THE GREYHOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

It is widely known that, as with all coach services worldwide, there are only two temperatures on a greyhound bus: Arctic or Sahara. It might be less well known that the thermostat on these American icons is motion-controlled, and switches whenever I take my jumper off, or put it back on again.

This is a brief account of our 11 hour bus trip from Nashville to Chicago. I have lots of thoughts on Alabama, and some on Nashville, and I hope to get those written up soon, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this account of our bus trip more than we enjoyed being on the actual bus…

Pathetic Fallacy.

Very soon after we leave Nashville, it becomes clear that the guy in the seat behind us is involved in a heated argument with his ex, but via a method I’ve never experienced before. He’s having this row out loud via phone dictation. Rather than reading her replies in his head, he has his phone play every single one of them out loud in a robotic female voice. He then speaks his cutting replies back into the phone. Her name is Amanda, and he must have a special form of voice dictation that translates tone, because every time he says it he puts a whining, sarcastic venom into it. Case in point: “I just want to be friends, Amanda, but I guess that’s not gonna work out.” We never find out his name, but I’m going with Cody; it suits his hat and wispy chin-strap. 

The most frustrating thing is that the messages from Amanda are not played quite loud enough to hear. If my journey is going to be disturbed I at least want a full picture of the gossip. All I can say is that after spending 10 hours in the man’s company I am firmly Team Amanda.

Cody lets out a big sigh: “Drama, drama, drama.”

After a spell of dicta-rowing with Amanda, Cody will video-call his mum (again, on speaker) to update her on proceedings: “She’s getting a restraining order, I guess.” Mum (“mohhhhm”) is keen for him to stop speaking to Amanda. She’s not the only one. At one point, he asks for pictures of feet. Cody, you dirty dog. 30 seconds later, however, he lets out a low whistle: “Eeesh, that is swollen”. I never found out whether the foot in question was mom’s or Amanda’s, but either way, I wish them a speedy recovery. Cody then starts messaging Amanda’s friends, who are having none of it:

Friend (via robot phone dictation voice): “I hope you aren’t using me to get to Amanda.”

Cody: “NO! Me and Amanda are SO done. I don’t want nothin’ to do with her no more.”

It quickly becomes apparent that Cody lives his whole life on loudspeaker, from romantic strife, to watching videos on his phone, to him constantly kissing his teeth, a habit that really starts to grate after about 6 hours. I have noticed that more Americans seem to conduct a lot of their lives out loud; they narrate their actions and feelings, they look around expectantly, hoping for agreement or comment. At first, especially as a Brit, this can be quite scary, but the expectations for how much you need to engage are often quite low; a simple nod or “oh, yeah” will generally suffice. There might some profound conclusion to draw here about the loneliness epidemic, but as a man on the hunt for blog material, it does make my life easier.

The other ongoing drama on the bus involves the driver, a middle-aged takes-no-shit woman with blue braids who has to shuffle sideways down the central seating aisle. She is very militant about not playing music out loud on the bus, which I appreciate, and initially earns her the respect of most people on the bus. This will not last long, however. At our first stop, just over an hour in, she becomes incensed that people are not sitting in their correct seats, and suspicious that we have a stowaway, and does a full ticket inspection, forcing those people waiting to get on to stay outside in the pouring rain as she side-shuffles all the way down the bus checking tickets with glacial officiousness. This stop lasts nearly an hour, at the end of which she has not found a stowaway and is very annoyed about it. 

It really was wet.

Perhaps to punish us for not finding what she was looking for, the driver comes up with a drastic solution to combat people playing their phones on speaker: she plays elevator jazz very loudly through the bus sound system. This wouldn’t be too bad, if she wasn’t playing it from her phone, and didn’t have her notifications on loud. From that moment on, the journey is punctuated by a series of deafening “PINGS” and “ba-da-da-DUH-DAHs”. Far from saxophone-ing us into silence, meanwhile, her decision to impose her tunes on the bus is taken as a declaration of war, and thereafter many more passengers start to play their phones out loud. Around me there gradually starts up a symphony of basketball highlights, of telenovelas, and, of course, Cody’s ongoing saga: “I did a lotta shit for you that you don’t appreciate, Amanda”. 

I seek solace in a podcast. At least now I can block out the noises around me with Hugh Bonneville’s dulcet tones reading Sherlock Holmes. What can I say, I was seeking home comforts. I press play, expecting to do the customary skip though an ad. Suddenly I get Donald Trump’s voice in my ears: “I have always said I would never let Iran have a nuclear weapon”. It turns out in the US podcasts can be sponsored by political parties. It also turns out that ads on US podcasts are almost all dark and foreboding. In the UK you might be encouraged to start a website for your side hustle, or buy a better mattress, or eat mini cheddars. In the space of an hour listening to a podcast in the US, I have been warned not only against Iran’s nuclear threat, but also the threat of identity theft, financial illiteracy, PMS, and worst of all, wrinkles. The small print for the Botox ad lasts longer than the ad itself. In the way that the US tends be a forecast of what we can expect, it feels like UK capitalism is still stuck in the “anything is possible if you grind hard enough” phase. You too could start a pointless website (thank you for signing up to quentinberoud.com). You too could eat Mini Cheddars. If podcast ads are the bird’s intestines of capitalism, I can tell you that I’ve read the next step for us, and it is techno-doom. Sex no longer sells, it’s all fear, baby. The good news is that Mini Cheddars are actually a delicious way to get vital salts in the water wars. 

The driver steps up her psychological warfare by suddenly pulling over on the side of the highway and having a twenty-five minute phone call. We only know she’s on the phone because one mirror above her seat shows her phone up to her ear. If she is aware of the hundred people behind her craning their necks to shoot daggers at her via this mirror, she gives no sign of it. Maybe five minutes after finishing her leisurely phone call, she pulls into a service station, orders us all to stay on the bus, and swans off to the shop.  At this point, however, her authority has crumbled; the mutiny is in full swing. Her desire to run a tight ship has completely backfired; if she were actually a ship’s captain, she’d have been killed and eaten by now. As soon as she’s out of sight, we all pile off the bus to freedom. When she re-emerges after a solid fifteen minutes in the toilet, she is NOT amused. Marching onto the bus, she immediately closes the door and starts up the engine, deaf to the cries of passengers warning her that two people are still inside the service station. The offenders re-emerge, drinks in hand, and begin jogging towards the bus. She does eventually let them back on with extreme reluctance, but her feelings on the matter are made clear when the smooth smooth jazz comes on a few notches louder than before.

After all that, we somehow arrive in Chicago only forty minutes late, so perhaps I owe the driver an apology. She knew she had time to kill. It was also just late enough to make Cody miss his connecting bus. Somewhere, I hope, Amanda is smiling. 

This is a much less photogenic blog than the others...