The waiting room of the Greyhound bus
station in
It is the middle of winter and the room is
filled; half of the people cling to plastic bags which contain the sum of their
possessions. It is late at night;
One woman sits and carries on an extended
monolog with herself oblivious of her surroundings. There is some invisible
ghost from her past which is very present to her in her ongoing fantasy. She
has lost control of reality, or the reality she faces is no longer the one we
share, but who is to say that it is any less real?
A man enters with a paper cup. He is very
self-assured as he goes from one person to another asking for spare change. He
sees the woman engaged in her monolog and there is instant recognition. She
comes into his consciousness and they speak.
“Hi there, Betty.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Whatcha
doing here?”
“Oh, just sitting.”
“I’m
gonna go to church. They got some beds in the
basement.”
“To church. Oh good.”
He leaves. Another woman begins a song.
She sings, “If I didn’t care for you, would life be the same?” It is an old
vintage song once made popular by the Ink Spots. She is a woman in her late
sixties with shaggy, unwashed, once-blond hair. Through her song she reveals
she has no teeth. The cadence of her song is mimicry of the original rendition.
She gestures with her hands as if wiping away cobwebs from her face. She is
remarkably in good voice with a sense of pitch and a sweet tone which might
have been trained in her youth. Song over, she opens a brown bag and takes a
swig from a bottle, the contents of which are concealed.
Soon she also begins a monolog and
finishes her song, “If I didn’t care for you.” There is a bit of irony to her
performance for no one, it seems, really cares much for her. The awareness of
this truth brings tears to her eyes.
The room is a circle of Godots, a no exit where hell is not only other people but
oneself as well. The group is mixed with men and women forming a menagerie of
lives with no present or future, only a past that slowly gets buried into
memory.
Their circle
signifies infinity, the unending circle of poverty, the circle of perpetual
indifference into which they have fallen and which leads to the ninth circle of
Dante’s Inferno.
A burly black cop breaks through the circle
and enters the waiting room. He has a billy club and
a revolver resting in a holster on his right hip.
“Come on, everyone, show me your tickets.
If you don’t have a ticket, go on and get upstairs and get out of here.”
He tried to act tough, but his face is
gentle and shows signs of compassion. He’s just doing his job and would rather
leave these people alone. They’re not really bothering anyone. He goes from
person to person. A few onlookers produce tickets. The vast majority of them
have none. They know what they must do and they get up to leave in an orderly
procession. They leave looking like refugees on their way to a distant camp
which has no name.
“Come on, get up!”
He strikes his billy
club against the heel of a semi-conscious man drowning in a sea of inebriation.
“Come on, Joe. Let’s go! Upstairs!”
The cop knows the man’s name.
The man arouses from the abyss of slumber
and finds himself in a daze. He too leaves.
The room becomes eerie and silent – an
exodus of homeless people leaving the prison of their captivity to wander
through a desert of alien encounters with people who treat them as though they
no longer exist.
Once the officer leaves a few moments pass
and they slowly return in ones and twos because they really have no where else
to go.
The room slowly fills up again and the
evening shift of the homeless replaces some of those that had come earlier.
Street vendors, or those homeless who are more entrepreneurial, enter peddling
socks and shirts. One man comes in and says, “Does someone want a suitcase?” He
has in his hand a used piece of black luggage with a broken handle.
“Hey, you!” He says pointing to a man huddled on the
waiting bench, “Do you want a nice piece of new luggage?”
“Yeah, I can use some luggage.”
The peddler moves over to him and displays
the suitcase which has compartments and straps inside it and a double zipper on
the outside. It has obviously been stolen.
“Yeah, I’ll take it.”
“How much you give me for it?” the peddler
asks.
“How much?”
“Yeah, man. This is for sale. It ain’t no gift.”
“I thought you asked me if I wanted it,”
the other man says calmly. “I didn’t know you was selling it. I thought you was giving it
away.”
The vendor gets angry.
“Man, you got a soft head! In life no one
gets something for nothing.”
A comic reprisal but no one laughs. They
have heard it all before. A few moments pass. It is now well past