The Wayward Bus
In which our doughy protagonist drags his poor wife from a romantic getaway into an unscheduled 30-hour bus trip through the heart of America, courtesy of the government shutdown.
Why was Walkthrough cancelled on Monday? It’s a long story.
Chapter 1: Talkin’ Louis Armstrong International Airport Blues
The incoming flight nearly left Philadelphia International Airport on time. It was “waiting for takeoff” on the American Airlines app as we left Fauborg Marigny. It was ominously still waiting when we arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport, and still waiting when we cleared security. It was finally in flight as we reached gate B15. That’s a long time on the tarmac in an air-traffic-controller jam.
I was reluctant to leave Marginy, with its charming cafes and shotgun houses painted the colors of praline boxes, until the plane which would take us home was safely en route. American Airlines had sent an Everything is going to be fine, probably email before Karen and I snuck off for a romantic getaway on Wednesday. On Saturday morning, however, as we watched a couple marry outside the St. Louis Cathedral and then parade behind a Dixieland band around Jackson Square, the airline sent a Whoopsie, shit is increasingly splattering against the fan email.
Had our return flight been cancelled or ominously delayed, I would have booked a cheaper hotel somewhere off the tourist trail so we could plan our next move in relative comfort. But our flight was still “on time” less than two hours before its scheduled departure.
Some background: New Jersey schools close for two days in early November for what amounts to a teachers’ union muscle-flex. Karen and I have not travelled beyond the Jersey Shore without kids since we had kids. We haven’t non-shore vacationed at all since a 2022 EF school tour, where Karen was working as a chaperone. Gone on Wednesday, back on Saturday: one school day and one Thursday night Raiders-Broncos snoozer missed. My elder son C.J., now a student teacher, also had two days off. He would dog-sit Frank the Tank while grading papers.
It was the perfect three-day getaway: the Quarter, Marigny’s greybeard-friendly Frenchman Street music bars, street performers, crawfish etouffee, muffaletta, a cozy boutique hotel in a neighborhood where locals walked their dogs and carried yoga mats to a converted church.
We almost got away with it.
Our flight was delayed an hour: understandable, due to the delayed takeoff. Then another hour. The departure board in the terminal began blinking and flashing like a Star Trek red alert. Muttered tales of vacationers stranded in Orlando and elsewhere circulated through the boarding area.
By the fourth delay – each arriving about 20 minutes before scheduled boarding, each a little longer than the last – anxious travelers peppered the poor ladies at the boarding desk with mostly-silly questions. One woman literally asked to speak to the manager. The boarding-desk lady explained that the latest delay was due to the fact that the scheduled pilot was no longer legally allowed to fly due to FAA regulations about shift length. The same woman then asked to speak to the pilot. I suppose she thought she could give the pilot a Red Bull and a pep talk, slip a twenty into his breast pocket, and convince him to risk his license to fly us off to Philly while groggy.
Our plane would never take off. I booked a cheap airport hotel. Then I weighed our options:
Flights: Per American Airlines, Delta, Expedia and prayers to St. Christopher, I learned I could book the two of us on a hypothetical flight to Dallas/Fort Worth for perhaps 8:05 AM on Sunday, with a theoretical connection to Philly scheduled to depart maybe 4:05 PM on Sunday. There were other, similar, rapidly-drying-up options.
The problem? Dallas/Fort Worth, a madhouse of an airport on its best day, was reportedly experiencing greater delays/cancellations than Philadelphia International. Getting stranded in Dallas would leave me with even fewer options for getting home. And yes: I checked Sunday/Monday flights to Newark, La Guardia, BWI. They were long gone.
One-Way Car Rental: My driving glasses were sitting in Karen’s car, which (as I write this first draft) is still sitting at the airport. I don’t need them to drive legally, only safely. Puttering to the store on a clear day without them is fine. Negotiating I-59 into Chattanooga in uncertain weather? Not so much. And Karen can only do some of the driving.
