Truck stop burger king bus scum

'American' Part 1: Scrambling | Transit Story 2

You are about to read a chapter from ‘American’, a brief book of my brief life story. All chapters will be posted in chronological order by August 2025, so if you enjoy this read, please check out the other chapters.

Spring 2023
I want to scream at the speakers overhead to shut the hell up. I’m wiping the eyeliner off my face with an old, crumpled napkin in the bathroom of a scummy Burger King in Nowhere in Particular, USA. The middle aged Indian lady who was sitting next to me on the bus zips out of the stall without washing her hands. I judge her momentarily before realizing she probably just doesn’t want to risk standing at the sink and thoroughly scrubbing from her wrist to her fingernails while a strange white girl has a meltdown at the next sink over. The speakers are force-feeding me acoustic, folk-pop love songs but my mind is completely severed from the belief in love, or happiness, or anything at all outside of this pine tree darkness-encrusted Burger King truck stop hell.

There’s an entire industrial roll of toilet paper shredded and strewn across the floor. I try to dry my hands off, but the hand-dryer is so weak that it couldn’t convince an ant on the floor below that it’s a distant breeze. I cry more. I turn to leave and I’m faced with a door handle and no paper towels to grip it with. I cry more.

You may think I'm a germaphobe, but that’s not it. I’m a normal-phobe. It’s not the door handle or the toilet paper littering the ground or the bad hand dryers freaking me out. It’s the fact that I haven’t had to look at a gas pump in years, and I haven’t been in a Burger King in over a decade, and I haven’t listened to the radio since 2011. Yet, I’m now sitting here with sixty other people who had no intention of being in this situation tonight, and they all seem to be adjusting much better than I am to our new life. They’re unfazed that whatever teenager closed this Burger King tonight probably doesn’t get paid enough to tend to the random smudges left by the sticky hands of wired children, or the butt sweat of old truck drivers on these chairs. They’re unfazed that all of the songs have sounded the same, in a sad “it’s the 21st century, let’s all have depression” way (yes, I did just write that sentence in the middle of several paragraphs about having a panic attack. Sue me.)

I’m sitting at a table with four seats and every seat in the room has been filled except for the three around me… Officially, I am the crazy white girl of FlixBus 2866.

I’m a snob - I know you’re thinking it. I am. But I earned this snobbery. I spent two decades of my life and then some fitting into the nooks and crannies of everyone else’s life. I don’t just mean in the normal kid-under-a-parent’s-roof sense, but in that I lived with just about every relative and family friend within a forty-mile radius in Central New York for some amount of time; I lived briefly in my great aunt’s house in Ohio, and in my aunt’s house in Florida, and on the couch in my brother’s basement, and in a family friends’ attic; I spent Christmases in airports; and I’ve taken probably two hundred buses up and down the East Coast, and I am done. All the time that normal people spend in the hands of another - a relative, at best, or a scuzzy bus company, at worst (so far) - all the autonomy-surrendering that most people do in a lifetime, I completed before I even graduated high school.

So it’s not that I’m a horrible, self-centered snob who’s incapable of remembering that there are sixty other people also going through this - I have no special right to complain. I understand that most of the world is in a worse position than this. It’s just that I’ve already exhausted the part of my brain that is capable of relinquishing control over my own whereabouts; the part of me that has grown comfortable with discomfort has been the dark shadow of my adulthood and it’s been an exercise in deep-thinking to get myself out of the mindset that comfort is wrong. Tonight, I entrusted myself - this body and mind that I have tended so carefully with every one of the minuscule resources I have had - into the hands of a bus company that does this professionally. It is their job and their responsibility to transport masses of people across significant distances in a timely manner. It is their job to have working vehicles. It is their job to communicate with their clients if something has gone awry. But this company has failed in all of those departments tonight.

It is 4:21 AM. We have been at this truck stop for two hours and twenty minutes, having been told it was a ten minute break. We will be here for at least another hour. It will be another two and half hours after that when we finally make it to Syracuse, and another hour of solo driving before I finally make it to my destination. I’ll arrive - un-showered and un-slept - right in time to walk up to the church where my grandpa’s memorial service is being held.

I’ll get there when the good Lord says I’ll get there (or perhaps tonight was someone else’s prerogative). Just in time hop into another car to caravan to the cemetery to bury a great man beneath the soft spring soil. But in the meantime, must I be subjected to Today’s Top Tasteless Truckstop Ten?

---

Sitting here, I hear laughter. I look up and see couples snoozing on each other’s shoulders and families gathered in a fast food temporary homestead. That’s what I’m on the road for. That’s what I’ve always been on the road for. For roots. But I’ve been like ivy, clinging onto the lives everyone else has planted. Just waiting to be a tree, if only a sappling.