Long Rides And The Things We Ran From

By Ben Leib

 In my experience, folks on cross country bus rides are, as often as not, running from something.  My qualifications for such an opinion – while I have spent many, many hours aboard Greyhounds, aboard municipal locals, aboard intercity locals, I have only been subjected to two interstate expeditions.

The first was an adventure but I was running nevertheless. My dad and stepmom were on vacation that week, which made my departure less complicated.  One night I wrote a note to them, left it on their bed, hugged and kissed my little brother goodbye, and ran down the driveway to meet Colin, with whom I’d be driving to San Diego by way of Santa Cruz.  From San Diego, it was a long Greyhound ride east.

There is an ethos to bus travel in the US that I’d discovered long before my journey to Texas.  For example, though physical contact is unavoidable in such close quarters, bus etiquette stipulates that you touch the person sitting next to you as little as possible.  Do not allow your ass or legs to cross the line constituting the border from one seat to the next.  The shared arm rest is first come, first serve.

When travelling, I sit at the back of busses with the misfits, the homeless, the broken and the insane.  Leave the front seats for those who believe themselves to be upstanding, normal, pleasant-minded travelers, I’m a backseat dweller.  I bullshitted with those misfits, listened to their stories with a genuine hunger for life’s true strangeness, and was granted the opportunity to tell my own story in return.

Marijuana, booze, and narcoleptics of all forms are a commodity on long bus rides, for sleep and comfort are difficult to come by.  I have discovered that I can reliably expect three hours straight sleep on a crowded bus if I consume four Tylenol PM (a fifth pill and the likelihood that I piss my pants in a comatose-like slumber increases tenfold).  The best place to sit in a Greyhound bus is on the very back bench, by the bathroom, for, though the seats do not recline, there are three of them in a row rather than the standard two, and, if nobody sits next to you, that’s the closest you’ll come to a bed.

During much of the trip from San Diego to Texas, I sat next to two hoodlums from Georgia, with whom I shared my weed and my bourbon.  Once intoxicated, they began to talk.  They were running from something nebulous.  They’d gotten into dangerous trouble, whether with the law or with other hoodlumsm I couldn’t tell, and they’d been compelled to leave California as quickly as possible.  Late that night, as I closed my eyes, hoping desperately for a slumber that would not come, I heard those kids plotting to rob me.

“We just take his shit,” one said.  “Who’s he gonna tell?”

Let ‘em try, I thought to myself, though I dared not open my eyes to reveal that I’d heard all along.

Where is the grace on an interstate bus?  What calloused hand ushers that awkward vehicle and its awkward passengers through crossings?  At the Arizona border, in the dark of early morning, police with chained dogs circumnavigated the bus to ensure that no dope was being smuggled into their state.  And then, sometime later, I crossed the other border of Arizona, having bisected that beautifully desert state.  West Texas was a purgatory of rolling hills and roadside fast food.

That’s how we travelers were sustained: the driver would stop once every four hours or so, if not at a depot then at a corporate burger joint that seemed inexplicably to sprout from a bland and unpopulated horizon, only to recede once again into the tumble weeds, into the dust and the exhaust as the bus’ ticketholders all regrouped, re-boarded, and departed.  And what a strange and motley crew we were, after too many hours, too little personal hygiene, and nothing that could be described as restful sleep.  We were not a cross section of humanity but were humanity’s dregs: forgotten, anonymous, alone, unwanted, and unappreciated, we ran.

—

I had, days before my departure, opted to drop out of rehab after eight months’ inpatient treatment, after eight months sober.  I drank a twelve pack my first day out of the facility and I knew that I wouldn’t be going back on the wagon any time soon.  I had, that very day, moved into my own apartment.  I’d purchased furniture, groceries, household items.  I moved everything into my new place and that night I was drunk.

One twelve-pack was all it took to confirm my ever-lurking suspicions that I was not done kicking at a world which I thought deserved all the punishment I could muster.  I called my new landlords and told them that I had to break my lease.  I returned everything that I was able to get cash refunds for, storaged the rest, and quit my job by phone without notice.  I went back to my inpatient facility, allowed counselors and patients alike to yell at me for an hour or so, listened to them while they explained that the bottle, for me, held certain inescapable repercussions which, in their opinion, I was not strong enough to survive.

I heard them out, tried to defend myself a bit, and then walked back out the front door. 

—

On extended interstate bus ride number two (and by now, I’d travelled the south by bus), I was a somewhat different man than on extended interstate bus ride number one.  I wouldn’t say that this unforgiving country had broken me, because I’d found kindnesses wherever I went.  I had discovered a desire for merriment that transcended regionalism, cultural barriers, age, and personal interests.  But that said, I was tired when I boarded that bus for California.  The trip, from the moment I departed from New Orleans to the moment I stepped onto Petaluma’s familiar old streets, was seventy hours.  I was scared, for my destination was hazy at best, and the machinations of providence’s unknowable whimsy had thus far presented me with obstacles that I was unfit to surmount. 

But it was unimportant, at least over the next three days, just how I would manage to right this temporary derailment, because, for the moment, I was with my people, the transient and invisible denizens of the back of the bus. 

