greyhound retrospective
[Written during and after a Greyhound trip to Humboldt. Never got around to finishing and now the end is lost.]
I sit here an American, a white male with privilege and glasses, concerned more with convenience than survival, a bastion of the decline of free thought in the Western world, and here, in what could perhaps be most definitively America, I am an alien. I am an endangered species, at once shunned and preyed upon, comfortably ignored and ostentatiously avoided.
The family in front of me, waiting near the end of the line, is a (presumably) single mother with two sons. They’re Hispanic; she’s late forties, they’re about fifteen and two. She’s preoccupied, perhaps thinking about the crippling expense that this voyage is incurring, perhaps mulling over job opportunities (or lack thereof) perhaps merely studying a particular chink in the wall marred by decades of indifference. The young son is given free reign, making his bumbling and irrationally excited way around the crowded building, running into people and objects and then looking at them with a fascination unmatched by any “intelligent” person. He has a bottle to gnaw on, and I, having been raised in the gentle home I was, presume that his is a mother who hasn’t the time to breastfeed her offspring, not immediately noticing, of course, that the child is far too old for that; indeed, the bottle itself must have been a security-invoking carryover from his past. The mother makes passing attempts to remove her youngest from the paths of whatever serial killers and dysphoric homeless women might be lurking, but isn’t willing to give up her place in line to save her child from just one of what will inevitably turn out to be many seemingly dangerous situations. Her other son stands behind her, stoic and uncomfortable. Stoic because he is used to the veritable delinquency quarantine that is middle school, though he has since graduated to high school, which thus far has not persuaded him to do anything differently, and in these festering cesspools of bullshit, stoicality is a highly revered virtue among the entestosteroned. He is uncomfortable, however, because he is realizing that the street kid he is trying to look like, by way of spending a great deal of (his mom’s) money more on huge, pristine clothes than on, say, encyclopedias, is not the glorified image he has had cultivated in his mind by those who would have personal worth measured one-dimensionally. Slight flickers of uneasiness escape his monolithic aspirations, but unbeknownst to him, I respect him more for it, for the recognizance, than I would for the clothes, swagger, and stolidity that it invalidates. Having seen his place in the world, as someone who, proud to be low-income (or maybe lower-middle class), has no concept of real poverty, he makes a good choice, and lets go. He holds his brother’s hand. He gently keeps the future stoic in check, adding a silent hand to his mother’s actionless voice.
A couple, one that looks perfect for each other and therefore doomed to failure, make themselves known. They appear to have been together for some time; certainly they’ve been alive for some time, probably both in their mid-40’s. They’re somewhere between Crazy Guy in the Bookstore Who Talks To Everyone and Hobo, fashion-wise. And unstable-personality-wise. They are at the very front of the line. They are talking, then discussing, then weighing options, and then point-counterpointing, and then arguing, and then they walk away, toward the ticket counter and out of my interest.
Family dynamics abound in this place; I am alone. I am coming from a split family, going toward a pseudo-family that I cannot understand, and yet here, either would be as good as the Cleavers.
Some children mingling with each other and various obstacles catch my attention. They’re small, maybe three, a boy and a girl, and I’ll call them twins. The twins are black, and so (thankfully for my left brain) is their mother. Their mother is young, and as such sees no reason why producing offspring should in any way hinder her apparently rollicking sex life. The child-bearing, already years ago (God how time flies), has left no permanent unsightly weight on this tall and shapely woman, and so she is out, with her thong (I assume), pre-frayed, pre-faded, pre-old jeans, her low-cut shirt, and her carefully applied makeup (no doubt with an obnoxious daughter tugging at her pants, not understanding that Mommy needs to be pretty and pick up a new Daddy), to get some. To be fair, I did not observe her chatting up anyone at the time, but given the selection, the real surprise would be if she behaved otherwise. When the children, insistent in their childlike curiosity, got too tiresome, she sent them, cornrows, baggy pants, infantile gangsta glare and all, to the seat next to mine, outfitted with a coin-operated black and white television in what appeared to be bulletproof armor. They went together and got in the same seat, and they did the same things almost without speaking, though it was clear that the girl (Deborah? Delilah?) had the upper hand over the more observant and confused boy. Their mother, having generously provided them with one plastic seat and an inoperative TV to keep them amused, safely forgot about them and went about her business, which I paid little attention to, being more interested in the antics of the children. They turned out to be stale at best, though I recant my previous dubbing of them as twins, it becoming more probable that the boy is younger.
