baby on the greyhound bus
i once quit everything to live on the greyhound bus. i'm gonna tell you all about it, starting with only this tiny bit because in ten minutes I need to pick up my kids
i want to find a picture of me actually on this trip, but they’re all in a suitcase somewhere because this was of the getting-your-photos-actually-developed era
ok, very long story short that maybe I’ll get into in a more in-depth way another time, but when I was 25 i bought an all-you-can-ride two month ticket on the greyhound bus. i have no idea if such a promotion still exists, but i was desperate to leave new york city, to be alone, to see the country, to “figure out what my whole problem is” (reader: it was drinking,) and basically to make my world feel small and manageable by isolating it to literally sitting on the greyhound bus and looking out the window.
me sometime shortly before i left for the trip, drinking in my Brooklyn apartment, where the rent for my room was- i believe- FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS. are you jealous of my advanced age yet?
and on that note, AGE REVEAL/important context: this was literally so long ago that i did not have a smart phone. i had some kind of Nokia brick that i had to t-9 text people with, and i remember agreeing with a friend at a bar on the lower east side a couple days before i left that we probably wouldn’t be texting each other because “texting is weird and dumb.” what this meant is i actually spent that trip doing what i’d intended- thinking, looking out the window, having weird interactions with strangers, and picking my next destination based on the paper book of hostels i’d brought with me + a LITERAL MAP i’d consult, to try to determine which hostel was walkable enough-ish from whatever greyhound station i’d randomly selected. sometimes- a lot of times actually- i ended up places not because i thought they seemed particularly interesting, but because they offered the irresistible combo of a greyhound station + a hostel that answered their phone (and didn’t appear to be run by a serial killer) within a couple miles of one another.
quick sidenote, isn’t it amazing the kind of skills we used to possess?!? my phone died in the car recently- in the borough of Brooklyn, in which i live and have on and off spent the last 20 years- and i had a brief moment of like I AM DONE FOR! HOW WILL I EVER RETURN HOME, ‘TIS THE END OF ME I SHALL WANDER THE STREETS LOST AND BROKEN FOR ALL OF MY DAYS!
oh man okay though- i have to go pick up my kids now!!!
before i go i want to say that there are very specific objects that immediately come to mind when i remember this time period: gas station granola and a carton of 2 % milk i’d open and dump the granola into, a blue seattle seahawks hoodie, a giant book about supervolvanoes, camel lights and sometimes parliament lights and sometimes whatever anyone would give me, the bus window and the way it felt on my forehead- sometimes cold, sometimes warm. more often than i am proud to admit- the taste of the window too. it’s hard to lean against a window for hours and not end up tasting it a little bit, harder than you might think. it didn’t taste bad, necessarily. there is that weird way sometimes that dirty things taste good, like if you’ve been running around outside on a hot day and then you lick your arm, or sweat just kinda falls into your mouth and you swallow salt and dirt and... it’s kinda good, right? maybe I’m just disgusting. but i do remember thinking those windows tasted like a thousand peoples’ handprints and hot little dreams, most of them abandoned, all of them furiously yearned for. that i was accidentally swapping saliva and DNA and fecal matter, probably ugh, with SO many people, everyone desperate for something and most of us unlikely to get it. it’s probably obvious that i was reading a lot of Bukowski back then.
OH. but the story my adhd brain insanely thought I was going to be able to tell you in these ten little minutes (ha!) which has now been twelve minutes and i am running late, is:
One regular afternoon on the bus somewhere in Montana, we lurched into a gas station for a ten minute stop. a harried but adorable teenaged mom who’d been sitting nearby and i’d shared several “ two youngish girls on the bus together” smiles with clocked that I didn’t seem to be getting up this time. she asked if i’d mind holding her baby for a minute, she wanted a snack and a smoke and she’d be right back, would that be ok???
