“They love my little mustache
They love a man in uniform."
-- Ben Folds, “Rent-A-Cop”
--
8:15AM
I was just kicked out of a public restroom in the mall. I was evicted while evacuating.
The bus stopped at my apartment’s corner. The machine ate my five and I had to get change from two Latinas who boarded after me and who stared suspiciously when the driver told them to give their cash to me. I sat in the nearest seat, tucking my briefcase under and hooking a finger into the handle of the suitcase. Halfway towards downtown I realized I should have hefted the suitcase onto the rack beside the door, but the vacant and judging eyes of the other passengers held me to my place.
I got off at 4th and Vine, a block east of where the MegaBus will pick me up and take me to Indianapolis. Awkward and conspicuous, I entered the Starbucks there, stuffed my stuff in a corner, and ordered coffee. I’m drinking it now. My phone buzzed to remind me of the time. I got up and returned to the sidewalk.
This suitcase was with me years ago when last I flew on a trip to Scotland. When the black case slid out of the flaps and down the ramp and onto the revolving oval of Baggage Claim, I saw that something black and spindly had been taped haphazardly to it. When it got to me, I saw: the towing handle, the kind that retracts into the back of the bag, had popped out of its holes and some handler had made good by going for the packing tape. (There. All better.) Fast forward to today. My luggage transport options are to bend in half as I walk like a hunchback with the de-armed suitcase in tow, or to lug it around. If I lug it, I rock as I walk. If I bend over, it can roll. To rock, or to roll?
Starbucks inexplicably didn’t have a bathroom, so I walked to the mall lobby that doubles as the pick-up zone for MegaBus. I knew the food court there, and its restroom. I was impatient on the down escalator. Sbarro, Chick-Fil-A, Cajun and Japanese portals. Tall white faux-marble columns. A dry, greening, metal fountain like the ruined bastion of modern art in the center of an army of shiny tables. No one was there, of course, except for an old man reading the funnies and not laughing. Restrooms in the corner—I beelined. At the entrance, leaning on a bar and watching his watch, was the mall cop, a thin-mustached young guy who took one look at me and my big black bag and straightened his posture. (Terrorist?) I smiled. “Good morning,” we said, cowboys in some vacant modern saloon.
I’ll spare the in-stall details. An old man—maybe the same guy who was reading the funnies—tried the door, peeked through the crack. “Excuse me.” Shortly after he found a throne of his own, the mall cop’s voice came reverberating around us: “Two minutes.”
I didn’t know what that meant. I chose to ignore it, returning to my reading.
Later, as I washed my hands, the mall cop’s image appeared in the mirror like Dracula behind me. “Two minutes,” he repeated.
“Cool,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
The mall cop disappeared and then reentered. “I don’t mean to be a dick,” he said. “But sometimes guys sleep in here.”
“No problem.”
I took everything back into the food court, where the old man had been replaced by an old lady reading a magazine at a different table. I sat at a table at the foot of the escalators, extracted my laptop, and started typing this entry. A few minutes later, the mall cop swaggered by and told me to have a nice day. Then the Mexican workers who run the Japanese portal arrived, eyeing me with confusion like I was a redecoration they didn’t like.
Just now, a bald, older mall cop descended the escalator like a god. He’s been adjusting a sign (PLEASE KEEP ESCALATOR LANDING CLEAR) for two minutes. He walked away.
The changing of the guard is complete.
--
“In a cold place
You know well."
-- The Good, the Bad & the Queen, “Northern Whale”
--
9:15AM
Aboard the MegaBus. Fifteen minutes to go.
The driver and a loader checked me in and took my suitcase. I took a seat but then saw a sign (THIS BUS HAS FREE WIFI AND 110V POWER OUTLETS) that moved me. Amidships there’s a pair of table with seats facing inward. I sat across from a speckle-skinned blond woman who sneered when I put my briefcase across from her. An obese hipster girl—also a blond—across the aisle offered to share her table. I thanked her but started to get situated anyway, only to realize that the outlet in the ceiling is so far from the table that the adapter box would be dangling precariously from the power cord at eye-level of the speckle-skinned blond. “On second thought,” I said, and switched to the port side, which for some reason is raised about two feet higher than starboard. My power outlet doesn’t seem to work, but the obese hipster blond—who also has about a dozen piercings just in her face, including the unfortunate Chicago Bulls-esque circular nose ring—offered to switch out whenever my battery drained. I bet she’s really nice, but I doubt we’ll actually talk on this two-hour journey.
The speckle-skinned blond turns out to be a snob. Her cell phone rang—loudly—and she hissed at it, “Jesus Christ.” She answered and demanded that the other person buy “the good gazpacho.” The other person apparently asked what gazpacho was and she huffed and explained. When she hung up she took out her Food & Wine magazine. She’s reading it now. She flips her pages as if she wants people to hear the progress she’s making.
From where I sit, with the obese hipster blond on my left and the snobby speckle-skinned blond on my right, I perceive them as two circles in a Venn diagram: what is different between these two? What is alike? I imagine they buy food in the same places—Whole Foods, the Findlay Farmer’s Market, organic and “green” restaurants that serve everything with feta and/or balsamic vinaigrette—and vote for the same politicians. But the snob does these things for the sake of snobbery, for the privilege of informing others what the difference is between good and bad gazpacho. This mindset has come to define her, and she never intended for that to happen, but well, here she is. Her devotion to obscure organic food, fine wines, and trendy outfits has become her job, a vocation she loathes but maintains for its benefits.
For the hipster blond, she is still redefining her mindset. She sees the poor argument for liberals across the aisle and thinks, “You’re no different from them anymore, you know.”
