Tales from the Hound
Being a recollection of some of my experience on long distance Greyhound bus trips illustrated with the assistance of a large language model
There was a meme going around twitter last week about the furthest you’d traveled by various forms of transportation and it got me thinking about my late teens and early twenties when I was a regular on the Greyhound bus NYC to Hartford, CT on the regular and then at least three trips cross country. Here’s some stories from those days.
NB: As an experiment I feed each of these stories, as written into ChatGPT. I’m illustrating this post with the first draft illustrations it shared. The caption for each picture is the description churned out by the machine.
It’s 1994, I am twenty years old and moving to California by bus. I’ve got a backpack and a weird canvas bag I made myself and that’s it, that’s my whole life. There are four of us going all the way to California — three African American dudes from the city and me. On the first leg, no one says much, but as we hit Pennsylvania we start to chat a bit here and there. I share a shot with them on occasion, but I’m essentially a child and they’re all thirties or older. I never get their stories, never know why they’re going cross country by the cheapest means possible – using a mode of transportation only used by folks with more time than money.
Generally I stay to myself. Most of the crowd on the bus shifts by the day, folks get on in Chicago, but they get off in Colorado. We stay constant. Somewhere out west, (maybe Nevada?) we begin to climb the foothills of the Sierras. One of the cross country dudes is sitting behind me, his seatmate is a young hippie girl. He is floored by the mountains - “Damn, this shit out here is gorgeous.” “Oh this isn’t much”, she says, “there’s much prettier places.”
“Fucking prettier than the Bronx” he responds.
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I am in my early twenties doing another cross country bus run, starting in San Francisco, ending at my parent’s place in Connecticut. I’ve taken the southern route this time to visit a friend in Memphis. The Houston bus depot still has the old TVs mounted to the seats, but none of them work. The Reservation we pass through is especially bleak when visited by Greyhound bus. Somewhere in Arizona, a middle aged white dude sits next to me. We comment on the scenery and he tells me the story of how he was picked up by aliens out there.
He was all alone on the road when his truck stalled. As he got out to check the car, they appeared above him. They take him, of course, but I don’t know what happened next. I wish I’d pressed for more details, but I was young and a little afraid of engaging with him. If this ever happens again, I’ll get the full scoop.
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I am 19 years old and heading back to New York City after visiting my parents in Connecticut. I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a thriller of sorts which makes extensive use of various strains of so-called Western esoteric and masonic type conspiracies. A young clean cut white guy sits next to me. Probably late twenties. About twenty minutes into the ride, he notices the book I’m reading and engages me in conversation. He tells me he’s a member of a secret society of Catholics who have been fighting the Mason’s for thousands of years. I wish I could remember the name. It was in Latin, like the book he was reading. The conversation had a pleasant tone. Two strangers passing the time, chatting. Except the subject was the need to fight the horrors of Masonic evil.
To this day, I don’t know if he was pulling my leg, crazy, or sincere.
Note: I’ve shared these stories in various places over the years and I’m sure the details have changed a bit in the telling. Dialogue is recreated and memory is subject to change, but I swear to god this shit happened.