Freighter of Dregs

The Greyhound bus leaves from Arcata every day at 9:50 from the Intermodal Transit Facility, arguably the most squalid place in town. The Greyhound company always locates their stations in the most deteriorated neighborhoods. If the town is too small to have a real ghetto, Greyhound will nonetheless find a suitably foul corner to put their station in. Right next to the Arcata station is the Food Endeavor. There's always a crowd of ornery indigents camped out around it, with rats darting in and out between their feet, the indigents fighting over spare change and the rats over their crumbs.

I hadn't ridden the bus down to Oakland for many years. I remembered that only the most desperate people took the bus, and I always tried to avoid it. It seemed that every few months a Greyhound flipped over outside of Bohefus, three or four people died and twenty-six were injured. Once a man in Canada sawed off his seat mate's head with a Swiss Army knife. It was very telling, I reckoned, that the Greyhound went strait to West Oakland and only secondarily to San Francisco.

I paid $51 for a one-way, weekday ticket to Oakland, more than I would have paid for gas had I driven down by myself.

Alongside the curb where the bus stopped, a stretch of pavement stained with many a puddle of piss, many a cigarette tar stain and dried loogie, stood a line of people waiting for the 'Hound to appear. Their luggage were overflowing paint-splotched duffel bags, piss-stained bedrolls and in one case simply a tattered garbage bag.

An Indian wore a colorful, woven cap and a white man of perhaps thirty wore dusty Carhartts and shredded skate shoes with a beat-up skateboard, a sleeping bag and a day pack. An old man with a Navy veteran cap chatted about field-dressing gunshot wounds to a younger man with tattoos on his hands who was rolling a cigarette. Someone was smoking a joint, and a young trustafarian was wandering around telling an unsolicited story about eating some mushrooms in the forest and “tripping face.” He was aiming his story generally in the direction of the crowd. Everyone tried to ignore him.

There was a wild-eyed, middle-aged man smoking a cigarette and wearing a dirty, torn hoodie that said “Welcome to My Hood: Bay Area” with skulls and motorcycles on it. His face was grown over in thick stubble. There was a Mexican in a sweat suit with a shaved head and an area code tattooed on his neck. I wanted to ask him what he'd do if the phone company changed his area code.

There was a woman carrying a baby and stringing along two young children. There was a man in a Slayer hat and a shredded hoodie with an anarchy circle-a and patches sewn all over it. There was a guy with bad acne wearing a beanie pulled way down over his eyes. It said “Humboldt” on it with a pot leaf under the “o.” There were at least five “Tap Out” and “Fox Racing” and "Hurley" hats. There was a woman with a lip ring and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth chasing her toddler through the landscaping shrubs, shouting “Come here this instant, Jeffrey. You stop that this instant! Three...two...one...that's it!” She yanked his arm just as the crusty kid began telling her his mushroom story.

The man with the “Welcome to My Hood” hoodie was running around, looking for the motherfucker who had snatched his bed roll.

The inside of the bus smelled strongly of weed as I boarded. I sat next to a seat with vomit stains on it, hoping it would ward off potential seat mates (the scheme worked until the bus was totally full). Panning across my fellow passengers, I concluded that I probably had the fewest felony convictions amongst them all.

As soon as I sat down a conversation started up in the row next to me. One of the interlocutors was the man with the hand tattoos, and the other was an emergency room nurse or technician of some sort. It soon came out that the man with the hand tattoos was a 34-year-old retired Marine named Robert. He was a certified welder in the state of Washington. He drank every night, stayed with friends and relatives in Arcata and lived on a $3000 a month military pension. In the course of relating a story about a fifteen-year-old girl he saw who had huge tits, he also mentioned that he had a daughter somewhere.

Immediately the Marine began to broadcast his war stories to the rest of us. He spoke loudly of the atrocities he'd witnessed overseas, hoping someone cared to overhear. “Somalia was a fucking shithole. A fucking shithole, man,” he told the nurse loudly, shaking his head. “There were bodies laying around everywhere, man. One guy stepped out of a building and shot this 15 year old kid right in the head right in front of us.”

The nurse was suitably impressed, and let out a noise of resignation. Then he asked the Marine where he was going.

“I got this little black girl down south,” the Marine said. He spoke in a laconic, lazy drawl, using the word “motherfucker” frequently.

“Yeah, she's from Harem,” he said, “Harlem, motherfucker.”

“Oh, shit,” said the nurse, “that's the big fuckin' city.”

“She's still got a little bit of ghetto in her, you know” the Marine said, “but she's been civilized and all that. Like, she's got a jacuzzi in the back yard and a big screen teevee, all that shit. I'm staying for a month.” The girlfriend, he said, left for work every morning, where she sorted files for a record company, so he could sit on the couch all day by himself watching sports. At night, all she wanted to do was fuck, he said, like a little rabbit.

