Escape to Raleigh

For years, I've relied on the kindness of strangers to get me through the holidays. I make for a good distraction at most dinner tables: the curious person who clearly does not belong. The orphan with soot on his cheeks and unrefined manners, grateful to be in from the cold with a warm plate of food before him.

This is how I found myself on a 12-hour Greyhound trip down to Raleigh, North Carolina last week. Surrounded by a swarm of coughing, wheezing mouth-breathers. The bus may have been heading directly to a morgue because everyone around me seemed to be suffering from the final stages of the Bubonic Plague. I had over 24 hours worth of "WTF with Marc Maron" and "This American Life" podcasts loaded onto my iPod to help me take my mind off of the hellride... but 12 hours of sub-human conditions is a long way to go without getting your spirit broken a bit.



Early morning at the Raleigh bus station, waiting for my buddy to pick me up, I struck up a conversation with a man who'd just gotten out of prison. (Rather, he struck one with me.) I was at my final destination but he had hours to go before his transfer bus arrived. He muttered something vague about what he was in for, as if to reassure me it wasn't something diabolical. His first and last stint in jail, he promised me. He got to Raleigh expecting to go home to his wife but it turns out that his wife was in prison herself. Seems she got herself addicted to the crack pipe and was "slingin pussy to pay for it—slingin pussy out her arms, her pant legs, any which way she could so she could buy more rock". He could've paid her bail but she didn't write him once when he was in lockup, so he was taking off.

I nodded sympathetically as if I personally related to his predicament.

I thought to myself, This is the last time I'm taking Greyhound if I can help it...

[Two days later, I paid the extra dosh to hop a train back to NYC.]