1.
Certain kinds of people ride the bus – it’s trash America; poor single moms with three squealing kids, their hair uncombed, off to visit their family in Ohio. Old people with packed sandwiches – dropping their teeth when they fall asleep, a few afraid-to-fly uptight types and of course there’s always some runaways and drifters of several varieties. There is no glamour on a Greyhound.
You take your seat and watch the people board the bus, clinging on to their purses and food. You size them up while they’re busy finding their seats. You hope that if one of the plops down next to you they don’t stink or talk. Nothing worse than being forced to listen to some one you don’t want to know blabber on about shit that don’t matter.
The air is stale as it’s forced through the vents. It’s moving but devoid of oxygen. You can smell the blue sanitary toilets. You sit with a strained neck as you stare through a tinted window. The world looks just as gray and bland as the upholstery your ass is sitting on.
If you were wondering what kind of rider I was, I would classify as a drifter I guess. I used to be a runaway but at the age of 19 I felt like I had graduated on to be a drifter.
I had taken this ride to New York City from Minneapolis once before. I had hopped the bus on the fly and took off to New York City just to hang out with some friends in a punk band. I had to go back to Minneapolis when my kidneys failed after consuming nothing but beer for weeks on end.
The month or so that I was in New York I had been squatting in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. We all use to live like animals and pee in pickle jars because we had no plumbing. It was disgusting. To this day I still can’t look at a big jar of deli pickles. All I see are pickles floating in pee.
No matter what kind of sickening situation I find myself in, it’s always about hygiene. I am obsessed with hygiene. I’d spend my last three dollars at the laundromat and shower in the cold spray of an open fire hydrant when I had to. And believe me, there were many times when I had to.
So anyway, while I was squatting there we all drank a lot of beer. It was the punk rock way of living. I was damned close to comatose by the time I made it to the Beth Israel Hospital. I stayed for about ten days before I popped the IV out of my vein and cashed in my round trip bus ticket for home.
But this trip was different. This was my fresh start. I was leaving the street gang bullshit of Minneapolis behind me. All my friends were going to jail, or the military or dieing. Literally. I was boxed in back home, unable to shake the street fights, my bad reputation and all the shit that went with it. It’s not that I had better things in mind for myself, I just knew that way of living was a dead end. I set out alone. I had gotten myself a job in New York City. I had $90 in my pocket and carried everything I owned in an army green backpack. I was nineteen, tough as nails and nothing was gonna stop me. Nothing did stop me. I’m here telling the story now, ain’t I?
I wasn’t a punk. I was a skinhead girl and a proper one at that. You see skinheads, the true skins, have very set ways of doing things. My life as a skinhead had nothing to do with the race relations or white supremacy that people today associate with the skinhead subculture. We just drank lots of beer, got in fists fights over nothing, listened to good music and looked good doing it. After Oprah aired that first piece about Nazi skinheads and Geraldo Rivera got his nose busted by a rowdy skinhead wielding a folding chair things changed drastically for us. It sounds funny but it’s true. Prior to that no one in America really knew what a skinhead was and no one cared. We went from being discarded youth to being hated celebrities overnight.
So there I was, a proper skinhead girl. My pants were tapered perfectly to meet the top of my shined Doc Martin boots. My plaid skirts were cut high to show lots of fishnet covered thigh. I wore the required Fred Perry brand shirts with my braces (thin suspenders) up. Some of skins wore the Ben Sherman shirts but they were nearly impossible to come by in Minneapolis because they are imported from the UK. It’s not like I could afford them anyway.
My hair was in the “fringe cut,” meaning shaved short on the top with longer wisps circling my hairline. I thought this cut made me look feminine compared to my punk rock comrades sporting their Mohawks, soaped spikes and shaved heads. I was just a streetwise tomboy, what did I know about feminine?
The bus took me through Wisconsin and down through Chicago. We hit Cincinnati in the middle of the night. I had to transfer buses there when the drivers changed shifts. This was a good chance to get some food and wash my face. Well sort of. The cafeteria-style restaurant was closed so I got some chips from the vending machine. I tried not to drink anything because it would just mean having to dangle my ass over the bus toilet while we zoomed down the highway. And there really was no way to wash your hands in those bus bathrooms.
So I was washing my face in the station’s bathroom sink and when some lady gets her bag lifted. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, leaving their bags outside the stall while they pee? That woman wailed and cried, but there was nothing anybody could do. The shit was gone.
In these situations us cold-hearted types blame the victim just for being there. The truth is you’d see crime after crime in a bus station if you hang out for a while. The EKG of the bus station has a staggered heart beat which piques at times when people are ripped off, or hearts are broken, or when the vending machines takes somebody’s change. There’s a ruckus for a moment, somebody’s screaming, yelling and crying. Everybody else tries to ignore it. Just drag your luggage with the broken handle from one roped off line to the next, board the bus and it’s all gone. If you are smart, you just try to exist between those blips.
To be honest I enjoyed the action because it made the time pass faster and plus I felt relatively safe. Nobody bothered me. I may have looked young, but I felt like my tattoos made me look seasoned. Keep in mind that society has changed it’s view on tattoos since I scratched these marks in my skin. I wasn’t sporting the fashionable works of art that we see gracing people’s skin today. My tattoos were done by a cranked up biker in the middle of drunkin’ skinhead parties. Each tattoo cost as much as he needed to score that day. He learned his art in prison and still used a homemade tattoo gun like the one he fashioned in his cell, made out of walkman motor and a ball point pen casing.
