Jack Kerouac obsessive Killian McDonagh retraced the route from On the Road, albeit in the opposite direction, along the interstate 80 from San Fransisco to New York in search of truth and revelation. He boarded a night bus out of San Fransisco, and this is what he saw…
Having caught the night bus out of San Francisco, I passed through northern California in the dark. I awoke to brilliant light sitting on plains of green sage-brush which sloped up to jagged swirls and grooves of red clay mountains, all laid out beneath a soft blue sky. The occasional homestead surrounded by piles of scrap metal whizzed by to my left as the Mexican hoodlum sitting in front of me recounted tales of gang warfare to his newfound mamasita. I got talking to the two people in the row behind me; one a nineteen year old single mother of Puerto Rican background named Kayla who was fleeing an abusive relationship with a Somalian man, the father of her beautiful nine-month-old baby girl Jamila, the other a soft spoken man of about twenty eight named Stephen (after the first Christian martyr, as he informed me) who had recently been released from a psychiatric institution for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and who was on his way to Missouri with his grandmother’s ashes in his duffel bag to take care of an aunt who had just had a stroke, and who’s ultimate goal was to attend Christian college and become a minister. My immediate thought was: these are the kind of people for whom Kerouac would have creamed himself.
About an hour outside of Battle Mountain, Nevada, disaster struck. The bus began to shake violently and the driver immediately pulled over to the side of the freeway to discover that the transmission was shot. We were stranded in the baking heat, forty miles from the nearest town in the middle of the Nevada desert. Unpleasant as this situation was for us however, it was worse for Jamila, who’s periods of good behaviour were interspersed with moans and yelps that would bring forth such spewings of feigned aggression from her mother as: “Don’t make me lose my nerves!”, which would then be followed by her storming off to have a cigarette outside, leaving her baby in the more than capable hands of the would-be-care-giver-cum-preacher who would rock her on his knee and sing to her until she calmed down. Matters weren’t helped at this point by Leah, a wraith-like tweaker in the seat in front, who, having clearly hit rock bottom in San Francisco, was on the way home to visit her parents in Wyoming, and whose constant convulsions and coughing fits raised the levels of stress in the bus considerably- if purely out of concern for her well-being. During the course of the day the heat took its toll, and it wasn’t long before our small band of stranded travellers were slumped listlessly in corners dozing through the remainder of the seven hours it took for the rescue bus to arrive.
Night fell and we set out again. At around this point Leah’s behaviour began to deteriorate. I had agreed to let her use my phone to call her parents earlier in the day (although her hands weren’t steady enough to dial the numbers herself), and she now came over with the intention of doing so again, only this time, after issuing forth tear choking “I love you guys” at the end of the voicemail, she refused to leave the previously unoccupied seat beside me and proceeded to lean in towards me mumbling “Please don’t be freaked out!”, shaking uncontrollably. Before long she was up wandering the isle and falling in on top of other people, mumbling and shaking, until finally needing to be physically redirected to her own seat. She proceeded to lie down in the foetal position and continue to undergo violent spasms until our bus pulled into Salt Lake City, Utah. From here we went our separate ways, Kayla and Jamila disappearing with an ex high school football player sporting a goatee, Stephen continuing on his own epic journey, and me heading off to find somewhere to sleep. I just wonder what place there was in Kerouac’s romantic vision of humanity for someone like Leah, and I suspect the answer would be that there wasn’t one.
