Considering the events of my first-ever U.S. Greyhound ride, I had high (or low?) expectations for my second trip: a 40-hour epic ride from New Orleans to Los Angeles. I spent my last couple of days in New Orleans simultaneously dreading the ride and feeling excited about it. What kind of characters would I meet? Would I overdose on fast food and spend two days staring out the window, fighting down nausea?

I took a cab to the bus station early Friday morning, and the ride seemed like an auspicious omen: the cabbie was chatty, expounding on everything from the post-Katrina recovery to the Louisiana prison system. (“It’s like the gulag Solzhenitsyn wrote about,” he said, and I noted silently that while I’ve heard cabbies talk about a lot of things over the years, this was a first for literary Soviet dissidents. Two days later I’d hear that Solzhenitsyn had died, and wonder at the coincidence.) I decided that if this cab ride was any indication, the bus ride would be heavy on interesting characters – and hopefully, light on the nausea.

The first stretch, from New Orleans to Houston, was uneventful. I dozed; the bus, though full, was remarkably silent. The eight-hour ride passed quickly, and I started to feel ever more confident about my chances of surviving this 40-hour Greyhound odyssey with my sanity intact.

*

After a hectic few minutes in Houston, I boarded a second coach. It was crowded, and I dropped quickly into a seat next to a polite, soft-spoken young man who helped me jam my backpack into the overstuffed overhead compartment. After I’d settled into the window seat, he leaned across the aisle, chatting quietly, alternately in English and Spanish, with another passenger. We’d been rolling along again for several minutes when I started to pick words out of their conversation: “probation” and “parole officer,” and phrases – familiar from television – like “they put me away” or “when I was inside.”

At some point I must have glanced over curiously – my seatmate turned to me, gestured to the man across the aisle, and said: “he just got out of prison.” He pointed to the man’s white, plastic mesh bag: “That’s how you can tell, you know? That’s what they give them when they leave.” I nodded, and glanced up and down the bus, spotting 6 or 7 more of the telltale bags. The man across the aisle – who didn’t seem to speak much English – pulled out a plastic ID card with the words “TEXAS OFFENDER” written large across it, and waved it in my direction. I smiled and nodded, trying to appear as though I run across ex-cons every day. Then my seatmate said: “I’ve got one, too” and a second TEXAS OFFENDER card was waved in front of me.

He seemed to expect some kind of reaction. I shrugged and smiled. Was it rude to ask what he’d gone to jail for?

“You ever been to prison?” He asked. I shook my head. I’ve never even had a parking ticket. “I did three years,” he said. Three years? That seemed like a lot. “Well, yeah, I robbed three banks. Actually, seven, but I got busted for three. And I got extra time because I used a gun.”

Oh.

Over the next couple of hours, I got a detailed explanation of the making of prison tattoos – accompanied by displays of exhibits A, B and C, on his right and left biceps. The guy was an artist, I had to give him that. I also got a run-down of his impressive rap sheet: a couple of armed robberies preceded the bank heists, and before that, a range of misdemeanors – starting, at just fourteen years old, with a misdemeanor for graffiti.

Graffiti?

“Yeah, I used to just draw on my desk in class, you know, draw in pencil and then erase it, draw and erase, draw and erase. And one day I was so bored, I just went crazy, and covered the whole desk in drawings. When the teacher caught me, she called the police and they charged me with graffiti. I spent a night in jail, and had to pay to replace the desk, and pay a fine.”

“Wow,” I said. “At my school they would have just made you wash it off.”

“I know, right? My first mug shot, at fourteen years old. Can you imagine?”

I couldn’t.

“Just think,” I said, feeling more comfortable with my new friend by now, “if they would have just enrolled you in an art class instead.”

He nodded, and we both stared out the window for awhile.

*

Most folks – including my new friend – got off in San Antonio, and the rest of us spread out around the bus for the long overnight haul to El Paso. We were due in at the border town around 7am – nearly 24 hours after we’d left New Orleans, and I wouldn’t even be clear of Texas yet.

We lost some time overnight, and after some delays in El Paso we were running a couple of hours late by the time we crossed the border into New Mexico. Hours passed, and the emptiness of southern New Mexico amazed me. Then, not long after we crossed into Arizona – and still with miles and miles to go before we hit Tucson – the bus gurgled and sighed into silence. The driver guided us onto the shoulder before we lost momentum altogether.

We spent a tense twenty minutes or so standing in the dust and heat by the side of the road while the driver tinkered with the bus. Someone made an awkward joke about who would get eaten first, if we were stranded. Everyone squinted at the sun, and tried to guess the temperature. 110? 115? Finally, the engine was roaring again, and we limped slowly along the remaining miles, through Tucson to Phoenix, where we arrived four hours late.

*

The final stretch from Phoenix to Los Angeles was pure agony.

Since Houston, I’d been carefully avoiding a particularly angry single mother. You know the type: the one who almost seems to be yelling louder for the benefit of the onlookers, as though expecting sympathy for the burdens of parenthood – when in fact the onlookers are whispering to each other in pity and sadness.

In this case, the child was a big-eyed, curly-haired girl, maybe four years old. The pair sat in front of me for that final leg, and though I barely heard the girl make a noise in the darkness of the sleeping bus, the mother made enough for both of them.

“Dammit, Haley, quit drinking all my Mountain Dew!”

“Would you shut up, these people are trying to sleep!”

“Don’t touch me, Haley, it’s too fucking hot!”

I stared out the window into the darkness and cranked my iPod louder and louder, but the mother’s voice pierced me regardless. Behind me, I felt as much as heard another woman sighing, “That poor child.”

*

I closed out the trip with another taxi ride, a 1am dash from the Greyhound station to my hostel in Venice Beach. This time, my driver didn’t mention Solzhenitsyn, but he did offer some classic cabbie wisdom about the city. He began with a complex metaphor about five men and one woman living in an apartment together. The men, he said, all fantasize about the woman – but because of the living arrangements, they can never have her, or all would be ruined.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” He asked me, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Los Angeles is... not for having. It is for... imagining.”

I nodded, to show I understood.