The Greyhound bus ride from New York to Memphis takes 24 hours, so you may as well do something pretty with your time, like getting drunk before noon off a liter of J&B or tagging the initials "Nc" on the window or checking your blood pressure at the drugstore next to a transfer station. Or you can call a friend to offer some long-distance advice, even if they probably won’t take it.

“Imma tell you how not to fumble that bag,” my seatmate Jameer is telling his friend Niki over the phone. They’ve been talking about keeping her life on the straight and narrow for at least an hour now. It’s the real ones who always get the deals.

Jameer, the older of the two, is 23 at most. Blessed with an old-school name, he stays up late working on his sound, and offers advice about not getting caught up with party boys who talk game. Given the light flirting and veiled allusions to whatever happened between them way back in the day, I’d bet money that Jameer and Niki were once romantically involved. It’s hard to say whether he is truly interested in another round, or just whiling away the hours on a long bus ride.

Jameer may not know the answer himself. As he talks, Niki is folding her clothes and straightening up around her apartment. Daytime TV is on in the background, suggesting that she is only half-listening to his advice. On the one hand, Jameer has a sense of purpose in his life. He talks a good game. On the other hand, he is calling her from a Greyhound bus in the middle of the day, half-drunk.

Jameer is headed to Memphis to stay with a friend who is going to help him with his music. I am headed to Memphis because I wanted to see Ja Morant play basketball. I’d bought a $45 ticket before the Grizzlies star got injured. Instead, I will watch the ducks walk through the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, which is famous for its duck-walks. In the morning, the ducks walk across the lobby, where Elvis’s tailor still has his shop, and in the afternoon they walk back across the lobby into the elevator, which they ride up to a pagoda on the roof, where they spend the night.

That things fall apart is a truth inscribed in the DNA of all living matter. It may be your fault, or her fault, or nobody’s fault. It may happen in accordance with the laws of gravity or in defiance of all previously known laws. When it does happen, you may not believe it is actually happening to you. But that doesn’t make it any less real.

The question of how it happens is usually easy to answer. You dislocate your shoulder. You lose your job. The money runs out. The plant shuts down. A spouse leaves. Your child is born with a rare heart defect and requires repeated open-heart surgeries. Your son or daughter is abducted by a political cult or by TikTok, or otherwise retreats into the darkness of his or her room. The roof of your house collapses under the weight of a heavy snowstorm in April. The dog runs into traffic and has to be put down.

Large, impersonal factors may also play a role. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses. An Iron Curtain descends across Europe. California tumbles into the sea. A songbird arrives on your doorstep and delivers a prophecy of a death foretold, and the death in question turns out to be your own. The arrival of long-awaited “fuck you money” means that your wife is free to finally leave you. Stranger things happen and keep happening.

Americans are a restless people, believers in the big rock candy mountain which rises up above the valley that is directly behind the mountain in front of us. We reject the certitude that our lives are, in fact, finite, and flee from voices that tell us otherwise, like a nation of Jonahs. While the destructive potential of this trait is obvious, it is at the very same time the source of our strength, both as a nation and as individuals. God and death are the poles between which the American character is forged, requiring a certain degree of wide-eyed obliviousness to both, which in turn produces the characteristic anxiety of American existence.

While our hopeful collective belief in the manifest destiny of America — and also of every individual American — may be the cause of assorted genocides and wars, it has also had broadly beneficial, demonstrable effects, allowing for the building of military-width highways through swamps and the transformation of barren deserts into tracts of neatly laid-out single-family homes. And if the majority of the houses should go unsold, and if the lawns should turn brown and die from a lack of water, and if the sun-bleached Venetian and Tudor homes that someone built side by side in the desert should disappear into the surrounding sands by tomorrow, you can always pack up your furniture and rent a U-Haul, or buy a bus ticket, and go someplace else, to do battle with the whale.

A Greyhound bus ticket is our lowest-common-denominator approach to escaping the present tense for a new present, which will be better in precisely all the ways that the existing present disappoints us. The future-present, in which the qualities of a rosy, imagined future are retroactively layered onto the present, so that the speaker is always standing with one foot in the present and the other in some imagined, better future, is a form unique to the American language. This temporal hybrid tense is a refuge for hope-peddlers of all stripes, from starry-eyed salesman for graham crackers, BLM and Herbalife, as well as a useful instrument in any con. 

