Going Home

11.12.01 | 11:53 PM ET

Omaha, Nebraska
Wednesday, August 8, 2:40 a.m.

A twelve-inch TV dangling off a mechanical arm shows the Home Shopping Network. They’re auctioning Ichiro Suzuki rookie baseball cards. The snack bar sells bacon and eggs, ham and cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, burgers, fries, apples and oranges. A young short order cook waits for someone to order. Next to the snack bar is a gift shop that sells cassette tapes, baseball caps, sunglasses, and inflatable Greyhound buses. There is no newsstand—no newspapers, no magazines, no paperback books. Outside, on the front steps of the terminal, a half-dozen guys stand and smoke, gazing into the Omaha night, as if anticipating the arrival of their destinies.

I am listening to Dale, a veteran trucker from Arkansas, deconstruct the romance of long-distance trucking. He’s 48 or so, youthful in a Carville-esque kind of way. He’s wearing tinted glasses, a flannel shirt, jeans and black cowboy boots. He speaks in relentless bursts, the way you might expect someone who’s spent such a large chunk of his life having no one to talk to he’s not gonna wait for the niceties now that he has a captive audience. You see, our connecting bus doesn’t leave for Sioux Falls until 4:30 a.m.

“Man, I’ve been busy,” Dale says. “Workin’ six, seven days a week since last Christmas. Hardly had a day off this year. When I git this sucker back from Spokane, I’m takin’ a week off and goin’ to Memphis. I need it. Big time.”

“Is Memphis fun?” I ask.

“It is when I show up,” Dale says. “I have a lotta tension to work off.”

Dale is going to retrieve a truck abandoned in Spokane by a rookie driver, who wasn’t quite prepared for the rigors of cross-country trucking. Apparently, it’s a common event. A guy drives forty or fifty harrowing hours across the country, his speed wears off, nervous system crashes, at which point he has an epiphany: This isn’t the life he thought it would be. He packs it in right there, on the side of the freeway.

These days, trucking companies use Global Positioning Devices to track their trucks as they make their way across the country, so what Abandoning Drivers do is park under a freeway overpass—satellites can’t trace them there—open up the back of the truck, and sell whatever they can out of the back to make enough money to get home.

“I’ve bought big screen TV’s that way for a hundred and a quarter,” Dale says, smiling at the thought. “Hell, my whole house is full of electronic equipment I bought off the back of a semi parked under an overpass on the freeway.”

I’m going home, to Winnipeg, on the bus, to play golf with six guys I went to high school with. After September 11, ground travel has suddenly gone from quaint ‘50s anachronism to a suddenly viable—if not exactly desirable—form of travel. I ended up on a Greyhound Bus for pre-September 11 reason: I was a little slow to book an advance flight home. It was what I used to do, not now—not until airfares shot up to $700 or $800 and my choice was between going Greyhound or staying home counting the minutes in sullen, idle, spiritually noxious Los Angeles.

Last summer, I wrote for an entertainment dotcom. I had a development deal with Time-Warner to write a comedy pilot. My wife had a part on a television series, playing a British exchange student on a show starring a talking dog. For a brief moment, in a life together that was more uphill struggle than success story, we were earning $20,000 a month.

I got laid off from the dotcom, which went bankrupt a few months later, having burnt through $32 million in a year. My pilot wasn’t picked up. My wife’s series completed its season and wasn’t renewed. The NASDAQ bubble burst. Strike-talk scared all the studios into preparing a production-free summer.

This isn’t how you go home—hobbling back to town dead broke, sleep-deprived and smelly. You go home smelling good, telling cryptic stories of parties in the Hills with porn stars; the time you drove up Bel Air Road in a VW Bus to Quincy Jones’ estate, how he wanted to turn your play into a television series; the day you made page one of Daily Variety.

And yet, I’m not that down about it. I need some cheering up, and I expect I’ll get some. My friends have lived a variety of lives, some more lucky than others. Although we all grew up in the same several square miles of the same city, we all have lived divergent lives featuring a variety of education, incomes and aspirations. One is a real estate broker in Alberta who has three children and is filing for divorce from his wife. One is married, built a house on the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg, collects wine and is in perfect shape—he looks exactly the same as he did when he was 17 and played goalie. Another is a fundraiser with an MBA who wishes he was a standup comic or actor but never left Winnipeg. Another is a corporate lawyer in New York with a housing allowance who lives at the corner of Church and Warren Street, four blocks from where the World Trade Center used to be. A couple other guys got union jobs right out of high school and stayed at them. They’ve been steadily employed for twenty years, are married. One has kids, the other doesn’t. They own homes. I left for ten months in Europe and Africa immediately upon graduation in 1980 and for good in 1986. Since then, I’ve lived in Toronto, Grand Prairie Alberta, the West Bank, Montreal, Vancouver, New York and Santa Monica. You know what? If you added us up, we’d be one successful life.

They say your whole sense of yourself is based on what happened to you in high school. And the more I live, the more I realize that apart from family, my closest relationships were the ones I had with those guys I went to high school with. Mostly, we aren’t that close anymore, but high school was the time when we were the rawest, we had no shape, and all formed our ideas of ourselves together.

Meanwhile, in L.A. no matter how you’re doing, you go to parties, or to dinner, or to screenings, or to church, or to twelve step meetings, or to the cafe, you meet people for the first time. Quite often, you never see them again. As you grow older, making friends becomes more and more difficult. You wouldn’t think this would be the case, but it is. I can safely say I have no guy friends in L.A. The biggest shame of this summer reunion wouldn’t be arriving on a Greyhound. It would be not arriving at all.

