When I was 18 I took a Greyhound bus from Alabama to California. The trip took four days and nights of driving across the country till I arrived at five AM in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. It was one of the longest trips I’d taken in my life. And also one of the most surreal. A glimpse into an America I hadn’t had much exposure to having grown up in between two gargantuan coastal cities (LA/NYC).
Traveling the Greyhound is not a luxury trip. It’s not a fast flight and it does not get you comfortably to your destination. Every few hours you stop at a bus depot, unload, wait around, and board another bus. Most likely not the same one you’ve been previously on for the last half of the day. So you’re not even granted the luxury of a familiar rip or stain in the seat you’ve staked out for the journey, giving you some strange comfort. The unspoken understanding of you and the other passengers that each one of you has laid claim to their seat and you all have agreed this is the situation. Instead, you find what seat you can, hope it’s a window (and not close to the back where the restroom is) and figure out a way to make yourself comfortable.
But unlike an airline where you can withstand the discomfort because you know it’s ending soon, the Greyhound just continues on. One of the subtle things that makes it that little bit of extra uncomfortable is that unlike an airline, where you have overhead air vents that can be closed, the Greyhound’s AC system is just a long vent that runs the entire stretch of the bus beneath the windows. So while you rest your head against a bundled up sweatshirt against the glass, you are getting a fragrant blast of stale, ice-cold air into your chin.
The reason I was on this Greyhound from Alabama is a story itself. I was a recent high school graduate (barely) and didn’t have a clue what I was doing with my life. My father had gotten a job on a film that was shooting in the South. It was an independent production, a story about the birth of electric blues from its rural, more acoustic, roots. Set in the juke joints of the South it was going to be shot in Alabama. With nothing else going on in my life he asked if I wanted to be a production assistant and I said sure.
We road tripped driving along Interstate 10 and passed along the furthest southern interstate you can take, cutting across the border of Mexico, through the heart of Texas, and on into the Gulf states. We made it into Alabama after seven days and nights. The town we were staying in, Greenville, was roughly an hour south of Montgomery which made it officially the Deep South. I’d never been to this part of the country before and the accents were so thick I genuinely had a hard time understanding what was being said to me.
Greenville was one of the many small towns across America where a thriving Main Street was now just plywood shutters and empty stores with indecipherable ghost signs hanging above. A Walmart had opened some years back and basically crushed the local businesses, leaving Greenville feeling like a ghost town.
I made it five days before I needed to get out. I was young and completely lost. I felt the need to get back to my friends in Los Angeles and get away from this lonely place. In hindsight I regret making the decision to escape when I did. As it turns out the movie, John Sayle’s Honeydripper, was an indie gem, telling a micro story of a macro movement, the blues to rock and roll pipeline. But like I said, I was lonely and homesick, spiraling about being suddenly so out of place.
The clincher was the rental that my dad had found. A huge old Victorian style home. When you first entered you were greeted by a giant bible on a pedestal in the foyer, lit from above like the heavens had opened, with walls that were adorned with needlepoint bible quotes and old family photos.
There were also dolls. Everywhere.
In my room at the corner someone had built a tiny balcony high above. The ceilings stood at what must have been at least twelve feet so the room was ample and tucked away on the little balcony overlooking it all was a tiny bed, complete with tucked in doll, staring down at me. I gave a definitive ‘no fucking way’ and promptly decided to go back home. This is where the Greyhound trip came back into the picture.
My dad gave his blessing, understood my desire to leave, and promptly helped me book the Greyhound. It was cheap and he agreed that it would be an experience worth having. I remember him waxing poetic about his time backpacking around Europe as a young hippie. He imagined I’d have a similar experience, the classic road journey. I’m actually still impressed that he thought the Greyhound would be the best move.
He waited with me at a tiny shack in the humid swamp. Eventually the bus rolled in crunching on the gravel driveway. I was the only one getting on at this stop. I loaded my bag, said my farewell, and walked on finding a seat towards the back.
Quickly I became friends with my seat mate, Jamal. He was in his mid 20’s and wore a garish XXL green t-shirt will large denim shorts. He also had a gleaming platinum grill across his teeth. Jamal was traveling to California for a court date related to child payments. We chatted for hours about whatever was on the mind. As we pulled into the stop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he pulled out a crumpled BBQ potato chip bag and gave a nod to it.
“What?” I asked.
“Shh, look.”
He unfurled the bag and out dropped four small Jack Daniel’s bottles. I understood immediately and we got off the bus to go and find a quiet area to drink and smoke cigarettes. We sipped the bottles slowly so we could make them last during the two hour layover and chatted about everything we had going on in life, plans we were making, all the usual hopes and dreams, big goals from both of us. It was the uncharacteristically honest kind of conversation that can only happen with strangers passing each other on their respective journeys.
Something that’s worth mentioning here is that every Greyhound bus stop is usually housed in the more forgotten parts of a town. An example of this is the Los Angeles depot. It drops you off at Seventh and Alameda, just bordering the heart of Skid Row, which boasts one of the countries largest unhoused communities. Baton Rouge’s was easily one of the roughest ones I’d stopped in yet. Half of the terminal was filled not with other travelers, but addicts from the bordering neighborhoods, scrambling to and fro. Every corner on the street outside had a dealer hawking their wares. Like some old world bazaar, the corners were buzzing with sounds of people shouting different prices, trying to get customers to their particular street corner.
Once Greyhounds had actually been a shining star of America’s transit infrastructure. These intercity transits were heavily utilized and stayed well maintained. Now things are in decline, ridership has dropped from 140 million in 1960 down to 40 million in 1990, and physical bus stops are beginning to completely shutter. In fact it’s in such decline that private investment firms have begun circling like vultures, buying up the old architectural gems, for the land value underneath them. Chalk it up to the usual adversaries of white flight and underfunding that has led to their current predicament.
But something that made me pause in remembering this story is realizing that all of these “public” transits were actually private companies and had been since the beginning. America had never bothered to put any funding into actual national transit infrastructure, except in certain city-wide subway lines and buses. There is no national transit system, unless you consider Amtrak to be a public service. Amtrak was bought out in the 1970’s when the national rail companies were in a bad way, and since then has been majority owned by the federal government, left in a “transitional” state till the company makes a profit, which has not done for the past 50-ish years, while still being heavily subsidized.
So my trip commenced through the southern states with decaying bus stops, architecturally beautiful and woefully uncared for, many of them in a beautiful “Streamline Moderne” style from the thirties with curved corners and glass brick walls, towering neon sign above. Just like the depots themselves, most of these stops in the smaller towns were along the main streets where they were being slowly forgotten as well. Big box business like Wal-Mart had opened on the main interstates and like a damaged limb that’s been left to rot, the small “central” business district of each town was falling into decay.
The Baton Rouge stop was no different. It had seen better days.
Almost like a talisman, the addicts who utilized the station as a hangout all had dimes, literal Roosevelt silvery dimes, tucked neatly into their ears. I’d never seen it before, and to this day haven’t seen it anywhere else. I never got a chance to ask what the dime signified. It looked uncomfortable. Was it a flag to others that they were looking to score? Strange money earrings in a decrepit bus terminal.
Finally we boarded again and were off. Jamal and I had a nice buzz going now and promptly went to sleep in our seats as night fell on our exodus from Louisiana.
Pt.2 coming soon.