckiest man alive, I swear!” he bellowed and guffawed. “I saw you over in the Grey Café all deep in that broad’s jugs. Good God, son!” I was stunned by what he said. It was as if I had been hit by a wave of thick air hearing the driver’s descriptions of Jenny. I was embarrassed and probably blushed.

“Good job, chief!” he exclaimed. “A woman in every port! That’s my motto.”

I didn’t know exactly what to say, so I made my way toward the back of the bus. The back row was once again completely open. A man was sitting on the opposite side against the window reading a book. I thought maybe he wanted to be near the toilet. I sat back in my seat and looked out at Fresno in the afternoon. Fresno seemed, from where I was sitting, like a forgotten town in a sea of concrete at the far edge of the world. The sun was cooking everything within its reach. I felt the heat oozing through the aluminum bus and slipping through the air-conditioning. It was the only thing the old people on the bus seemed to be talking about. I listened to their comments, not really having an opinion.

I pulled the notepad and pencil from my shirt pocket and wrote down three sentences, soon to be a memory, of my thoughts on Fresno.

Paper bags with peanut butter sandwiches. A waitress with soft hands. She hugged me in a sea of concrete.

As we pulled away from the bus station and back out onto the main street heading toward the freeway, I struggled to say more, but realized that three sentences were enough. Then I wrote the name
Jenny
in the margin.

We pulled out onto the freeway again. The road signs said it was the 99. After the bus built up speed, Jim came on the overhead speaker one more time.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Just want to welcome you to the 1443 to Los Angeles. Our travel time is approximately four and a half hours, which should put us in Downtown just after noon. A little later than first expected, but close enough. This portion of the drive is pretty steady and mostly downhill, so we may pick up a few minutes. Please remember, no drinking alcoholic beverages on the bus, and thank you for choosing Greyhound.”

When the speaker made the clicking sound again, I noticed it was louder than Jim’s voice, which was jarring, as the speaker was just above my head. It was the hardest thing so far to get used to. In the first twenty minutes of driving, several people had made their way back to the rear of the bus to use the toilet, including the tall, bald man in the suit. He nodded at me with a smile as he disappeared inside and locked the door. The
occupied
light came on with the sound of the lock sliding into place. I quickly figured out that most of the people who were going into the bathroom were going in there to have a cigarette. With every person who went in, the air following them out smelled heavier and heavier. I told myself that I would never smoke when I was older, no matter how good they might be. Cigarettes made everything stink. People’s clothes, their faces, their hair, and their hands. Their teeth were yellow, the whites of their eyes were yellow, and their collars sweated cigarettes when it got hot. The smell burned my nose and bothered me to no end. But maybe it was necessary, as every adult I knew always smoked or “needed one.” My mother always said she was “fiending for one.” I had heard her say that smoking was romantic, but I just couldn’t see how. It seemed like a death ritual more than anything else. All the Catholic services that I had ever sat through always burned incense. At least that smelled better, but not by much. The thought of Jenny stayed with me. She was beautiful and kind, she smelled nice, and she didn’t smoke at all. My mother had also said that “people who don’t smoke are squares.” I had now come to believe this wasn’t true. I felt angry at her for lying to me again. But I was happy to finally be sure about something about which I used to believe otherwise.

The bus sped quickly, and the world passed by the windows. I was just an observer but very glad to be seeing it sweep by beside me. Endless farmland, sewn together like the massive bed quilts that my grandma would make, one piece after another. Jim turned music on over the loudspeaker at a low volume to help break the monotony. I read the road signs, trying to count the rare occurrences of the letters
x, y,
and
z.
Several large yellow signs alerted drivers not to pick up hitchhikers because there was a prison nearby, but I didn’t see any signs of hitchhikers or prisons. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be. Early-morning commuters started to crowd next to us on the freeway. People were driving with an intense focus, and most of them were still eating their breakfast and drinking coffee from Styrofoam McDonald’s cups. Everybody else’s life seemed so different from my own.

I put my attention back inside the bus. Someone else had just locked himself in the bathroom. Sitting quietly on the row of seats alone, I fully realized my boredom and wished I had brought something to read—a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. Stuffed inside the seat pocket was yet another ad brochure like all the others conveniently placed in the Fresno Terminal.

