Traveling with the DOg: Greyhound and American Journeys
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
ARTICLES Traveling with the Dog Greyhound and American Journeys DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the...
...It is unlikely he ever did either voluntarily again...
...Even in the “good” old days of the classic Hollywood bus movie, 1934’s It Happened One Night, Clark Gable’s and Claudette Colbert’s chic romantic patter intentionally contrasted with the tawdry background...
...In his life and his death, while he still lingered in memory, Jacques Godard was a member of a collective soul...
...A long distance ride can be a rough adventure, but not the kind that friends and family traditionally envy...
...In a country where lives at the lower end of the economic scale are increasingly rendered invisible—shunted to the margins of American cities by gentrification...
...You sit, the hours wearing upon the body...
...The actors wear soiled dungarees...
...Absent a politics that they themselves can recognize, it’s arguable whether there can really be a “working class” properly defined, making the phrase seem slightly odd or antiquated, no more at the heart of the public consciousness than an old Greyhound station that used to be situated downtown, but closed and reopened near the outskirts of the city...
...the temporarily displaced...
...No need to fret over the means of social entry or the cultural norms...
...Note: New York City Port Authority, like many New York public spaces, functioned as a de facto homeless shelter back in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the changes wrought by Rudolph Giuliani’s rigid enforcement of “quality of life” ordinances...
...But I risk giving the company too much credit...
...Or should I say—in the spirit of Romains—from new acquaintances...
...Is it my subjectivity that pictures the group as a collective of Jacques Godards whose personal memories have become representative stories...
...I ambitiously tried to carry along seven pieces of luggage...
...In Jules Romains’s lyrical and leisurely paced 1911 novel Death of a Nobody, Jacques Godard dies, his atoms disperse, his memory fades, while the dust from his grave sweeps into the chimneys of Paris, into the lives and abodes of families, factory workers, and field hands...
...Gable and Colbert live and breathe class, however lightly they may take it...
...The ad features a pristine white family in unruffled clothes, enjoying a Where would you like to go...
...Though you still see their names, buyouts have made the other lines subsidiaries...
...Its romanticism cloys...
...In the older movie, class is, at the very least, vaguely articulated, if lacking gist...
...There was a time when the stations were newer, brighter, cleaner, and the clientele solidly middle class, but the claim of an attractive getaway option was always strained, primarily appealing to the American imagination, rather than describing actual services...
...The Greyhound dog leaping across the skyline is a working-class flag...
...Calamity results...
...By the end of the 1950s, Greyhound had discovered its signature motto: Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us, which promises no more than the working-class bare minimum...
...My favorite memory must be of a rainy, nine-hour slog shortly before Christmas Eve...
...Is it no more than my subjective impression that on a lengthy Greyhound ride, like pairs with like...
...That Frank Capra has this battle-of-the-classes romance ignite aboard a Greyhound underscores how the space itself highlights class lines...
...I have taken numerous cross-country trips over the past two decades, often simply to embrace the experience...
...The people must travel, and travel should be efficient and sanitary...
...In the Colbert character’s customary palaces of wealth, such issues would be smothered beneath politesse...
...If I keep going in this vein, I will end by suggesting that the resolution of all our political problems rests in a new itinerary for senators and congresspeople: let them ride the buses...
...While everyone I tell this story to responds that a stormy yuletide in transit (even for an adult) seems hopelessly depressing (they’re not entirely wrong), I have at no other time in my life been surrounded by so many “Merry Christmases” from strangers...
...Whenever one praises working-class environs or culture, one risks essentializing the working class and identifying the group by the very limitations that have been put upon it...
...Teenagers cross paths and trade accounts of abusive situations at home...
...The charms blurred, like a nostalgic vision revisited...
...Ads throughout the 1940s and 1950s stubbornly appealed to patrons with images of fun, frolic, and family...
...I wasn’t as eager to embrace jeopardy or “solidarity” if it meant transferring buses in a badly lit parking lot or on a lonely street corner at midnight...
...Still, though the company is no selfconscious respecter of worker rights, the terminals remain community parks of the working class, with management, employees, and patrons trapped in a slightly abusive relationship...
...Midnight Cowboy’s social mirror is tilted to emphasize salaciousness for its own sake...
...I was flabbergasted that so many people rose, like wound-up automatons...
...He may have taken a longer journey on a Greyhound bus...
...The real world is depression America, a demanding and unforgiving place that reduces the very attractive stars to very seedy circumstances, hoboing, spending nights in work camps, fending off charlatans and fellow stragglers...
...Hoffman’s character pees in his pants en route, then he expires, leaving Voight clutching the corpse of his partner and, so to speak, of his dreams, in a sardonic twist on the notion of dying in one’s buddy’s arms...