Plus, a time constraint: I could bag Walkthrough, but Karen would be burning sick days, while Frank the Tank needs his two square meals per day, plus love and affection. Driving safely, at our age, would require two overnight stops.
Amtrak: The early Amtrak trains leaving New Orleans were sold out; folks whose flights were swiftly cancelled, like the folks at Ground Zero for a nuclear blast, turned out to be the fortunate ones. The later trains would essentially leave on Monday and reach Philly by the NFL playoffs, at considerable expense.
Greyhound: Two affordable tickets on a bus leaving New Orleans for Atlanta at 8:05 AM on Sunday, with a transfer to an Atlanta-to-New York overnight bus with a Philly stop. We would arrive home – or in Philly, at least – by 3:00 PM on Monday.
Let’s be clear: anyone flying right now is rolling the dice with a -5 penalty to all rolls. Every layover means another roll, another chance at a critical fail.
Karen and I have nearly a half-century of public school teaching between us. We can handle some grunge, discomfort, disorderliness, chaos, elbow-to-elbow interaction with the sort of folks who don’t get to enjoy boudin benedict brunches in gentrified suburbs during weekday getaways. The bus would be pokey and no-frills, but it would move continuously in the right directions. And the government couldn’t fuck the situation up for the bus-traveling community any more than it has already done for the last two centuries.
So we made our choice.
Chapter 2: Don’t You Know Me? I’m Your Native Son
Our 6 AM Lyft driver knew the Greyhound route from New Orleans to Atlanta well. He took it many times as a youth to visit his grandpa. The bus line brought back cherished memories of a loved one.
“So is it, you know, nice?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he replied. “Noooooooooo.”
The driver was at least reassuringly professional and knowledgeable about important matters like getting from points A to B. Our cab driver from the airport to the Bare Minimum Airport Hotel spoke zero English (even by cabbie standards), could not use Google Maps, didn’t know the airport-region geography well and seemed iffy about how to drive a cab.
The late-night cabbie took us to the Bare Minimum Airport Hotel Suites by mistake, which was at least an understandable error. The woman at the desk, when eventually summoned, directed us across a few parking lots and instructed us to dial zero on the phone beside the entrance to get the attention of her counterpart; cheap-hotel night desk employees apparently float in a featureless void until they are conjured. Her fellow NPC happened to be on duty when we arrived. Other stranded fliers were ahead of us in line, and he was on the phone with a traveler whose cabbie took them to the Bare Minimum Airport Hotel Extended Stay Suites by mistake.
We spent Saturday night emailing emergency lesson plans and instructing Young Mike to Lyft home from college to replace C.J. on doggo detail. We fell into a shallow sleep sometime after midnight, then awoke before dawn. Karen had one fresh change of clothing left. I donned what I wore while watching a wedding on Jackson Square on Saturday morning.
The New Orleans Greyhound station shares a building with the Amtrak terminal. It is well-lit and clean. There is a Subway offering breakfast sandwiches and coffee, a sundries shop for antiperspirant and toothpaste (our travel-sizes had been used up), a fellow at a desk to answer questions, a security officer to walk around and look official. Everyone was friendly. Boarding was simple and human-scale compared to the stresses and rigors of air travel.
My wife and I scrunched into seats which were incrementally larger than coach airline seats. It’s important to note here that sitting together made the entire journey bearable. Sitting next to a stranger for 30 hours? You’ll meet a few of the strangers in due time.
Soon we were chugging across the eastern tip of Lake Pontchartrain on I-10, the sun still low in the sky.
We reached Biloxi by mid-morning. The Amtrak station there is near a crossroads so quiet and windswept that the devil once waited there to buy a guitarist’s soul, got bored, and gave up evil for a while.