I’m not entirely alone in my alienness. A girl sits down, a girl very much like me, to all outward appearances, and seems similarly uncomfortable. She’s a bit overweight, mostly plain, and ergo has adorned herself with the quintessential plain (and therefore, of course, intellectual) college girl look; not quite punk, not quite emo, not quite goth, but rather more “hey look at me but I don’t care if you do cause I don’t care what people think of me and what do you think of that, eh?” Her hair is slightly artificially colored, and her face as well. In another place, had she been born with one or two different chromosomes, born to her aunt as opposed to her mother, she might be highly attractive, but under the circumstances, I can only be attracted (as is my sometime wont) to the dearth of ostentatious attractiveness. Her feminist-tinted confidence is undermined by her eye-flicks and fidgeting, and I grin a little, pretending to myself that I entirely understand her position.
Two Hispanic guys in front of me are doing their absolute best to break the stereotypes laid down on them; They’re both pretty large, intimidating, short manly hair, shirts emblazoned with things that I no longer recall but which I can assure you were quite masculine, but they have such soft voices… Their faces are anything but intimidating because they’re so used to smiling, their jokes are appropriate and charming, and in an unassuming manner, one of them even engages in small-scale small talk with me.
At the end of the line is a homeless (-looking) man, fitting the bill exactly. He has a round face, with round facial hair, his clothes are layered and tattered, he looks like his #1 most-uttered word is “change,” and his belongings aren’t even in the measly 1960’s luggage that the other people scrounged, but in a good ol’ fashioned black trash bag. He says nothing and disturbs nobody.
As I’ve been sitting here, taking in what surroundings interest me, the subdued din has been punctuated by slapping and crying. The source of this aural intrusion turns out to be a family of some amount, broken down (as best I am able) here:
Two (2) small Hispanic girls, roughly sixish, acting apparently repeatably slappable. At least, one of them does, as the other is out of reach, either physically or legally, leading me to believe the latter and that therefore Small Girl #2 is merely a friend of #1, who, in a few years, will probably become:
One (1) slightly older Hispanic girl, maybe nine, who, having learned her lesson when she was six, remains aloof from the others and watches, until she becomes bitter enough to become:
One (1) yet older Hispanic girl, who, having been privy to this behavior for something around fifteen years, has seen the light and now wears at least three metric shitloads of cheap makeup at all time, along with her (doubtlessly) trademark scowl and:
One (1) similarly aged teen girl, rather whiter than the rest, appearing probably to be a friend of Scowl Girl. She seems to have practice being polite around borderline-abusive families, and pretends to watch the carpet and talk quietly with the Human Scowl, ignoring at all costs:
One (1.5) Hispanic woman, age belied by many thousands of dollars worth of skin products, who is unhappy with her income level, weight, marital status, and offspring at pretty much all times. She is the slapper in this scene, thwacking her (I should hope) daughter for crying, which rather predictably causes little but more crying.
This causes head-shaking on my part, believing that all people are fundamentally like me, and if they aren’t, well then by God they should look inside themselves and realize the folly of their ways. I cheer momentarily for a man (White Male Interloper) who appears to have approached the mother and asked her to calm down with the striking of children, and she responds to him with a calm and rational explanation ending with “These is my children and ain’t nobody else gonn’ raise ‘em but me!” This development provides some circumstantial evidence in favor of Small Girl #2’s being a spawn of this woman as well, but varying inflections, along with the vibe of the friendship between the girls and the interactions between #2 and the rest of the family, still lead me to believe otherwise.
