Fall 2021 | Occasus | Issue 11.2

Confronting the Circle of Life at the Greyhound Station

I once heard a story about a baby that was born on a Greyhound. Apparently, a priest lay down a couple of garbage bags while a car salesman and a Frenchman fought over whose shoelace the bus driver would use to cut the umbilical cord. The whole ordeal took two hours, which is why I was confused about being told this anecdote by the only person working at the bus station I had been waiting at for six hours. Clearly, this delay wasn’t a heartwarming tale about different people learning that they’re not so different at all, or this mother was having triplets.

This was Detroit at 10pm. When I’d arrived at 4pm with just a duffle bag and the humble dream of being home by six, I took in my surroundings. I was the only woman in the station, and also the only one not having a shouting match with the person beside me. As the sunlight dwindled and the vending machine won seven undefeated matches against a man with one eye, I retreated to the girl’s bathroom. I found a lighter in the stall and figured if worst comes to worst, I would offer to roast marshmallows in exchange for my life.

A week before, I had been at the London bus station at 3am. The atmosphere was similar, if less spirited, and I was on the way to visit my one-time theatrical love interest, Aaron. Unfortunately, Aaron had taken our entanglement seriously and decided to become an actor, which meant I had to finance the trip. While Hollywood was the city of stars, Winston-Salem, North Carolina was the city of acting school. I couldn’t afford to fly direct, so there I was smuggling myself across the border in the middle of Halloween night.

To be able to buy the tickets, I’d spent the summer working at a restaurant called Amsterdam that specialized in craft beer. Trevor, the manager, was forty years old, dressed exclusively in sports jerseys, and thought gluing a baseball hat to his head would be less obvious than wearing a toupee. Each week he would come up with a new “leadership strategy” designed to teach us about teamwork and how far college students and people with neck tattoos are willing to go for minimum wage. When he made us all compete for one, hundred-dollar bill and gave the rest of us nothing, he said, “That’s capitalism, baby!” and excused himself to attend his racial sensitivity course.

When I turned up at training day, Trevor explained that he’d hired everyone based on the “house party theory”, which stated that you should hire anyone you’d like to have sex with. As we all looked at each other and judged Trevor’s tastes, I thought of my trip to North Carolina and figured this would be an interesting story to tell the actors. When they asked for characters at improv night, I told them about my friends Yoda the communist drummer, and Wilhelm the German ex-con who could actually pronounce lager. When I suggested they write a play about us, I told them I’d sell them the rights as long as they called it something like Barrel of Laughs, or maybe Everybody Hates Trevor.

I was googling Amsterdam reviews and reminiscing about the time Wilhelm got the day off to attend his arson trial when the bus station intercom announced that the Greyhound had finally arrived. After I scrolled past a clever review titled, “Spiders, Sewage, and Sexual Harassment”, I gathered my bags and went to go inquire about the reason for the delay. I wondered if they would name the baby after the bus driver, or if they would channel the avant-garde and call her CeeDee after the seats on which she had been born. But the attendant looked solemn when I approached him.
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I once heard a story about a man who had a heart attack on a Greyhound. As I examined my seat for obvious signs of a struggle, I found myself thinking that six hours is an awfully long time for a birth, but man, is six hours a quick turnaround for a death.

Alex Rozenberg is a third year student pursuing a double major in Film Studies and the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (SASAH). Her favourite movie is either Hubie Halloween or Rear Window depending on who's asking.