...A mother in the middle of “issues” with family services meets another mother facing the same issues...
...My body was less prepared to weather the ride...
...effaced from an American history that focuses on great leaders and from a popular media that rhapsodizes the glamorous—bus travel remains a visible and viable working-class space...
...Because it’s as real as it gets,” a friend used to say whenever we passed by a (post-segregation era) Woolworth’s diner...
...The ads illustrate the company’s struggle to forge a pleasant or, if possible, benign identity...
...I never met an American kid who believed Greyhound was a way to “see the country” The rhythms of lengthy bus travel can be called lower working class— characterized by a tenuous sense of safety, a dread of falling through the cracks, and a constant pulse of hurry up and wait, similar to the rhythms of day labor, wavering between transitory ease and anticipation of rough patches...
...In no sense off limits, it is in plain view...
...Although Woolworth’s diners have disappeared, Woolworth’s on wheels remains...
...The journey, it says, may be uncertain...
...It Happened One Night is clever before it is realistic...
...Go Greyhound, but the American working class deserves a better champion...
...President Barack Obama has released several billion dollars of stimulus package employment and opportunity money toward creating a national light rail system...
...What if tentacles multiplied, creating an affordable rail system, less constricted geographically than the cold, steel Amtrak lines...
...Death of a Nobody illustrated Romains’s once fairly influential philosophy of Unanimisme (Romains coined the word himself) or “the mystery of the group” Highly spiritual (rather than sociological or statistical) in its outlook, Unanimisme was generally presented in works of precociously modernist prose poetry and took as its central task to illuminate the “particular qualities of groups of all sorts, from the transitory collectivity of human beings who huddle under an awning during a quick shower to families and business and professional associates who spend significant parts of their lives together in subtle patterns of proximity...
...speech—if it happens—reveals sympathetic correspondences...
...experience...
...Hoffman’s and Voight’s limitations as individuals stand in high relief, and whether we empathize with them or condemn them, our curiosity is personal, not political, and, at worst, prurient...
...The subject is treated humorously, but the filmmakers and their audience clearly responded to the power of the conception...
...These fairly dramatic scenarios are equaled by the number of passengers looking for an inexpensive route to new beginnings...
...Consider again the New York City Port Authority, where I heard the peculiarly phrased question, “Where are you trying to go...
...it is public...
...Another classic Hollywood image of bus travel is appropriately unglamorous...
...the conditions have worsened to the point of mocking the family travel fable, but the other aspect of the romance, its seedy poetry, if you will, remains germane...
...Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and culture critic living in Santa Fe, New Mexico—until the Greyhound takes him elsewhere...
...The people must get where they’re going...
...Trips through the glittering snows of the North are as restful and as pleasant as travel under sunny Southern skies...
...But the intellectual conception of class is stronger in the earlier movie...
...ARTICLES Traveling with the Dog Greyhound and American Journeys DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON At the Greyhound, Seven Stages, and Trailways bus stations, when you approach the ticket agents behind the glass that separates the world of employees and rules from the public at large, you may be asked, “Where are you trying to go...
...Death of a Nobody was an unabashed defense of the nobodies, albeit the book was a product of its times...
...Yet “Quality of Life,” as many homeless rights advocates have noted, primarily speaks to the protection of surface values, upkeep, and appearances...
...rather than a Where are you trying to go...
...Ask the defeated strikers if the dog belongs on a working-class flag...
...During the upheaval of the 1990s, Greyhound called in nonunion bus drivers...
...or “Where would you like to go...
...Greyhound eventually prevailed and effectively broke the bus drivers’ union...
...The picture of a lonely, broken Greyhound traveler has been sentimentalized in country music—another adaptation of the connection between bus travel and class consciousness that can be traced as far back as It Happened One Night, a film so popular in its day that patronage of interstate buses purportedly tripled after its debut...
...The Greyhound romance (if it is still alive) isn’t a holiday one...
...they speak in inarticulate stutters rather than a champagne-bubbly repartee...
...caricatured in popular entertainment...
...To speak of a poetic collective force other than the military esprit de corps today seems mystical, but I confess that I have felt “the spirit of the group” in fairly commonplace circumstances, a blurring of the importance or relevance of individual identity, while traveling Greyhound...
...On the same occasion while I waited for a bus, I watched three police officers saunter into the Greyhound area...
...The administration also released a map targeting corridors of the country for construction...
...in Redding, California, a picketing striker was killed by a bus driven by a strikebreaker...
...A search on Google will pull up ads from the history of Greyhound, which was founded in 1914, preceding the age of mass transit, and which stands today as the sole provider of national bus service...
...Under Gable’s chauvinistic guidance, the heiress learns about the real world...
...I was astonished by the mechanized routine...