For Americans, the idea that one is always acting simultaneously in both the present and in a future that is yet to be born is entirely normal. Hundreds of millions of people live this way on a vast continent which offers plenty of room for everyone’s dreams, and to escape the resulting nightmares. Here is an AI-generated photograph of what your house will look like, complete with your choice of finishes, and here is a half-built exit ramp off the highway. So who really cares if the land in question is currently a swamp, filled to the gills with giant, sharp-toothed alligators? The realtor doesn’t care. The company that built the houses doesn’t care. The bank certainly doesn’t care, especially given the fact that 120 percent of its holdings are insured by the government in order to encourage precisely this type of enterprising speculative madness. 

Why not join in? A nation of dream-chasers organized into systems of capital-extraction and investment — by banks, governments, property companies, and what have you — functions something like a nuclear reactor, generating industrial quantities of hope. Hope generates speculative fictions that help us to organize space and time. Stories, when organized into systems, can generate more than enough energy to send men to Mars and bring them back, too. That is the basis of the American system. Just remember not to look down, and to keep a bus ticket stashed in your wallet.

A bus ticket is an inexpensive and practical device for getting from here to there, with no necessary expectations of what might happen upon your arrival. It might get you there in time for the funeral, or to pick up a child you barely know from an estranged ex-spouse who is heading off to Mexico with her new lover. It might be a ticket to a hot meal and a bed that doesn’t stink.

Between the ages of 25 and 42 or so, I took plenty of bus rides, while pursuing the not-exactly-thriving-but-still-remotely-viable profession of writing long articles for major American magazines, which came out every week or month and paid the expenses of their writers, in addition to editing their work and printing it on paper. My MO was to ride the dog from my home in New York City to Las Vegas, Tallahassee, Duluth, Columbus, Amarillo, El Paso, Buffalo and places in between, and then call my editors, who as a rule were kind enough to give me a free hand to write about dog tracks, blimps, truck drivers who built atomic bombs, and whatever other subjects that I wanted.

Unfortunately, having come off two stints covering wars, I was also prey to serial addictions, which on any given day or week would determine what gear my brain was stuck in. Which made long expanses of time on buses a useful and often necessary means of getting right with myself. Riding a bus for ten straight hours was my way of calming the demons of fear and self-loathing that fed lavishly on my inner weaknesses. Whether as a writer, a lover, or a friend, I knew that my best bet was generally to keep moving.

Bus rides could also be dangerous. Once, riding the dog on the way to Houston, a woman sliced a man’s cheek open with a three-inch pocket-knife, an occurrence that produced an animal-like howl from the victim followed by a chaotic eruption of screaming from the back of the bus. This was followed by the bus lurching to a sudden halt by the side of the highway. The next thing I knew, the bus driver was rushing past me down the aisle with two capable-looking men behind him, before rushing back up the aisle. When the bus started moving again, I saw the pair standing together calmly by the side of the road, as if nothing had happened to either one of them. The man held a roll of paper towels that the bus driver had left him with to staunch the bleeding. The woman’s knife was safe in the bus driver’s pocket.

On another ride, I met a kid named Chris from New Jersey, who it turned out was staying at the same motel that I was in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The driver dropped us at a nearby Waffle House, where the mostly shirtless or shoeless crowd was still going strong at 2 AM. I offered to buy Chris breakfast, and in the same spirit he offered me cocaine of such a shockingly high quality that it gave me a whole new neural connection that I spent the next week exploring in my hotel room while supposedly reporting a feature article about NASA’s plans to colonize the Moon.

