Riding the Dirty Dog

Republishing here, with light-editing, a long-read about Greyhound bus travel I wrote for VICE print magazine back in 2015. The print mag was always hard to get a hold of, and the private equity conglomerate that has bought VICE has left the online archive all but unreadable. Special thanks to photographer Bobby Abrahamson for the accompanying photographs, from his 2001 Greyhound trip.

In the 1957 Jayne Mansfield-heavy film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, an assistant mechanic named Kit Carson stands chatting with a lunch-counter girl with Hollywood ambitions in a dusty Central Valley bus depot. “I wonder if there’s going to be any important people on the bus today?” the girl asks.

“Important people don't ride buses,” Kit says.

Nelson Algren taxonomized the non-people he would run into while traveling in his short book Nonconformity: “The pool shark hitchhiking to Miami or Seattle, the fruit pickers following the crops in the 1939 Chevy with one headlight gone and the other cracked… the ‘unemployed bartender,’ ‘unemployed short-order cook,’ ‘unemployed salesman,’ ‘unemployed model,’ ‘unemployed hostess,’ ‘self-styled actor,’ ‘self-styled artist,’ ‘self-styled musician’… Their names are the names of certain dreams from which the light has gone out.”

The dregs of the American dream. Though seemingly dated, vanquished Beat-lit stereotypes, these hustlers, dealers, prostitutes, and “freelancing phonies” never really went away—they’re still here today, tucked on the back of a Greyhound bus.

Sometime in 2002, I caught a chance ride to Fort Benning, Georgia, for a protest against the School of the Americas—the academy responsible for training the Latin American paramilitary death squads. I watched frocked Catholic priests thrust themselves over the base’s ten-foot-high fence to do nonviolent civil disobedience, and linked up with two young transients on their way down to Florida.

After the protest, we caught a ride with a guy in a Buick, taking turns driving through the night. On a misty two-lane road in southern Georgia, a rural sheriff pulled us over and ran our IDs. One of my new friends had a warrant and was taken to jail—his girlfriend was only 17, and apparently her parents didn’t approve that he was 18. We drove around to three different ATMs to get bail money and made Gainesville the next morning, stumbling into a Denny’s, bleary-eyed.

In Gainseville, as if by magic, an expired Greyhound Ameripass made its way into our hands. Having never held an Ameripass myself, knowing only the legend, I examined it with awed reverence.

For the uninitiated, the Ameripass was a reasonably affordable laminated ticket that gave the holder 30, 60, or 90 days of unlimited bus travel throughout the United States and Canada. Originally marketed toward European backpackers and students on a budget who wanted to wander cities and towns by day and sleep on the bus by night, the Ameripass offered holders a glimpse of the “real” America before being rebranded as the Discovery Pass and then permanently discontinued in 2012.

For a talisman of such immense power—providing the bearer passage to literally anywhere in the continental United States—it was easily reproducible, just a laminated page of black-and-white text and numbers, long before the repressive era of QR codes. Along with the pass itself, we had been provided with a photocopied character set of all letters and numbers in the Greyhound font. So, we posted up at the Kinko’s, hunched over X-ACTO blades and paste, scraps of paper flying everywhere.

After we printed out the final copies, we stepped back to admire our handiwork.

It looked awful—a sloppy cut-and-paste job. The numbers and letters were unevenly spaced and tilted from side to side. “This will never work,” I muttered. “It’ll be just fine,” my companion said, though he sounded uncertain. When we brought them up to the lone Kinko’s employee to have them laminated, he grumbled. “You guys doing this all wrong! These look absolutely terrible!” Then he reluctantly laminated our passes. Sealed in legitimizing acetate, they looked a little bit more official.

+++

Anyone who has ridden Greyhound or is familiar with the bus line’s various nicknames—”The Dirty Dog,” “The Hell Hound”—understands that it is often an unpleasant experience. But what if that unpleasant experience was free? It’s hard to feel indignant and ripped off by free.