Through a combination of paranoia (wondering why everyone else is in the line and I am not), intrigue (attempting [unsuccessfully] to peek at the ticket of a woman in the line to ascertain her destination), and looking lost (until I am asked by a security guard if I need help), I learn that this line is in fact the one I should wish to find myself in, should I wish to reach my destination as planned. The rest of the populace apparently gleaned this information, during breaks in their aforementioned antics, from the alien noise emanating at irregular intervals from the PA system. I have learned, through years of middle-class traveling, to decipher and understand the speech of airport terminals and airplane captains; this, however, is a new and frightening linguistic experience for me. Sheepishly, but convinced that nobody has noticed my awkward maneuvering, I take my place at the end of the line. The bus soon boards, and about three people ahead of me, a boy is stopped as he attempts to explain the validity of his ticket despite his having already used it. As he tries, futilely, the driver takes a quick count of the passengers remaining. Not a good sign indeed, considering my position at the end of the line, but I make it on with one seat to spare. As it turned out, however, my fears were unjustified; my own failure to think “outside the box” led me to assume that the bus would be considered full when all seats were taken, but I had forgotten the seating properties of the aisle down the middle, which became temporary home to some half-dozen transients. My own seating arrangement placed me next to an unintimidating Japanese boy. I was lucky to land such a catch, thought I, musing that maybe I would even get a little decent conversation in on this, the second leg of my trip. My meager hopes were dashed, though, at the same time as my judgment of him as unintimidating was confirmed; he slept, or at least was attempting to, for the entire eight hours he was next to me. The guy didn’t even get up to pee until he reached his stop. Multiple times, his head started slipping toward my shoulder, and I entertained the thought of proving my American hospitality and openness to physical contact with complete strangers, but when he jolted into consciousness and saw my proximity, he swiveled away and, in his endearing manner, again dashed my aspirations against the wall like so much ceramic diningware.
At any rate, he was not the focus of my attention for this stretch. It was, rather, demanded by Small Girls #1 and 2, who sat together in front of me with White Male Interloper. Excluding the possibility of the fastest recorded wooing of an enchildrened woman at a bus station, this cinched the fact that WMI was, if not an actual father, a father figure of some class. The Small Girls talked, one considerably more than the other, about nothing and everything, in that unique Small Girl way. The real conversation starter, however, was when we crossed some bridge or another, spanning some body of water or another, prompting the impromptu singing/chanting of “Deep, deep, deep, deep, waterrrrrr…,” over and over again for, more or less, ever. The SGs did this in unison, repeatedly, long after we passed water of any depth, until the third or fourth time the WMI told them to shut the hell up. At this point, you must understand, I was completely on the side of the SGs, involved in some youthful playfulness of some sort. After being shushed, however, the more talkative of the two (#1) started singing again, “Deep, deep, deep, deep, waterrrrr…,” and the other would join in again. Eventually the mother yelled from down the length of the bus “WHATTA THEY DOIN’ OVER THERE?” and, at a loss for words, the WMI replied “They, eh… er, dem, uhm, che, ke-singing some, deh, ‘deep water’ bullsh-crap!” His eloquence notwithstanding, I was inclined to agree with his exasperation more and more with every passing refrain. Before my very eyes, however, the mother grew as a person and said “Well, they ain’t hurtin’ nobody.” My heart swelled with joy that these rambunctious and obnoxious little shits might escape a physical punishment this time, and my faith in humanity was restored.
Ten minutes later, the mother made it quite clear that her daughter would be introduced repeatedly and at high velocity to a belt. My heart sunk a bit, but then the whole crew got off, and the bus was ever so slightly quieter.