For most dog riders, though, a long-haul bus ticket is the opposite of a lottery ticket. Their dreams died decades ago. The wisdom they had to share with me was about how you go on living, which came in handy two decades later, when my industry collapsed, and my youngest son turned out to be suffering from a serious genetic disorder. I generally avoid writing or talking about my son’s illness, because the attempt to make it intelligible to others inevitably requires me to excise parts of my own experience. It is common to hear heartwarming stories about children who are great companions to their parents and siblings despite enduring years of painful surgeries or being condemned to breathing through a tube. I can’t say for sure whether these stories are true, because nothing quite so horrible happened to us. What I can say is that my son Elijah is a person like any other, with highs and lows, and jokes that reliably make him laugh, and that he and I are great friends, and we share many things in common, including a love for music and our dog and for his brother and sister, and a thriving curiosity about what happens to our pond in the winter. We also share plenty of genetic material — some of which might even help to cure his disease. Beyond that, though, I would say that my experience as his father is private and unknowable, unless, for whatever reasons, you have also spent the past decade of your life in a state of sleeplessness and dread.

My wife diagnosed Elijah’s rare illness correctly when he was 13 months old, only to be dismissed out of hand by the doctors, and eventually by me, as a crazy mom, obsessed with premonitions of doom that had zero basis in reality. Except, they did. As a result of this private experience, perhaps goosed by larger social forces, my sense of trust in social institutions and normative modes of thought collapsed, as I saw the trust I had formerly placed in everything from doctors and hospitals to newspapers and universities casually betrayed by those same people and institutions. I can’t really answer the question of whether America itself had rotted away, or whether I simply had my eyes opened to an existing reality already inhabited by most other people.

Either way, I couldn’t unsee it, a country full of people with no place they could reasonably turn for good-faith answers to questions like “Who can allow me to say goodbye to my dying mother in the hospital?” or “Under whose authority was the universal abacus of suffering created?” Clearly, the answer wasn’t me. The more despondent people became, and the less they trusted each other, the easier it was to demand mandatory proofs of conformity to propositions that only got more far-fetched with every passing month.

In short, while I was emerging from a personal crisis, the world around me was going through an even bigger crisis. My son still didn’t sleep through the night with any regularity, but he was happy. His happiness meant that I could also be some version of happy. Life would be wonderful, in fact, if only the people who destroyed everything that I had once cared about — magazines, indie rock, independent films, bookstores, beach towns, and dog tracks — would stop trying to turn America into a surveillance state run by an oligarchical ideocracy made up of rich kids and their parents whose watchword was “equity,” a banker’s term if ever I heard one. I was doing fine at home. Meanwhile, America, my America, was dying.

By the time I arrived at the rotting communist-brutalist exterior of the Port Authority bus station in Times Square I had settled on a destination for my journey: Memphis. I chose Memphis because I didn’t know anyone there, which was mostly how I traveled when I took buses to go places in the early 2000s, which was the last time that America truly felt to me like America. I remembered that there was a hotel in Memphis with a flock of ducks who took the elevator down from the roof every morning and spent the day splashing around the marble fountain in the lobby, where the Lansky brothers, Elvis’s tailors, had their shop.

Memphis was a place where things ended. It was also a place where things began. I had seen Al Green lead a rousing Sunday church service there and visited the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I had also visited Graceland, which, along with Dealey Plaza in Dallas, is one of the twinned spiritual centers of postwar American life, where a man twisted nearly beyond recognition by the radioactive power of wealth and fame forever mourned the death of his mother Gladys, who was perhaps the one person in the world who truly loved him.

When he wasn’t blitzed on pills, Elvis spent his days in Graceland watching the people of his hometown pass by on a closed-circuit television set in the hope that he would see someone in need and be able to run outside and do them a kindness, which in the Jewish tradition is called a tovah. The concept of a tovah is distinct from a mitzvah, which is something that you are commanded to do by God. A tovah is a more casual kind of favor, which for me has always made it more significant than a mitzvah. A tovah is unbidden. The fact that Elvis did someone in Memphis a tovah several times a week is why I visited Graceland the second time I was in Memphis, armed with an eight ball of cocaine, a baggie of MDMA, and a woman whose doping frequency matched my own, and who used that coincidence to entangle herself in my life in ways that took me several painful months to unravel. Memphis was also the home of Sun Records, the studio where Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash first laid down their sound on wax, but in the chaos of that last visit, I fell asleep in the hotel lobby with the ducks, and never made it to either destination.

