My America 2005

So now I know what purgatory's like.

I had a great time at a little bar called The Dog House in the Shockoe Bottom section of Richmond last night many thanks to the bartender, April, as well as to Mark the retired fireman, Dale from Southwest Philly and my man Grasshopper, who got me a cab at the end of the night. But that's when stuff started to go wrong. Long story short, I almost lost my Ameripass, my digital camera got pretty much smashed, and the first real tactical error of my navigation of Greyhound's system conspired to leave me all but beaten.

The plan was to head to Raleigh, but why go to Raleigh when Savannah sounds so much nicer? That's about as much thought my addled brain put into the decision that resulted in me switching lines at the Richmond terminal. I barely made it onto the packed bus, which was scheduled to empty and reboard after an hour-long layover in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 5 a.m. Those going onto Savannah had to switch buses at 5, but the bus we were supposed to switch onto was already almost full. With only an Ameripass and not an actual ticket, I was stranded until the next Savannah-bound departure, scheduled for 8:15.

So what was a chaotic mess of unwashed humanity gradually faded into a few lost, soiled souls.

There was the kid slumped over the little TV chairs who claimed he'd been there since 1 p.m. the previous day. There were the drug dealers who tried to wander onto a bus bound to New York even though they didn't have tickets, and there was the drug dealee -- think Justin Timberlake if he didn't bathe, change his clothes or sleep for three weeks. A very self-assured young terminal employee kept herding them politely but firmly out the door, until about the fourth or fifth time they had wandered back in. Then he called the police. The squad car pulled up, the cops walked inside the terminal to get a cup of coffee and stood outside drinking in the light of dawn, and that was enough. The overtly drug-affected trio was gone.

So I figured this might be what purgatory is like. You have the helpless damned, waiting for the cops. You have the hopeful-to-be-saved waiting for the bus. And then you have the Greyhound angels, with the entire spectrum of dispositions, herding us around, telling us which line to stand in, when the bus was leaving, when the bus is full, and occasionally mopping the floor.

One good thing about Fayetteville's bus station -- and I had to think hard -- was that they eased up on the price gouging. In Washington, D.C., I bought a bottle of Nesquick chocolate milk for nearly three dollars. Three DOLLARS! Same in Richmond, although the five-dollar bacon cheeseburger was worth every penny (who would have guessed?) What's more, I was elated to find Mz. Pac-Man machines to be pretty much standard in the terminals, until I saw the price in D.C. and Richmond: a dollar a play. Practically everywhere else in the world, it's a quarter, owing to the hypothesis that the inflation of American currency has maintained about the same rate as that of the coolness of video arcade games. So what's worth a quarter in 1981 can still be worth a quarter in 2005. Well, Fayetteville Mz. Pac-Man costs 50 cents, I'll have you know, and I nearly got the high score.

Anyway, by the time the bus to Savannah arrived, only half full, I was so glad to be on it that I temporarily forgot about the other stuff that was going wrong. I've got to split now, or I'll miss the whole Georgia night, but I promise to fill in the blanks in the next post, hopefully early tomorrow morning.