Caligula's Blush

Perhaps it was very appropriate that the final movie they played on the Greyhound hell-ride from CA to MN was none other but Gore Vidal’s 1979 sleaze-flick/Roman history biopic  “Caligula.”  I shit you not. 

29 hours into the ride when I was about to crawl out of my own skin I realized that when a Greyhound bus gets a certain distance from a place that could possibly issue any kind of punitive retribution – all official protocol goes right out the window.   

I noticed this filthy looking old white man who got on the bus somewhere in Northern Arizona, talking to the driver a couple hours into a long stretch of no towns. This bus had little TVs installed all over the bus and you could listen to whatever was on them if you plugged some headphones in to the little jack on the back of the seat in front of you.  He must have been asking if he could put a movie in for us all to watch.  How kind of him. The driver’s bored voice came over the intercom and I thought he was going to announce the next town we were stopping in, but he was just asking if anyone had any objections to watching a movie. Nobody spoke up. He didn’t exactly say what movie it was, but no one hardly even reacted anyway. 

I thought it was funny how many kids there were on the bus and how none of the parents objected to anything in the 2.5 hour orgy of blood, incest, lunacy, and Roman history. I’m just as perverted as the next gal, but through the first hour of it I felt like I had witnessed 15 children get eye-raped by the cinematic feature chosen by a guy who looked like he could be a relative of John McCain.  The second hour, however – I got more comfortable with the absurd events unfolding before me.  I found it actually QUITE appropriate that such a film was going to be heralding my arrival in the upstanding Midwestern town where I would begin my reign of nihilistic excess and titular exploitation of flesh.  It was kind of a boring film in parts, but I’ll say that I gave it “one thumb up, one thumb down” from the relative seclusion of my seat in the back under my blanket. You savvy?

To kill the agonizing boredom it even crossed my mind to try and score someone in the lavatory.  This idea was very short lived for a number of reasons.  The thought of it even made me see and hear violent static and black & white flashes for a couple seconds.  A: There is NO Greyhound equivalent to the “mile-high club.” Don’t even consider it folks.  B: The smell might have made me vomit all over my partner, which is a buzzkill – unless you’re into that sort of thing. And most of all, C: There was not one soul who rode on that bus from CA to MN who I would have even considered talking to, let alone conquering in that 70 mph shithouse.

A Greyhound bus honestly has to be the absolute worst way on earth to travel from one place to another. I would have seriously felt more comfortable, and safer duck-taped to the corrugated rear bumper of a semi than in the greasy, cramped, flatulent confines of that damned hell bus.  Sure I was feeling a little suicidal and prone to self mutilation back in S.oCa.l , but what I very painfully learned on that bus was that there are certain kinds of torture I actually don’t enjoy. Correction – CAN’T enjoy.  While buying your motor coach ticket online from the comfort of a home in sunny Cali.forn/ia – you truly have no concept of what 51 hours on a bus feels like.  It’s a whole week of work plus 11 hours of overtime… spent in the company of the old man who farts and uses the bus toilet every hour, and the LA gangbanger and his baby mama who he argues with in their own incoherent language, or the greasy and fat old woman in the calico muumuu who twitches a lot and carries a big stuffed dog for comfort. You can’t just get off in one of the towns unless you want to stay there for another 8 hours till the next bus breezes in and you try your luck with the next rogue’s gallery of societal throwbacks. Maybe I’m being harsh, but I feel needle pricks and the sound of buckets being pounded with hammers every time I think of that bus ride.  Maybe it helped me understand that Chinese guy in Canada who beheaded his seat neighbor on a Greyhound trip as he slept a couple weeks ago.  The guy even took bites of the corpse after he was done displaying the severed head to the rest of the passengers.  And they didn’t even show “Caligula” on their bus. Well… maybe they did?

I even skipped my favorite pill and didn’t drink any coffee in hopes I could just sleep through the whole living nightmare. I bought some cheap sleeping pills at a gas station when we stopped. 

The whole ritual put me out for about 10 hours but that only added to the terror of it all. I fell asleep when it was light out, and woke up in a different state, at night, groggy as hell,  had gotten my period, confused and depressed because I had skipped my prescription, and absolutely disoriented.  The bus was also now full of people when it had been somewhat sparse when I fell asleep. I couldn’t see who was next to me since I was blaring stimulus so jaggedly.  I didn’t want to see. I was learning also that I did indeed have a ‘comfort bubble’ and the entire bus was violating it like farm boys loving sheep.    

I had only slept for 10 hours; roughly 1/5^th of the entire trip. I knew there were still double digits ahead of me but somehow I was able to keep it together. So proud of myself for not totally losing it and beheading someone.  I thought of sending in my application to NASA for that theoretical “1 Person, 1 Way” Mars mission I read about. With that kind of emotional stamina displayed from CA to MN, I know that 6 months in a capsule alone on a kamikaze science field trip to Mars would be like ice cream in the park compared to the Greyhound ride. Every time that old man hacked up phlegm in to that hanky I thought my jaw would unhinge itself and I would chew through my own cheeks like something out of “Event Horizon.”   

When I finally arrived in the middle of the night at the bus station in Minneapolis, I felt like a martyr for the human race. I really wanted a huge dick hanging between my legs because it seemed like I could use it like a shotgun to blast my contempt for that silver bus and everyone on it in a sticky white atomic discharge that would send them all to the 9^th level of Hades where they all belong. Maybe that’s why I am liking Minneapolis so much; it lives on in my mind as the place where I finally got off that motherfucking bus.   

I was trying to be as smart  as I could about conserving that pot of money back home, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have paid 8 grand for a plane ticket to Minneapolis as an alternative to that. I realized I saved $300 by taking the bus over a plane.  Now $300 won’t buy back the piece of my soul that ride took from me. 

It’s clear now that the pent up rage and sexual frustration that fueled my first two (and possibly favorite) fucks in Minneapolis was a result of that ride. So in the end, it turned out okay. But never again so long as I live will I ever take a Greyhound anywhere except for the race track.