The Port Authority is most definitely a place where dreams go to die. The cold 1980s façade of the building looks like a giant erector set, now old and oxidized after someone abandoned it on the sidewalk in the middle of one of the most trafficked intersections on the planet. From the sidewalk, you can see deep streaks of rust on the beams, whose crossmembers are encrusted with mounds of ancient pigeon shit. The inside of the Port Authority resembles a low-budget shopping mall with sufficient foot traffic to stave off the immediate threat of bankruptcy.

The flagship Greyhound terminal is located below ground, in a far corner of the Port Authority basement. To get there, you have to climb down several flights of stairs and walk down a long corridor, at the end of which one is greeted by the sleekly elongated silver-toned Greyhound logo, which provides the singular touch of manmade beauty and hopefulness that I encounter over the course of what becomes a 49-hour-long journey. 

Making a left at the Greyhound logo, I arrive at an expanse of cracked concrete flooring and bright orange wall tile that appears to be an extension of a nearby public restroom. There are perhaps 18 gates here, though it is hard to get an exact count, since various gates are blocked off, either temporarily or permanently.

The answer to the question of who takes the bus these days is simple: Bus passengers are people who don’t take the plane or the train, and don’t have a car with insurance or enough money to pay for gas. No one inspects your bags on a bus. No one wears masks. The bus driver takes you from here to there. Or at least, that’s what the ticket promises.

Starting out from Manhattan, my companions include two migrant families; a nice old lady named Maggie who is traveling to visit her sister in Columbus, Ohio; and a guy who is carrying a new-looking hard-sided suitcase and looks like my idol Ja Morant, the star point guard for the Memphis Grizzlies who recently separated his shoulder, condemning the Grizzlies to another lost season. As a sports fan who lived to see the Boston Red Sox win the World Series not once but three times, I am content to focus my attention now on individual performers, team fandom being reserved for suckers who are condemned to scrabble for stray scraps of meaning in shared misery with other suckers who perversely encourage each other to blow their disposable incomes on official team merchandise.

In the case of Ja Morant, my attraction stems from his unbridled joy in shot creation and driving into the paint, combined with his blithe disregard for the drawbacks of his slight frame. Physical intimidation isn’t part of his game. Ja simply moves with greater foresight and velocity than anyone else on the court. The fact that he is always a step or two ahead makes him invincible. When someone sends him sprawling half-way across the court, he bounces back up with a smile on his face, before he does something else new and amazing. In turn, the confidence of his game makes his team-mates better. How can they lose, playing with Ja?

It goes almost without saying that the exuberance of Ja’s game has made him a target for every cakewalker and gangster in Memphis, resulting in a string of questionable decisions and associations and court dates that have led in turn to two suspensions and the loss of major endorsement contracts. All of which makes it easy for me to welcome Ja as kin.

“Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,

Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother,

After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,

Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,

Or a soldier camp’d or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner

in California,

Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink

from the spring,

Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess . . .”

Ja Morant playing basketball is a sight that Walt Whitman would surely have traveled to Memphis to celebrate. So I am sad that, due to a separated shoulder, I won’t get to see Ja play during my trip, even if I get to see Graceland again, and visit Sun Studios. My wife made me fresh cornbread for my journey, which was kind of her, and will save me from having to survive on the single extra-large box of Honey Nut Cheerios that I purchased on sale at the CVS in Walton, New York, before I drove to the city from my home upstate. 

A last-minute gate change from 66 to 77 is being announced on a crackly PA system, the incomprehensibility of which reminds me of traveling through the dismembered portions of the former Yugoslavia. The only word I recognize is “Columbus,” which is one of the intermediate stations on my journey to Memphis.

The woman in front of me, who is traveling with her young daughter, remains frozen in place. Suddenly, a man in an orange vest appears by her side. “I’ll help you,” he says. “Follow me.” He is an angel, sent for people for whom negotiating a trip to Columbus, Ohio, is a major undertaking.

The drivers are joking around outside the buses. “You ready to make that money?” I am not yet in on the joke, which is that no one here is making any money, from the angel in the orange vest, to the bus driver, to the bus company. I take my place in the bus, in a busted seat that doesn’t recline.