We passed a gay bar near Biloxi station. It was little more than a flat-roofed plywood shack, but with a sign on the door and rainbow flags over the windows. I’m sorry, but it looked like a barely-concealed mousetrap assembled by some Confederate-flag-flying evil-doers. I couldn’t imagine a more unsafe location for gay folks in southern Mississippi to congregate, which is saying something.
(I ran the last paragraph past Too Deep Zone’s expert on contemporary gay culture, who shares with me, among other things, a knack for stringing sub-references together. “Gay dudes probably have the time of their fucking lives in there,” the expert said. “That’s their Pink Pony Club. You drove past Danny the Street.”)
It was on to Mobile, a city I know well. The Greyhound station, however, is not located in Mobile’s New Orleans-lite downtown, nor near the South Alabama campus, nor by the airport, but on a grubby commercial stretch of Government Street.
We left the bus for a mandatory driver change and maintenance check. We spent a half hour inside a concrete slab whose vending machines were inoperable and whose bathrooms lacked toilet paper. At least the folks at the desk sold lukewarm Diet Cokes and peanut butter crackers.
Our fellow travelers through the Deepest South were quiet, agreeable folks. In our post-college years, both Karen and I taught in adult-education programs which can be politely described as “court-mandated.” We taught life-skill English or math to the recently/nearly incarcerated, to folks in danger of losing public assistance for various reasons, to non-English speakers, to all-of-the-above. Such folks often have their rough edges, as do irate flyers who demand to speak to the pilot, but an all-in-this-together attitude. Such was the vibe for the first leg of our journey: nods, smiles, country courtesy.
Onward we rode. One stretch of I-10 is on stilts for miles, crossing dozens of little creeks as a causeway through wetlands called the Mobile-Tensaw Delta Wildlife Management Area. It was an almost-exotic landscape.
After the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, there was nothing to see along the interstates except billboards for Buc-ees, “a chain of travel centers known for clean bathrooms and many fueling positions” according to the company’s website. There’s also jerky and barbecue, apparently. The mascot, Bucky the Beaver, is a bucktoothed rustic stereotype who probably should have been updated or abandoned as insensitive circa 1980.
A web search reveals that much of the nation is as familiar with Buc-ees as I am with Wawa, so I won’t dwell on this topic much longer. We passed two locations, and they looked like fever dreams designed by someone with ADHD playing Truckstop Tycoon. In my bored imagination, I imagined a Buc-ees-themed film franchise, Five Nights at Freddies-meets-Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the lovable-assed animatronic hillbilly beaver lures road-weary Yankees to their doom with the promise of brisket and a well-scrubbed toilet, hacks them to pieces, then serves them to the next batch of unsuspecting Yankees as brisket.
Next stop: Evergreen, which made the Biloxi station look like Heathrow. Try searching for Evergreen on Google Maps: it will plop a dot in the middle of a patch of Alabama and call it a day. There’s a crop-duster airport nearby, but no bus station. The Greyhound pulled up to a gas station off I-65. A 20-something woman sat on her suitcase beneath the Shell sign with her headphones on, awaiting her chariot.
Several Greyhound stops in the Deepest South were like this: Wait, oh lonesome and vulnerable traveler, at this filling station on the side of a forlorn road in a part of the world cellphone service never found. A malicious individual could have whisked this woman to her doom without a trace, except that this stretch of road was too forlorn for even malicious individuals.
When I booked this bus ride, I was given the option to select lower-priced routes with five or six changeovers, some of which promised to reach greater Philly a few minutes earlier or stop someplace more convenient. Had I chosen them, Karen and I may well have ended up sitting beneath a Shell sign somewhere. I would not be divorced now, but dead. My wife would have murdered me. And sold my carcass to Buc-ees for brisket.
“I’m gonna take care of y’all in a minute,” the driver said, somewhat ominously, before we left the Shell station. He drove about a half mile past the I-65 interchange to a Love’s truckstop with an Arby’s. “You folks have 15 minutes to get food and catch a smoke,” he said. Some dudes sprinted past, the friction from their velocity igniting their cigarettes the moment they leapt off the bus.
