On the Bus

IN COLLEGE I got to know every bus terminal in upstate New York, or so it seemed: the old station in Binghamton where a faded, cardboard cutout of Fred MacMurray looked down upon the waiting room, urging you to “Go Greyhound and Leave the Driving to Us”; Rochester, where the bums were so polite they sat on the chairs, not on the floors, and looked only as bad as your average Manhattan account executive in the bar car of the 6:18 out of Penn Station; Syracuse, where the derelicts were of a more deranged order and where the cabbies had torn the taxi listings out of all the yellow pages, every last one, lest you call an independent cabbie; the newer, sleek stations of Buffalo and Albany, which were bright with happy graphics and kitchen-white enamel paint, but it was just like dressing up an emergency room in cheerful colors—still a depressing place. And then there was the squeaky-clean stop in far north Watertown, where the bus station looked like it had been scrubbed and sterilized in an autoclave.

All the