“Used
to drive a truck,” says Bill. “Thirty-five years on the road. But driving a bus
beats that any day. Sure, I sometimes encounter problems — all the aggression
comes from boredom and eating high energy junk food, that’s what I think. How
do I cope? I just listen to people, hear them out.
“Of
course, you can’t solve all the problems all the time. One day this guy on the
bus tells me he wants to get out, right in the middle of nowhere. He was
getting aggressive, too, screaming at me. Just as soon as I got to a town, I
pulled into the driveway of a fire station, opened the door, and told him I
could let him out now. But suddenly, this guy, he just doesn’t want to leave
anymore. So I talked to him calmly, told him to step out for a minute, that I
had to move the bus a little further along in case a fire truck needed to leave
the station. And, as soon as he got out, I slammed the door shut and drove off.
“A
few weeks later, I heard one of the other drivers had the same experience —
possibly it was the same man. Suddenly, as they were rolling full speed down
the highway, the guy started screaming that he wanted to get out. Then he
somehow managed to force the door open and jump. He hit the metal marker and
was cut right in two. After that, the driver quit. He was an ex Vietnam
veteran. Perhaps that experience brought back nightmares.
“What
I really like about driving a bus is all the free time. I’m on the road one day,
get the next day free. My wife does crafts, so she’s a busy woman. On my free
days we go shopping, do housework together. It’s the ideal life. My daughter
and son live near by. She keeps chickens; my son keeps a snake. One day, at my
son’s house, I opened the fridge and a frozen rat fell out. The snake had
killed two but could only eat one, so my son saved the extra one for later. I
like animals too. I had a horse but it was shot by poachers in the night. It
would have cost too much to have the body towed away, so I just dug a big hole
and buried it in place. Broke my heart because I loved that animal. Still breaks
my heart every time I pass that spot in the field.”
“Why
not plant a tree right there,” I say. “That way the horse becomes a living being.”
“Never
thought of that. I like that idea. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”
***
On
the next bus, a huge woman eating a hamburger and a pile of fries squeezes into
the seat beside mine and pushes me against the window.
“I
just got married,” she says, but her tone is dreary, quite resigned. Perhaps
she is merely grateful to have found a mate. “I’m edjucated, have a real big
vacabalary. I’m real differnt too. At that job in Wallmart I had, they din use my
potential.”
She begins a conversation with an even larger woman one
seat up who is on her way to Ohio, to start a new life. “My boyfriend broke off
our relationship after four years, broke off on New Years Eve. Then what
happens? I get drunk and total out my car, no water in the raduator.”
Soon
best buddies, they brag about weight they’ve lost. The lady in front has lost
one hundred pounds; the one beside me claims to have lost 200. Is this
possible? What size could these woman have been?
“I
used to be real skinny but I had this accident? Was laid up for three years.
That’s what put the weight on. Jus’ sittin’ aroun.”
When
the bus makes a stop, both stock up on hamburgers, more fries, and a neat pile of packaged
cakes.
***
Waves
of people fill the streets of Savannah — some kind of festival is taking place
— and there’s not a hotel room to be had for love or money. An overhead
television entertains us with slaughter, missiles, bombs, aggressive killer
types, much foul language, terrified screams, and considerable sadism: bravo
for freedom of expression in the arts and entertainment. I jump back on the
bus.
One
o’clock in the morning by the time we reach the next city. No hotels in this
part of town, and there are strange characters wandering through the night
streets: not quite the right time for a stroll.
“You
wanna hotel? Take a taxi out to the strip,” says the sulky woman in the office.
“How
far is that?”
“Gotta
take a taxi,” says the man standing behind her. He is obviously a taxi driver.
“How
much will it cost to get out there?”
“It’s
on the meter.”
“Of
course, it will be on the meter, but approximately how much will it be?”
“It’s
on the meter.”
We
continue the fascinating dialogue until I give up.
I
am searching for a phone book when Don, the last bus driver, approaches. “I was
thinking. You could share my hotel room. Two beds, no sex, no obligation. Out
at Howard Johnson’s. They might charge you for the extra person, but maybe not.
I have a car coming to take me out there.”
