trvlgs

Half of Washington state is pretty and the other half is boring and that’s that. I arrived in Seattle at five PM. The Seattle Greyhound station looks like the locker room of a waterpark. Grace and I both got out there but we somehow lost each other, I didn’t say goodbye or get her number and I thought pursuing either would be a bit silly. I later regretted this. “Gotta get them digits,” the Very Nice Gentlemen would later say to me. Kate would laugh at Grace when I shared my trip. I was in a complete daze, which happens to you after you’re in a bus for three thousand miles. I meet David like old times, he calls Kate, Kate asks me if I want to get a beer with her – she just turned 21, and she’s been abusing this one bar, he says—and I tell her, “Kate, I will drink a beer with you. I will drink a beer with Barack Obama. I will drink a beer with a Pegasus.” I stepped out of the terminal, and I meet Seattle, who isn’t so big.

Towards the end of Montana, Greyhound buses make a stop at Jaspers, the silliest fucking souvenir shop on the planet, a massive emporium of crap, the literal representation of the three wolf moon shirt. Indeed, there was an entire section dedicated to wolves. And a variety of eight or nine aquariums, all filled with trout. And a live, animatronic band. And a poster advertising the animatronic band above the urinals. And a greeting card rack, with one card in particular catching my interest and love: an image of a woman riding a Pegasus. It was in the “All Occasion” section. Frankly, I can’t think of a single occasion in which a woman riding a Pegasus wouldn’t be acceptable. It’s your birthday? Here’s a woman riding a Pegasus! Your dad died? Hope this helps!

The convenience store area (located next to the mini-casino, of course), featured countless foods that were huckleberry flavored. Grace tells me that this is, like, the huckleberry capital of the world. I told her that I didn’t know huckleberries were real things.

The weird thing about Grace is, in the months following the trip, I’ll remember her smell at complete random, like a backwards Proust. It wasn’t as bad as she looked, but it wasn’t humanly; I would just convince myself it’s the smell of cargo trains and hang onto it for a few seconds.

When I woke up next to Grace I woke up in Montana, glorious Montana, holy shit Montana, half the state is covered in mountains and all of those mountains are covered entirely in the trees that come in a size that doesn’t exist on the east coast, and at eight in the morning every mountain is covered in miles of mist. Before I left, my dad said to me, “You’re seeing a lot of states I’ve never been to. I’m actually pretty jealous.” Montana is what he was talking about. A Very Nice Gentlemen would later perk his eyes open wide and tell me, “Oh, that’s God’s country.”

1. Both of her parents have been married five times.
2. She has ten siblings; they were born boy-girl-boy-girl from top to bottom.
3. Exactly half of her immediate family is gay.
4. She has a disorder that disallows her from ever having kids. This is why you don’t joke about fertility.
5. When she lived in Olympia, she worked as a woodcutter.
6. She drank the vitamin water in San Francisco and woke up two days later in a stranger’s house.
7. She doesn’t regret being a teenager and having “REJECTED” tattooed on her knuckles via pick-and-stick, but she does regret letting her friends practice on her.

I first noticed Grace in the Billings station, arguing with Cartman at the desk. She looked smelly and carried a small guitar with her. I asked her what it was when she sat next to me on the bus; it’s a small guitar, she said. Oh, because I have a mandolin, etc. Yeah, this is bigger. I was tired. I had meant to fall asleep but she was talking on the phone and I had to listen; I kept hearing words that I was overly familiar with from a world I was not a part of, Kate’s world – squat, punk house, etc – and I couldn’t fall asleep, and it felt like she was throwing them out there just to keep me up with my eyes glued on nothing in particular. There was a braggardly confidence in her voice that she’d lack the next day, as she complained to a guy with a new girlfriend about how all her friends are guys and their new girlfriends take them away from her, and then about getting drunk and playing video games in a punk house, and a million things that don’t matter. I went to sleep when she did, with my right leg and her left leg resting against each other and swaying back and forth in a weird and completely non-romantic way, but in a way that was comforting and necessary.

Grace was nineteen and young, a “newly ex-punk” with a recovering mohawk sloping down the right side of her head, and filthy, mostly-ripped clothes.  She was a capital-letter Traveler and Street Kid. She was traveling from Philadelphia to Olympia, jumping trains, but she busted her leg in St. Louis and took the Greyhound the rest of the way. (She says, “Johnny Cash wrote all the time about jumping trains but he never actually did it.” “Yeah, he never actually wore black either.” I had to explain that I was joking.) She assured me that jumping trains was mostly just boring, waiting hours for the thing to get moving. Street kids all have nicknames like Piss and Puke, mostly given to them within hours of “becoming” a street kid. It wasn’t that interesting and it didn’t have to be. She wasn’t attractive and she had three lip rings so I wouldn’t know how to kiss her anyway, and I was glad. By Seattle we had inside jokes. Only connect, or whatever.