The transience of America is the horror and the glory of the place. Everything gets thrown into the furnace. We ourselves are simply fuel for the fire — which lives inside us, feeding on our hopes and dreams, and the lives of our children.

Still, I can hold my own in the yard. Getting on the bus, I look around warily. Everyone is super guarded, beaten down yet not entirely without hope. They don’t look like bad people. They conceal their sorrows in their phones, which connect them to loved ones and exes. A phone screen is its own little portable simulacrum, a model world, manicured and abstracted to create the illusion of control. As the entire field of creation is reduced to a rectangle that is maybe two and half inches wide and five inches long, the user becomes God, able to manipulate tiny digital forms by twiddling their thumbs.

No one on the bus confuses their phone with real life; it’s more like an electronic rosary, a lifeline to the heavenly universe of people who might send them $50 by PayPal. It’s a window into what the people who control the platforms want you to see, and the means by which they rewire your synapses. Their aim is to take from you whatever hasn’t already been taken, using mind-viruses to disable the life force and substitute only the bare illusion of a connection between minds, as the devices imprison their users in the mental equivalent of a windowless cell illuminated by a single, low-wattage bulb. It doesn’t take any kind of special perception or understanding to recognize that what I’m describing is already our reality.

Working for Greyhound is a calling of sorts, especially for the bus drivers. Along my journey I meet five of them, each of whom is more gentle and patient than the next, in the manner of old priests and recovered alcoholics. What they know, or so their manner suggests, is that we live on the sufferance of others, and only for a little while. They are stand-up people.

In the meantime, though, everyone is going somewhere. I am going to Memphis to stay with the ducks at the Peabody Hotel and maybe buy a black velvet shirt from Elvis’s tailor. Before that, I am going to Allentown; Harrisburg; Pittsburgh; and Morgantown, Virginia. I am going all the way to Columbus, Ohio, then down to Cincinnati, and then further down to Nashville. And finally, to Memphis. On the way to these places, there are old cars, truck parts, scrubland, overgrown rail tracks. A weird metal tray above my feet descends with a squeak, proposing various degrees of elevation.

Outside my window is a corridor of unrelieved ugliness and decay. The only hint of some type of maybe-viable civilization comes from the rows of freshly painted trucks lined up outside an Amazon warehouse off the highway. The visionaries who built America’s highways imagined them, in part, as a means of providing access to natural beauty for the millions who weren’t fortunate enough to own private railway cars to shuttle them back and forth to their mansions in the countryside and by the sea. Today’s highways look like something that someone imagined after 20 years working in a prison machine shop banging out license plates.

When we arrive in Philadelphia, we take a ten-minute break. Here is the city where the US Constitution was signed; the Liberty Bell was cracked; Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Katharine Hepburn all starred in The Philadelphia Story, which is the only movie I ever watched with my grandmother — a manic-depressive who was shuttled in and out of mental institutions until the discovery of lithium’s therapeutic effects, a small dose of which instantly made her more or less normal. It is where Sylvester Stallone filmed Rocky, a film that distilled the American dream down to its essence better than any other film or novel I can think of except Moby-Dick. 

In what will turn out to be a running theme of my journey, the Greyhound station in Philadelphia consists of a brick wall near a parking lot. The wall is located in a strip mall, directly in front of a dry cleaner inclusively named Any Garment Cleaners, which is next to a nameless storefront selling donuts. I mentally label the place Nameless Donuts. If Elliott Smith had opened a chain of donut shops in Portland, he could have done worse than using that name. Large parts of the neighborhoods that we drive through seem semi-deserted, like in the opening scenes of a zombie movie.

The road out of Philadelphia is clogged with traffic between blocks of tannish-gray apartment buildings which appear to have been transported here from the outskirts of Zagreb. I munch Cheerios while contemplating the road. I am Jack “Honey Nut” Kerouac.