The plan was to go separate and meet up in Pensacola. The crusties I was with tried to clean up, pulling out septum piercings and putting on crumpled button-up shirts. Despite their best efforts, they still looked like dirty guys dressed up in normal-people outfits. Being the kind of person who waits for a friend to dive into a lake first to see if they hit jagged rocks, I opted out of the maiden voyage.

I said goodbye as they trudged off to the station, looking sullen and funereal. Given that one already had a warrant, I didn’t expect to see them again.

When I showed up in Pensacola a day later and went to a punk house, they were already there, drinking beer and Bacardi cans that had fallen off a loading dock. “No problem at all!” they shrugged when I asked them how it went.

After a nasty bar fight with some local military guys put a quick end to our time in Pensacola, my companions jauntily walked off to get on the bus to New Orleans, seemingly already comfortable and at peace with riding for free.

+++

It wasn’t until the next summer that I tried out my Ameripass, and even then I did so only out of desperation. After two days trying to hitchhike out of the Omaha sprawl and another spent in the tall grass of Missouri Valley waiting for a freight train that never slowed down, I stood in front of the Greyhound station, playing out my various escape plans should the attendant realize my Ameripass was a fake.

Eventually, I worked up my courage and sauntered confidently up to the counter. “Portland, please,” I said, trying to smile and exude charm. The lady scrutinized my pass and typed numbers into her computer. She looked at my ID. Then looked at me. Then looked at my pass again.

A single bead of sweat appeared on my forehead. All I could think about was running away. Then, like a slot machine hitting jackpot, the old dot-matrix printer started spitting out reams of tickets—transfers, layovers, itineraries, the whole undulating geography of Greyhound’s western route spilled out in black-and-white.

The Greyhound attendant put it all in a blue paper sleeve and handed it to me with a smile.

Outside the double doors, I tried to blend in with the thugs and cab drivers and meth-kids scavenging cigarette butts. An intercom squealed garbled departure schedules. I got in the long line for my bus.

After 45 minutes, when our driver appeared at the door to check tickets, a middle-aged woman went up to him and started asking him some questions. “I don’t have to put up with this!” he scowled. Then he abruptly closed the gate door and drove away in a half-empty bus, stranding us all there.

Another bus came an hour and a half later.

When I boarded, I headed immediately for the back rows, hoping to be discreet. As we careened out of Omaha, the new driver’s voice crackled over the intercom: “Anyone who wants to smoke or drink or do drugs on this bus—I WILL throw you off without thinking twice. I will throw you off in the middle of nowhere and make you walk. Then I’ll call the police to come get you.”

+++

On the Greyhound, even if you’re paying, you are not treated as a customer, a paying passenger. You are another inmate in prison transfer—you might be an adult, a grandmother, a veteran of foreign wars—but to them you are just a kid in detention, a kid being frisked by a cop, asked, “Do you have any needles that are going to poke me?”

As the bus rumbled over the prairie, people settled in and started getting to know each other. An older guy with a vampire tattoo on his hand struck up a conversation with me. He was heading west with his wife. She looked like RuPaul.

They said they were just married—he said he had hopped a freight train going 40 miles an hour out of Vegas to make their wedding. They kept discreetly dipping into a well-concealed cooler and pulling out bottles of Smirnoff Ice. Throughout the back of the bus, other people were quietly pulling out their brown bags, careful not to make a crumpling noise.

The vampire-tattoo guy’s wife fell asleep, and he started a flirty conversation with a big country girl in the seat by the toilet. When the bus pulled over at McDonald’s for a lunch break and everyone piled off, he asked his wife to go inside and get them some Big Macs.

As soon as she was off, he headed for the bus’s toilet. The country girl was waiting there for him, with wide, expectant eyes. As he crammed into the bathroom with her, he saw me staring and grinned, “I’ll buy you a burger if you don’t tell my wife what I’m about to do.”

Later that day, the bus abruptly pulled over near Cheyenne in a deserted parking lot. Two police cruisers flooded the bus with their lights and the driver stepped out. Everyone seemed visibly tense — each of us with our guilty secrets, looking ready to run. The guy with the vampire tattoo and his wife hid their empties and held each other tight.