In Montana, the land of gold and silver, people still wear t-shirts with Cartman screaming about cheesy poofs etc. The city of Billings is a flat and desolated crackhead of a town with an abandoned movie theater on every corner and sidewalks littered with wandering flyers from the seventies probably. The Greyhound station is dark brown and cozy; the P.A. system was down, quite fittingly. The Cartman-clad announcer just yelled out the bus times and everyone listened. I plugged my ever-dying cellphone into an outlet and kept it in the pocket of hoodie and thought to myself that this would make a nice and unsubtle image in a film that’s trying to make a point about technology. I avoid eye contact with the old man and the girl up front. It’s midnight, and for the first time in months, that felt late.

At the Billings terminal I got a good look at her and saw that her lipstick exceeded her lips by about an centimeter. She had a lazy eye. She got the old man on his next bus, I think, and I spent my time until Seattle wondering where the hell he was.

Now this is fucking silly, but I had an existential crisis, as is often my wont. This happened, I think, for several reasons all at once:

1. I was in a bus in the middle of Wyoming with nothing around me but desert and a mostly-black sky. I was a body in a metal tube going seventy miles an hour through space.
2. I had just finished reading a particularly bone-shattering section of Howards End – Leonard Bast in the forest!—and it made me cry, as any decent book does.
3. I realized that this might actually have been the first moment in my life in which I ever made a choice on my own, entirely alone. That every point of self-improvement I’ve made since being the second-most-unpopular kid in middle school set absolutely no precedent in doing something as obvious as helping an old man get up to pee, and that everything I know about myself is probably wrong etc.
4. Nothing breaks me like the old and helpless, nothing.
5. Why wasn’t anyone with him? Why couldn’t he find his ticket? Why did the fucking busdriver just roll his eyes every time the bus came to a rest stop and we had to help him up? Why didn’t he help?

I stared out the window with my eyes fixed on a mass of matter off in the distance, wondering if it was either a collection of high-standing trees or low-hanging clouds. As the highway curved around, the mass disappeared into separate, unnoticeable parts; this doesn’t mean anything at all. In the moment after a crisis of existence you notice these things.

I helped him up at least three more times, and he did become my responsibility, and twice I had to use my booklight to search the bus toilet for his wallet. It was in his back pocket both times. Every time I helped him up, his pants would fall down; after using the toilet, he didn’t buckle up his belt. He said “thank you” and you could tell in his voice that he was trembling with embarrassment.

In Gilette, Wyoming, for some reason, the Italians finally got off. I quickly shuffled to the front of the bus; the banshee asked me, “Oh, you’re getting off?” I mumbled, “No, I’m moving.” I was joined by the romance novel enthusiast who said about them something like “Well, I never…” as well as the teenager and her mother, who just looked glad to be alive. A stop or two later, a heavy, heavily-tattooed man in a sleeveless Harley Davidson shirt helps on an antique of a man and then leaves him there, alone.

He sits across the aisle from me when it gets dark. We’re still going through badlands. He wears a bright red baseball cap with a gas station logo on it, something a much younger person will have found in a thrift store. The girl up front, the one I thought was the banshee’s sister, humors him, asks him questions, talks to him like a kindergarten teacher, which he doesn’t seem to mind. He suffers from Alzheimers or dementia or something like it, I don’t know anything about those things; he doesn’t know where he’s going. The girl tells him about how excited she is about Spokane(!!!), repeatedly. In a moment, he releases one clear-as-hell thought, that the man who helped him on was the son of a roommate in the hospital, and I think to myself, shit, maybe this guy isn’t crazy and the girl up front has been unknowingly condescending the daylights out of him. Later he would ask me if this gas station has a “pee room,” and that worry was quelled.

On the bus, he needed to use the bathroom, and she wasn’t strong enough to lift him up. This is going to sound silly: I took a lot of time deliberating whether to break from my book and become a part of this, because the girl didn’t even seem entirely in control of her own faculties and if I stood up, he would be primarily in my care, and I’m scared of old, helpless people, and I’m still a little boy, and I’m weak as hell, too, I think. I finally forced myself to ask the struggling girl, “What are we doing?” and I stand up and start to lift him by the arm. Old people are surprisingly heavy, I think because I naturally assume they’re made of dust. By the end of it, I was sore all over. The romance novel enthusiast told me “That was a very nice thing you did,” and I didn’t look her in the eyes.