A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was an age of expanding wisdom being exposed to urban culture and an age of foolishness where a sheltered white guy rode the Greyhound bus. It was the epoch of belief I would be robbed and it was the epoch of incredulity of missing a bus transfer. It was the season of bright fluorescent bus stop lights, and the season of innane security guards. It was the spring of hope I wouldn't be raped, and it was the winter of despair when I gazed on Detroit. This is the story of Brael's bus trip.

The story begins on a cold December night. I was preparing to leave my town and head up to a remote home in Michigan to visit my dad for a couple weeks. Because he was unable to get time off from work to pick me up at the airport and it seemed retarded to rent a car for two weeks just to make a 3 hour drive it was decided I would take the bus. Greyhound even has a bus station right outside my dads work so things appeared to just work out.

The bus in town was to pick me up at 8:45 that night, however the bus driver ran late and didn't actually show up until 10:15. The bus stop itself was on a street corner with no shelter and it had been raining all night so things were off to a good start. While waiting for the bus I met a companion for a part of my trip he was a local drunk who would use the bus to travel between my town and the next town over each day. He appeared to be homeless, nevertheless he was a great source of information about the bus system. Apparently it's a bit of a custom for the bus to show up late, if it shows up at all.

Eventually the bus arrived and I began the trek south to Charleston WV so that I could catch a connecting bus that would eventually go north. This would be like taking a flight from Chicago to New York so that you can catch a connecting flight to Los Angeles... bus logic. The trip to Charleston was interesting, I get car sick easily so I was doing my best to fight it off. There were only 5 of us on the bus and everyone was quiet except for one woman on her cell phone who did her best to include the entire bus in her conversation. Although I could only hear one side of it, the conversation was quite entertaining it was about her time working in a carnival freak show and her dad being a crackhead. Her problem with her crackhead dad was that her dad wouldn't share his crack with her.

The bus made pretty good time as I got to the Charleston bus station only an hour late rather than the 90 minutes late that the bus was when it picked me up. My layover in Charleston was only supposed to be 10 minutes so I figured my bus would have been gone by that point. However this wasn't the case, they held the bus an extra hour for us making everyone an hour late to their next destination. An efficient transportation system at work. The bus drove across Tennessee and Kentucky then finally swung north to Columbus. By car from my apartment to Columbus is a grueling 2.5 hour drive but the bus system managed to get me there in a mere 6 hours. During this trip back to Columbus I was feeling out of place. I'm a sheltered white guy wearing khaki's and a white polo shirt as more and more black people would board the bus, usually in small gangs of people wearing the same colors. Each group seemed to have their own section. I'm pretty sure I was sitting in the wrong area but no one said anything to me, I was sitting with the blue shirts. This part of the trip was also filled with me trying to not get motion sick but I had the added fun of being surrounded by black thugs.

After getting to Columbus the bus driver told us to leave our stuff on the bus and we would reboard in an hour to head to Detroit. I left my suitcase of clothes but brought my backpack as I didn't trust leaving a backpack with a laptop in it just sitting there. During the layover I saw the bus station had a food court, this is something that looked to be missing from Charleston and as I later learned is something of a rarity. Not only was there a a small refrigerated rack of food but they had a McDonalds like place. Being 4 in the morning the McDonalds was closed but I had my choice of tiny week old sandwiches, salads, sugary drinks, and bottled water from the kiosk. I went over to a table to eat and mess around on my laptop talking to friends on IM that were awake at that time. During the conversation I brought up the prices of the food which were higher than even stadium prices so I took a picture of the food kiosk to get some proof that a 12 oz bottle of water really did cost $4.39. I took a picture and went back to a table preparing to get back on my laptop when security arrived.

The much esteemed Department of Homeland Security has some weird regulations in bus terminals, as it turns out taking a picture inside a terminal is a violation, and a rather serious one at that. I was taken to the security office while I was searched along with my laptop, backpack, and phone. Watching them explosives test the Magic cards in my backpack was especially thrilling. As they searched my phone they confiscated the memory card and began doing background checks on each person whose info I had saved. Occasionally I will get someones number that I talk to online and either because it's easier to think of them as their screen name or because I don't know the persons last name I just put them in as the screen name. They were especially interested in these people and the assumption was that they were terrorist code names. Eventually they returned my phone but kept the memory card for "evidence".

The entire security ordeal took about 20 minutes, after it was over a security guard was assigned to me for the rest of my stay in the bus station. The entire thing was ridiculous, not only did I have the security guard making veiled threats towards me the entire time and reminding me that the bullets he was using were very lethal hollowpoints but the bus stations themselves lacked security. There were no xray machines or metal detectors and no search when loading bags or people onto a bus. Pre 9/11 airports had 10x the security of any bus station today, but they sure flipped the fuck out over a picture of a bottle of water.

After this was over I saw some people from my bus and sat down by them to wait for it to load. 5 am comes around and no bus. My experience with busses so far is that they're always late so I don't worry. When 5:30 comes around I ask customer service what's going on and they tell me I missed the bus. I have no idea how, but I did. After realizing it's gone with my luggage I think about how lucky I am to have taken my backpack with me. Unlike airports busses are on a much more sparse schedule, there's only one per day for the most part. This means that it would be a 24 hour wait to get a followup bus to the big D. I start trying to plan an alternate route but the employees in a bus station at 5:30 in the morning aren't the best and brightest. The customer service person especially is a fat black woman with a bad attitude. She eventually tells me to wait until 6:30 for "her girl Rwanda" to arrive and sort things out.

