Chapter 5: Panic in the Port Authority
The cab let me off at the 9th Avenue entrance to the Port
Authority building, not quite as familiar to me as the main entrance on the
other side.
I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, overwhelmed as I always
got when coming here, amazed at the tall buildings the same way I had been when
I came to this place with my mother when I was five.
The awe of it never left me, an icon of my life I still
clung to, those journeys here with my best friend Hank, the wandering through
streets to places no tourist would go.
It pained me to leave all this behind, even the would-be
muggers who had mistaken us for easy prey, finding out only too late that we
had been seasoned on the dark streets of Paterson, not at all the usual naïve
suburban teenyboppers who stepped off the buses from New Jersey.
The shapeless gray people clung to the street corners even
now as dawn exposed them, turning them not to dust they way dawn might
vampires, but into the sad collection of drunks, junkies, pimps and prostitutes
that lost their furiousness or appeal in daylight, the homeless who had been
turned out of the bus terminal by the police earlier in the night, struggling
over subway air grates to stay warm, or moving from bench to bench when they
could find them. And there were hippies, too, dazed and confused, their dilated
eyes seeing things in the world I could not.
I stood before the glass doors to the terminal dazed and
confused in a whole different way, thinking that my next steps would take me
out of one world and into another, a gate to some alternative universe I still
didn’t completely comprehend, yet once through the glass doors and up the
escalator, I knew my way well enough.
I knew the look and smell of the place, the dirty floors and
diesel fumes, the washed and unwashed masses that passed through these vast
caverns daily, the hobos that took up residence in its dark corners, the businessmen
who occupied the banks of phonebooths with their endless deals.
Ticket windows for local buses lined one whole side of the
largest of these caverns, most closed at the moment until the official
beginning of rush hour when passengers would flood into here, coming and going,
purchasing tickets to small towns and large, going north, south, east and west,
only none of them went as far as I needed to go. Many a night, Hank and I had crawled
through here, purchasing tickets to the last bus to Jersey before morning,
desperate to make it home before my uncles discovered my violation of curfew
and before Hank’s father found out he was not home snug in his bed.
This time, I needed to seek out the wider ticket counters
that lined the narrower passage nearer to the front door, those with blue or
gray or red banners advertising long distance buses such as Greyhound of Continental
Trailways, counters that boasted of more exotic destinations such as Boston,
Atlantic City, Philadelphia even Tampa or Miami.
In the back of my head, I still heard the clock ticketing
and knew by this time one or more of my uncles had risen, and had perhaps
discovered evidence of my crime, perhaps a bit too confused to put all the
pieces together to justify calling the police.
But soon they would, and I needed to be on my way before
they did, before the made the logical conclusion that I had made my way here.
I was, after all, a creature of habit. I had fled to New
York more than once – if not forever, then as a temporary reprieve, if not with
pockets full of money, then with the idea of digging a whole somewhere to hide
out in until I could make sense of my life.
A shudder went through me as I approached the Greyhound counter.
The man behind it half nodded with boredom and need of sleep, his uniform
jacket hanging on the back of his tall chair. He had even loosened his tie – as
if approaching the end of his shift.
“Can I help you?” he asked me but without enthusiasm.
Who could blame him? This was not an hour at which anyone
could feel enthused.
I struggled to speak, my head still filled with the images
of home, of my uncle’s early morning faces, of my mother’s face in particular
when they informed her of what I had done.
I put them out of my head.
“I need a ticket to Denver,” I told the man.
The man’s thin eyebrows rose. “Denver?”
“Yes,” I said. “When does the next bus leave?”
“The next bus is scheduled to leave about 7:30 p.m.”
“Tonight?” I said, shocked. I could hardly breathe. I had
mistakenly assumed buses to the west had the same regular schedule as the bus
to New Jersey – and I cursed myself for not checking before I committed my
crime.
The bored clerk seemed puzzled at my reaction.
I couldn’t wait even an hour let alone the whole day. I
staggered away, moving onto the next ticket booth, under the sign for Continental
Trailways. The woman there gave me the same sad news, and then when she saw how
devastated I was, told me Trailways had a bus heading west out of Philadelphia
at 11 a.m.
“We can take a bus from here to Philadelphia and transfer to
that bus,” she said. “Would you like that?”
Her eyes seemed to sense the panic I was in. She was pudgy,
yet very pretty, giving me a gentle smile as if she felt sorry for me.
“Yes, please,” I said, calming slightly, although my voice
still sounded shrill with my panic. “When does the bus for Philadelphia leave?”
The woman glanced up at the clock that hung over the banks
of escalators, then looked down at the schedule in front of her.
“If you run, you can catch the one that’s leaving right now,”
she said. “They usually wait a minute or so longer for late arrivals.”
I shoved money across the counter at her, enough to cover
the bus to Philly and the transfer to the bus west from there. Then, clutching these
tickets I ran to the escalators, and then up them three a time because they
just didn’t move fast enough. There were police officers sanding in the waiting
area between the banks of escalators where several dozen seats allowed
passengers to wait. One officer eyed me and my urgency, then apparently figured
I was simply trying to get to some office somewhere and lost interest.
I ran across hall at the top, passed the stores selling booze,
coffee, newspapers and souvenirs.
When I reached the stairs to the bus platform, I leaped up
these three a time, stumbling halfway up, nearly falling, then plunging ahead
aga. The smell of bus fumes filled my lungs. The echo of grinding gears told me
the bus was already pulling out, and it was, but stopped when the driver saw me
at the top of the stairs, opening the doors for me, smiling as I breathless
climbed aboard and handed him my ticket.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “The next bus doesn’t leave for
another three hours.”
Lucky, indeed, I thought, as I made my way down the narrow
aisle, passed other sleepy passengers, most of whom looked like businessmen. In
another three hours, I would have been caught and dragged back to New Jersey.
For all the ill-planning, somehow, I had pulled this off.
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