There are no better places than Pennsylvania and Ohio to see what an unholy mess Americans have made of the good green earth they settled, conquered, stole, purchased, farmed, and then developed into oblivion. The only ones who will be held innocent here are the Amish, whose generations-long project of living lightly on the earth is without doubt superior to the behavior of the Rockefellers and their ilk. The case against the Amish is that they are not and have never been in the majority, and never bought into the culture of endless improvements, meaning that they have routinely let the rest of us down. Plus, it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that in their elevated state of righteousness the Amish missed out on many worthwhile adventures, like sending men to the moon. Also, if Hitler had indeed taken over the planet then the Amish would have wound up driving their buggies beneath a giant Arbeit macht frei sign somewhere in Colorado.

Still, personally speaking, I’d rather ride a Greyhound bus to Memphis than take a rocket ship to the moon, which puts me at least somewhat in tune with the red-bearded Amish-looking man named Robert Francis who boards the bus in Harrisburg. When I ask him what he does, he says he grows strawberries. Which seems nice. I must also admit that my knowledge of the specificity of Anabaptist sects in America could stand some updating. He could be a Mennonite, a Hutterite, a member of the Bruderhof or the River Brethren, or a friend of Frodo Baggins.

Whatever the case, I am more in tune with him, I imagine, than with his mask-wearing fellow traveler, who is clearly part of a cult. Maskers are a detail in an early-middle-period DeLillo novel come to life, who have adopted fear of airborne respiratory viruses as their identifying trait, once again proving the political science theorem that the number of potential identity-based interest groups is functionally infinite. I once attended a lecture by a political scientist in which he proposed that a society could even divide itself between short people and tall people. When challenged on this point, he offered up the example of the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

This particular masker, a short-haired woman who appears to be in her late 30s, is carrying a blue nylon knapsack, of a type that one might buy at the Gap — too flimsy for hiking or travel, but useful for carrying books across the quad. My guess is that, given her age, she has achieved at least a master’s degree, which positions the knapsack within a larger program of self-infantilization masquerading as self-improvement. In addition to the mask, she is wearing AirPods. Whatever measures she may have taken to seal off other orifices are not immediately apparent. As the author of a text titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” explained decades ago:

“The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin. We use the term ‘oversocialized’ to describe such people.”

The Unabomber wasn’t wrong. The yearning that she is manifesting through her mask is self-erasure at the behest of the state. You’re not going to avoid getting sick by wearing a crappy surgical mask on a 12-hour bus ride, lady, I telepathically signal to her. When it’s your time, God’s messenger will come for you, too.

In Harrisburg, we take another break. “It’s a good time to get out and stretch your legs,” the bus driver, Frank, instructs me. “You should stretch your legs, depending on where you are going.” Frank is a short, dark man, perhaps in his fifties, or maybe sixties. He is nearly bald. He reminds me very powerfully of a man who saved my life one night when I was in my twenties, in a small village in Jamaica, where a man kept promising to cut me up into pieces with a machete. Frank, who was born in St. Lucia, comes from similar karmic stock. The bus passengers are his flock, and it is his job to tend to them, and then turn them over to the next driver.

In the bathroom, Trigger Trea has inscribed his name in black marker on the wall, in a neat hand. Maybe he was trying out the moniker, which would in turn suggest rather low odds of survival. In the privacy of the metal stall, I pour out a mental 40 for my Trigger Trea.

At the ticket counter, an older black man with wild, graying hair asks to buy a ticket. “Where are you going?” the lady behind the counter asks him, with a friendly smile. He smiles back at her. “Out of town.”

It’s a classic. In fact, this is the first real Greyhound-seeming Greyhound station I’ve seen on my ride, complete with a promotional poster to “See America!” that’s at least a quarter-century old. There’s electronic bowling, Hill Climb, as well as Mike and Ikes and M&Ms available for a quarter. There’s a machine that will get you straight with the basics of your weight and height. We are now most of the way to Pittsburgh, which isn’t all that far from Columbus, Ohio, which is around where I can maybe expect to see my first Kum & Go — which is surely the grossest-named convenience store chain in America. 

