Out of Port Authority I haven’t been on a bus with toilets since I was fourteen, since that memorable summer my parents took me to the Catskills Mountains on the only family vacation we could afford. It was long before iPods were invented to kill time or portable DVD players to help ward off motion sickness. There weren’t even cassette tapes. My only diversion was staring through the bus windshield counting the utility poles rushing past and regularly asking my exasperated parents, “Are we there yet?”
That was the summer I learned how to french kiss. My teacher was Flossie Higgins, the sixteen years old daughter of the owners of Maple Lawn Guest House, who served tables in the dining room three meals a day and serviced some of the lucky sons of the guests in the Rec Room between meals after their parents were asleep and snoring on the creaky guest house beds. Ah, Flossie, whose real name was Florence, how her name comes up still in my dreams, mixing memories with desire!
Growing up as I did in Brooklyn, I rode the subways everywhere. Sometimes I took the city buses without toilets, though some of the riders left urine samples behind, the more considerate ones in soda bottles; those less concerned just used the seats. During the years I taught junior high school, I traveled in yellow school buses smelling of rancid tuna fish and fetid Parmesan cheese that the pine cleaner never got completely out of the rubber mats, on countless, endless field trips with hordes of loud teenagers screaming, “Are we there yet?”
“You’re a brave man,” a friend said when I told her I was taking a Greyhound out of the New York Port Authority up to Keene, New Hampshire, to pick up the car I had bought, sight unseen on the Internet. “But you’d better carry some mace or pepper spray at least, and an aerosol can of Lysol,” she added, “just in case.”
I didn’t understand her warning until I arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8th Avenue in New York City. The bus terminal is the stuff of legends and movies, but not the romantic kinds like The Orient Express, or the ones where long-lost lovers meet after a lifetime of separation. Stories like that take place on trains or under the clock in Grand Central Terminal, and the hero is always someone lovable like Tom Hanks or a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson, and the leading lady is Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or a willowy Uma Thurman. In movies like that the hero somehow discovers that Meryl or Glenn or Uma conceived a son before he shipped out overseas and she was forced to endure society’s condemnation for bearing the child out of wedlock and faced economic misery raising the boy, an adorable moppet violin prodigy or savant, on her own because she never married or even loved another man. And Tom or Mel lost his memory or an arm and a leg in a decisive battle in the war, but when they are reunited that doesn’t matter to her, because she is a nurse who can care for him, and she loves him, she’s always loved him for the man he was and not for the one he has become. No, movies of the Port Authority ilk feature young Jodie Fosterish waifs from Kansas or Nebraska who have run away to New York City looking for a life of glamour and end up exchanging sexual favors for lunch money in bathroom stalls with foreign sailors on shore leave during Fleet Week, or traveling sales men waiting to take the bus to Scranton.
“Where do I get my bus?” I asked the bored clerk behind bulletproof glass when I picked up my ticket. He barely opened his eyes and nodded toward the escalator that was carrying people into the darkness below ground level.
The first thing I noticed as I got closer to the waiting room was that it had too few seats for the teeming people desperate to escape from New York, the schizophrenics who had escaped to New York, and the homeless who had been dumped on the streets in front of the terminal in the hopes that they would find the ways and means to get out of New York and become New Jersey’s problem. The second thing was that, unshaved and dressed in my ill-fitting elastic waist drawstring pants with the zipper perpetually at half-staff, my worn sneakers and an army field jacket rescued from a thrift store hanger, I looked pretty much like all the others who were waiting.
“Are we there yet?” one grizzled man shouted from the corner. “I told you once,” he answered his own question. “No you didn’t!” the argument went on. And when he saw me watching him from afar he demanded, “What you looking at, chump?”
“Please, sir,” a frantic guy with crazy eyes blocked my way and pleaded, “I just need a couple of bucks more so I can pay for my bus that’s about to leave.”
I fished into my pocket and handed him a damp dollar. I did it again on each of the three times he passed through targeting the newcomers, before I finally thought it might be a scam!
Spotting an empty seat and ignoring a suspicious looking stain on the cushion, I slipped into the chair beside a large biker with Billy-goat beard and prison tats crawling up both his arms and circling his neck. His pirate earrings slapped him in the face whenever he turned to eye me or check out the three college girls who were bent under their backpacks and probably returning from spring break in Cabo San Lucas.
Someone with Turret’s in blind-man Ray Charles sunglasses on the other side of me shook the entire row of seats every time he flinched and cursed. He obsessively rolled, unrolled and re-rolled the cuffs of his pants to optimize the view of his black engineer boots, the fashion likes of which I hadn’t seen since I owned a pair in 1959. Then he flinched and cursed and started the entire routine again.
A disembodied voice announced my bus and I vacated my seat, sticking slightly, just as the pleading man tumbled in for more bus fare, accompanied by the shirtless guy in dread locks I had seen on an earlier visit to the Men’s Room showering in the sink. I broke for the gate and joined the lineup already camped in front of the glass door anxious to board – a band of little Peruvians in short-brimmed fedoras transporting live poultry, a Joe Buck looking midnight cowboy in hand-tooled cowboy boots and a black Stetson, engaging in a heated exchange with a Ratso Rizzo look-alike.
When the doors of the loading bay swung open the bus was just as I remembered from my youth, only smaller and not as luxurious. We rushed to get good seats. The Peruvians stowed their chickens in the overhead bins and then commenced a pan flute concert up front, breaking in unison into El Condor Pasa, while Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo took places midway. A pimp and two really desperate looking “ladies of the street” staked out the last three rows next to the toilet and were setting up shop on the bench seat in the back. One of the girls winked me an invitation and patted the empty place next to her. The pimp glared. I nodded at him, politely declined and dropped into an open seat by the escape window, directly across from a mother nursing her infant and toddler twins who watched me curiously.
The bus motor roared, spewing noxious fumes into the cabin before the driver closed the door, and eventually we all settled into the tedium of travel – the sounds of snoring and crying children, the too loud cell phone conversations and the bobbing heads, mostly in the back of the bus.
Around Bridgeport the toilet backed up, sending blue water and toilet paper up the aisle, making the facilities unusable and travel to the back of the bus a hazard. But I had no intention of going there, or going at all, even after one of the twins got bus sick and launched projectile vomit tinged with the hint of tuna and the aroma of Parmesan cheese that grazed my carry on. The smell brought back a flood of memories, making me almost nostalgic for those long-gone glory days of junior high school trips to the planetarium and the reptile museum.
With each stop more of my fellow travelers disembarked. Somewhere in Vermont I must have napped for a while and when I opened my eyes with a start I was looking into the bus driver’s face. His hands were going through my pockets.
“Are we there yet?” I asked and he jumped back.
“I-I thought you were dead,” he stammered. “Honest. I was just looking for some ID.”
The empty Greyhound was parked in the lot behind Home Depot idling in the Keene darkness. Apparently I had arrived with nothing very monumental occurring on the trip. Ratso Rizzo didn’t die in the cowboy’s arms to the swelling strains of “Everybody’s Talking At Me.” The pimp and hoes were gone. And except for a dark stain on the seat across the aisle, the nursing mother and her kids had disappeared without a trace. Even the Peruvians had flown the coop with only a few chicken feathers to indicate they had been there at all.
My dinner at the diner was ordinary. Later I settled into the Keene Cut-Rate Motor Inn, but I didn’t get much sleep. Noises from the adjoining room where the “ladies of the back row” had apparently set up shop, kept me up. In the morning I waved to them as they boarded another Greyhound. And after breakfast I went to pick up my new car for my solo drive back to New York.
© 2007 Joseph E. Scalia from Scalia vs. The Universe
