I recently rode from Chicago to West Virginia on a Greyhound bus. I realize that this decision was not a good one. I was curious, but more importantly, broke. It took 23 hours. Just under one calendar day. I loved it. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was like visiting relatives that your parents always told you, you didn’t have. Humanity has never seemed so vulnerable as on a Greyhound bus. No laptops, no vaccinations, just real people, “ridin’ dirtay”.

The people on the Greyhound are special. They weren’t from the other side of the tracks. They were from the other side of an electric fence. You don’t have to escape from railroad tracks… and they had all escaped from somewhere. A dead end job, and alcoholic boyfriend, prison. Mostly prison.

Your Greyhound experience will be fine, as long as you are careful as to WHEN you board the bus. You don’t want to get on early, because then you must wait until somebody chooses to sit next to you, and that sucks for 2 reasons;

1 - If you are chosen last, by team Greyhound, God is trying to tell you something. But in order to do so, he has to send an angry black mother of 9 who hasn’t not told the truth since she said she was ‘on the pill’ in 1987, and only got stuck next to you because her sons car wouldn’t start and she got there last. Listen. Hear that?… the lord is disappointed… and he wants you, to, “move yo fat ass ova… and stop breathin’ through yo dam nose yo buggas be whistling an shit daaaamn, fuck this I’m sittin with the driva”. Clean it up.

2 - You aren’t in charge of who you sit next to. And you must use some discrepancy, otherwise you will wind up sitting next to the worlds loudest cell phone ring and its chain smoking, blood coughing, open sore specialist.

If you get on after half the people have boarded, you at least have some choice. But it’s definitely packed. You wont be sitting alone. They have to pack those buses. It’s the law. Federal Statute 98112-011389 states: “Greyhound cabins must smell worse than their bathrooms…”, and the only way to do that is to pack them to the gills with people who were raised in barrels of rotten cole-slaw and cancer juice. On the way from Columbus OH to Huntington W. VA, I sat next to a pile of burning tires. Which wasn’t the worst draw on the bus.

But my favorite part of the Greyhound experience, is the terminal. Otherwise known as “station”. They feel to me like, I imagine, “Bartertown”, from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), would feel to me. Only, Tina turner is 390 lbs. and has a blond weave. And instead of a giant with a midget on his back, “Master-Blaster”, is a midget with a giant boil on his face, selling gold chains out of a newspaper and staring at my bags. And there’s more radiation.

Going Greyhound was a charming experience. And at times it was fun. Or at least exciting. Stopping in Indiana was scary. When you’re riding through Indiana, It’s better to be on the inside than outside. If Greyhound had an amusement park, it would look a lot like Indiana. Rusted out combines everywhere, gun racks on every tree, little boys and their grandma’s, shooting at cars from their porches. 3 wheelers and bottles of tequila rose with every ticket to enter. I took 17 ibuprofen and tried to play dead.

But I understand. Greyhound is for everyone. Even Indians. Thank you, Greyhound, for preparing me for my fellow man. I will never forget the Greyhound. It will always live on inside me. Really though, I feel something clawing at the back of my sternum… ow.

17/07/2006
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