We procured some turkey-whatever wraps and sodas from Loves. The restrooms were roughly equivalent to the ones at the Molly Pitcher rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This was all fine, really. I had NFLGSIS to keep me abreast on Sunday’s action. I could even have loaded NFL+ to watch games, but motion sickness limits my ability to focus my eyes on anything while riding in a vehicle. So I listened to podcasts and looked at the scenery. Karen read her Kindle. After a stop in leafy, pleasant downtown Montgomery, the moon began to rise over the open fields of northern Alabama and western Georgia.
We changed time zones. Halfway home? More like three-eighths of the way. It seemed that we would reach Atlanta, switch buses, fall asleep, get “taken care of” by a driver at a truckstop when we awoke, and reach cities I knew my way home from before we knew it.
What was supposed to be so bad about bus travel, anyway? Probably some racist/elitist bullshit.
Chapter 3: Midnight in the Switching Yard
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, NOVEMBER 10th, 2:15 AM A fight broke out in the Greyhound bus station, a squat baitbox of a building located in the armpit of a warehouse block behind the Panthers stadium.
A walking clenched fist of a 40-something dude got fightin’ mad at a roly-poly 20-something lad for speaking to/looking at/breathing toward someone he referred to, without her apparent consent, as his “woman.” Recriminations, threats, and then the recognizable middle-school cafeteria lunge. Some travelers intervened, some skittered away in self defense.
Karen, who has broken up more brawls than James Dalton and would normally/unwisely unleash her Black Bolt Teacher Voice on the combatants, silently trembled at my side. Our coping reserves were nearing empty.
We had boarded the northbound Greyhound at 9:45 PM at the Atlanta terminal, which had the look/feel/smell of the emergency evacuation site for refugees from Mordor.
Exhaustion showed us some mercy soon after boarding. But Karen and I, partners in sleep for over 30 years, became rivals in the cramped bus seats. Every attempt at comfort by one of us came at the expense of the other. She could not scratch her nose without elbowing me; I could not adjust my crimped neck without jarring her awake. A bus stop or two, with the noisy announcements and slamming of luggage compartments, kept any dozing fitful and light.
We were rousted from the bus in Charlotte for a mandatory driver change and some light fisticuffs. We stood, stared and shivered in the early-morning chill as the outgoing bus driver and a custodian broke up the fight and attempted de-escalation counseling. They were the law here.
The men’s restroom was at least functional, in the way the old Veterans Stadium urinal troughs were functional.
I returned from the restroom to find Karen staring at a vending machine with puzzlement, as if it were a Tokyo bidet that would perform a deep colon irrigation while playing a video of anime princesses giggling at you if you pushed the wrong (?) button. Technology passed my dear wife by circa Windows 98, and she was now sleep-deprived and stress-addled. I intervened to fetch her a Gatorade, but the machine was indeed malfunctioning, waving a mechanical arm at the drink selection like a robotic archbishop performing a blessing without ever clamping down on anything. An onboarding college lad procured a Gatorade from his hike-the-Appalachians-sized backpack and gave it to Karen. He is now spiritually our third son, fourth counting Frank. A functional vending machine provided me with a bottle of Dunkin coffee. Provisions were low.
We returned to the bus.
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA, NOVEMBER 10th, 5:10 AM. A fight broke out at the Greyhound station, a pile of cinderblocks which made the Charlotte Greyhound station look like Jerry Jones’ private suite.
Same combatants. Same conflict. The clenched-fist dude, unregulated/sleep deprived/jonesing/psychotic, had been fuming on the bus for three hours while Karen and I elbowed each other into sleepy submission. He lunged at roly-poly lad, screamed threats at him, got yelled at by “his woman,” screamed threats at her, and looked poised to bite anyone who made eye contact.
The driver ordered the dude to walk the plank, but he spent several minutes circling and menacing the terminal. There was no security, no one at the desk.
