Get off the bus!

So yesterday I wrote about my harsh introduction to the rambling, roving world of Greyhound buses. Being the eternal fountain of optimism that I was (you can tell that's been quashed over the years), I hoped maybe I just had a rough start. In the great adventure that lie before me, surely there would be interesting people, stories, and completely safe and clean bus stations along my route. Right?

Um... well, in a word, no.

I quickly learned that the safest way to maneuver through this horrible idea was to stick with the buddy system. Your selection of "buddies" are limited, however, when the majority of people on the Greyhound bus are the sort of people that don't drive cars -- mostly because the state won't allow them to have a license. Of these people, I huddled close by the safest of these groups -- the elderly. The majority of these weren't so bad -- at the very least, I could run away and be sure I could outrun them. These were people who still thought it was a grand adventure to ride on the bus and see the country -- they dressed in their Sunday best while carrying their khaki green suitcases, talking to me about their grandchildren and their medications. I just sort of clung to this group as long as I could, like a scavenger fish on the back of a slow, old, dumb whale.

Unfortunately, I lost my cover in Cincinatti. Three hours doesn't seem so long when you're looking at a bus ticket in the comfort of your dorm room. It does, however, seem like forever when you're sitting in the middle of a ghetto, in a bus station where you are warned by the bus driver to stay inside the terminal, at 2 a.m. So I did. I sat on a bench with my luggage all closely huddled around me, reading my Stephen King book (it was Salem's Lot, by the way) while continuously glancing around me, glancing at the clock, and trying to figure out just where the aroma of urine was coming from.

When it came time to board my bus -- four hours later -- I was trying to shuffle all of my luggage along with me when a homeless man came up and asked for change. I declined, stating I didn't have any cash on me. At this point he flashed me. Yes, I can honestly say I have seen an old wrinkly 70+-year-old black man's penis. As he pulled down his zipper and shook it at me menacingly, all I could think was, once again, "This was a really, really bad idea."

I didn't sleep between Cincinatti and Indianapolis -- despite the fact I was going on 23 hours without sleep -- because I was afraid the man talking to himself across the aisle from me would try to kill me. At first I thought he was rapping along to music on headphones, until I realized he didn't have any headphones on, and he wasn't rapping. (This was before bluetooth headsets were popular.) When he reached a stanza of silence in his soliloquy, he'd stare at me. By "me" I mean my breasts. Once I realized this -- and this bus, like the original bus, was packed, so I had nowhere to go -- I got out my college sweatshirt and bundled up like it was January, despite the fact it was actually late August and still really hot. And those buses get really, really hot, really, really fast. And with the heat comes the smell.

Greyhound buses stink. It's not a noticeable, detectable smell, like urine, or feces, or body odor. It's this strange mutated hybrid stench that is a combination of all of the above, every possible odor and fluid the human body can put out, plus an intangible element to really punch it up a notch, like sadness or desperation or hate. It's not a pleasant smell at all, and on my initial leg of the trip I thought maybe it was the people I was sitting beside (or sitting on me), but I quickly realized the terminals and all buses smelled like this.

I'm pretty sure I was almost raped/robbed/pillaged in the Indianapolis terminal. I mentioned last time that I didn't go to the entire bathroom the entire trip. It wasn't for lack of trying. In Indianapolis, despite my better judgment I decided to go use the ladies' room. Carrying all of my luggage with me, I went to the back corner where the bathroom signs were, and as I rounded the corner I heard someone walking behind me. Ignoring it, I went into the bathroom and as I was headed into a stall, I saw a man standing in the bathroom behind me.

He was probably about 6'5, tall and skinny, with a long rat-tail in a braid. His eyes were black and dilated and he had a small smile on his face as he groped himself through his sweatpants.

I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs. I may have peed myself, having had to go so badly. A security guard who looked to be in his mid-70's came ambling into the bathroom with his hand on his baton, looked at the man who surely was about to murder me and steal my Vera Bradley luggage, and said -- more exhausted than actually threatening -- "Damnit Ernie, I told you to stay out of here."

The security guard then helped the gentleman out of the bathroom the same way you'd see an orderly escort a senile geriatric. I didn't know if I was safer in the bathroom -- where the stalls, as I figured out, didn't have locks -- or taking my chances out in the main area, where there was possibly "Ernie," or a homeless man trying to show me his penis, or who knows what else. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I was a nice girl, from the middle of Jesustown Midwest, USA, and I just wanted to see my boyfriend, whom I didn't like that much anyway, and my mom was right, and oh... oh, this was bad. This was really bad.

I wound up sitting bythe concession counter, curled in a ball with my luggage around me like some sort of protective designer shield, watching week-old popcorn pop and trying not to cry. In 24 hours, I'd been sat on by a large black woman, I'd been referred to not-to-quietly as a "stupid cracker bitch," I'd been panhandled at and flashed, and I'd narrowly escaped all sorts of wrong in a bus station bathroom. And I hadn't even reached my destination yet.