The majority of the luggage belonging to the Asian guy next to me, along with portions of the guy himself, was removed from the aisle, which was the only way to get to the luxurious lavatory aboard our bus. I realized that I sorta had to pee, but as that would require getting out of the seat and undoubtedly waking my companion with the sight of my ass, thereby confirming his already strong belief in my homosexuality, I refrained. As the bus traveled farther north, fewer and fewer passengers were forced to undergo the travesty of sitting with another person, but as my person was unconscious or at least pretending to be, there was no escape for me. “That’s alright,” I thought. “I am an open-minded and comfortable individual, and there is nothing wrong with sharing a seat with a complete stranger when what few passengers remain each get their very own seat, and, in some cases, row.” I may have been lying to myself, but my fear of confrontation won out, and I waited until two stops before mine, when Young Asian magically woke up, gathered his luggage (a large blue rolly suitcase and what appeared to be a Chinese phonebook), and left wordlessly. All of a sudden I was filled with wonderment. Does he even speak English? Why would he need a phonebook in another language, referring, no doubt, to another locale? Why, even if there were a reason, wouldn’t he keep said phonebook in the ample suitcase? Was he REALLy asleep for eight hours in the middle of the day? Was it jet lag? Was he recently arrived? Was he a spy from Communist China? Had great amounts of steganography been employed in the form of a phonebook in order to convey a four-sentence message to agents in northern California? Would I be forever known as the guy who had a chance to prevent the takeover of Humboldt County, who had figured out the whole scheme, but failed to act? Jesus Christ, why a phonebook?
Time passed, as is its wont, and it did so most admirably, involving not only weeks, days, and hours, but neglecting to neglect the minute minutes or seconds as well. Soon I had cause to repeat my travels in reverse direction. It was early when I caught the bus, me and roughly five other lost souls. Company was similarly sparse for the first few hours, allowing me to read most peacefully. Eventually, however, the bus did start to fill, and I found myself in the unenviable position of appearing to be entirely fine with someone sitting next to me while at the same time dissuading any potential sittees. I could only hold them off for so long. We pulled up to a stop downtown somewhere, and taking stock of the new arrivals I noted their predominant Hispanicity. I sighed with resignation, presuming that now, finally, I would be forced to sit with some heavily tattooed and heartily homophobic immigrant who would make me feel like a completely useless human being if he even knew I was capable of reading. I put my book away and braced myself. A few men and women passed me, finding new and delightful methods of squeezing into already-full seats somewhere behind me, and I thought that maybe I had dodged the bullet when a pair of feet came to a halt beside me. I looked up to see… a white kid, early 20’s, a bit of a red nose, pretty strong resemblance to a younger and more reckless Vince Vaughn. He spoke to me in White Guy Facial Body Language, saying “I can sit here, right?” and I replied with some subtle movements to the effect of “Oh, uh yeah, sure, no problem whatsoever, kind sir.” As he swung his skinny white ass down and into the not-quite cushy seat, he said (in English, this time) “Lesser of the evils, eh?” I chuckled before realizing that I didn’t know what sort of sense it was supposed to make. Who or what was the lesser of the evils? Was it as in “Better the unintimidating white guy with a resemblance to Vince Vaughn than the stereotypical gang member sitting next to you?” Or was I the lesser of the evils, with a scrawny nerd-looking kid being preferable to a family of espanophones? Perhaps it was something completely else, but at any rate the lack of verbal context left me adrift for a while, pondering the ramifications of a misinterpretation if there were a quiz or something later on. Gradually I grew to accept my ignorance, and I continued to read. He was reading too, which left no dearth of excuses not to talk, but he managed to instigate some locution here and there. He was reading Jack Kerouac and I was reading a scholarly and researched version of the The Da Vinci Code formula (scientist in normally obscure position discovers meaning beyond his wildest dreams in ancient writing and is caught up in intrigue and violence, and also falls in love with a slightly unlikely female), so when he asked what I was reading, I just showed him the cover, and he nodded with that look that means either “Oh that one, I should have known” or “I couldn’t care less anymore, since I’ve never heard of it,” but of course it always indicates the latter. He asked if it was good. I responded in the castrato voice reserved for the beginnings of sentences which are being produced with the intent of sounding positive and cooperative but which the speaker has no vested interest in (common such beginnings include “Uhm… yeah,” and “Well… you know…”), and I did so in the vague affirmative. He wasted no time in then recommending his book, a recommendation which I took neither to heart nor to any other internal organ.
[The end by necessity. later events included fake-Vince Vaughn and me (though i wasn't really doing anything) getting into a conversation with a native american man, who first boasted that being native american and a medicine man, he could get all sorts of drugs past authorities (showing us the peyote in his case as proof) because whitey didn't wanna even get into that. He ended up inviting a visibily enthusiastic f-VV to a vision gathering of some sort in the desert.]