As the cops boarded the bus, they made their way down the aisle, taking obvious pleasure in the discomfort of the passengers. Finally, they grabbed two Mexican guys— who went willingly, looking crushed. A few passengers mouthed objections, but most of them seemed relieved, as if thinking “Thank God it wasn’t me.”

Crossing Wyoming, I met a 26-year-old skateboarder who’d been living under a bridge in Santa Barbara all summer. We swapped cassette tapes and talked about Mike Watt and the Minutemen. When our bus pulled over at a deserted Dunkin Donuts in the middle of the night, we got high behind the dumpster.

Then we stayed up all night talking about aliens. After he fell asleep, for a long time I pressed my cheek to the cold window glass, looking out at the swarming stars and lunar cliffs. I watched the sun rise across the flat desert at 4:30 in the morning. The Greyhound was amazing, filled with treasured lifelong memories.

Boise was empty and glowing at dawn on a Sunday morning, like a movie set. I got some vending-machine coffee and had a peaceful moment peering up at the rumpled-bedsheet hills.

Crossing Idaho, I sat next to a middle-aged man who told me about his work fixing wind turbines. “It must be crazy to be so high up and close to those massive propellers,” I said. “It is crazy,” he said, his eyes moistening. He talked about following the contract work across the West. Then he tried to show me naked pictures of his girlfriend on his phone.

Two days later, finally, the bus finally pulled into verdant Portland, the city of dreams. I saw my friends waiting for me in the bus parking lot, outside the window. I ran out and grabbed them like a man who had been drowning—we spent the summer as one did in Portland in those days: riding bikes, drinking espresso, dumpstering from Trader Joe’s, and lazing indolently about in the grass.

+++

And so began a period of aimless travel, facilitated by the Ameripass and strung together with the flimsiest of excuses—visiting a girlfriend, visiting friends, trying to get home for the holidays. The important thing was to stay moving, crisscrossing the country, finding new nooks and crannies, state highways and little towns.

For restless-types—descendants of Cain cursed to wander the earth—the only peace is the peace of being in motion. Nothing is more comforting than an engine rumbling under a seat, landscapes passing in the window, the rows of fluorescent-illuminated products in an all-night truck stop—you have the most restful sleep of your life with your hoodie pulled up, using your backpack as a pillow.

When people say things like “I haven’t left town in two years,” you look at them in disbelief. How can they live like that. In the middle of the night, you look around the bus and feel moved at the sight of all the passengers sleeping soundly, curled up on one another, drooling and snoring —it reminds you of nap time at school, when the lights got turned off and all the kids took a nap together.

+++

You wake up in Pittsburgh, with its seething river and menacing Moriah-like mountains, the whole geography exuding a certain darkness as if lorded over by some winged black demon.

You wake up in Savannah, the old clock on the wall, the church-pew wooden benches, the drooping Spanish moss containing a strange, pregnant sense of blood history.

You wake up in Amarillo, where the yellow sunlight streams dustily through the huge windows and the station has been untouched by time—the pay phone is still 25 cents and there are coin-operated televisions attached to the plastic bucket seats.

You wake up in Dallas on a seething Saturday evening in summer and walk past all the people out on dates to a little corporate “green space” and fall asleep on the lush sod grass until you are roused by police.

How many times did I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble into the fluorescent station for a two-hour layover? Teenage ROTC cadets in their camo playing shoot-’em-up arcade games, a deadbeat dad making promises to his daughter on the pay phone, grandmothers sitting dignified on benches, heading down to Fort Lauderdale, a group of guys with crumpled dollar bills shooting dice on the Greyhound station bathroom floor, a security guard waking up the sleepers and making them display their tickets. All kinds of people being shuttled down the river Archeron.

In the Atlanta terminal, you sit next to a 90-year-old man who is wide-awake and reading through his papers. An elderly Spanish anarchist from Madrid named Unamuno—named after Miguel de Unamuno, the iconoclastic Basque philosopher who barely escaped being shot after delivering a pointed j’accuse to Franco’s generals in 1936.

