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Part 1 - "Awaiting the Dragon" 01.17.04 6:30 a.m. (E.T.)
It all started in a McDonald's parking lot. Well no, actually it started two weeks previous to this when my roommate Ross asked me if I was game for celebrating the Martin Luther King three-day weekend inside "The Big Apple". Take my word for it, when you live and work in Maryland, you'd embark on a nudist trip to a wintering Russia if it meant you got to escape Baltimore for a couple of days. I was most certainly "game". But the trip started in the parking lot of a McDonald's, so for all intents and purposes that is where my story will begin as well.
I'm at a loss as to how to best illustrate the degree in which I did not trust the bus service taking us from Baltimore to New York. I guess it would be easiest to start by telling you that we chose the cheapest charter line available. Instead of a Greyhound or Peter Pan bus, we stood in the parking lot of a McDonald's awaiting something called a "Dragon Coach". Ross' confirmation/ pick-up directions literally read: "The Baltimore stopping location is one block south of O'Donnell Street just off the I-95 off-ramp." We arrived at this spot and it really was just a McDonald's off the side of the highway. There were no signs posted for "Dragon Coach", no wooden pole with a hand-written sign that said, "Stand here idiots" – nothing. We were confused and we weren't even out of Baltimore yet. The confirmation page that Ross printed up also stated very clearly that pick-up was at 6:30 a.m.*
Oddly enough, the only other business in the immediate area aside from McDonald's was Baltimore's Greyhound bus terminal. As mentioned before, Ross' bus instructions weren't clear and so I don't believe our going into the bus terminal to inquire as to whether or not this "Dragon Coach" stopped in the Greyhound parking lot was out-of-line. But when we asked the elderly clerk at the terminal window if she'd ever heard of this company, her jaw tightened, her fists clenched, beads of sweat formed atop her brow line, and she quietly uttered, "No. I have never heard of them. I work for Greyhound."
Ross and I looked at one another, then back at Grandma Greyhound…
…The old bat knew something but she wasn't talkin'. Someone had gotten to her already. If we couldn't make this canary sing, the only thing left to do was turn tail and head nervously back out to McDonald's.
I won't lie to you folks; we hitched a ride to the complete opposite side of town and were essentially stranded until this damn bus showed up. We were awaiting a bootleg bus that may or may not be showing up and was apparently blacklisted by the old biddies working the redeye shift at the bus terminals…
...We began preparing ourselves for the worst. And frankly, I wasn't sure if I even wanted the bus to show up anymore. Our fears were anything but quenched when we called the "Dragon Coach" information number in hopes of checking on the current status of the bus. Ross dialed. There was a pause.
He finally got an answer and he says, "Uh yes, we're waiting for the New York-bound coach number 260. Is it…yes. Is it on time?"
There is another short pause; Ross looks at me and shrugs. The voice returns on the other end of his phone, a voice I'm sure was not only barely fluent in English, but probably standing somewhere much warmer than the 15 degree morning chill we were foolishly taking part in.
Ross says, "It is. Okay. Are you… okay, are you sure?" Ross hangs up the phone after another moment and smiles; "I couldn't tell everything she said but I made out, 'Yes. Yes, on time. On time."
Well that's reassuring, I thought.
Ross smiled at me. I think I just blinked back at him. Ross has a way of portraying nothing when he smiles. I've known the kid five months and his smile means nothing to me. Usually when someone smiles it means they are happy or content. With Ross, he smiles when he has phlegm in his throat.
By now, I'm almost positive that some dude named Leroy is about a mile away from the McDonald's in an Astro van with a Chinese Dragon stenciled on the side, ready to take our money and then our lives. At one point Ross, gazing out into the concrete wasteland that is the I-95 says, "I just hope whoever shows up for us, doesn't kill us in Virginia. They'll never find us if we die in Virginia."
Then he smiled.
This was to be my travel partner for the next two days.
What can I say? I'm here for the adventure and either way, adventure was what I was bound to get. So there we stood for another ten minutes frantically looking for anything with a dragon on it. Ironically enough, a decent size coach bus pulled up on the side of the road, but it had no Dragon anywhere on it. Not stenciled or spray painted or colored in blood – nothing. Nevertheless, it turned out to be our coach; late, but much more official looking than my nightmares were previously estimating it would look.
We climbed aboard and found an almost packed house. Seems as if this particular bus started its journey in D.C. and picked up a dozen French foreign exchange students along the way. Fair enough, but they had so many needless knapsacks and stuff that each little rail-thin Frenchie took up two seats! This meant that Ross and I were forced to cuddle in the way back, him constantly getting smacked by the bathroom door every time the French went to tinkle and me with my sneakers in an old doggy bag half full of barbequed ribs.
Goodbye Charm City, hello Big Apple!
...to be continued tomorrow with part 2: "Eat My Buffalo."
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* READER'S NOTE: That's 6:30 in the morning – East Coast time, 5:30 Central Time and for a few of you on the West Coast, that's 3:30 in the morning. Either way you slice it, it was a painfully early time to meet on some random bus line.
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