Things are different today. Many of today’s tattooists are well-paid art students. And people with money get tattoos to look pretty or to look like their favorite VJ on MTV. I got them to ugly myself up. So I was harder on the surface. You know, like armor. People looked at my skin and knew only a crazy person would do what I had done. Mothers would grab their children and cross the street. It worked.
And I was packing, sort of. I had a set of brass knuckles. I had one brass piece for each hand. One in each pocket of my bomber jacket so I could slip ‘em on just by tucking my hands inside my pockets. I only had to use ‘em a few times, but they were always my security blanket. You got to lookout for yourself.
After twenty-eight hours I stepped off that bus into the center of 42nd Street’s Port Authority Bus Station. Out of that sick, sour air and into the stinky, steamy August air of New York City. I was aching for a shower and looking at Port Authority did not make the situation any better.
This was 1989 and 42nd Street was filth. Port Authority was the congregation place of homeless people, hustlers, peepshow customers, and drug addicts–I felt right at home. It had all the seedy parts of life that make me feel so comfortable. For example, there is something about a homeless man laying on a square of cardboard, soaking in his own piss that is so honest to me. As people pass him without so much as a glance he’ll shout out “You fuck face!” You know he’s just lying there is his own worthlessness and speaking his mind. He’s got nothing to hide.
Compared to the regular guys I had encountered in my lifetime—the guys in suits who gave me jobs, handled my social services files, the guys who lied through their teeth, stole money, and hit on me even if they were married with kids–this homeless man just felt so much safer to me. These street people wear their ugly parts on the outside and I appreciate them for it. You know exactly what you’re dealing with.
I carried this bag that weighed almost as much as I did through the bus station until I found a subway map. Cabs were not an option. Ninety dollars can last about five minutes in NYC if you’re not careful and I knew that. I was going to go directly to my new job; let them know that I arrived and I wanted to be put on their schedule immediately. I would work that day if they would let me.
The trains were easy enough to figure out. I used the same plan that my sister had taught me when she showed me how the buses ran their routes in Minneapolis. If you get on the wrong train you just hop off and go the opposite direction; there are only so many mistakes a person can make.
I took the 1/9 line uptown to 110th Street. Climbing the steps out of the train station I found myself in the Columbia University area, a totally different world. It’s a richer area where the garbage is swept off the streets and the people stroll around with baby carriages. Baby carriages that carry actual babies and not cans to be recycled or broken televisions. I walked the couple of blocks to the address I had written down and found it: Kinko’s Copy Center.
It was smaller but otherwise exactly that same as the store in Minneapolis, where I had worked for more than a year. It was a good job. I had health insurance and could see a gynecologist when I needed to, see a dentist to get my teeth cleaned regularly. I liked the people I was working with and I was always learning something new. I liked the machines too.
I very quickly learned how to fix every machine in the joint. I could fix anything, whether it was a fax machine, a folding machine, whatever. I could fix a copy machine with a nickel, Scotch tape and a paper clip.
Of course, this was before the big duplicators were so electronic. Today the copy machines have sensors, they detect where the paper is jammed and then a particular light goes off. It’s automatic. Back then the machines would not do diagnostics on themselves. They would simply stop with the sound of scrunching paper and you would have to open them up and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. They ran with a lot of cogs, pins and rollers.
Anyway it was a job that was very easy for me, and my strong work ethic made them appreciate me so I did well.
I went to the cashier and asked for Mike. He was the manager I had spoken with on the phone. He came to the counter and introduced himself. Later he told me that my tattoos had startled him. I had a lot of tattoos; by this point I had even tattooed my head, which was exposed by my short-cropped hair. And a day before I left Minneapolis I had a friend rather crudely scratch a spider web tattoo into my right elbow with a home-made gun. Like I said, a lot of tattoos. As I shook Mike’s hand he shook hard enough to break the new tattoo open again. The fucking thing stayed raw like that for weeks. Every time I bent my elbow the scabs would open up.
Mike was prepared to receive some sweet girl from the Midwest and in walked this tattooed street punk. He hired me anyway. I wanted to start right then and there. He put me on the schedule starting two days from then. I took what I could get.
Before I left I used the Kinko’s bathroom to wash up a little. I washed my face and privates. The key to washing up in a public restroom is not touching anything. You try not to let your feet touch the floor or your hands touch the sink. You teeter on one foot and slip into your socks. You hover over the sink and only touch the stream of water. It’s a balancing act.
I washed that elbow tattoo—there were always bits of lint and stuff stuck in the scabs—and covered it with a coat of Bacitracin ointment. I changed my panties, socks and shirt. I rolled my dirty clothes up in a tight ball and pushed them down inside the bag. Oh how I longed for a shower. I wanted to wash my hair, but didn’t want to step out of the bathroom with wet hair. I didn’t want people at Kinko’s to think I was homeless.
I stuck my mouth under the faucet, drank some water and put on a fresh coat of powder and eye make up. I put on my jacket, despite the heat, so no one would see that I had changed my shirt and left. Looking back, I may have been down and out and a little reckless, but I guess I had a lot of pride.
I stepped out the door of Kinko’s and into the heat of midday. I was feeling a little fresher, but my bag was feeling heavy. My head was feeling heavy. This seemed a little strange to me. I was thinking how I had been sitting on that bus forever. You’d think I’d be rested, but instead I felt tired. (I did not understand that traveling itself could make one tired.)
I took my big bag of worldly possessions, all my most valuable stuff, across the street to a bench. I sat down, pulled the bag in close to me and set my head down on it. I could have fallen asleep right there. But I didn’t, I had to plot my next step.
© Ducky DooLittle 2006