I sit here an American, a white male with privilege and glasses, concerned more with convenience than survival, a bastion of the decline of free thought in the Western world, and here, in what could perhaps be most definitively America, I am an alien. I am an endangered species, at once shunned and preyed upon, comfortably ignored and ostentatiously avoided.
The family in front of me, waiting near the end of the line, is a (presumably) single mother with two sons. They’re Hispanic; she’s late forties, they’re about fifteen and two. She’s preoccupied, perhaps thinking about the crippling expense that this voyage is incurring, perhaps mulling over job opportunities (or lack thereof) perhaps merely studying a particular chink in the wall marred by decades of indifference. The young son is given free reign, making his bumbling and irrationally excited way around the crowded building, running into people and objects and then looking at them with a fascination unmatched by any “intelligent” person. He has a bottle to gnaw on, and I, having been raised in the gentle home I was, presume that his is a mother who hasn’t the time to breastfeed her offspring, not immediately noticing, of course, that the child is far too old for that; indeed, the bottle itself must have been a security-invoking carryover from his past. The mother makes passing attempts to remove her youngest from the paths of whatever serial killers and dysphoric homeless women might be lurking, but isn’t willing to give up her place in line to save her child from just one of what will inevitably turn out to be many seemingly dangerous situations. Her other son stands behind her, stoic and uncomfortable. Stoic because he is used to the veritable delinquency quarantine that is middle school, though he has since graduated to high school, which thus far has not persuaded him to do anything differently, and in these festering cesspools of bullshit, stoicality is a highly revered virtue among the entestosteroned. He is uncomfortable, however, because he is realizing that the street kid he is trying to look like, by way of spending a great deal of (his mom’s) money more on huge, pristine clothes than on, say, encyclopedias, is not the glorified image he has had cultivated in his mind by those who would have personal worth measured one-dimensionally. Slight flickers of uneasiness escape his monolithic aspirations, but unbeknownst to him, I respect him more for it, for the recognizance, than I would for the clothes, swagger, and stolidity that it invalidates. Having seen his place in the world, as someone who, proud to be low-income (or maybe lower-middle class), has no concept of real poverty, he makes a good choice, and lets go. He holds his brother’s hand. He gently keeps the future stoic in check, adding a silent hand to his mother’s actionless voice.
A couple, one that looks perfect for each other and therefore doomed to failure, make themselves known. They appear to have been together for some time; certainly they’ve been alive for some time, probably both in their mid-40’s. They’re somewhere between Crazy Guy in the Bookstore Who Talks To Everyone and Hobo, fashion-wise. And unstable-personality-wise. They are at the very front of the line. They are talking, then discussing, then weighing options, and then point-counterpointing, and then arguing, and then they walk away, toward the ticket counter and out of my interest.
Family dynamics abound in this place; I am alone. I am coming from a split family, going toward a pseudo-family that I cannot understand, and yet here, either would be as good as the Cleavers.
Some children mingling with each other and various obstacles catch my attention. They’re small, maybe three, a boy and a girl, and I’ll call them twins. The twins are black, and so (thankfully for my left brain) is their mother. Their mother is young, and as such sees no reason why producing offspring should in any way hinder her apparently rollicking sex life. The child-bearing, already years ago (God how time flies), has left no permanent unsightly weight on this tall and shapely woman, and so she is out, with her thong (I assume), pre-frayed, pre-faded, pre-old jeans, her low-cut shirt, and her carefully applied makeup (no doubt with an obnoxious daughter tugging at her pants, not understanding that Mommy needs to be pretty and pick up a new Daddy), to get some. To be fair, I did not observe her chatting up anyone at the time, but given the selection, the real surprise would be if she behaved otherwise. When the children, insistent in their childlike curiosity, got too tiresome, she sent them, cornrows, baggy pants, infantile gangsta glare and all, to the seat next to mine, outfitted with a coin-operated black and white television in what appeared to be bulletproof armor. They went together and got in the same seat, and they did the same things almost without speaking, though it was clear that the girl (Deborah? Delilah?) had the upper hand over the more observant and confused boy. Their mother, having generously provided them with one plastic seat and an inoperative TV to keep them amused, safely forgot about them and went about her business, which I paid little attention to, being more interested in the antics of the children. They turned out to be stale at best, though I recant my previous dubbing of them as twins, it becoming more probable that the boy is younger.