I
accept the offer with alacrity, not because spending the night with Don is a
dream come true, but once out there, there might be another room available or
other hotels in the vicinity. In any case, since I’m on a book tour, Howard
Johnson’s does have at least one literary reference in its history.
Back
in 1929, the mayor of Boston banned Eugene O’Neill’s play, Strange Interlude — the
heroine embarked on many affairs, had an abortion, and was unfaithful to her
husband — and the production moved to neighboring, less reticent Quincy. The
five-hour long play was presented in two parts with a dinner break in the
middle, and since the first Howard Johnson’s restaurant just happened to be right
near the theater, hundreds of playgoers dined there. Thus, through word of
mouth, Howard Johnson’s slowly became a well-known name, was eventually able to
develop into a large restaurant and hotel chain.
The
chain did, however, maintain a whites-only policy throughout the 1950s, and
this provoked an international crisis in 1957, when one Delaware restaurant
refused service to Ghana’s very respectable finance minister. Eisenhower did
make a public apology, but protests and sit-ins against Howard Johnson’s racist
policy continued into the 1960s. In 1962, one of the protest organizers in
Illinois was Bernie Saunders.
Don
and I go outside, wait in the icy drizzle behind the bus station. And suddenly
Don is nervous. I can see he’s regretting he made the offer.
“You
got a violent husband who will suddenly come out of nowhere and kill me?”
“Even
if I did, it would take a while for him to arrive from Europe.”
But
his agitation increases: is he wondering when I’ll figure out that the “no sex,
no obligation” is only a lure.
To
pass the time and calm him down, I tell Don I’m a writer and a photographer
traveling around the country. This seems to comfort him for some reason— or
maybe it makes me seem more human. He tells me he plays guitar, will soon start
recording his songs in his home studio. The CDs will be distributed by a man he
met on the bus, “a guy who says he has international connections. The real trouble
with most songs today is they have no meaning. I write words that do. I write about
God, because He has entered inside me. He protects me. I’m not religious, none
of that dead, hypocritical church-going, but I’m spiritual because I’ve opened
my heart and mind to receive personal messages. My wife’s the same. God talks
to us both on a daily basis.”
Listening
to God also gave him the strength to fight a heroin addiction in Chicago. “It
also stopped me from killing two people — I was evil, back then. It’s also made
me open to everything, like sharing a room with a woman and not having sex.” He
repeats this four times: easy to see this is uppermost in his mind.
I
should be alarmed, standing out here with a self-confessed potential killer who
receives messages from supernatural sources, but I’m not. Perhaps I’m
unconsciously receiving personal messages telling me to keep cool.
Finally,
a long black car with a license plate that reads, SWAMI stops in front of us. The
driver is a very doubtful looking man, with a dark pointy beard and shifty
eyes. He and Don seem to know each other well — Don mutters something that I
can’t hear, then slides into the front seat beside him. Will this be a
kidnapping? The beginning of a long and painful death? Am I really going to
climb into the back of this car, travel into the dark night with these two? Of course
I am. And soon we’re off, rolling for endless miles along rain-slick highways.
Only after a long tense moment do the glowing lights of Howard Johnson’s appear
like a modern Nirvana.
Without
meeting my eye, Don asks for one room two beds. I smile nicely at the desk
clerk, ask if he has another room for me at a good price.
“I’ll
tell you what,” says that young man who, thankfully, seems to have picked up on
the situation. “It’s late. I’ll give you a room for the cheap service price.
Twenty-eight dollars, is that okay?”
“Wonderful!”
Defeated,
Don scuttles away without a word or a backward glance.
I
stay with the clerk for a while, chewing the fat. He’s thrilled to discover I’m
a writer — he also writes, unpublished stories with a frustrated love theme —
but he wants to hear about my books, my research. He wants details, images, flavors,
tales of other countries and different horizons.
So,
under the lobby’s bleak neon we settle on unspeakable orange Naugahyde, and to
the accompanying hum of a soft drinks dispenser, I give a full-fledged book
talk. And, believe me, the experience is just as much fun as jawing away in
front of a whole crowd.
More about my books and passionate life can be
found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com
and http://www.jill-culiner.com
and on my story podcast at https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner
