Prepare yourself...this one is a
doozy.
T'was three days before Christmas and all through the land,
not a traveler was stirring since airline travel was banned.
The children were nestled in uncomfortable airport chairs
with visions of their tree across the country and its festive wares.
Teddy the drag queen in his crown and I with my book
Had just settled on a bus bound for Colorado, by hook or by crook.
Yes...I just said drag queen. Not only that, but Teddy is the reigning "
Empress of Chicago" who does the most incredible Whitney Houston/Celine Dion/Billie
Holliday/Dionne
Warick/Carol
Channing impersonations I have ever seen.
Only I would end up sitting by a transgendered lounge singer.
The characters made the trip. My faithful companions who had been displaced days earlier kept me sane throughout our many adventures. Karl was a young South African studying to be a mechanical engineer. He spent most the trip making witty comments worthy of an Englishman. Lynnette and Melissa were 20-something friends from Boston who spent most of the trip, like me, finding humor to be the best coping mechanism. My undying gratitude goes out to Karl, Lynnette and Melissa for making the absurd bearable.
We think that we built up bad karma on the way to Omaha. Prior to the fateful bus change, we were happy as larks. We acquired our own set of seats and would curl up at every stop in order to take a short "nap." As a result, we made it to Omaha in what I now know to be the height of comfort. Teddy the
Empress was on the first bus, as was the Grizzly Bear. As a result of one man's intense snoring habit, Teddy bequeathed him his title. Once he woke up we wished that his loud, crude self would have stayed in hibernation. These were nothing compared to the leg of the trip Karl fondly entitled, "When Hell Froze Over."
We unloaded our bus and traipsed through the bustling streets of Omaha. I believe that we bumped into one whole person the entire way to the pizza place and all he wanted was money. After a great meal, we rushed back to the station to get in line to carry out our master plan to have our own sections again.
The station was brimming with people who were periodically yelled at by a rent-a-cop with a serious power trip. Our departure time came and went while we stood watching women's
WWE "wrestling" on a blinking box circa 1975. Absurdity had begun.
We filed onto the bus and to our dismay there were few seats left to be had. My traveling companions and I were separated. Karl and I ended up in the back row of three right next to the "washroom" with no hand sanitizer; the mother of all misnomers. I was by the window, Karl's 6 foot frame was next to me while Harvard Kelvin's tall self sat next to the "washroom." Karl began with a crack about how Kelvin should go outside and see how many of him the temperature was. Kelvin just studied. Karl hypothesized around 267 kelvin.
We sat in the bus packed like sardines for 2 hours before we departed Omaha. Our seats did not recline and the people in front of us refused to be gracious and not crush poor Karl who now had negative leg room. I tried my best "begging for mercy" face, which only ended with the lady in front of me flipping her seat up in a violent gesture while retorting, "How about YOU work for me tomorrow then!" The guy next to her reclined his back further trapping Karl. All of this happened while we had to watch a movie named "Paulie" about a talking bird followed by a movie about a runaway gorilla. I say "had to" because though 3 am would seem to be prime time for sleeping, our driver was convinced that watching movies at full volume was a much better torture instrument than our own individual attempts to follow the present numb state of our limbs into restless oblivion. Thankfully I was deeply intrigued by a sci-
fi novel about breeding child geniuses for intergalactic war.
Our driver would also stop randomly, circle parking lots, step outside for a moment and then resume "driving" only after she would briefly get stuck in a snow drift. Every shift of the gear was a low grind. The smell of the burning clutch was pungent since she never could quite find the right gear. Our bus swayed in the lanes, the hum of the engine interrupted by frequent "
thunkthunkthunk" intervals when she would stray too far.
Somewhere in Nebraska the absurd level peaked. We stopped to pick up a few travelers. Karl straightened up and remarked.."so, where exactly do we intend to put them? on the roof?" Of course not, that would be silly. Three women with babies and 5 others joined us. 5 men gave up their seats and stood for the remaining 6 hours. The driver later offered the men a "reprieve", to get off at a dimly lit rest stop to wait for another bus an hour behind that had a seat. Karl and others lobbied for refunds for them. This was shot down because obviously her solution was much more
accommodating.
One of those who generously gave up his seat was a young and talkative ROTC recruiter from Texas A&M. His constant ridiculous
verbiage was only halted when he got tired of standing and retreated to the "washroom" for the remainder of the trip to sit...yes I said sit...and read. He said the light was better in there.
We learned to live for our rare breaks from the traveling circus. One such location provided self-heating meals. I pondered the energy source that must be included, a small nuclear reactor perhaps? I decided that if sleep had actually visited, I would had missed out on all of the completely illogical meanderings of my brain.
Through the frozen window (our defroster apparently did not work and thankfully I had my
trusty Jamaican flag
beach towel to keep me warm) I saw the Rockies rise above the horizon a full 24 hours after our departure from Aurora. I said goodbye to my friends and stood with my pile of stuff among the thousands of other vagrants at the Denver bus station. I paid no attention to my disheveled state and thanked God that I had survived the journey, which will be story fodder for years to come.
The problem was...that that picture was taken in 1993 or 1994. I was a year or two behind the trends and fads. Hence my citizenship in Out of it-Ville. I think that I would have been completely mortified and dejected, unable to show my ice-skating rink of a forehead in public ever again, but, incredibly, I didn't feel that way at the time. All of my friends were in Out of it-Ville. I would gaze longly at Init Land, but honestly, can any of us say that it would have been worth it without our friends...our real friends?