Unamuno might be the most mysterious and interesting person you’ve ever met. He claims that he is an art and antiquities dealer and is traveling the country on behalf of a shadowy client he refuses to name.

You sit together and ride through the night, communicating in a mix of broken English and broken Spanish. The next morning, when you arrive in Raleigh, he blows off his connecting bus so you can go to breakfast together. You show him around your hometown. At the old diner, he pulls a pile of papers out of his leather satchel, scribblings, pamphlets, aphorisms, Venn diagrams, swatches of color—a new moral-philosophical system he’s created, his version of philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. You can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or he’s schitzophrenic.

You walk Unamuno back to the Greyhound station to see him off as he continues the trip north. You never see or hear from him again. Googling yields nothing.

+++

Adulthood sets upon you insidiously. Doors close, certain adventures grow stale, the body decays, and serious responsibilities to friends, family, health, and work begin to loom large. Your appetite for risky behavior diminishes commensurate with the embarrassment it has the potential to cause. Like all good citizens, you eventually understand that it’s just cheaper to put quarters in the parking meter than pay for a mess of parking tickets.

All noncompliant subjects will eventually be beaten into submission.

By the late 2000s, only a few stubborn lifers continued to mess with the Ameripass hustle, often to their own detriment. One friend, already four years into a dress-up salaried job but trying to milk the last drops from his youth, took a final trip on his fake pass that ended with his having to run and hide in the desert scrub brush.

Another guy I met had his pass confiscated in San Francisco. Yet another was caught using a fake Ameripass in Ohio, was arrested, and had to spend months going to trial, logging thousands of dollars in legal bills.

Like all the long-dead scams from the 1960s strewn across Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book! the Ameripass is now just a distant memory.

In 2007, Scottish transportation company Firstgroup bought Greyhound with the intention of rehabilitating the brand to compete with new, low-cost carriers like Megabus.

Greyhound’s comforting red, white, and blue logo was replaced with a silver-embossed dog—a sleek harbinger of a fresh, more comfortable era of American bus travel.

Recently, after a four-year or so break from riding the bus, I went to the Greyhound station in Raleigh and bought a ticket to New York—it was cheap, as cheap as Megabus.

The counter lady gave me an assigned seat on a svelte new vehicle with Wi-Fi, spacious leather bucket seats, and a nice bathroom. The other passengers sat by themselves quietly fiddling with their electronic devices and magazines. As we were getting ready to leave, someone shouted to the bus driver that the Wi-Fi was not working. To my surprise, the driver promptly and courteously fixed it.

The “new Greyhound” was unrecognizable.

After a few hours on the road, the bus pulled off at a rain-spattered rest stop in rural Virginia. The passengers cowered from the rain in a little gazebo, stretching their legs and smoking.

A graying, middle-aged guy with kindly eyes offered to share his cigarette with me. He was on his way back home to Petersburg, Virginia, after a month with his kids. As Southerners will do, we got to talking about the Civil War.

He told me that he had found a loaded Civil War–era musket and a Native American tomahawk while metal-detecting out behind his house along the Virginia. He even found an artillery cannon buried out behind an abandoned house and some ancient megalodon teeth while diving in Virginia’s muddy coastal rivers. “There’s all sorts of cool stuff buried out there… You just have to look for it,” he said.

Wow, that is so cool, I said.

A construction worker with a Massachusetts accent heading back to the Cape joined our conversation. “Oh, megalodon teeth,” he said. “I have a buddy who goes out diving for those!” When he learned I was a writer, he told me I could go live in some half-abandoned house up on the Cape he knew about.

Plans and dreams are discussed. Lives are shared and splayed open. It’s all still there.

There are still hidden places and fascinating people out there you’d never think to meet—secrets hidden in the underbrush. Dinosaur bones and dusty suitcases lie buried in the ground, waiting to be discovered.

As the great surveillance eye of the future tries to map and penetrate all known things and places, the hidden world never really goes away, just conceals itself deeper underground.

Endnote: Dear Nice People at Greyhound: the events and stories described herein are all fiction.