I spend the next hour in a minor panic but for the most part keep cool. The security guard was not amused that he would have to watch me longer. I wander the terminal a bit pondering how anyone can ride the bus and how this can possibly be a profitable business. One guy especially caught my eye in the terminal, he was sleeping on the floor in the middle of the walkway. He looked and smelled homeless, but the security guards would routinely wake up the sleeping people and ask to see their bus tickets so he must have been a legit customer. For the most part though, everyone would just wait around with nothing to do for their 2-12 hour layovers. I have had some bad layovers when flying but the worst layover in an airport is better than the average bus layover, it gave me a whole new appreciation for flying.

Eventually I struck up conversation with the other people from my bus that I had been watching to know when to board. They all missed it to but hadn't really done anything about it. Each person that missed it said they didn't hear the announcement so atleast I wasn't the only one and we all left our luggage on the bus. One of the six people that missed it happened to be white so I gravitated more towards conversation with him. I learned that he was from rural northern Michigan and that he always traveled by bus. He also told me that this situation was pretty typical. We were very different types of people so he didn't want to speak to me much, eventually I took the hint and shut up. He got along great with the security guard though, and they both talked about the navy. The 450 pound security guard talking about his navy special forces days and whitey listening in amazement and talking about how he was joining soon. The most amazing part to me was when the security guard gave whitey his gun fully loaded and chambered so that he could check it out.

As time went on Rwanda eventually showed up. She was professional with a great attitude relative to everyone else. She was also a thin black woman and even wore business attire. After looking at the routes she gave me an option. I could take another bus up through Youngstown OH and then into Detroit where I would then have a 23 hour layover to make the connection to my dads town or I could stay in the Columbus bus station for another 22 hours and take the next bus to Detroit. I thought things through for a few minutes, being in Columbus I could have a friend pick me up and stay at their house for a bit getting some food, a shower, and some sleep or I could head up to Detroit and try to get my luggage. Before making my decision I made sure that I could speak to customer service in Detroit and Rwanda assured me that there was atleast a 5% chance of getting my luggage back if I talked to them when they opened at 8:00 and went that route. After weighing my options I decided to head up to Detroit for a day, making me the first person in the last 30 years to willingly spend time there when presented with an alternative.

I board the new bus to the security guards relief and a few other people from the old bus board with me, after I told them the route and explained they could head up. A few could even still make their connections. This bus ride is uneventful and I was unable to get any sleep because it would stop every 10-15 minutes. We're on the road when 8:00 rolls around and I give customer service a call. This time I'm the freak having a cell phone conversation on the bus while everyone listens in but I manage to get them to sweep the bus and recover my luggage. I even did Whitey a favor out of a sense of Aryan brotherhood and save his luggage too.

Eventually I get to Detroit. As it turns out the Columbus bus station was nice by bus station standard and the Detroit bus station like the rest of the city is a real shithole. It was in the middle of downtown. There were no lockers to store my stuff and no food kiosks, only a single cash only vending machine with no ATM. I asked customer service about nearby places to eat and was told about a few but the opinion was that even though they were only a block away it was a very bad idea to walk there even though it was 10:00 in the morning. If I wanted to go somewhere I needed to get a taxi. It turns out that the Detroit bus station had security too, mainly to keep people from trying to walk anywhere. If I had wanted to walk somewhere anyways, I would have had to do so in the street because a good number of the sidewalks were blocked off by the city due to crumbling buildings and falling concrete being a concern.

I'm exhausted and hungry at this point having only eaten that one tiny salad in the middle of the night and virtually nothing the day before. So I get a taxi which is cash only. First we hit up an ATM so I can pay the guy, and then we goto Dennys. I spend quite awhile in there because I wanted to relax and I was able to recharge my netbook. I didn't charge it on the bus and Detroit had no charging stations. Eventually I head back and spend the next 17 hours in the bus station. For a good portion of the trip I sit in an uncomfortable metal wire chair just people watching. From time to time I was able to get internet when a bus was in the station as they all had wifi. The station itself offered no internet service though. The people watching was the most interesting part of it all, there was a ritual when two people would meet and they would ask eachother how many Obamaphones the other person had. The person who had more was the superior and could pick the conversational topic or take the persons seat. I was never asked this question but the Obamaphone was very important here. I never heard someone say they had fewer than 15 and the highest I heard was 74.

As the hours wore on my laptop battery died again despite it being a netbook with 8 hours of battery life. I didn't want to spend another $60 on a taxi so I went back to their entertainment area which consisted of an 80's arcade game and a pinball machine. I unplugged the pinball machine and plugged in my laptop. That is how I passed the rest of the time. Leaving Detroit was like a godsend. At each stop some people from Detroit would get off the bus and be replaced by old white people heading to the same destination as me so they could gamble. We all eventually unloaded at the casino my dad works at. All the old people headed inside to gamble, while I went to meet my dad, then got in his car and passed out.