Most of the other passengers are opting for the upper deck, but I’m content to remain raised two feet on the bottom level. I ride upper deck if I’m a tourist, because that’s the best spot for photos. But on this trip, I’d like to sink, to stay in the womb, to sleep.
--
“I went lookin’ for my darling
I went lookin’ for a sign
And I found her in the morning
Somewhere in the back of mind."
-- Belle & Sebastian, “Wrong Love”
--
9:40AM
A problem emerges with the whole typing-on-a-bus thing: the table wiggles and the laptop vibrates, turning the simple act of typing into a game of whack-a-mole. I keep hitting backspace. The screen fills with doubled words and I feel like I’m watching a Danny Boyle film.
I’ve ridden MegaBus before, for a one-day trip to Chicago when my sister finished Navy boot camp. My memory of that ride is cloudy because it began on a rainy day after a stressful week of touring and an especially stressful day wherein a co-worker was fired. I was the road manager of that tour, and as such I had known about the imminent termination for almost the entire week. So when it finally happened, when the bosses showed up in the rain to help us load out and sequester the target and give him the news, when he added teardrops to raindrops and wordlessly grabbed his things from the van where the rest of us sat in silence and watched as he refused a ride home and marched, proud in his shame, towards the nearest bus stop…after all this transpired there was a tremendous release. The van was silent for a time. Another actor said to be honest with her: “Did y’all know this was gonna happen?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Okay.”
They drove me to the mall and dropped me off. I waved and sat near an old couple and their red luggage. I sat for a long time, thinking about the firing. The bus came and I boarded without thinking about it. I watched trees and grass fields and creeks and dwelled on the firing, on the knowledge.
--
“Well I’ve been thinking about
And I’ve been breaking it down
Without an answer.”
-- Monsters of Folk, “Dear God (Sincerely M. O. F.)
--
10:02AM
Right now, on the highway and looking out the window across the aisle, the ghost reflection of our side of the bus appears superimposed on the scenery. It makes me doubly aware of our velocity, our bullet trajectory westward, because the trees in the window and the trees in the glass blur past at different speeds. It is like being on a train.
The coffee has cooled in the cup, but its work is still good. The wi-fi cuts in and out, and right now it’s out. I had hoped to upload these entries to my travel blog, but I guess I’ll have to wait.
--
“Don’t tell the people that they gotta go.”
--Michael Franti & Spearhead, “Hey Now Now”
--
10:44AM
Stopped at a fueling station. I’d call it a gas station, except that it sounds more adventurous to say fueling station, and because it is more of a place for huge tankers to refuel than it is for small cars to fill a tank. A Risinger semi truck has pulled up beside the bus and Humpty-Dumpty climbed out of the cabin. The snobby blond has her bare feet up on the seats across from her.
She naps.
When we pulled up the driver announced the stop as “our lunch break,” telling us that if we wanted food, we should get it to go. “We aren’t stopping for a long time. Twenty minutes.”
Because I’m not a fan of peeing in moving vehicles, I’ve been holding it for a while. I joined the exodus for the promised land of the fueling station restroom. The urinal pad had 6/18 markered on it. I’m refraining from buying station food (McDonald’s and Subway are the only non-packaged options) because I’m really going to try to save money on this trip. So far today I’ve only bought bus fare and a small coffee. We only have another half hour or so until Indy, anyway. My hunger can fester.
Once in Indy, I need to grab lunch and get on the airport shuttle, which hopefully isn’t any more than a few blocks from the drop-off. There are three hours between disembarking the bus and boarding the plane. If I read the Indy bus schedule correctly, I will have only about half an hour’s playtime in the city before I have to get onto another vehicle. For now, it’s nice to be still.
An old black woman came down from the upper deck and took a seat. “Excuse me,” said another elderly woman, “there were two young men sitting there before.”
“Anyone sitting there?” the old black lady asked.
“No.”
“I don’t care about them. They can find another seat.”
“Oh,” the other woman said, as if she’d just been flicked on the nose.
“They’re my grandkids,” the old black lady explained, and laughed.
The other woman went to the back door, where the two young men were about to board. “Sir,” she told them, “I tried to save your seat. But she—”
One of the young men looked into the bus. “That’s my Grandma,” he said. “It’s cool.”
Now the two elderly ladies are conversing—I’d say talking, but there’s a wonderful lyrical formality to the way old people speak, especially old women, that is more like an exchange of pleasantries and blithe information than trivial chitchat—about their respective trips. Both are staying on the bus until it reaches Chicago. The old black lady hasn’t said what she’ll do there, but the other woman will be staying in Chicago until July, when her sister will drive her out to Iowa for a few weeks. “I just turned 70 a week ago,” she says, “but I stopped working a long time before that.” She was a secretary and then a teacher. The old black lady still works in hospitals.
More of the older folks from the lower deck are returning. They make hooting sounds as they step inside, and I can hear them panting as they shuffle to their seats. One of the old ladies welcomes them—“You made it back!”—as if the trip from bus to bathroom to counter to bus again was an epic journey. I smell McDonald’s.
My focus drifts elsewhere. Humpty Dumpty has returned to his chariot. He has what looks like a Turkish bazaar tattooed on his left arm and what is definitely a naked mermaid on his right.
Inside the shop, a mechanical female voice announces that the bus to Indianapolis and Chicago is leaving. The bus driver returns and announces, “Load it up!”
Just as I’m starting to wonder how many people get left behind at this stop each year, something in the bus whirs up like a quiet siren (the sound is not unlike the wwwwooooo of the Enterprise just before she warps), and we are back on the road.
Next stop: Indianapolis, Indiana.
