American Bus Ride, Part 3: 40 Hours in St. Louis

 A series of comical failures: I have been messaging an old childhood friend who lives in St. Louis with the intention of meeting up. The first day I’m there, he’s sick with food poisoning. The next day, when we’ve set a tentative time to meet before his work shift, his dad loses his car keys and he has to drive him to the DMV and wait with him.

I spend most of my time walking around the city. Unlike a bus which takes you on a predetermined route, I am now an independent agent responsible for making decisions of where to go, what to see. I go to a museum when I realize that I can store my unwieldy backpack in the front and temporarily lighten the load.

On my way to the AirBnb, my phone dies just before I read the code for getting in. The sky has already lost most of its light. Desperate for help, I see a mail delivery woman and ask her if she knows of anywhere nearby I can charge my phone. There’s a church across the street that she says might have an outlet. 

The AirBnb is a room in an apartment with a few others, none of whom I interact with extensively. I walk to a Mexican restaurant nearby, scared of the dark and quiet streets, and eat alone. I go back and watch a Youtube video of four men taking a four day greyhound trip. I read a reddit thread that begins with someone proposing their idea to do a greyhound road trip—the first comment: “Couldn’t you just find a nice dominatrix to abuse you instead?” I call my mom.

A city bus that takes a wrong turn into a dead end; the driver spends a long time trying to reverse the bus to get out. It’s foggy out as I walk along the road parallel to the Mississippi River to get to the Chain of Rocks bridge connecting Missouri and Illinois, and by the time I get there, it’s almost dark.

Towards the end of this forty hour layover, my arc of luck seems to dramatically reverse direction. I am walking towards Venice Cafe, a live music venue that’s open late, with the plan to stay there until it’s time to get on my midnight bus out of the city. I am across the street, and I see a small crowd of people outside. Picture me, with a large backpack that has been both a source of convenience and embarrassment, wearing the nicest outfit I have with me, which is really not that nice. I begin to cross the street, and there is a dip in the pavement following the curb that I have not seen. I fall forward, and as I try to save myself from this fall, the weight of my backpack propels me even more forward. I fall onto both knees, hard. A woman in a car in the intersection asks if I’m okay. My knee stings, but I get up as quickly as possible to avoid embarrassment. I cross the street and walk over to the people outside Venice Cafe. I first encountered three older people sitting in the back of someone’s van. They said that it looked like a pretty hard fall, was I ok? They introduce themselves, one of them being a member of the band, the others being groupies. They tell me I’ve come in the middle of a “geezer New Year’s Eve performance,” 4-7 pm so all the old people can go to sleep early. 

My mishap turns me into a minor celebrity. I talk at length with a revolving group of middle-aged people. One of them is an artist who works with acrylics on found materials, like mattresses or wallpapers. She tells me about her son and his girlfriend who have been doing long distance from LA to New York for ages. Another tells me about how he and his wife had a stupid argument over Christmas, but I guess that’s what the holidays do, he says. And yet another, a man who grew up on a farm outside St. Louis, tells me about the half year he has recently spent travelling in South America. 

Eventually, I work up the courage to go inside, asking the bartender if I can keep my backpack behind the bar. I wander around as I wait for the next band to begin their set. I meet the eyes of one of the only younger people in the room, a guy with a ponytail. The second time we run into each other, we start talking. He had seen my dramatic fall, and asks what the backpack is for. I start telling him about my trip. He’s from St. Louis, but lives in Arkansas now, and comes back here from time to time to visit his family.

He leaves to go get dinner with his parents’ friends who were in the previous band—geezer’s New Year’s Eve—as they’d called the event, then comes back. I watch the next band from the floor above. The guy comes back. In the hour or so before midnight, I end up with him and his cousin at his cousin’s apartment. The guy is twenty-nine, and the cousin looks to be in his late thirties or forties, with a glass of vodka, already slightly drunk. He tells us about how he fantasizes about moving to Tucumcari, New Mexico. Hey, I was just there, I say. There’s really not much there, but that seems to be part of the appeal to him. He likes its emptiness. The guy, like me, has also been in New Mexico recently; he recently got out of a relationship with a woman who lived there. The cousin tells us about a movie with a twisted plot—a husband who ties the wife up (consensually, in an effort to revive their sex life), but then dies unexpectedly, so the wife is stuck in handcuffs and has to watch their dog eat the dead husband’s corpse. 

Shortly past midnight, the guy gives me a ride to the bus station, and though I can hear the stern voices of people telling me not to get into a stranger’s car, I reason that by this point, he is not so much of a stranger. As we wait in the parking lot until my bus leaves, he tells me to let him know if I’m ever in Arkansas or St. Louis again. I tell him about some of the stops along my bus ride, by disdain for the men of Amarillo. Finally, it is time to leave this city. I say goodbye to the friendly stranger, and board my bus with only a few minutes to spare, uncharacteristically rushed—I am almost always too early.