Go Greyhound!
My father is probably the cheapest person I have ever known. This is a man who carries a change purse in his pocket so that when he calculates the 15% tip (total of the meal, not including the tax) he can round down to the closest penny. This is a man who did a cost benefit study to figure out how much lawn maintenance would be on our house and decided that we should have gravel instead of grass. This is a guy who, when driving, would wait until the last minute to apply his brakes so that he wouldn’t wear the brakes out too quickly.
Of all my father’s stupid schemes to save money the most painful would have to be the time he told me and my two brothers (Richard two years older, Aaron three years younger) that instead of flying us down to Florida for winter break from Baltimore, we would be taking a Greyhound Bus. We were excited about going to Florida. To a 10 year old taking the Greyhound bus sounded like an adventure. My dad kissed us goodbye, saying my aunt would pick us up in Miami and gave my older brother $20, telling us that he expected to see some change when we got there.
I ended up sitting next to a guy named Kurt, a 24 year old who wanted me to call him “Sylar”, the name given to him by the people of Ubat, a planet 200 light years away. At the time I had never heard of Ubat, but obviously it was a place where people didn’t believe in bathing or any sort of dental hygiene. Sylar and I talked about all sorts of things, like how he was able to communicate with his home planet via the TV antennae that was strapped to his head and how the mittens he had made out of aluminum foil were actually brain scanners. Kurt was forced off the bus in Blacksburg Virginia when he got into an argument with the driver’s rear view mirror.
My brothers in the meantime burned through the $20 before we got out of Delaware, going on a Coke and Smarties spending binge that left them with so much caffeine and sugar in their systems that Richard claimed he saw God driving a ’62 Dodge Dart and Aaron cleaned the bus 3 times.
By the time we arrived in South Carolina we were hungry, stinky and had learned to cuss like sailors, which the people from the Family Services didn’t find amusing as they hauled us off the bus as possible runaways. We explained that we were meeting family in Florida, but in retrospect the story did sound pretty shaky. We didn’t have any money, any ID and my younger brother Aaron, whose pupils were the size of hubcaps, kept saying things like, “You know how many rows are on the bus? 20. You know how many fingers and toes I have? 20.” And then the hyena laugh would start.
Richard and I spent the next two weeks in foster care living with a family of Jehovah Witnesses. I found the whole thing fascinating, although I didn’t like going door to door selling that Watchtower newspaper. Richard who has a nervous stomach, just threw up a lot. And Aaron said the two weeks he spent in “Sunshine Place”, a drug rehab center, were instrumental in keeping him from moving onto harder stuff like Sugar Daddies and Pixie Sticks.
We never made it to Miami, which was okay. We had the memories of being on the open road, the knowledge of how to fend for ourselves and a new and intimate understanding of the danger of sugar and the power of aluminum foil mittens.
Lloyd Stein 11.29.10
my real fake life 