Rasmenia

So, there we were, a frozen December night in Tulsa, with our faces pressed against the cold, dirty glass, staring at our empty bus.  The Greyhound station was small.  The movies had gotten worse – instead of Billy Bob Thornton, we were now trying to avoid looking at the screen as an estrogen-soaked Lifetime movie cackled in the background.

Olivier & I went outside while I shivered & cursed.  The Greyhound employee inside had informed us that we would be stranded until 3:30am, when the next bus for Amarillo, TX was due to arrive.  If we could get a seat on that bus.  We tried to come up with some sort of plan to get ourselves out of Tulsa.  What we came up with was… jack shit.

We went back inside & ran into the kid with the Hari Krishna hair.  “I saw a bar down the street,” he said.  “I really like beer.  I make my own brews at home.”

Olivier & I smiled & nodded politely.  “Yeah,” I said.  “Beer is good.”

I looked down & saw a little man with a face much too round & chubby for his small body sitting in the corner.  He was wearing green pajamas with the Mountain Dew logo all over them.  Standing next to him was the scary Erik Estrada.  I noticed that he, too, was wearing pajamas.

“Check them out,” I said to Olivier.  “Do you suppose that they’re some sort of gang?”

We looked around.  There were 3 guys standing in the corner that had just walked in from the street.  Everyone pretended not to see them.  They were wasted, belligerent & seemed to be looking for something violent that no one else wanted them to find.

The hippies were sitting in a circle on the floor with the Rasta Man & the Iggy Pop lookalike, who was busy telling his new friends all about his knitting.  Now he wore not only his grandma afghan poncho, but several knitted pouches hung from his neck in all sorts of tacky, parrot-like colors.

“I made this one between St. Louis & Tulsa,” he said, holding one up with pride.  “It’s to hold my cell phone.  I made this orange one right after, so I could have something handy to hold my smokes.”

I wondered what he had against pockets.

“Check out my pant legs,” the male hippy said.  “They’re all crunchy & we haven’t even gotten to Frisco, yet.”

We drank vending machine soda & squeezed ourselves into 2 uncomfortable metal chairs next to a woman who was taking up the rest of the row with her baggage & bulk.  She made strange sounds & weird smells wafted all around her.  I leaned on Olivier’s shoulder.  I fell in & out of sleep, lifting my head from time to time to wipe the thick thread of drool connecting my face to his jacket.  I realized that I was slobbering & snoring loudly.  My hair had gotten greasy over the past couple of days.  My clothes were dirty.  In this crowd, in this place, no one noticed.

I stood up.  “I’ll be right back,” I said.  “I’m off to the bathroom.”

I walked in & found 2 stalls built on a dirty concrete floor.  Piss, toilet paper & tampon wrappers lined my path to a horrifying porcelain petri dish.

Sitting there, not really enjoying this time alone, I was interrupted mid-stream when someone else entered the bathroom.  At first, I barely noticed, assuming it was likely that some other woman had to piss at 2am.

“Shawna,” a deep voice said.  He was just on the other side of the door.

“No,” I said, from inside my dirty toilet stall.  “Shawna’s not here.”

“Shawna, get the fuck out now, or I’m leaving without you,” he said.

“I… am… not… SHAWNA,” I said, wondering if I was about to be murdered.  He cursed, then exited the room.

So, Shawna, whoever you are, wherever you are, your boyfriend is an asshole.

I went back out & told Olivier about Shawna’s cockbite boyfriend.  “Man,” he said.  “St. Louis was bad, but this place is so much worse.  I’m afraid to think of where we’ll end up next.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “We’re just traveling to each Circle of Hell… with no fucking Virgil.  I can’t even imagine what Amarillo will be like.”

"Hi! Welcome to the 9th Circle! Or, as we like to call it, Amarillo."

That was when the Amazons came blustering through the door of the bus station.  Two black women, each one over six feet tall, blew into the room from the bus that had just arrived.  Each one of them dragged in a confused looking toddler.

“No heat on the mother fucking bus!”  One of them leaned down to get nose-to-nose with the security guard.  “You get my babies on a bus with heat… YOU HEAR ME?”

We all heard.  Everyone looked away, even the security guard.  No one wanted to incur the wrath of the Frozen Amazons, who now sat on patrol at the door of the bus station, barking at anyone who dared to open it, thus letting winter air inside.

“Man,” Erik Estrada said.  “Are we actually going somewhere?  Why are we lined up in front of the door, standing around like fucking idiots?”

That was when the Greyhound employee informed us that we would now be leaving.  On the same bus that we had arrived in, which had been sitting outside with its engine running for the past 8 hours.

We trotted out to the bus & jumped inside, bouncing around on our seats & whooping like a bunch of 1st graders ready to embark on a field trip to the zoo.

As soon as I sat down, I was asleep & didn’t wake up until we were in Amarillo, TX.  It wasn’t exactly the torturous inferno that we had been anticipating.  We were surprised that they actually handled our luggage for us – which made us a bit nervous.  We were having profound trust issues with these people by this point.  The bathrooms were overflowing with stale, swampy shit water, but we managed to find an oasis just across the street.

We could hardly believe our eyes.  Snacks?  Burritos?  No rubbery cafeteria meat?  We ran out the door.  Inside the tiny restaurant, we found 2 tiny tables & a smiley Mexican man behind the little counter.  He was laughing & friendly… we’d forgotten what people look like when they’re not miserable or insane.