Among our fellow travelers: a woman C.J.’s age with a six-month old cherub; a senior citizen on crutches; our Gatorade benefactor, who was leaving the station to return (I presume) to campus; a few meek women and rickety dudes who would suffer a first-round knockout to a stiff breeze; and someone who was either a genuine Shaolin monk of European descent or the world’s most dedicated cosplayer. There were also a few guys who could form a credible posse, but they weren’t the sorts of guys you would want to deputize.
Fortunately, clenched-fist dude finally vanished into the predawn air for good, though many of us never stopped glancing toward the entrance until we left the station.
There was one open, cleanish men’s room stall. Hip-hop blared from the handicapped stall two doors down. I heeded nature.
“FLUSH THAT,” bellowed a voice above the hip-hop.
I thought: With all due respect, sir, the first capsule has barely achieved splashdown, and more cosmonauts are clearing the troposphere …
“FLUSH THAT” came another order, before I could protest or even proceed further.
Some homeless citizen had apparently taken up residence in the handicapped stall of the Raleigh Greyhound station. He was determined to achieve what dignity he could by demanding swift and repeated flushings. As a useful side-effect, his troll-beneath-the-bridge exhortations caused a constrictive form of performance anxiety. I indeed flushed away my meager accomplishments and hustled away, secure in the (false) assumption that there were other opportunities ahead.
We returned to the bus. Our new driver, unlike the fellow who took care of us in Evergreen, carried himself like a cross between George C. Scott’s version of Patton and Aaron Glenn’s version of Aaron Glenn. He growled orders at us as we climbed aboard.
Chapter 4: Morning in America
Dawn found us in Virginia. It was autumn again, or at least the roadside flora was again golden-brown and familiar. Karen slept, open-mouthed and relatively peaceful. I guzzled my bottle of Dunkin and consumed the Mobile peanut butter crackers.
Not long after sunrise, the fellow in the seat in front of us began facetiming, with the volume and timbre of Method Man going through a soundcheck, with the woman he considered his girlfriend.
They met when she was vacationing in New Orleans. They achieved enough intimacy in The Big Easy to exchange phone numbers. Now he was bussing up to New York to visit her, unannounced and uninvited. The woman would have preferred the bus to plunge him and the rest of us into the nearest river. I know all this because everyone in the bus could not help but hear all of it.
You would think that this couple would have little more to say to one another once it became clear that she thought he sucked eggs. It certainly did not sound like a conflict that could be resolved from seat 3B of a Greyhound bus at 7 AM. But he kept talking, and calling back. She kept answering.
He chided her, shamed her, demanded that she show him respect. Clever strategy, buddy: piss her off enough, and she’s sure to greet you at the door of her Manhattan penthouse wearing Victoria’s Secret and a smile. The lady’s judgment also left something to be desired: at some point, you block the calls and deadbolt your door.
Driver Patton sometimes interrupted this romantic equivalent of a Jets-Browns game over a bus intercom with its volume pushed to Voice of Zeus. “You must use headphones and talk quieter. This is your final warning.” But dad was not turning this car around, and the lothario knew it. So the saga continued.
Petersburg is a shabby-chic, semi-quaint little Virginia country town on the hilly fringes of the Richmond metro area. Its bus station was a red-brick structure on the edge of the town’s Main Street. The station is also used for local transit and tour busses, which means its restrooms are probably not primordial ecosystems or makeshift studio apartments. But Patton would not allow anyone off the bus for potty/smoke/stretch breaks.
The same thing happened in Richmond, where the Greyhound “station” was the parking lot behind the Amtrak terminal. We were apparently behind schedule, if only by a few minutes. Patton would not let anyone seek a restroom. There was a bathroom at the back of the bus, but no one dared, no one dared.
Through Northern Virginia we rode, into the Beltway sprawl, over the Potomac, past the Jefferson Memorial and other symbols of indomitable hope.
