Allllllllbuquerque!

Cooling my heels in Albuquerque for a bit, trying to manifest a little scratch, spend some quality time with some family of my choosing, maybe cement my future a bit, and also literally cooling my heals (that toenail with the blister under it? Turns out the end of that story is it came off. Left it in Margaret’s shower).  Margaret and her husband Brian, my hosts in this fair city, seem content to let me stay as long as I’m carrying heavy stuff (they’re moving back to OR next month; apparently it’s the cool place to be now that I’m out here), and I’ve got a porch with a view to crash on

three floors up and neighbors who haven't complained about seeing me in my underwear yet. what more could a man want?

so I’m likely to be here through the week while I get some stuff together. In the meantime, bloggees and bloggettes, I thought I’d do a little retrospective work (and satisfy my father, who prefers this over all other forms of communication). Starting off with:

Greyhound: a postmortem (unless I end up back on there, in which case: a midmortem)

Hmm, what to say about our nation’s only transcontinental bus line. It’s a great way to meet poor Americans and middle class Europeans. I think our cousins from across the pond must do their research online and just shop by price before getting here; they rarely seem to understand what’s waiting for them on the other side of a Greyhound month pass. I met  a couple of Austrian kids once, just out of highschool, who had come out the other side of a twenty-four hour Greyhound ride, their first, and it was some real Apocalypse Now shit. And they had another 29 days of that. Never did find out what happened to them, I assume it was all ill-timed acid trips and mirror punching from there out. In all fairness, there should probably be a disclaimer on the Greyhound site warning the euro kids that American buses are not like European buses. I imagine they’re more like European halfway houses with a slightly higher average mph, but don’t quote me on that.

If you ever do find yourself relying on the monochrome canine, dear gentlecreatures, I can assure you that by far the best way to do it is with a pass. Week, two week, month, two month (yes, they offer a two month, and I can only assume that if you survive it you get your name on a plaque somewhere), doesn’t matter. All of the shitastrophes that are the intrinsic hallmarks of a Greyhound trip are much easier to bear when you realize, hey, I’m not paying for this. Or more accurately, I’m not paying any more than the original sunk cost, and if this bus blows a tire or bursts into flames or rolls over (all of which happened on buses somewhere in the country during the week I lived on them), I can just walk onto the next one. Seriously, that’s how passes work; you walk onto whatever bus you want to be on, and just flash your pass in the little plastic envelope/keeper thing they give you, an action which gives a small thrill of celebrity while thoroughly defining the idea of big fish/small pond. I met one couple who’s eight hundred dollar (!!!) trip was riddled with breakdowns, tardiness, incompetence and occasionally outright hostility (station I met them in had a customer to employee ration of roughly, and I’m being dead serious here, 40:1. Maybe worse. All of whom needed to replace their tickets because their bus had broken down. Hence the beauty of the pass). I didn’t have the heart to tell them that, for a quarter of that price, I could do whatever the fuck I wanted as far as Greyhound was concerned for half a fortnight. A twotnight? One week. Whatever. Point is, somebody would have died in that trip if I had been stuck where they were, but with the pass, it didn’t matter, I could float between buses at will. So, you know, if you go Greyhound, pony up for a pass.

The busses themselves were kind of what you’d expect; dirty, loud, smelling of chemical toilet with a constant background chatter of debate over which state prison system has the worst food. Overall, very reminiscent of high school. The stations though can foster a really fascinating ecosystem all of their own. It’s easy sometimes, especially late at night, to forget that you are just in a room in the middle (except for Phoenix) of a city, free to walk outside and go be a person whenever you feel like. I was often tethered to the station by my luggage, finances, schedule or the fact that I was in Utah, but I’m not sure what would hold so many of my travel companions  in the room with me. And many there were; the ecosystem in question would start in earnest once there was a hundred or so of us killing time, united by our common bitterness of circumstance and the particular kind of voluntary limbo we existed in. People would arrange their bags to form a sort of dual furniture stand-in/border delineation, denoting specific camps in the wilderness of the Greyhound plains. Dice games would start up, social cliques would fuse (I’m serious- walking through certain neighborhoods of the Greyhound barrio without the right connections would pull serious mean mugging and occasionally verbal aggression), the whole place would take on the feel of an involuntary summer camp or minimum security prison. I would occasionally walk into one of these situations blind, having opted to spend my layover on the penny slots on Freemont, the 16^th st mall or the happenin’ Albuquerque scene, and would be confronted with blank confusion, a blinking kind of non-comprehension that clearly communicated that these creatures had no grasp of a world outside of the grimy linoleum realm of the bus lines. If they had to stay there any longer, I fully believe that a significant portion of these people would have ended up like the old dude from Shawshank, completely unable to find a place in the outside world.

All that being said, there is a certain laissez-faire, don’t-tread-on-me charm to the Greyhound experience. As I mentioned before, they have a pretty strict set of rules regarding what you can have on the bus, but the enforcement is largely through a don’t-ask-don’t-tell strategy. I once saw a security personnel going through a kind of cursory visual inspection of one line’s carry ons, but never had to deal with that myself. I routinely traveled with at least four items that were expressly forbidden on the bus and easily twice that number in things I wouldn’t be able to get on a plane, and only had a problem that one time I was honest about it. The Greyhound world is one where there are no hard and fast rules, and once you learn the lay of the land you can do pretty much whatever you feel like. So, once again, a bit like high school.

Plus, you know, super cheap.