i paused for a second, in the way that you do when you feel pretty sure you’re a person who should have zero responsibilities, especially live human ones, but then i said okay. the girl needs a moment, let me give her that moment, i can hold a baby for five minutes, i thought. i want to be the kind of person who can hold a baby for five minutes, so maybe if i say yes it will help transform me into the kind of person who can hold a baby for five minutes.
what i probably looked like when the girl handed me the baby, except way more freaked out.
so i held the baby, and regretted it IMMEDIATELY. i felt insanely itchy, suddenly desperate to run outside and smoke myself. why had i decided to be good and not smoke at this stop? what an idiot! this is what happens when you try to be good, people hand you their fucking babies, i told myself.
but it was too late. i was a mother now. i held my ephemeral baby and wished it was a cigarette. I wondered if i’d ever grow out of my selfishness enough to hold a baby and think it feels like anything but resentment.
out the window, wistfully, i watched the real teen mom disappear into the gas station, then rush behind it to smoke. i decided to stop being so crazy and just attend to the baby for a goddamn second. i looked at the baby, and she was cute. i gently poked her little nose. boop. she smiled and burped and her burp smelled amazing, like she had no toxins inside of her. her tiny body and organs must be so pure, i thought. i hope you never start smoking, i whispered. i started enjoying the baby, like you enjoy a baby you know you’ll get to hand back to someone in 2 minutes.
that’s when the bus driver announced we were about to leave, and i realized the girl was still gone. i scanned the bus, making sure she wasn’t just crouched down in a weird place or something. nope. I scanned the gas station and parking lot out the window, the surrounding sadly cared for trees- nothing. where the fuck was she?! i could feel my heart starting to race and i looked at the baby almost accusatory like do you know where she is?!?!?!?! the baby didn’t know either.
the baby and i locked eyes, and there was A WHOLE UNIVERSE inside my mind that happened in those next sixty seconds before the girl came hurtling back through the bus doors, looking freaked out and out of breath.
i can’t even explain the relief i felt, seeing her push her exhausted teen body towards us down the aisle. I think she was wearing a Sublime t-shirt, crooked eyeliner. I don’t remember her name, or if she ever gave it to me. She took the baby and i felt like my life was given back to me, and then it occurred to me that she might feel the opposite. A look passed between us - she’d thought about not coming back. She’d thought about making a break for it. She’d thought about leaving that baby on the bus with me, and in that hot second of a shared look, we both knew it.
We sat back down, a few rows apart, and the bus lurched forward. We rode together for at least 7 more hours, made a few more stops, passed each other on the way to the bathroom or in line to buy a soda, but she didn’t ask me to hold the baby again. She stayed with the baby, and now I went outside and smoked. I felt guilty for my freedom, sneaking looks at her between puffs. She looked so small through the bus window, a kid trapped in steel, a smaller kid strapped to her body. I wondered where she was going, and what she was running from. She didn’t speak to me or even look me in the eyes for the rest of the trip, even though before all of this we’d been friendly. i tried to make eye contact with her, but she was deeply committed to avoiding my gaze. which i understand.
i wanted to share one more look with her SO BADLY. i wanted her to look at me, so she could see that i didn’t blame her, that i didn’t judge her, that in my opinion it was okay she thought about abandoning her baby with a random 25 year alcoholic girl on the bus because ultimately, she decided not to. she might have wanted to, but she came back. her impulse to run didn’t make her evil or broken or bad, it was just a fucked up moment that happened and there were probably a million good reasons why. i could imagine wanting to do the exact same thing. I still wish I could tell her that. I still hope she and that baby are okay.
This moment would haunt me too. I was a teenage mom and those days when you imagine just walking away are so powerful. It's impossible to explain how important it is to imagine it,even take a few steps, and then the terror/relief of the return. You've captured it as a witness/participant. I want to know more about your two months on the bus .
I really liked how you began this; with this sense of emergency since you needed to pick up your children.
So there I am, silently urging you to get on with the story so that you don't have to leave in the middle of it.
Then, later, I'm willing the bus driver not to drive off yet. Wait! Please! There's a mother that needs to come back for her child.