Trailways Koan Part I
The first part of a short story
In the late summer of 1978 I was 17 years old. I was finished with high school and decided to set off on a cross-country trip to prove my independence. I filled my old Boy Scout backpack with the aluminum frame with clean clothes, paperbacks, and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. On the bottom was tied my sleeping bag. For two weeks I would travel alone by Trailways buses with an unlimited “Travel Anywhere” pass. I’d seen a television advertisement for it and decided that’s how I was going to see America.
Being heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac I wanted to see San Francisco and get away from home. My relationship at home with my mother was contentious, fractured, and miserable. We argued most of the time so I stayed in my room, smoking pot and listening to music, while she occupied the recliner chair in the living room opposite the blaring television.
Looking back I wonder how I convinced Mom to permit me do it. Maybe it was the path of least resistance since she couldn’t control me then. To let her know I was alright on the road, she had me call her collect with a fake name. She would decline the call. If I called collect with my real name, she would accept the call and we’d talk. Long distance calls were expensive back then.
Maybe Mom let me go because back in the mid-1950s, when she was almost 30, she took two long trips with her twin sister and their two friends who’d all grown up in the same Bronx neighborhood where my grandfather and uncles had their drug store. They were post-war modern working women who lived with their parents and had their own money to spend. They bought a Chevrolet with a manual transmission; a beast of a car and almost impossible to parallel park, and drove to the West Coast. They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, like the Mertz’s and Ricardo’s. Mom was disappointed it was painted orange and not gold. Yep, black and white fantasies will do that to you.
Their other trip was to Europe. They arrived in England during a rail strike. She told me how hard it was to get around because of it. Her travel stories fascinated me. I loved her luggage with the stickers of different places on it. She gave me a small black coin purse with coins from every country she’d visited. As a child I often looked at the strange money and wondered where I’d go when I was older.
Perhaps she acquiesced to my journey because of her own travels. She surely was apprehensive given my instability and proclivity to get into potentially dangerous situations. Again, I don’t remember what I said, but it must’ve been convincing because I was on the subway with a ridiculous orange backpack riding down to Eight Avenue and Forty-Second Street to catch a bus for Chicago.
I gave my backpack to the driver who loaded it in the storage compartments underneath. I sat in the smoking section in the rear (those were different times). The toilet was also in the rear. It smelled of disinfectant. That didn’t last long. With a book and a pack of cigarettes I was ready to get started. I slumped down in my seat, reclining it, and started reading. It was probably Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s story of Zen angels, traveling and solitude in nature.
Eventually everyone was boarded and we rolled out and headed north. I watched the Palisades and Hudson River from the window. At the George Washington Bridge, a marvel of engineering with a terrific view of the city from the upper deck, we picked up more passengers. Once across the bridge and heading west I picked up my book and didn’t look up until we were well into Pennsylvania.
The interstate made no impressions on me. The only thing I remember was an exit sign in State College that read “Beaver Terrace.” Mysterious, indelible, and weird. My interior joke was the location of Penn State’s sororities.
Traveling through Ohio and Indiana I saw corn fields for the first time. I was impressed by the sheer quantity that grew there. We stopped in Gary and Toledo and I observed poorer neighborhood with billboards for Kool cigarettes and Schlitz Malt Liquor, that filled me with a strange feeling. These particular advertisements and marketing to African Americans felt new and unexpected. This wasn’t Harlem. These were black neighborhoods in American places I was passing through, an outsider looking in.
When we arrived in Chicago I found myself under elevated train tracks with my gear on my back. I was on Wabash and I asked some dude where The Loop was. I was going to stay at the local YMCA and close to there. He said, “This is The Loop” Twenty minutes later I watching roaches climb the walls of my room.
I complained to the desk clerk downstairs and demanded a new room, which turned out not to have a room number on it. This creeped me out because reminded me of the movie So Long At The Fair where Jean Simmons searches for her missing brother in a hotel. As I was locking my room up to go find a restaurant for dinner, a short bald white man tried to sell me a portable television. Amused, terrified, and suspicious I summoned all my New York survival skills and told him to fuck off. I lit a cigarette and ventured out to downtown Chicago. I had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake at a diner near the bus station. This was my go-to meal for the entire trip. I returned to the Y and went to bed early. I woke up in the dark thinking it was just before dawn and went downstairs to check out. The lobby clock showed it was midnight. It freaked me out and I slept fitfully the rest of the night thinking I was going to miss the next bus.
The next day I walked around downtown on some of the bridges over the Chicago River looking down at the water and up at the buildings. It was like the opening of The Bob Newhart Show. I also checked out the park by the lake. Then I checked out and boarded the bus to Denver.