The nurse said that the other day he had picked up a “little twenty-four year old bartender.” He'd just strode into the bar, and all these other guys were hitting on her, and he'd just ordered a beer and sat there without talking to her, and before he knew it she came up to him and started hitting on him, and they fucked on Thanksgiving.

“That's how it is, man,” the Marine said.

“One time I was in this bowling alley in Albany,” the nurse said. The Marine gave him a quizzical look. “You know, Albany,” the nurse said. “So you got Oakland, then you got Berkeley, then you got Albany, and they're all connected together. So anyway, I was in this bowling alley in Albany on Mother's Day, and I picked up this one sister at the bar. We ended up going out to the back of my truck...” His voice fell almost to a whisper as he described their act of copulation in the back of the truck. “Weirdest thing I ever did. Well, not the weirdest. I've done some weird shit. Then she asked me if I wanted a forty. I was like, 'Shit, is this your Mother's Day present?'”

Both he and the Marine let out a series of wheezing laughs, the Marine eventually coughing up a ball of phlegm, which he swallowed.

“Heard there's a strip joint around here somewhere,” the Marine said. We were headed south out of Eureka.

“Yeah, it's right up here, right out of town,” said the nurse, pointing out T-Great Razooly's Tip Top Club.

"Heard it varies," the Marine said.

"Yeah, it varies," the nurse said.

They got to talking about gunshot wounds. The Marine wanted to know if the nurse ever saw any of them at the emergency room.

“Yeah, we just got one the other day,” the nurse said, “Some guy had come up and shot this guy at point blank range with a .22 rifle. The bullet went through his--” He stopped to think. “His liver, his diaphram, and his lung, and it missed his spine by, like, two inches.”

“No shit?” the Marine said.

"Yep," the nurse said.

“The other day I was walking down the street, after I had had a few beers at the bar, you know," the Marine said. "I was just about ready to go crash out. It was the end of the night. And I see this big crew of high school boys coming at me. Like, four, five of 'em. And high school boys ain't small.”

“Shore ain't,” the nurse said.

“Anyway, one of 'em asks me for a cigarette, so I'm like 'Sorry, bro,' cause I was flat out,” said the Marine. “And then they starting gettin' up in my face and shit, you know. Like 'you motherfucker, I'm gonna kick your ass,' and this and that, you know. Fucking bullshit.” The Marine's voice rose to an innocent tenor, and he showed the nurse his palms. “I said, 'You know what, bro? You're a kid. If I hit you I'm going to jail.' But anyway, this one motherfucker starts circlin' round behind me and swings at me, and gets me with a ring or something, you know, like, he didn't really connect but his ring got me. So I fucking pull out my knife and grab one of 'em by the collar, and I got my knife right up under his nose, and I says 'You're messing with an ex-Marine with a big fucking knife.' They all ran off after that.” He let out another hoarse laugh.

“Oh, shit,” the nurse croaked solemnly.

The bus stopped in front of the liquor store in Rio Dell to pick up a motley collection of serious madmen in suspenders and snow boots and leather pants. They were lined up in front of a bear statue carved with a chainsaw from a big hunk of redwood, beside which sat a huge stack of empty Taaka Vodka shipping boxes. In the window, Copenhagen snuff was on sale for $4.49 a can, and Rusty the yellow lab was missing. There was an obese woman in a faded hoodie that said “Bad Dogs: Bite Me.” Her male companion wore a hoodie with a crucifix on it flanked by several skulls.

The driver announced that we'd be stopping for ten minutes. Everyone got off to smoke cigarettes in front of the liquor store. When they got back on the bus filled with the smell of hot dogs and fried chicken, the sounds of a toddler screaming, having shat in his diaper, and the sounds of the Marine licking his tattooed fingers.

Outside of Leggett the sun hit the western side of the bus and everyone passed out. The Marine curled up against the window like a raccoon in his den.

When he awoke again he cracked open a can of Joose, the popular malt-liquor soda pop. He opened in surreptitiously behind the seat so that the driver wouldn't see him. He took a few swigs and then belched up the carbon dioxide. The belched Joose fumes drifted under my nostrils.

Then the Marine tried to engage me in a conversation about the book I was reading, “The Catcher in the Rye. ”

“Good book,” he bellowed. “I heard it's banned in somethin' like 33 states. I wrote a big report about it in high school. Yep, I know a lot about that book.”

I said almost nothing. It was the first time I got a good look at his face, though. There was a gaping head wound above his left eye.

