I wanted to take the train from
Florida to Louisiana, but Hurricane Katrina destroyed the railroad tracks from
Jacksonville to New Orleans. Nine years
later, they still haven’t been fixed, so I was forced to ride a Greyhound.
My journey began in Tampa, Florida
inside a harshly illuminated bus terminal.
I sat upon a wire-metal chair that threatened to buckle under my
180-pound frame. I attempted to read my
Kindle but was too distracted by the quirky characters around me. Just outside the glass doors, there was a thin,
haggard man dressed nicely in dirty clothing.
He held a water bottle to his ear like a telephone and spoke
emphatically through the plastic as though communicating to the hydrogen oxide
molecules.
A bearded man opened the door and
chomped on a banana. In between bites,
he babbled incoherently and then retreated to his exterior sanctuary.
A few chairs away from me, a fat
man muttered to himself while lugging three bulky bags around the station. He would bicker something unintelligible,
pick up his luggage, and relocate to a space three chairs away. He repeated this process several times during
my hour-long wait.
The Greyhound website advised me to
be at the station an hour before my departure time. Apparently, what they mean by this is that if
you don’t heed this advice, you would miss the show performed by the local
lunatics.
Who are these people talking to? I wondered. I checked all their ears for headphones or
Bluetooth extensions, but I found none.
I wanted to give these people a fair trial before I deemed them
insane.
After a trip to the restroom, where
I found splattered urine all over the toilet seats, I realized I was not at a
bus station but in an asylum waiting to be rescued.
I scrubbed my hands and emerged from the
bathroom assuredly infected with some invisible disease. Then I took a seat next to a harmless-looking
woman.
I attempted to read a few more
pages of my book when the woman next to me blasted the volume on her smart
phone. She decided that everyone in the
bus station wanted to hear her exercise video.
While the thumb-sized man on her screen shouted ways to tone your thighs
to the beat of the music, I exchanged looks with a man across from me who was
roughly my age. Without using words, our
eyes spoke volumes. In that instant, we
verified each other’s sanity, and we realized that our mothers did a
magnificent job raising us to be courteous and civilized people.
Finally, the bus swooped in to save
me until it abandoned me in another terminal in Orlando. During my lay-over, I snacked on trail-mix and
read a few chapters while sitting on another questionable bench. I was making great progress through the book
when another man with discourteous habits and zero self-awareness perched upon
a divider that was not meant to be sat upon.
He was wearing vibrant orange cargo shorts that sagged underneath his
boxer-covered backside, but I actually admired his overall ensemble because his
baseball cap matched his shorts and his shoes.
He, too, played loud music and sang foul lyrics to an older woman I assumed
was his mother.
“I hit you with a left,” he rapped,
“I hit you with a right. And beat the
pussy up.”
He continued this refrain and
laughed each time he completed his verse.
I respected his tireless endurance but eventually grew annoyed with his
boisterous antics. Midnight was
approaching, and a few travelers curled up on the benches to catch some shut-eye
while waiting for the bus. Paying no
mind to those around him, the man repeatedly implored his mother to watch his
performance. Although he must’ve been in
his late 20s, he still sought his mother’s attention like an impatient, whining
infant.
Miraculously, the man left the
station by his mother’s side, and it was during that glorious moment of quiet
that nearly convinced me of the plausibility of divine intervention. After yet another inexplicable bout of
behavior, a burly white man next to me made eye contact with me. His forearms were thick with muscle, and his
boots looked worn-out.
“Are you going to be around here
for a few minutes?” he asked me, but I understood what he really wanted to say.
“I’ll guard your stuff,” I said
with as much authority as I could muster.
He laughed because I saw right through his question. I rarely find myself wielding such powerful,
unspoken truths during strained moments. I relished the opportunity to sound
tough and deliver quotable dialogue.
As the man walked to the restroom, I
wondered: Why did he ask me? Do I look trustworthy? Or did he trust me because I’m white, and
there were a lot of black people around?
Did he think we could form an immediate bond due to a common skin
pigmentation? That must mean he assumes
the inclination to steal is directly related to the melanin levels and the
epidermis’ exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
I harbored no racist thoughts. In
the bus terminals, I distrusted everybody equally.
In order to avoid another episode, I
stepped outside and began walking laps around the station to help me stay
awake. Before I reached the end of the
parking lot, a cabbie approached me and asked me if I needed a ride. I told him I was waiting for a bus and I was
wandering around just to kill time.
“You don’t want to walk around
here,” he said with a Caribbean accent. “It
is the ghetto, you know what I mean? You can get robbed.”
I thanked him for the advice and
reluctantly went back inside to bide my time on the uncomfortable, cushion-less
chairs. There is only one restaurant in
the Orlando bus station that offers sandwiches, burgers, hot dogs, fries,
yogurt, apples wrapped in plastic, juices and sports drinks. If you don’t like what’s on the menu, you
could brave the ghetto and walk for miles to find a McDonald’s, or you could peruse
the vending machines. Like a jumpy squirrel on the lookout for predators, I nibbled
on my honey-roasted peanuts with shifty eyes.
The buses are only slightly more welcoming
than the terminals. There’s a slight,
but persistent tang of urine wafting in the air-conditioned atmosphere that you
never completely adjust to. I didn’t
manage to snag a window-seat, so I spent an endless night attempting in vain to
find a comfortable vertical position in which to sleep. My spine throbbed when I slouched and
stretched out my legs. With perfect
posture, I didn’t feel relaxed enough for rapid eye movement. Eventually I gave up on sleep, and that’s
when I smelled marijuana burning.
Immediately after detecting the
stench of weed, I heard a man coughing violently. Later, I saw this same man fall asleep with
his head suspended upside down in the aisle.
When we disembarked in Tallahassee, he caused a scene as the passengers
lined up near the bus to collect their luggage.
This man had a military build and stubble that promised to sprout into a
thick beard if allowed enough time. If he
orchestrated his facial muscles one way, he looked like a man you could
immediately respect because of his confident stature. But the man composed himself with the dignity
of a high-school bully.
He accused a woman of stealing his
salad while he slept and threatened to call the cops on the bus driver. His evidence was that the woman was sitting
across the aisle from him, and that his salad was missing. He had left it on the floor under him, and when
he woke up it was gone. He held the
woman accountable due to her proximity, and he blamed the bus driver for
allowing such a crime to happen on his watch.
As I listened to his testimony, I began
to realize why everyone around me was acting so crazy. Stranded from civilization, we had entered dangerous
terrain where missing salads not only warrant questions but full-scale investigations. I vowed never to travel by bus again. The next time I needed to cover a lot of
ground I would fly over these lunatics as they bickered over heavily-dressed
lettuce.
If I ever set foot inside a bus
again, I feared what would happen to me.
My brain would deteriorate causing me to misplace my snacks, but I would
have a plan. After punching a few
buttons on my mobile device, I’d speak to my imaginary lawyer through a plastic
bottle of Gatorade.
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