Greyhound Memoirs #9

INTRO TO JOSE
5/17/01 3:45pm CST

I’m sitting next to a young man who was recently discharged from the Navy. His name is Jose and he enjoys talking, even though he doesn’t speak English very well and is therefore very hard to understand. I sort of wish he would just speak Spanish, I would have a better chance of understanding him and maybe I could drown him out and sleep. He’d be more comfortable and I wouldn’t feel so bad for the things I misunderstand. He finally stopped talking and is sleeping now.

I’m reading this book. It’s really brilliant and moronical all at the same moment. Princess Leah (Carrie Fisher) is the author, you may have seen the movie, Postcards From The Edge. I always sort of wanted to see the movie, but it looked too much like Thelma and Louise for me. A few months after being in Portland I rented and watched the movie and was not all that impressed, but Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep are wonderful.

The second section is quite wonderful. The first section was good, but the dialog lacked something. I’m not a writer yet, so I can’t tell what. I think maybe…

Jose woke up distracting me and asked if I was writing to me boyfriend. Boys, so subtle with their intentions. I told him I wasn’t he said, “you do have a boyfriend though?” I nodded, smiling. He said, “I could tell.” How sweet is that? I guess I am easily swept off my feet.

There are a lot of people on this bus. A few small children, screaming, of course. That’s what the adults would do too, if that was socially acceptable. I didn’t really notice the screaming baby, behind me until Jose woke up, but when I think about it, the screaming has been going on the whole time.

Boys notice how annoying babies are more than girls, I think. Now that I am a mom, I notice screaming babies more because I am trained to react to it, but I’m not bothered in the slightest by it.

We’re in farmland now. Ah, middle America -- Iowa, maybe Nebraska. We stop in Nebraska for dinner in a few hours. Stomach inventory: a can of coke, a bagel and I’ve had about four cigarettes.

This bus has the rainbow seats again, that makes me smile. I wonder if I’m going to make it in one piece. No, I guess I know that I will and crack within the next few weeks. To be perfectly honest, it took much longer than a few weeks for me to crack. Ben came to visit the first or second week I was in Portland and I read him this entire journal and we laughed and drank and went out to eat and had a good old time. The whole transition was still a vacation at that point. I didn’t start feeling homesick for about a month of dead-end job searching, eating TOP ramen and living in the apartment building we would later refer to as The Asylum.

I called Irving in Chicago. I think I might call Ben in Nebraska it only seems fitting with the neb/ben joke. But I should definitely eat first. I don’t change buses until Salt Lake City.

Oh! I forgot to mention – this bus' final destination is San Francisco. How sad is that? A couple of years ago, I planned to move to San Francisco with Ben and now I am moving to Portland “with” Irving.

I’ll finish the second section of this book and continue those broken thoughts later.