When I was in college, unlike other kids, I didn’t have a car. So I took buses, mainly to Tallahassee to see girls who didn’t like me. By the time I had a car, I had either given up on those girls or they had graduated. One was Janet Alshouse, a statuesque Gemanic type who had gone to my high school and whom I had tried to date, more or less, in high school.
I know at some point I took a bus up north, first to go to New York to see my uncle and aunt, then possibly back through Morgantown, WV, my birthplace—now I’m getting this trip mixed up with one I took when I was teaching and had a car.
But the one up north from Alabama, the first leg through Tennessee and Kentucky to Cincinnati, I remember clearly. A worker sat next to me. It was a revelation that he had found work in Auburn in construction and then took a bus home, to somewhere 20 or 30 miles away, maybe to LaGrange, Georgia or Lanett or West Point. A number of little towns cluster on the Alabama-Georgia border, and I had and have no knowledge of the denizens who populate them.
We spoke and he slyly slid out of his jacket pocket a pint of bourbon, Jim Beam, I believe. “It’s my granddaddy’s birthday. I want him to celebrate in style.”
I stared at the bottle which he displayed as stealthily as though it were illegal. Possibly it was in his community. Alabama and Georgia had dry counties back then, 1974 or so.
It was maybe the first time that I was fully aware of our class divide in America. He was a construction worker on a job in Auburn, and he was taking a bus home because he didn’t own a car. He was the first adult I’d met who didn’t have one, and he didn’t seem to mind or even think about it.
And he’d bought a pint of bourbon for his grandfather. Why not a fifth? That’s what my father would have bought (I’m up to 1.5 liters because it’s cheaper overall and otherwise I’d be in the liquor section of Safeway with too embarrassing frequency.) But a pint was apparently all this poor guy could afford.
The buses I took from Auburn to Tallahassee were a graduate course in our country’s class divide. On one bus, a young white fellow climbed aboard and immediately turned on his radio, entirely too loud. The bus driver turned his shoulder minimally and growled something—I couldn’t make it out. But the young guy turned his radio off right away, and it stayed off.
An older black woman stated loudly and clearly, “Thank you. I want to thank you.”
On another trip, another black woman in front of me opened a paper bag and pulled out various pieces of fried chicken. She pulled them apart with surgical exactness, and the chicken looked truly delicious: deep dark fried, it separated willingly, the bones falling from the meat. I couldn’t smell it, but I thought I might be able to if I inhaled deeply enough. She probably didn’t have money to spend at any of the fast food places we might come upon—and Tallahassee was six hours from Auburn by bus—but I envied her. Her chicken was champion over any rapid burger, as my brother used to call them.
Yet another trip through Florida I sense must have been south of Tallahassee, though I have no memory of taking a bus to Ft. Lauderdale, where my family still mainly lived in those Auburn years. But the bus was hot and very crowded; several people had to stand.
I regarded one man standing in the aisle. He didn’t look like he belonged on a bus. His dark straight hair was neatly combed. He had a young face and a pleasant smile. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. I wondered who he was and what he was doing. He wasn’t burdened by a briefcase or any luggage.
Then the man in the aisle seat next to the man beckoned him to perch on his chair arm. The young standing man nodded and smiled appreciatively and took a seat. In just a minute or so, the seated man had reached up and was massaging the muscles between the young man’s shoulder and neck. In a minute the man who had so gratefully assumed a seat on the chair arm stood away. The seated man turned and beckoned him back with a wave and an eerie grin that I can still see. The man now standing several feet away shook his head but smiled graciously.
In 1974, after I graduated from Auburn, I took a trip to Europe, funded mainly by the $300 ($1,820 in today’s dollars, still a pittance) that I inherited from my grandmother when she died. I learned a lot on that trip. When my buddy and I got off the train in Copenhagen, a tall, blonde, gorgeous, blue-eyed girl who was at least three inches taller than my 5’10” confronted me and asked, “Would you like to come with me?” I stammered and shook my head no. I may as well have said, “Bu-bu-but I have school tomorrow!”
What a trip! I had ended it by leaving my plane ticket back to Boston on a diner’s counter in London. Someone had to signal to me to retrieve it. I was reading something by Virginia Woolf, appropriately.
I flew from London back to Boston but couldn’t go home yet. I had tragically or mistakenly or both been accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at UNC-Greensboro, so on the way back to Auburn, I booked a flight into Greensboro to find an apartment for the fall.
Standing in line in customs in Boston, I knocked a cigarette butt receptacle over and cut and bruised my toe. (A butt receptacle! Remember how the smoking section on a plane was all blue smoke?) I lived with that toe all the way to Auburn.
I flew from Boston to Greensboro and somehow I ended up at a motel downtown and near campus that had a bar. (Some events in my past contain the incomprehensible. I didn’t know anything about Greensboro; how did I end up at that motel?) I availed myself of $0.25 happy hour beers ($1.52 in today’s dollars, still quite a bargain, even for Budweiser). I was alone at the bar with a suit-and-tied business fellow. When I couldn’t get the bartender’s attention to order a refill, this guy was kind of enough to signal the barkeep more assertively.
I found an apartment, somehow; it was 50 years ago, and some details are simply lost. Then I made my way to the Greensboro bus station and took a bus to Auburn, where my parents were living by then. The bus went through Atlanta, where I had to get off and wait a few hours to change buses in the early morning.
It was more crowded than you would have thought at 4 a.m. A tall, slender, smiling fellow had taken a place in the center of the room, from which he accosted people who seated near him while passing through.
He would greet them genially and ask them about their lives. At some point he would inevitably intone, “You look like good Christian people,” and then engage them in evangelistic patter. I can’t remember any of it. But I was mesmerized: How could he keep up his enthusiasm at 4 a.m.? How did he manufacture such interest in these completely generic humans? What was there about him that engaged these people, who had to be sleepy, disoriented, and annoyed by having to take a bus who knew where so early in the morning? Yet they surrendered to him.
Finally I couldn’t take him any longer. I moved to another corner of the room; it occurred to me that I was fair game to him myself.
He became a character in a short story, “Katherine in Transit”, that I published a couple of years later in The Greensboro Review, which coincidentally I was editing. It’s not as nefarious as it sounds; students were expected to publish their work in it.
The main character was based on Janet Alshouse. I had had a crush on her in high school, and the romantic effort went only one way. She left Florida State without graduating to move to Wellfleet, MA. What she did there was a mystery. I lost track of her for a long time, then made contact with her again sometime in the last 30 years, who knows how.
In the interim, she had married. She somehow had also become some sort of vice president at Fox News. My last contact with her was on Facebook on one of the nights after Trump won the 2016 election. Some friends and I were speculating, correctly it turns out, on how awful the next four years would be. She broke in to ask, “What are you people smoking?”
I explained to my friends that this was someone I had known in high school, and I had no idea how mean-spirited she had become. I immediately unfriended her, and we’ve never spoken again. Other friends closer to her in high school subsequently have confirmed that she had turned into a creep. Who knew?
What a long, strange bus trip it’s been!
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