I’m not entirely alone in my alienness. A girl sits down, a girl very much like me, to all outward appearances, and seems similarly uncomfortable. She’s a bit overweight, mostly plain, and ergo has adorned herself with the quintessential plain (and therefore, of course, intellectual) college girl look; not quite punk, not quite emo, not quite goth, but rather more “hey look at me but I don’t care if you do cause I don’t care what people think of me and what do you think of that, eh?” Her hair is slightly artificially colored, and her face as well. In another place, had she been born with one or two different chromosomes, born to her aunt as opposed to her mother, she might be highly attractive, but under the circumstances, I can only be attracted (as is my sometime wont) to the dearth of ostentatious attractiveness. Her feminist-tinted confidence is undermined by her eye-flicks and fidgeting, and I grin a little, pretending to myself that I entirely understand her position.
Two Hispanic guys in front of me are doing their absolute best to break the stereotypes laid down on them; They’re both pretty large, intimidating, short manly hair, shirts emblazoned with things that I no longer recall but which I can assure you were quite masculine, but they have such soft voices… Their faces are anything but intimidating because they’re so used to smiling, their jokes are appropriate and charming, and in an unassuming manner, one of them even engages in small-scale small talk with me.
At the end of the line is a homeless (-looking) man, fitting the bill exactly. He has a round face, with round facial hair, his clothes are layered and tattered, he looks like his #1 most-uttered word is “change,” and his belongings aren’t even in the measly 1960’s luggage that the other people scrounged, but in a good ol’ fashioned black trash bag. He says nothing and disturbs nobody.
As I’ve been sitting here, taking in what surroundings interest me, the subdued din has been punctuated by slapping and crying. The source of this aural intrusion turns out to be a family of some amount, broken down (as best I am able) here:
Two (2) small Hispanic girls, roughly sixish, acting apparently repeatably slappable. At least, one of them does, as the other is out of reach, either physically or legally, leading me to believe the latter and that therefore Small Girl #2 is merely a friend of #1, who, in a few years, will probably become:
One (1) slightly older Hispanic girl, maybe nine, who, having learned her lesson when she was six, remains aloof from the others and watches, until she becomes bitter enough to become:
One (1) yet older Hispanic girl, who, having been privy to this behavior for something around fifteen years, has seen the light and now wears at least three metric shitloads of cheap makeup at all time, along with her (doubtlessly) trademark scowl and:
One (1) similarly aged teen girl, rather whiter than the rest, appearing probably to be a friend of Scowl Girl. She seems to have practice being polite around borderline-abusive families, and pretends to watch the carpet and talk quietly with the Human Scowl, ignoring at all costs:
One (1.5) Hispanic woman, age belied by many thousands of dollars worth of skin products, who is unhappy with her income level, weight, marital status, and offspring at pretty much all times. She is the slapper in this scene, thwacking her (I should hope) daughter for crying, which rather predictably causes little but more crying.
This causes head-shaking on my part, believing that all people are fundamentally like me, and if they aren’t, well then by God they should look inside themselves and realize the folly of their ways. I cheer momentarily for a man (White Male Interloper) who appears to have approached the mother and asked her to calm down with the striking of children, and she responds to him with a calm and rational explanation ending with “These is my children and ain’t nobody else gonn’ raise ‘em but me!” This development provides some circumstantial evidence in favor of Small Girl #2’s being a spawn of this woman as well, but varying inflections, along with the vibe of the friendship between the girls and the interactions between #2 and the rest of the family, still lead me to believe otherwise.