Lifting the leaflet from the seat pocket, I surveyed a woman’s smiling face printed across the front in full color. She had bushy brown hair and a laughing smile. It seemed over-the-top as an ad for Greyhound. The words
Go Greyhound
were printed in red across the front like an alert. I couldn’t figure out the purpose of the small booklet, as everyone on the bus had already clearly chosen to
Go Greyhound.
Opening the multipage brochure, I scanned it for anything interesting but only saw multiple photos of American landmarks like the Grand Canyon, the Saint Louis Arch, and the White House. I only knew these names as they were printed below each one, and every photo was accompanied by a short statement about seeing the world from a bus.

I put it back in the seat, a little confused. I would’ve expected the people in charge of making the flyer to advertise the cafés inside the terminal in order to persuade anyone not wishing to disembark on a layover to break down, give in, and go have a cup of coffee, just as I had. I had a frightening thought that maybe the cafés were rare and there weren’t going to be that many as we got farther from California. If that was going to be the case, I imagined I’d be stuck eating food from the vending machines.

I would have to pay for food at some point. I estimated that my breakfast would have cost me just over four dollars if I had paid. I slowly added the numbers up in my notepad.

It came to $4.85, which was a little more than I had thought. I realized I probably wouldn’t eat pie with every meal and so could deduct it from the total amount. But with pie, eating twice a day would cost me $9.70 a day. With three and a half days worth of driving, I had just enough. If I had added it up properly, I would have almost six dollars left by the time I got to Altoona. I fretted about other problems coming up and it costing me more than I could afford. If that happened, there was nothing I could do.

My mother had told me that my Aunt Sharon would give me some money and I shouldn’t refuse it if she did. I hadn’t seen my aunt in almost three years, but I never thought of her as generous. My mother had taken my older sister and me to go live with her one summer when she lost her job in the city and couldn’t continue paying the rent. At the time, my Uncle Gerald had a pig farm in Lodi, near Stockton, but now he was driving a truck, and they were living in Los Angeles. Aunt Sharon was a lot like my mother, smoking cigarettes constantly and angry anytime I spoke up or said absolutely anything around the adults. She was my mother’s eldest sister, but not any nicer, and I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her. I reckoned that she would probably just tell me what a bother I was to have to come downtown for and that there was something wrong with me. She always told me that I was slow and that I was a mistake. At the time, I didn’t know what she meant. After I retold this to my grandma, she told me not to listen to any of that nonsense.

The two-hour bus ride to Bakersfield went by quickly, even though I was bored silly. I felt determined to grab something to read once we stopped again. Driving to the Bakersfield station from the freeway off-ramp took longer than I expected. I had to use the bathroom, but it seemed eternally occupied. I had already reconsidered going inside and closing the door on one occasion because the smell was so awful that it made me turn away. The smell was horrendous, and my body had instinctively curled away before my brain had caught up. I was just trying to hold it until we got to the terminal, but I didn’t want to wet my pants either. The only change of clothing I had was packed away underneath the bus. After winding around numerous city streets and standing still at eternal red lights, we pulled into the Bakersfield Greyhound Station.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Bakersfield. We’ll be stopped here for approximately twenty minutes. For all those permanently disembarking, thank you for choosing Greyhound.”

Jim slowly pulled the bus around the terminal and angled it into its spot on platform 1. Looking out the window, I noticed that instead of being called platforms, the word
aisle
was painted down the metal stanchions that supported the awning above. I was the last rider to disembark, and Jim and all the other passengers were already headed inside the terminal. A Mexican lady with a broom and a mop bucket was waiting for me to get off so she could clean the floors and lavatory.

Bakersfield was a lot hotter than Fresno, and it seemed that most of the people wanted to be inside. Heading through the sliding doors, I noticed the tall, bald man in the suit watching me. He was curled around a pay phone, talking in a very low voice. He waved, but I moved too quickly through the entryway to wave back. I found the men’s restroom without delay and was shocked to see only one urinal affixed to the wall. All the others were either ripped out due to construction, vandalized, or leaking water from the pipes. Several large puddles had formed on the floor, making the place seem dangerous. A soggy copy of
Reader’s Digest
floated around in the slop. The bathroom was in bad shape, but I was thankful that no one else wanted to use the toilet. I wouldn’t have been able to hold it if I had to stand in line. I felt relieved as soon as I started to pee—it must’ve been all the coffee going through my system. I could smell it as it blasted against the porcelain bowl. The aroma of ammonia and burnt coffee rose up strongly from the urinal below me.