Officially, Greyhound stops at Union Station in Washington DC. In reality, it pulls up in a parking garage behind the station, far from the restrooms and amenities. Patton (who disappeared for a likely potty break in Petersburg) again demanded stoicism.
While new passengers boarded and others left, a woman wheeling heavy luggage ran toward the train, spoke to a Greyhound attendant, then screamed a cataclysmic “FUCK” that nearly set off car alarms. She pleaded, huffed and fumed. She eluded the attendant and reached the door of the bus, stepping up with one foot and boldly petitioning Patton for a seat. She was successfully speaking to the pilot, or perhaps Pilate. Some passengers sheepishly pointed out that there was an empty seat.
Patton guided this would-be stowaway – pushed is too strong a word, though not by much – off the step of the bus and closed the door.
Based on her airport-appropriate luggage and direction of approach, this woman, like Karen and I, was probably stranded by a cancelled flight. Perhaps she made her way from Reagan Airport or elsewhere to Union Station, the Amtrak trains were too expensive or otherwise untenable, she thought she could buy a Greyhound ticket the way you purchase a city bus ticket, whatever. She was desperate. She was now marooned.
But that’s not the worst of it. We later learned that some passengers, desperate to pee or smoke, defied Patton and left the bus at Union Station. He did not wait for them. Travelers from Atlanta to wherever, with limited resources at their disposal, were now stranded in the nation’s capital, currently closed for business.
Chapter 5: Buy a Big Old Wagon to Haul Us Away
Baltimore brought a mandatory driver change. Patton marched off into the sunset. But our elation at escaping his iron-fisted rule was short-lived. The restrooms at the Baltimore Greyhound station were cordoned off with caution tape. Three port-a-squats stood on the loading platform. They looked like they had come straight from last year’s Preakness Stakes, without having been serviced.
There was confusion in the terminal. Many transfer buses connect in Baltimore, some toward Pittsburgh, others on local routes to New York through Delaware and New Jersey. Our fellow passengers weren’t savvy about transfers: two buses going in roughly the same direction was too complex an equation to solve. Many folks, after all, find airports bewildering, despite standardized signage and color coding. Take all of those labels away, mix in some sleep deprivation, and you might be at risk of boarding a plane for Peoria instead of Key West, too.
Travelers began asking me questions. Maybe it was because I provided authoritative-sounding answers gleaned from studying online maps and timetables. But maybe it was because – even with my four-day growth of beard and the ratty last-of-the-laundry clothes I had worn on the French Quarter 48 hours earlier – I was the lone Middle Aged White Male in the station, and therefore the person subconsciously coded to be somehow “in charge.”
Trouble was, I didn’t really know why our bus was just sitting while other buses boarded and left. We were waiting for a new driver, I gleaned through hearsay and guesswork. There was no sign of a new driver. There were no signs of any Greyhound employees except a good-natured custodian, broom in hand, smiling and shrugging when questioned.
A still-teenaged girl nervously approached me, speaking in a library whisper. She was traveling with a non-English speaking father. They had brought no money and had not eaten.
The vending machines were well-supplied and actually worked if you ramrodded a credit card persistently enough. I satisfied one machine’s needs and asked her what she wanted. After a half-minute of dazed staring at the selections, she asked me to pick something out for her.
I had taught gals like this, in the most basic of basic math classes. Learning disabled, stoned, ditzy, all-of-the-above, makes no difference when so hungry that you will ask a strange man for food in a bus terminal.
I considered granola bars for her – Karen and I were dining on them for our breakfast-lunch – then imagined her rolling on the floor in anaphylactic shock with a peanut allergy she neglected to mention. Some packs of Oreos and a bottle of water instead. A chocolate allergy would have been figured out by now.
The bus sat. No driver or desk attendant appeared. Questions and tensions mounted.