Through a combination of paranoia (wondering why everyone else is in the line and I am not), intrigue (attempting [unsuccessfully] to peek at the ticket of a woman in the line to ascertain her destination), and looking lost (until I am asked by a security guard if I need help), I learn that this line is in fact the one I should wish to find myself in, should I wish to reach my destination as planned. The rest of the populace apparently gleaned this information, during breaks in their aforementioned antics, from the alien noise emanating at irregular intervals from the PA system. I have learned, through years of middle-class traveling, to decipher and understand the speech of airport terminals and airplane captains; this, however, is a new and frightening linguistic experience for me. Sheepishly, but convinced that nobody has noticed my awkward maneuvering, I take my place at the end of the line. The bus soon boards, and about three people ahead of me, a boy is stopped as he attempts to explain the validity of his ticket despite his having already used it. As he tries, futilely, the driver takes a quick count of the passengers remaining. Not a good sign indeed, considering my position at the end of the line, but I make it on with one seat to spare. As it turned out, however, my fears were unjustified; my own failure to think “outside the box” led me to assume that the bus would be considered full when all seats were taken, but I had forgotten the seating properties of the aisle down the middle, which became temporary home to some half-dozen transients. My own seating arrangement placed me next to an unintimidating Japanese boy. I was lucky to land such a catch, thought I, musing that maybe I would even get a little decent conversation in on this, the second leg of my trip. My meager hopes were dashed, though, at the same time as my judgment of him as unintimidating was confirmed; he slept, or at least was attempting to, for the entire eight hours he was next to me. The guy didn’t even get up to pee until he reached his stop. Multiple times, his head started slipping toward my shoulder, and I entertained the thought of proving my American hospitality and openness to physical contact with complete strangers, but when he jolted into consciousness and saw my proximity, he swiveled away and, in his endearing manner, again dashed my aspirations against the wall like so much ceramic diningware.
At any rate, he was not the focus of my attention for this stretch. It was, rather, demanded by Small Girls #1 and 2, who sat together in front of me with White Male Interloper. Excluding the possibility of the fastest recorded wooing of an enchildrened woman at a bus station, this cinched the fact that WMI was, if not an actual father, a father figure of some class. The Small Girls talked, one considerably more than the other, about nothing and everything, in that unique Small Girl way. The real conversation starter, however, was when we crossed some bridge or another, spanning some body of water or another, prompting the impromptu singing/chanting of “Deep, deep, deep, deep, waterrrrrr…,” over and over again for, more or less, ever. The SGs did this in unison, repeatedly, long after we passed water of any depth, until the third or fourth time the WMI told them to shut the hell up. At this point, you must understand, I was completely on the side of the SGs, involved in some youthful playfulness of some sort. After being shushed, however, the more talkative of the two (#1) started singing again, “Deep, deep, deep, deep, waterrrrr…,” and the other would join in again. Eventually the mother yelled from down the length of the bus “WHATTA THEY DOIN’ OVER THERE?” and, at a loss for words, the WMI replied “They, eh… er, dem, uhm, che, ke-singing some, deh, ‘deep water’ bullsh-crap!” His eloquence notwithstanding, I was inclined to agree with his exasperation more and more with every passing refrain. Before my very eyes, however, the mother grew as a person and said “Well, they ain’t hurtin’ nobody.” My heart swelled with joy that these rambunctious and obnoxious little shits might escape a physical punishment this time, and my faith in humanity was restored.
Ten minutes later, the mother made it quite clear that her daughter would be introduced repeatedly and at high velocity to a belt. My heart sunk a bit, but then the whole crew got off, and the bus was ever so slightly quieter.
