A Note From The Road - Vegas to Albuquerque

There's a woman and her two brats in front of me in the queue at the gates to get the hell out of Hell. The daughter is fairly undisturbed, despite the fact that she is toddler age, but I can already tell that the son is going to make my next twelve hours on the bus my penance for not giving in to the various temptations of Sin City. He will not stop moving around. My patience is wearing thinner than usual, as not only am I still trying to gather my ramshackle shreds of sanity together after my experiences of Vegas, but there's a tell-tale catch in my throat and I know something is festering in my chest cavity. It's not a good situation from the outset.

And wouldn't you know it, it gets worse.

I'm somewhere in the backdeserts of Nowhere, Arizona en route to Flagstaff. The bastard spawn is sitting directly in front of me. The girl, quiet though she was at the beginning, has been screaming at random intervals throughout the trip and the boy is giving his long-suffering mother grief by hassling the yelling girl. That catch has developed into a full blown sore throat, I'm red hot from fever and white hot with rage. Worse still, we've picked up a drunk. He's been hollering from the back of the bus since Henderson, NV and the bus driver's protests do nothing, because he doesn't speak a work of English and the driver isn't fluent in imbecile. We get held up as he gets kicked off the bus. That's my favourite part of Greyhound's policy - you cause trouble, you get packed off at the next stop and left there to sober up and wait for the next form of transport to shoot through and rescue you. The stop the drunk is stranded at won't see a bus for the next TEN HOURS and there's nothing around except for tumbleweed and skin cancer.

At the next stop, a guy gets on the bus and he has NO FOREHEAD. A huge chunk is missing from the top of his head. It's concave. His nose is grizzled, his hair is barely hanging onto his tightly-skinned skull and oh my god, if this was a film I'd be dead in an hour's time after he hijacks the bus and drives it off a cliff. And he's one of the more attractive patrons.

Some many hours later, I've managed to get a good two hours worth of rest and I'm gradually feeling worse as the minutes progress. The kid in front of me keeps looking back in my direction and every so often he shoots me a cheeky look, but there's also a note of concern in his eyes. As the sunlight fades and we near Albuquerque, his mother and sister fast asleep nearby, he works his tiny hand through the gap so that it reaches beyond the head rest and over into my side where my hand is resting against the window and the little fucker grabs hold. He looks about as tired as I feel, and we sit holding hands on and off for the rest of the bus ride. To this day it remains one of the most heart-warming and innocent gestures I've ever received from another human being.

Damn kids.

As we step off the bus a storm erupts around us, the stifling heat from the day erased by the downpour. The air instantly felt fresher. I waved goodbye to my little buddy and mouthed a thank you. I don't think he understood.