Karen, dreading another setback, stopped trying to help fellow travelers and drew within herself. My wife has been shouting down superintendents and staring down teenaged tough-guys for decades. She categorically does not draw within herself unless things have gone REALLY haywire.
Enough.
The luggage compartment of the bus was open. I dashed out and retrieved our suitcase.
Baltimore to South Jersey. Young Mike isn’t savvy enough a driver to do it. C.J. is, but he was student-teaching in New Brunswick. Amtrak? Maybe. Rental car? No glasses, but a clear day and a familiar stretch of road for both Karen and I. Maybe.
Lyft? I typed in a route to the Black Horse Diner, a mile from home, a convenient mile off the interstate for a driver. The price was bearable. It was well past tap emergency funds o’clock.
The first two drivers bailed on the long trip. The third, a fellow named Thomas, rolled up.
“This Black Horse Diner must have some amazing food,” he joked. And with that, we sped off in the chauffeured comfort of a midsized sedan.
We reached our front doorstep almost exactly 48 hours after we arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport for a flight which had not yet been delayed. We had slept about seven hours in that span. We had eaten one Subway breakfast sandwich, one Love’s turkey-and-whatever wrap and one granola bar each, plus some peanut-butter crackers and pretzels.
I was never happier to see Young Mike since the day he was born, never happier to pet Frank. And I could have bent down and kissed my powder-room toilet.
Epilogue: This Cockeyed Caravan
Yet I must backtrack a moment, and confess:
As I was ordering Lyft, a sober-looking fellow approached me who had asked me questions earlier. His car, like my wife’s, was in a Philadelphia International Airport garage. Could we split the Lyft?
I told him we were heading straight to New Jersey. Yes, but, perhaps we could work something out? Sorry, pal: I had to take care of my wife, I had to look out for myself. He had a ride service app as well, but what were his odds of finding a second Samaritan like Thomas?
I should have gotten the guy to the Black Horse Diner. We could have then driven him to the airport to fetch Karen’s car. Or, he could at least have gotten his own short Lyft and waited for it at a diner with coffee/sandwiches/bathroom comforts.
It hadn’t taken much adversity to curdle the milk of my human kindness.
But then, what of the gal with the baby? The Oreo teen? The monk? The roly-poly lad who found himself on a two-round overnight undercard? The Facetime lothario? OK, maybe he was best left marooned in Baltimore. But the rest were unlikely to have any other options but to wait for a bus driver who might never come. And others were marooned in Washington. And then there are the unpaid air-traffic controllers spinning as many plates as possible to keep America from grinding to a stop.
In the movie Sullivan’s Travels, a rich-and-successful director of silly comedies dresses like a vagabond and climbs onto a freight train to research a serious movie about the “problems that confront the common man.” He and his companion (Veronica Lake, setting fire to the celluloid) endure some hardships, but an entourage of movie-studio worker bees are never far out of reach to bail them out of trouble. Only when Sullivan tries to show his gratitude and prove his generosity by handing out crisp five-dollar bills to those who helped him along the way does he get into serious jeopardy. It’s showy, self-serving largesse that lays the pampered would-be champion of the common man low.
Sullivan (spoilers) learns his real lesson while working on a chain gang: his silly comedies, not his furrowed-brow concern or handouts, are his genuine, important contribution to society.
Maybe filmmaker Preston Sturges, the highest-paid person in America during the Great Depression, was reassuring himself that he was a fundamentally good human with that ending. Maybe I am reassuring myself with this one. But Sullivan ends up poolside with Lake, and I am safely home with my wife.
I cannot fix the government, pay air-traffic controllers, rescue every stranded traveler or make mass transit clean and dignified for every citizen. But I can write about the NFL’s weekly screwball comedy. And I’ll be doing so again before you can ask “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
I laughed a lot while reading this, but not more than when I read this:
“So is it, you know, nice?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he replied. “Noooooooooo.”
A true Travels with Charley. (Millennials, look it up.)