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bus trip part 1
The trip from NYC to DC was entirely uneventful.
At DC we boarded late, but they seperated people going all the way to Dallas from the people on the local stops, and I was put on a bus direct to Knoxville, which skipped many stops on my itinerary, which meant we arrived in Knoxville 4 hours early, and there was no bus to pick up at that time, so I was stranded there for those four hours.
While in Knoxville, I wound up in a long conversation with a kid who had been on the same bus as me from DC, who had started up in Boston. His name was R__ K___ and he is 22-years-old. He's married, has a six-year-old son and has been in and out of jail, most recently after serving six months for smoking a joint in the T-system. He had scars up and down his left arm that I could barely look at, and his only luggage were a pair of spare basketball sneakers in a brown paper bag. He too was headed to Austin, to visit the grave of his brother who hung himself while RK was in prison.
He told me that prison this time was good for him, that he was done messing around with gangs, done not being a father to his kid, done not thinking his life or anyone else's was worth anything. He told me he read about psychology in prison, and that's what he wants to do now, get his act together and become a psychologist, but it was hard for me to tell if he was slow or just had a long long way to go in education, despite the GED.
He told me that he was going to his brother's grave and smoking a joint and drinking a forty and then he never would again. His parents, who had thrown him out at 13 for dealing drugs out of their house said they understood that one, and had given the fare for his bus ticket. At Knoxville they wired him $200, and he had to ask me how to spell his password, Willy, to pick up the money.
At Austin, a friend picked him up in a car, and I wondered if any of it was true. Through the whole journey he started every conversation with me by saying, "Hey, New York!" and I started to feel like an extra member of Buckaroo Banzai's Blue Blaze Irregulars.
Leaving Knoxville (thank god -- what a shithole -- the arrival's board was on a crappy white board, and the snackbar sold postcards and weird giraffe print jackets that I was to see throughout Tennessee), I caught that Gore was expected to endorse Howard Dean on the front page of USA today.
Nashville was better, but no postcards. The cafeteria in the bus station was the first of several that served only greenbeans and okra that had seemingly melted together.
Memphis had the best of the Tennessee bus stations, and it was also where everything shifted -- in terms of being a minority and in terms of the accents becoming unintellgible. This was also the point that I noticed that at every single station since DC the Greyhound people wound up asking and not answering, "How are we going to get the Mexicans to Loredo?"
tbc....
At DC we boarded late, but they seperated people going all the way to Dallas from the people on the local stops, and I was put on a bus direct to Knoxville, which skipped many stops on my itinerary, which meant we arrived in Knoxville 4 hours early, and there was no bus to pick up at that time, so I was stranded there for those four hours.
While in Knoxville, I wound up in a long conversation with a kid who had been on the same bus as me from DC, who had started up in Boston. His name was R__ K___ and he is 22-years-old. He's married, has a six-year-old son and has been in and out of jail, most recently after serving six months for smoking a joint in the T-system. He had scars up and down his left arm that I could barely look at, and his only luggage were a pair of spare basketball sneakers in a brown paper bag. He too was headed to Austin, to visit the grave of his brother who hung himself while RK was in prison.
He told me that prison this time was good for him, that he was done messing around with gangs, done not being a father to his kid, done not thinking his life or anyone else's was worth anything. He told me he read about psychology in prison, and that's what he wants to do now, get his act together and become a psychologist, but it was hard for me to tell if he was slow or just had a long long way to go in education, despite the GED.
He told me that he was going to his brother's grave and smoking a joint and drinking a forty and then he never would again. His parents, who had thrown him out at 13 for dealing drugs out of their house said they understood that one, and had given the fare for his bus ticket. At Knoxville they wired him $200, and he had to ask me how to spell his password, Willy, to pick up the money.
At Austin, a friend picked him up in a car, and I wondered if any of it was true. Through the whole journey he started every conversation with me by saying, "Hey, New York!" and I started to feel like an extra member of Buckaroo Banzai's Blue Blaze Irregulars.
Leaving Knoxville (thank god -- what a shithole -- the arrival's board was on a crappy white board, and the snackbar sold postcards and weird giraffe print jackets that I was to see throughout Tennessee), I caught that Gore was expected to endorse Howard Dean on the front page of USA today.
Nashville was better, but no postcards. The cafeteria in the bus station was the first of several that served only greenbeans and okra that had seemingly melted together.
Memphis had the best of the Tennessee bus stations, and it was also where everything shifted -- in terms of being a minority and in terms of the accents becoming unintellgible. This was also the point that I noticed that at every single station since DC the Greyhound people wound up asking and not answering, "How are we going to get the Mexicans to Loredo?"
tbc....