A couple of them, as a form of jocular torment, emailed my itinerary to me, which I printed and tucked into a back pocket without actually reading. It’s a little scary when I read it, but a little less daunting when I actually make the stops: Los Angeles, Barstow, Las Vegas, St. George, Beaver El Bambi Rest Stop, Green River, Grand Junction, Denver, Ogalla, North Platte, Lexington, Grand Island, Omaha, Onawa, Sioux City, Vermillon, Beresford, Sioux Falls, Dell Rapids, Prairie Junction, Flandreau, Brookings, Arlington, Watertown, Summit Corner, Sisseton Junction, Fargo, Grand Forks, Pembina, Emerson, Letellier, St. Jean Baptiste, Morris, Glenlea, and eventually, 7:15 Thursday night, Winnipeg.

The PA announces pre-boarding for the bus to Sioux Falls. Re-boarders first. That’s me. I grimly clutch my orange rectangular re-boarding pass, the thing that allows me to reclaim my original seat before new riders board. I hand it back to the driver and climb four steps into the darkened bus, making my way back to my original seat.

The desperate wish of every Greyhound traveler, in the middle of an all-night bus trip (in this case two nights) is universal: two seats to yourself. Please, please, please God, give me two seats. I’ll go back to church if you just give me two seats to stretch my weary body out. You sit on the aisle and pile things on the window seat—things you could not possibly move. You fake sleep. You roll your eyes back in your head, let your tongue loll around in your mouth, tremble uncontrollably or scratch your hair violently, simulate a seizure—anything that might discourage someone from stopping and asking, “Is that seat taken?”

A young blond guy, maybe 21 or 22, does just that. “Mind if I sit there?”

He’s pointing at the open seat next to me. He’s on his way from Delaware back to his home in small town Minnesota. “I had a job dismantling grain elevators,” he says. “I thought it would be easy money. Then I get to Delaware, and these things are huge. Sixty-feet high. And pulling them apart is backbreaking, man. I wasn’t ready for that. Ripping strips off a grain elevator. It’s intense. And the insides of grain elevators are disgusting, man. Filthy. You don’t wanna know. I hurt my wrist on like the second day. Told the guy I was leaving. He gave me a bus ticket back to Minnesota and fifteen bucks.”

Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Thursday, August 9, 8:30 a.m.

The terminal at Sioux Falls is straight out of an early ‘60s desegregation movie. An outtake from “In the Heat of the Night,” maybe: long, wooden aisles, vending machines, a lonely corner ticket counter, walls bare except for a clock and a couple Go Greyhound posters.

There’s a forty-minute layover until the bus leaves for Fargo. It’s breakfast time.

“Excuse me,” I say to a woman at the counter. She’s about thirty, with glasses and long brown hair.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Do you know where I might find a quick cup of coffee?” I ask, waiting for her to direct me to the nearest coffee shop.

Instead, she says, “I’ll get you one.”

What was that? A sneak attack of Human Decency?

She disappears into a back room, from where I hear her ask, “Do you take cream?”

“Black,” I say, “Black is great.”

A cup of coffee and a set of brushed teeth later, we are back on the bus, hurtling through the prairies towards Fargo. Oddly enough, Dale is back on my bus. After having last seen him in Omaha, he’s now right across the aisle from me, spewing a stream-of-consciousness at a couple North Dakota spinsters who appear thrilled to be engaged in conversation with a man.

I flip open a paperback copy of Robert Crais’ novel “Demolition Angel” and read.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is reading paperbacks on long, meandering Greyhound bus trips. The bus, with its days-long rides across thousands of miles of interstate highway, puts me in a kind of trance, blesses me with a focus that real life rarely affords anymore. On a bus, the endless and relentless distractions of real life are nowhere to be found.

There’s just you, a highway, and fifty hours to kill.

The bus drives north, and the landscape grows sparser. There’s a Twins baseball game on my Walkman that fades in and out as we pass through one honky-tonk North Dakota small town after another.

The bus stops over in Fargo for an hour, then resumes its northward journey. Despite the fact that Greyhound trips are broken into one long, consecutive chunk of travel time—fifty hours, in this case—they are really four or five smaller journeys strewn together. You don’t necessarily get sleep deprived, either. I’ve found that often, I spend whole twelve-hour chunks of travel in a semi-coma, as if drugged. Riding the Greyhound, you finally begin to understand what Janis Joplin meant when she said, “It’s all the same fuckin’ day anyway.”

There’s a half-hour rest stop for dinner in Ogalla, where I go for a walk across a bridge that spans a dried-up riverbed. It’s seven o’clock at night, the temperature still around 85 degrees. I walk past rail yards, trying to remember what’s significant about Ogalla, when it hits me: Ogalla was made famous in “Lonesome Dove” because it was where Gus McCrae’s long-lost love Clara lived. Ogalla, from what I can tell, hasn’t changed much. It still seems lonely, a place young people yearn to escape, same as the way I yearned for most of my youth to get out of Winnipeg. It’s odd how you have to get back on the bus to recall those feelings, to be able to connect the dots that led you to Los Angeles.

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Thursday, August 9, 8 p.m.

They don’t have my bag. “Oh, that happens all the time at Customs,” a guy explains. “They pull the bag and it crosses on tomorrow’s bus.” Too bad for me. At eleven the next morning I have to leave town to play golf all weekend. My bag, it turns out, gets re-routed to Toronto, and doesn’t show up in Winnipeg until Monday morning at nine o’clock. By that time, I smell like hell.

This was the slow way home, that’s for sure. But know what? Who gives a damn? Who was it that decided “slow” was a bad thing? There are a lot of things that improve, the slower you go. Maybe not the economy. But maybe we’ve spent far too long confusing “the economy” with “our lives.”

Sadly, maybe it takes planes exploding into skyscrapers to recall that they’re two entirely different things.

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