...It doesn’t have a strong word-of-mouth reputation among the businessminded, even less among comfort-seeking vacationers...
...Once...
...This is very often the case...
...The couple remained impressively unfazed, eager, and hopeful, despite the peculiar welcome...
...in the contemporary film, the prosaic reality of class is carefully delineated, but without an intellectual framework...
...Cheap, greasy food, perfunctory service, and stained tablecloths baffled his imagination...
...When all other options have gone awry, the Greyhound bus is a symbol of their last resort, hope for the hopeless, a fast way out of town...
...Midnight Cowboy is closer to our sense of verisimilitude...
...My friend may finally have sat down and dined at Woolworth’s...
...Colbert is so spoiled that she expects the bus to wait for her on command, like a taxi...
...Midnight Cowboy is closer to kitchen sink drama...
...My most recent trek lasted three days from Charleston, South Carolina, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, traversing the small towns of the American flatlands...
...Class is the snake in the garden influencing their constant bickering over right, wrong, love, infatuation, and propriety...
...As real as it gets” meant as surreal as he could imagine...
...for decades, however, “class politics” has been a bugaboo...
...today it seems sentimental and slightly fantastic...
...Greyhound is a cheap means to an end that lacks the salt and pepper of travel excitement—a feeling of having been lifted beyond the commonplace, as when in love...
...and the peripatetic homeless, America’s invisible populations...
...Greyhound’s ostensible purpose is cheap transportation...
...Greyhound hasn’t been a friend to its employees...
...My ambivalence was also due to growing older...
...The recent recession has perhaps changed this slightly...
...Before the lead officer had even begun his spiel, commanding anyone seated here to show a bus ticket or leave the station, at least fifteen people departed, practically running...
...Gable and Colbert play a hardboiled reporter and a spoiled rich girl...
...These are phrases that bespeak service, comfort, a desire to please...
...The striker’s death isn’t commemorated in any Greyhound station, as far as I know, giving the story the tragic air of the battles waged against the Wobblies in the early twentieth century...
...I was astonished by the numbers...
...Two unemployed veterans swap stories...
...It’s astonishing to me how often people with like-minded frames of reference discover each other...
...No need to romanticize what needs to be and, more important, could be dispensed with...
...I’ve heard that question often—the last time addressed to a very young, backpacking couple in the New York City Port Authority, their faces as bright as sunlit glass...
...You buy a lunch, you buy a ticket, and you receive service...
...The most successful ad in Greyhound history sells neither a vacation fantasy nor the “on the road” dream of the open highway...
...But the opportunity was readily available...
...There are characteristic bus story scenarios: runaways (of one kind or another), released convicts, recently divorced women...
...No one would think of promoting long distance bus travel as particularly “restful...
...In an airport terminal, you would be asked, “Where are you going...
...The picture was fanciful then...
...It has to say something about bus travel’s diminished reputation in the social milieu that the college students I’ve encountered using Greyhound’s month of unlimited travel were European, or Australian, or African...
...The Greyhound personnel discouraged me, hinting strongly that the luggage service was unreliable...
...They record the historical difficulties of promoting interstate bus travel...
...With this said, I retain fond memories of Greyhound America’s hubbub and chaos...
...The comparison between these two movies and in fact many other popular films of the 1930s and today should help us understand how and why the theme of class has mostly disappeared from the public dialogue in America...
...Romains’s approach to his subject is still notable...
...The company has been the focus of two famous union strikes—in 1983 and in the early 1990s, both characterized by intense levels of acrimony, bitterness, and physical violence...
...Praise to the common man...
...It was a telling glimpse into the new, perpetually ambulatory homeless population, provided courtesy of Greyhound, whose “unanimisme” connects lower working-class America...
...The lines are too limited as yet to call it a national transportation system...
...It struck me, this time, how antiquated the bus system was, how the whole enterprise was close to a mad escapade: gas-guzzling buses burrowing through the rain and darkness...
...In John Schlesinger’s 1969 Midnight Cowboy, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman play a pair of hustlers surviving in the big city...
...its picturesque descriptions of the countryside seem to jar with the present day realities of Greyhound riders—a group most certainly bound together in a collective enterprise whose success depends upon cooperation, patience, and compliance...
...A 1947 ad reads, Greyhound alone, of all the transportation systems serving this Amazing America, can take you to and through every one of the fortyeight states, up into Canada and down to Mexico...
...It is not ghettoized...
...The film is the work of the same man who gave the world the chirpy Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, but in spite of its Hollywood smoothness, It Happened One Night is also a depression-era film...
...Regional lines that compete with Grandfather Greyhound provide transit only between major cities...
...The other— Where are you trying to go?—suggests lowly, hardscrabble transience...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