The majority of the luggage belonging to the Asian guy next to me, along with portions of the guy himself, was removed from the aisle, which was the only way to get to the luxurious lavatory aboard our bus. I realized that I sorta had to pee, but as that would require getting out of the seat and undoubtedly waking my companion with the sight of my ass, thereby confirming his already strong belief in my homosexuality, I refrained. As the bus traveled farther north, fewer and fewer passengers were forced to undergo the travesty of sitting with another person, but as my person was unconscious or at least pretending to be, there was no escape for me. “That’s alright,” I thought. “I am an open-minded and comfortable individual, and there is nothing wrong with sharing a seat with a complete stranger when what few passengers remain each get their very own seat, and, in some cases, row.” I may have been lying to myself, but my fear of confrontation won out, and I waited until two stops before mine, when Young Asian magically woke up, gathered his luggage (a large blue rolly suitcase and what appeared to be a Chinese phonebook), and left wordlessly. All of a sudden I was filled with wonderment. Does he even speak English? Why would he need a phonebook in another language, referring, no doubt, to another locale? Why, even if there were a reason, wouldn’t he keep said phonebook in the ample suitcase? Was he REALLy asleep for eight hours in the middle of the day? Was it jet lag? Was he recently arrived? Was he a spy from Communist China? Had great amounts of steganography been employed in the form of a phonebook in order to convey a four-sentence message to agents in northern California? Would I be forever known as the guy who had a chance to prevent the takeover of Humboldt County, who had figured out the whole scheme, but failed to act? Jesus Christ, why a phonebook?
Time passed, as is its wont, and it did so most admirably, involving not only weeks, days, and hours, but neglecting to neglect the minute minutes or seconds as well. Soon I had cause to repeat my travels in reverse direction. It was early when I caught the bus, me and roughly five other lost souls. Company was similarly sparse for the first few hours, allowing me to read most peacefully. Eventually, however, the bus did start to fill, and I found myself in the unenviable position of appearing to be entirely fine with someone sitting next to me while at the same time dissuading any potential sittees. I could only hold them off for so long. We pulled up to a stop downtown somewhere, and taking stock of the new arrivals I noted their predominant Hispanicity. I sighed with resignation, presuming that now, finally, I would be forced to sit with some heavily tattooed and heartily homophobic immigrant who would make me feel like a completely useless human being if he even knew I was capable of reading. I put my book away and braced myself. A few men and women passed me, finding new and delightful methods of squeezing into already-full seats somewhere behind me, and I thought that maybe I had dodged the bullet when a pair of feet came to a halt beside me. I looked up to see… a white kid, early 20’s, a bit of a red nose, pretty strong resemblance to a younger and more reckless Vince Vaughn. He spoke to me in White Guy Facial Body Language, saying “I can sit here, right?” and I replied with some subtle movements to the effect of “Oh, uh yeah, sure, no problem whatsoever, kind sir.” As he swung his skinny white ass down and into the not-quite cushy seat, he said (in English, this time) “Lesser of the evils, eh?” I chuckled before realizing that I didn’t know what sort of sense it was supposed to make. Who or what was the lesser of the evils? Was it as in “Better the unintimidating white guy with a resemblance to Vince Vaughn than the stereotypical gang member sitting next to you?” Or was I the lesser of the evils, with a scrawny nerd-looking kid being preferable to a family of espanophones? Perhaps it was something completely else, but at any rate the lack of verbal context left me adrift for a while, pondering the ramifications of a misinterpretation if there were a quiz or something later on. Gradually I grew to accept my ignorance, and I continued to read. He was reading too, which left no dearth of excuses not to talk, but he managed to instigate some locution here and there. He was reading Jack Kerouac and I was reading a scholarly and researched version of the The Da Vinci Code formula (scientist in normally obscure position discovers meaning beyond his wildest dreams in ancient writing and is caught up in intrigue and violence, and also falls in love with a slightly unlikely female), so when he asked what I was reading, I just showed him the cover, and he nodded with that look that means either “Oh that one, I should have known” or “I couldn’t care less anymore, since I’ve never heard of it,” but of course it always indicates the latter. He asked if it was good. I responded in the castrato voice reserved for the beginnings of sentences which are being produced with the intent of sounding positive and cooperative but which the speaker has no vested interest in (common such beginnings include “Uhm… yeah,” and “Well… you know…”), and I did so in the vague affirmative. He wasted no time in then recommending his book, a recommendation which I took neither to heart nor to any other internal organ.
[The end by necessity. later events included fake-Vince Vaughn and me (though i wasn't really doing anything) getting into a conversation with a native american man, who first boasted that being native american and a medicine man, he could get all sorts of drugs past authorities (showing us the peyote in his case as proof) because whitey didn't wanna even get into that. He ended up inviting a visibily enthusiastic f-VV to a vision gathering of some sort in the desert.]