Filled with joy once again & spicy breakfast burritos, we boarded the bus to Denver.  The driver, a little round bald man, came to each of us – much to our surprise – to ask about our destinations, giving us an estimated time of arrival.  He was making jokes & being kind to the passengers, all the while letting us know that if we dicked around, getting drunk & shouting, that we’d be “shit out of luck & off the bus”.  We liked him immediately, which wasn’t something that we had been accustomed to with our previous bus drivers.  Ditching us, snapping at us or rolling their eyes at us had become commonplace.  This guy was like… some kind of freak.

Olivier looked over at me & patted my thigh.  “See?  Things are finally looking up,” he said.  “Soon, we’ll be in Colorado & all of this shit will be behind us, then we can laugh about it.”

Looking back, it is all quite laughable.  It turns out, traveling on Greyhound can be much, much worse…

When Olivier & I woke up in our hotel room in Breda, we couldn’t focus on much except for breakfast.  Here’s the thing about breakfast: each time I leave France, I get all worked up & dizzy about what this new place will be serving for the first meal of the day.

I judge a country based on its breakfast.  Sure, there are other small, less important factors that affect my opinion of a place: the booze, the people, the sights… but, these are all nothing compared to the importance of what food a country starts its day with.

France, I love you, but a croissant & cup of coffee just doesn’t cut it for me.  This is a snack.  Fail.

Holland, on the other hand… they have their shit together in this area.  There was fruit, cereal, plates of meat & cheese… yogurt, juice, coffee, pastries & a variety of bread.  A chubby woman with an absurdly sincere grin brought me a plate the size of Greenland that was covered with runny eggs & bacon.

I was drunk on Dutch cheese & bacon.  Afterward, all I could do was gurgle incoherently with glee.  I didn’t want to move, but I had no choice.  As soon as the feast had ended, we had to stuff ourselves back into our scorching Renault oven to drive ourselves to Germany.

It was going to be a few hours, so we’d have entertain ourselves like the jackasses that we are… singing ridiculous made-up songs is a pretty good way of passing the time during a road trip.

While we were on the road out of the Netherlands, Olivier & I each remarked at the profound lack of tulips & windmills.  We did see a few windmills off in the distance as we sped down the highway, but not once did I see rolling fields of tulips.  It’s a good thing that I was drunk on Dutch breakfast cheese, or else I might have been very riled up about another cliché crashing down to the ground in front of me like this.

Another thing that we had to do besides keeping an eye out for confirmation of cultural stereotypes was to find postcards to send to friends & family.

It seems that the cagey bastard who swiped the tulip fields had also gotten his mitts on the fucking postcards.  We couldn’t find anything, so we had to settle on some free ones that we found hanging on the wall in a gas station.  Now, receiving a postcard with a picture of a gas pump on it & some gibberish written in Dutch may not seem classy to you, but… well, you’d be wrong about that.

Triumphant with our classy free postcards in hand, we were back on the highway & heading toward a campground just outside of Hamburg.

Just after we entered Germany, we made a rather wonderful discovery: Germany has something that France doesn’t.  Something that Olivier & I often lament because no one should ever have to go without it.

Of course, I’m talking about this:

As soon as we saw it, we were speeding into the parking lot, running inside & in the best German that Olivier could spit out in his excitement, he was ordering Whoppers.

Fuck.  Yes.

I also noticed in the Burger King the cleanest bathroom ever to be found in a fast food restaurant.  Likely it had something to do with the dude hanging around outside the shitters charging people 20 cents a pop to clean up after everyone.  We ended up seeing this all over the place in Germany & while we weren’t used to tossing out some change each time we had to see a man about horse, it was actually worth it because… well, you know – public bathrooms can be terrifying.

Anyway… on to the campground.

We stayed at a campground in the town of Großensee, just to the east of Hamburg.  We had picked up a few bottles of German beer somewhere between Burger King & putting up our tent.

We also had plenty of butane & canned ravioli.

We were pretty much set for the entire night.

Well, we were… until around 1:00 in the morning when I awoke in agony.  At some point during the night, it seemed that someone had attempted to remove the tiny bones of my inner ear with a rusty pair of needle nose pliers.

Evidently, I had also swallowed a fucking golf ball that was still lodged in my throat.  I was in pain.  I was outraged.  Naturally, I did what I always do in these situations.

I wept like fucking baby.

In the morning, instead of getting excited about breakfast, I was pouting & choking, sobbing into my scrambled eggs.  I was also barely able to speak, so not being able to bitch endlessly about my suffering was a bit of a bummer.

Obviously, I wasn’t very cheerful about this shit.

Olivier was on the phone, trying to find out what kind of medication to get from the pharmacy.  Words such as “infection”, “antibiotic” & “prescription” were flying around.

We went into the nearest pharmacy & Olivier threw together some words from his rusty German to discuss with the pharmacist all of this business with “antibiotics” & “prescriptions”.  Fortunately, the pharmacist didn’t feel like dicking around with us much & probably figured that if we were pill poppers trying to scam him, we wouldn’t be asking for fucking amoxicillin.

So, antibiotics & aspirin in hand, we were off to Copenhagen, where I would eventually be able to speak again.

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Technocrati Tags: Breda, Holland, Netherlands, breakfast, Germany, Hamburg, Burger King, bathroom, Whopper, Großensee, tulips, windmills, stereotypes, cliché, travel, road, camping, sick, pharmacy, ridiculous, food, postcards