There was the marine, a kid, younger than me, who had illegally abandoned the military and was now running by bus, not toward a foreseeable future, but away from his would-be jailers, away from the inevitability of a fate that he could only evade for so long while AWOL. 

There was a fourteen year old, a loud mouthed, pot smoking little gangster, who, I came to find, was well used to these extended bus rides, his family having shuffled him from one relative to another, as they, one by one, succumbed to the frustration of raising an unruly child who was not their own.  He was on his way to Los Angeles, where his great aunt awaited his arrival. 

There was a mother with a talkative daughter.  At one point during the long bus ride, the little girl ended up seated next to me.  She started to tell me that Daddy went away, and she didn’t know if she would see Daddy again, but right now they were going to see Grandma and Grandpa in New Mexico.  I smiled at the little girl, but searched internally for some way to discourage her talkativeness, for others could hear as she revealed these intimate family tragedies, and, as the catalyst or conduit for her innocent revelations, I felt something approaching criminal guilt.  The little girl’s mother, a buxom redhead, emotionally tender in ways that, from what I could grasp, were justifiable considering their circumstances, sat in the seat in front of us, where she could overhear her daughter talking about Daddy, and she began to sob softly but audibly.

And where, I thought, but the close quarters of an over-night bus ride could strangers come into such intimate contact as to unwittingly find themselves the arbiters of each other’s struggles?

I wasn’t unhappy during that return trip.  I was as talkative as ever, and I let everyone know that a brief stint in county jail was a cake walk, that the only struggle I faced during a week locked into a converted gym with sixty two other inmates was boredom.  I told people on the bus that I’d used heroin for the first time and that it’d been a wonderful delight.  I recounted sitting on the porch of an abandoned home in a side street of New Orleans, where one block meant the difference between parades and crack addicts.  I’d been brought there by an alcoholic who I’d bonded with over whiskey, and I described how I agreed without hesitation when he pulled out that bag of powder.  I didn’t regret my trip, nor did I regret the unpleasantries that had befallen me, nor was I unhopeful about the future (though it did constitute a limitless unknown).

I met Clara on day two.  She, like the other back-of-the-bussers, was on the run.  She was running from an abusive relationship, and, in her flight, had to also leave behind two step children whom she loved.  Clara was a mother through and through.  She reprimanded the fourteen year old thug for being too cavalier with his pot smoking, warned him that he would get kicked off of the bus if he pissed off the driver enough, and the kid, to my surprise, capitulated to her chastisements.  She was kind and treated the weird folks, living, at that moment, a life in transit, with the humanity that they each possessed and that they desperately wanted recognized during their otherwise anonymous existences.  And Clara cried when she talked about the children who she’d helped to raise, for her one regret was that she could not take them with her, nor could she ever contact them again, because she believed, with an honesty and a clarity that sent chills down my spine, that her life was in danger. 

The two of us colonized the back row of seats on the bus, where we took turns laying on each other’s lap, seeking as much comfort as we could, for these long bus rides were characterized by a dearth in comfort.  Our mutual luggages crammed about us, I rubbed Clara’s bare arm with the tips of my fingers in an effort to impart an odd intimacy that seemed almost inappropriate.  She ran her nails through my hair when I tried to sleep, kneading my scalp and looking down at me with eyes that bespoke a need of her own.

Clara was thirty one years old, though her hair was cut at about chin length and mussed by days of travel in such a way that she looked to be in her early to mid twenties.  She also had a bit of acne and no makeup which made her look disheveled, though I accounted the plainness of her appearance to the limitations of bus travel.  She talked about taking her “sink showers” in depot bathrooms, where we all did our best to retain a personal hygiene, unsustainable within that muggy, sweaty closeness.  Clara was pretty, in a country girl kind of way, and had both an innocence and a hardness written into the lines of her eyes.  She was slender, but seemed to lack the muscle to fill her skin fully, so that her arms and her breasts (at those moments when she abandoned the restrictions of a bra) were fleshier than might be considered attractive.

I found her to be the most beautiful woman I’d spoken to in ages.  And I was relieved that when I lowered my face to hers she lifted her head to meet my own and willingly, eagerly even, kissed me.  And I don’t think that it would be an exaggeration to say that no kiss, before or since the first time that my and Clara’s lips met, has brought me the same degree of cathartic relief, as if in that one moment we confirmed, I for her and she for me, that all problems were but extended interludes between such moments as this.

In the Los Angeles depot, a hell on earth bus stop where junkies populated the sidewalks and penny hustlers sold shitty joints for three dollars apiece to anyone who happened to have a spare three dollars, Clara and I parted ways.  Her layover was longer than my own, and she kept me company as I lined up for the express to San Francisco (her route north would take her farther inland).  She held my hand as we stood there assuring one another that life would hand us unexpected but long due opportunities, and that, despite evidence otherwise, things would be okay.  As the driver called my line to board, Clara held my cheeks in her warm hands, pulled my face close, and gave me one last departing kiss.  She then slipped a five dollar bill into my hand, for I had not eaten in nearly forty eight hours.