The Risk of Smoking in New York
The decision to move to Boston to be with Christine was easy. The act of moving could have been a lot easier. At the very least, I should have been more practical when considering what I’d do once I got there. Where I’d live. How I’d make money. But I didn’t think through any of these things, even during my two and half days as a passenger on a series of Greyhound buses during an almost non-stop trip from Phoenix to what was soon to be my new home. Two thousand, eight hundred eighty eight miles according to my pocket travel map. I kept the map for years afterwards, marking up in pen or pencil the paths I took from Place A to Place B, but this was its first trip in my pocket, and I had managed to kill at least a few minutes of the trip by highlighting the roads we took to cut across the country from my southwestern hometown all the way to the great big city of Boston.
We arrived in New York City at about 11pm. It was my first time there, so it was impossible to say if we were headed towards an interesting part of town or not. All I knew is that it took at least twenty minutes or so to get through a tunnel that seemed to transport us magically from just outside the city directly into the heart of it. At one end, we approached a forest of tall buildings. At the other, we were crammed between them, surrounded by taxis and people, the giant bus suddenly no more significant than a matchstick thrown into a pile of garbage.
Oh, the garbage. There was garbage everywhere. Black trash bags, stuffed and tied, lined the sidewalks. Every sidewalk. It must be trash day, I thought. And I guess there are no alleys here, so all the trash has to go on the sidewalk for collection first thing the next morning. I imagined how the streets must look like when all the trash is gone. Sparkly, I thought.
We pulled into a long and slanted parking space at the bus station alongside what seemed like a sea of other buses. In the past two and half days, we’d stopped in practically every town you could stop in between Phoenix and Boston, some big, some small. Not one came even close to having as many buses at its station at one time as this one. The Big Apple had a very busy bus station.
I filed up the center aisle behind the others and stepped off the bus, feeling quite like the star of a movie in which some cocky kid from the Midwest wearing a straw hat and chewing on a toothpick moves to New York to get his start at a career at which he can only be successful by losing the chip on his shoulder but succeeds anyway by being just cocky enough to win over the grouchy bar owner and, in the process, the pretty girl. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to look tough, like I belonged there. Mostly, I wanted a cigarette.
I decided to go inside the building to look for a smoking section. I wasn’t tough enough to stand outside, or to smoke in whatever damn place I felt inclined because I was cocky and could get away with it. A few seconds later, I met a man more excited about bus station customer service than anyone alive. Well, I didn’t so much meet him as get accosted by him. He stepped abruptly towards me, gesticulating wildly, eyes about to pop out of his head from the strength of his conviction that every stranger to his beloved city must be properly welcomed. I’m not sure I could have given the police a remotely accurate description of the man even moments later, but in the years since this event, he has gradually evolved in my memory to look more and more like Harrison Ford in the movie version of The Fugitive, prior to shaving his beard. Shorter, scragglier, and dirtier, but yeah, The Fugitive.
“Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?”
He said this loudly enough that I was sure everyone within twenty feet of me had to have been alarmed, but no one so much as turned their heads. Of course, my eyes were glued on this incredibly zealous bus station greeter, so I might not have known even if they did.
“Um.”
“Where’s your gate, man?! Where’s your gate?!”
He spoke in capital letters.
I pulled the bus ticket out of my pocket and flipped it around a few times to find right-side-up. “Gate Eleven,” I said.
“It’s over here, man! It’s over here! Follow me! Right this way, man! Right this way!”
These may not have been his exact words, but they were certainly something to the effect of, I’m fucking crazy and you better do what I say or you’ll find yourself alone and dying in gutter in New York, you cocky straw-hat-wearin’, toothpick-chewin’ son of a bitch. He didn’t say all that, but I’m pretty sure it’s what he meant.
I followed.
He led me past the main entrance and down a main corridor, emphatically yelping the whole time to “Come this way! It’s over here, man! It’s over here!” I spotted the smoking section as we raced past it. A small room with a glass wall, full of hacking, middle-aged trashy people too poor to fly to New York, an attraction a tour guide might introduce by saying, “And here we see Smokers, in their natural environment.” It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those rooms. Damn, I thought. I need a cigarette. That room is kinda neat. New Yorkers sure are crafty. “Follow me, man! Follow me!” I followed. The capital letters won the argument.
Gate Eleven had in front of it a line of people sitting on the floor. Indian style. Fetal position. Bags. Purses. Food. Whatever. Just a line of people waiting for a bus, no different than any other line for any other bus. The Fugitive pointed at the floor behind the twentysomething African-American woman at the end of it.
“Wait right here, man! Wait right here! Your bus’ll be along in about an hour. Wait right here!”
I sat.
He turned and charged back towards the entrance. “Wait right there. It’ll be here in an hour. Just wait!” He spotted another man whose face apparently said, I’ve never been to New York. Please accost me. “Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?!”
I stood up. I nodded at the twentysomething woman, little else than pure fear in my eyes. I walked back to the smoking room. If I needed a cigarette when I got off the bus, now I needed three of them.
Fifteen seconds after taking my first step in the great city of New York, the clock on my first New York minute was nearly over. All I had left to do was wait.
Wait. Right. Here. Man.