We were approaching Willits, where we'd have a layover. I imagined the people of Willits would be horrified at our arrival. They were like a coastal Gaulish village, and we were like a band of roving Vikings. There had hardly been such a high concentration of degenerates in one vessel since the golden age of piracy.

We rolled through the tidy downtown and into a neighborhood at the south end of town distinguished by its lack of aesthetic appeal. We rolled directly into the McDonald's parking lot. I knew there were several nearby Mexican joints that could have provided better meals for the same price, but I figured that this arrangement was part of Greyhound's “only the worst” policy. Either that, or they had a corporate kickback scheme with McDonald's.

Everyone filed out feverishly and lit cigarettes. The obese woman who had been listening to heavy metal at high volume in her earphones started eating Pop Rocks and Mentos. The woman with the screaming toddler was still chasing him around with a cigarette in her mouth, screaming back “Jeffrey, you come here this instant!”

Inside the McDonald's there was a twenty-foot line and a sign on the wall that said “Chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in foods or beverages sold or served here. Cooked potatoes that have been browned, such as french fries, hash browns and baked potatoes contain acrylamide. Burger buns, biscuits and coffee also contain acrylamide, but generally in lower concentrations than fried potatoes.”

On the way out of Willits we crossed a pass and started following the Russian River downstream. The Marine had something to say about that, too.

“I found a nice little place down there by the river,” he told the nurse. “Nice place to go swimming.”

“Oh?” the nurse said.

“Yep, but that river's contaminated,” he continued. “That's what they say.”

“Oh?” the nurse said.

Then they got to talking about femoral artery wounds. The Marine wanted to know if the nurse had seen any of those in the E.R. He related the story of a bum he knew who got stabbed in the leg with a box cutter recently and whose artery was narrowly missed in the process. “Did you ever get that guy?” he asked.

“Nope, I don't remember that,” the nurse said.

“Them femoral arteries,” the Marine continued. “One time in Somalia I had to reach up into this guys thigh and pull one of those out. No shit. He got hit by a ricochet and the artery retracted. The medic was screaming at me to reach up there and pinch it.”

“Yeah, them femoral arteries are bad,” the nurse said. “You can bleed out fast.”

In Ukiah, we stopped in the outskirts of the Wal Mart to pick up more travelers. There was a man with a handlebar mustache and hand tattoos wearing a full battle dress uniform, camouflage fatigues from head to toe. There were three black guys who gave the driver wilted I.D.s from New York State. One wore a leather jacket, a Yankees cap with the labels still attached, and jeans with skull designs weaved into them and an illegible, ominous slogan embroidered in the ass. One of the black guys had a shaved head, a full beard and a big tattoo on his throat. The third guy had what looked like the scar from a knife wound across his eye.

An old lady came on with her service animal. A drunken woman missing her front teeth came in behind her, telling everyone “God bless you” loudly. She was leading her senile mother along, and placed her in the seat behind mine. Then she started trying to convince the woman with the dog to sit near her. “I'd rather not sit near young children,” the woman with the dog said. “My dog is afraid of them.”

We pulled out and headed south. A conversation about blood transfusions and leukemia broke out in the row behind me. “He was coughing blood,” I heard someone say. “He was dead.” The guy in the fatigues sat next to the Marine, who began talking about himself again. That Marine was a tireless mill of bravado.

At Santa Rosa, there were at least twenty people waiting for the bus. The driver said we'd stay for twelve minutes. The woman with missing teeth staggered out, making a lot of noise and chatting up everyone, who ignored her, until the driver told her to “cool it.” The mothers all hustled out to smoke with their children. The “Welcome to My Hood” guy got out and rolled up his sleeves to reveal faded tattoos fully covering his forearms.

Outside stood a guy with a hospital wristband who screamed that he'd hit a wall going eighty-five miles and hour, and then sat down, cradled his face in his hands, and began to cry. One of the travelers, a short black man, fell over backwards when the driver asked for his ticket. As he struggled to right himself, the driver looked him over suspiciously. Another man wore a hoodie covered with safety pins and a skull-and-crossbones flag flag pinned to his back and three thick chains hanging from his belt and another baseball cap with the labels still attached. This must be some sort of low-class fad, this leaving of labels on hats.

The bus was just about full now. Someone finally had to sit next to me. It turned out to be a skinny little man with a pony tail and halitosis who asked me what I was reading. I politely informed him. Then he put on ear buds, plugged them into his laptop and watched a movie.

In Oakland, I got out behind the drunken woman with no front teeth and her senile mother. The woman chasing Jeffrey dropped her bag, and McDonald's toys exploded across the pavement. I hopped over them.

At the side of the bus, I collected my bag. It was covered in motor oil stains. Then I wandered into West Oakland, past a screaming woman with a baby and a man berating her.

FINIS.