Now Loading In Track Two

By Tom Poland    
August 15, 2013

Part Two: Pranks, Meanness, & Fame

Part I, Inside The Bus Station, provided an inside view of how patrons and employees interacted in an early 1970’s bus station. Part II provides more of the same.

Ticket agents—a blue-collar fraternity of sorts—had a pack mentality toward unfortunates who frequented the station. We looked down on them and we could be cruel. A huge flint rock propped the steel door open on warm days and beyond the rock sat a dumpster, the receptacle of oily remnants of burgers a skinny greaser and a bucktoothed, freckle-faced girl peddled in the lobby grill.

One afternoon an agent came in to work the night shift.

Nonchalantly he said, A dude’s in the dumpster.

We went out for a look. All you could see were feet wiggling around as if he were snorkeling in the islands. Agent A.T. Smith picked up the rock.

Watch this.

He hurled it against the dumpster. Twenty feet away the explosion deafened me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like inside that steel echo chamber. The dumpster diver launched out, a surface-to-air missile flying backwards his hands morphed into rockets. He landed on his feet, running like a man on fire. Desperate, tattered, and malnourished, he nonetheless set a record for the 40-yard dash across West Broad and down South Hull Street.

One brutally cold January night, 10 degrees it was, a one-legged wino came into the lobby. He couldn’t quite manage his oaken crutches. He made it to the ticket counter and asked us if we had anything to drink. And he didn’t mean coffee. Half a bottle of cheap gin (purloined from an unlocked bag) had been gathering dust on a baggage shelf. We decided to give it to him.

Now don’t drink it here, I told him.

No suh, I won’t.

As soon as we handed it over he popped the cap and drank it dry. We had him arrested, taking consolation in the fact that he had a warm place to sleep on a 10-degree night.

When things slowed down and work turned boring some agents amused themselves going through unlocked baggage. What did they find? Reefer, cocaine, and all manner of pills, pornographic materials, guns, and money. A vehicle of mass transit can be a bad neighborhood on wheels.

As we walked this high wire of grime and crime we balanced ourselves with laughter, often at the expense of a fellow agent. Back then, before computers arrived, we used a catalog-like book to plot routes and connections, Russell’s Official Bus Guide. With this reference, red-covered and thick, a 1,000-page collection of all bus stops, times and routes in the USA and Canada, you planned cross-country trips for night riders. This tedious process demanded that you keep many pages open and that you focus with all your might. You made notes, lots of notes. Screw up and a traveler would be stranded. Screw up and you would hear about it. Worst of all it meant you actually had to work. You could not, for instance, walk right next door across Hull Street to the Dawg House, a pub, and drink beer and shoot pool while on the clock.

Every ticket agent lived in fear of that one call where someone wanted to go from Athens to, say, Maple Bay, Washington. The accursed agent would be tied up for an hour or more, plotting and making notes while the traveler patiently waited on the other end of the line. And if he was the only agent on duty, say late at night, it meant trying to serve passengers and answer other phones as he plotted the route. It was pure Hell.

Sometimes when we got stuck with such an onerous route to plot, we’d crinkle a wad of cellophane near the phone’s mouthpiece and hang up on the would-be traveler. Thus did we escape this fate worse than death. Damned sorry phone service!

We visited this meanness on each other. During moments of boredom, we’d research the most difficult routes to plot and when we had found the perfect route for tormenting a fellow agent, we’d get a friend to pose as a traveler and call in. At the precise moment the call was to come in we busied ourselves. One night the mark, Jimbo Wilson, a fellow always wanting us to work his night shift, picked up the phone.

Bus station.

A frown formed. Shielding the phone with his hand, he looked at us for pity. Damn, this guy wants to go to Maple Bay, Washington.

Ah man, you’re screwed.

Jimbo thumbed through the guide muttering. He leaned over and into the Russell Guide. We went out behind the station and laughed until we couldn’t laugh anymore.

We brushed shoulders with fame there. I worked with Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland, baggage handlers. Ricky’s sister, Cindy, often stopped by to talk to the guys over the half-door that separated the baggage room from the lobby. They later met a fellow by the name of Fred Schneider and along with Kate Pierson formed a band called the B 52s. Many times Keith and I worked the night shift. When I see him in concerts, it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy I worked with many nights. He was shy and soft spoken, certainly not a drummer turned guitarist and vocalist. (Looking back I realize Keith’s time as a baggage agent was his only regular job. He’s been a rocker ever since.)

Back then, Hell it was the early 1970s, guys grew their hair long. Really long. Southeastern Stages, however, had a dress code that banned long hair. One agent, Tony Gay, had extremely long, wild hair, Led Zeppish hair. Gay refused to cut his. Instead, he tucked it into a hairnet and clamped a shorthaired wig over it to comply with the dress code. With his Roy Orbison-like glasses, Gene Shalit moustache, and wig he was the proverbial sight for sore eyes.

One cold, windy March afternoon, a Tuesday, the station manager, Mr. Strickland (Strick), sent Tony up the street to deposit the day’s receipts locked away in a bank pouch. Another agent, off duty it so happened, spotted Tony walking up the street leaning into a strong wind. As he turned the corner at North Lumpkin, a March blast knocked off his wig, which scooted down the street like a large rat running for its life. Tony fell in hot pursuit of his job-saving wig. A policeman, seeing this strange guy running with a pouch of money, fell into the chase as well. It ended with a big laugh for all.

The pay was low but the work was fun and the work was revealing. Seeing all manner of humanity interact was an eye-opening experience, an education for sure. I formed an opinion of mass transit that I have never shaken. When I read the writer’s account of her bus trip to D.C. and back, I knew exactly what she had encountered. Almost forty years later, bus travel it seems remains what it was in the 1970s. You can invent all manner of things and you can pass all manner of laws but you cannot change human nature.

Politicians, environmentalists, and well-heeled people insulated from desperate throngs, scalawags, and scoundrels like to propose public transportation as a more desirable way to move human beings about. They mean well but let’s say they are a tad inexperienced. If you like their idea, I suggest you get a job at a bus station, subway, or depot. Get an insider’s view. You’ll soon agree that cars, freedom, and privacy make a combination that will be hard to overcome no matter what gas costs. Knowing who works behind the scenes does too. It sounds harsh but never forget you are what you travel with.

It was a long time ago but I was there and I saw things I dare not repeat here. If you tell me today’s breed of humanity is nobler, kinder to strangers, and more pleasant to travel with I’ll call you a liar. Human nature is remarkably consistent.

Working at that station was my last job as a blue-collar kind of guy, and I miss it and the camaraderie I shared with its blue-collar cast of characters. Like many places I’ve worked, white-collar stops included, most employees just wanted to have some fun, slide by, and draw a check. We agents were riding the bus of life and we had our eye on the next station in life, our true career—dentists, pharmacists, accountants, musicians, and among them, a writer. I wish I knew what became of the agents, porters, and baggage boys I worked with. Like Conrad’s shipmates on the Narcissus I never saw any of them again but I come close now and then. 

When I hear the B 52’s Love Shack or see one of those smoky red, white, and blue buses roar by suddenly it’s 1972 again. I’m at 220 West Broad in Athens, Georgia. I key an imaginary microphone and say aloud: Now loading in track two, Greyhound’s local to Hull, Colbert, Comer, Carlton, Calhoun Falls, Saluda, Columbia, Fayetteville, Raleigh, and points north.

And then I remember the poor soul in that dumpster. Like me, I’m sure he never forgot his time at the bus station.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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