Back on the bus, my seatmate from New York City is still making time with Niki. “I got to be on this bus here for the next 23 hours,” he explains, before offering more advice about her aspirations in the party promotion business, from his vantage point as an aspiring musician. He has never been to Memphis, but he is looking forward to seeing the city and staying with his friend. “It’s ghetto,” he explains. “But he live in, like, a secluded portion of the ghetto.” Which sounds fine to me.

Downtown Pittsburgh is like every other big American downtown I’ve seen in the last two years. Hispanic men in groups sharing cigarettes and hunting through garbage for food in what has become our modern version of Ellis Island, the product of a total abdication of social responsibility, fueled on the one hand by the left’s desire for votes and public dollars, and on the other hand by the corporate right’s desire for cheap, exploitable labor and easy profits. Nothing works, because nothing and no one has to work — as long as the government continues printing money.

It doesn’t matter what language they speak, or what country they imagine they are coming to, or how anyone feels about it. The men and women who come in to clean the floors at night, like the men and women whose labor they are replacing, are temporary, or maybe more than temporary, residents of a territory or zone that is defined not by national laws or allegiances or shaped by common history and values, but by global movements of capital that are directed by other people, who live in gated mansions or penthouse apartments in the sky. They are only here because it is too early to tell which disruptions these movements have caused will turn out to be permanent.

“Yeah, so everyone has to take their stuff off the bus,” the new driver, who came to meet our bus here in Pittsburgh, is saying. “I don’t know what’s happening with you people.” 

The distancing is plain. In fact, it’s the last we are to see of him, or of any representative of the Greyhound Bus Company in Pittsburgh. It’s 6:40 PM, and there are no attendants and no buses in sight. “The bus driver tricky, man,” Jameer observes. Which is the last I will see or hear from either Jameer or the new driver. 

The way things work in practice is now different from how people say they work. Drivers sometimes show up, and sometimes they don’t, like in some distant province of Bangladesh. There is no Greyhound office here, just a break room where the drivers are supposed to clock in. The Greyhound Bus Company itself may be a fiction. If 37 dog riders have to spend the night in a dirty bus terminal on their way to Columbus, and then to Memphis, who exactly are they going to complain to, aside from the operators in a company call center located in Denton, Texas? It’s not like anyone is making any real money here, not the ticket clerks, nor the bus drivers, nor the bus company. My guess is that the cost of insuring and maintaining the buses and paying for gas has to be at least somewhere close to equal to whatever dribs and drabs of cash the bus company gains from the greater percentage of its routes.

After almost 11 hours, I’m not even halfway to Memphis yet. I could fly. But where’s the fun in that? Meanwhile, in the Pittsburgh bus terminal, my fellow dog riders are arguing ever more vociferously with their fate.

“I’ve been here for two days now and this is the second time I’ve tried to get out. I’m a military veteran. Going where? I’m going to Florida.” The veteran is 50 at most, with the remnants of a square jaw sunk in a puffy red face. Wherever he served, he saw plenty of sun.

“Look I know you’re not a bus driver, but this is unacceptable. I’m supposed to wait here until 1:55 in the morning? I need to be in South Carolina. Do you have a bus going there?”

A young white man, bearded, with long guitar-player hair, reports back to his hippie girlfriend that there are no locks on the doors in the bathrooms, and no toilet paper, either.

Meanwhile, the vet attempts a sterner tack, drawing on his experience of a structured lifestyle where mistakes can have consequences, even serious ones. “I don’t want to hear your excuses!” he barks into his phone. “I want results. 4:30 PM tomorrow? Now I’m spending the night in a bus station? I’m going to be here 24 hours?”

His face goes pale, as the reality of spending the night in the bus station, or maybe more than one night, sinks in. Surely the Greyhound Bus Company can’t simply abandon its passengers at an empty bus station like garbage. A mere 15 minutes ago, he was a military veteran, taking the bus somewhere where someone was likely to at least be respectful of his service to our country. In less than a minute, the voice on the other end of the phone has taken all that away. “I am a US Navy Veteran trying to get home!” he says, unwilling to give up on a reality that plainly doesn’t exist anymore. “This is unacceptable!”

Of course it is! Even so, the veteran is clearly on the downslope towards accepting that there is nothing that neither he nor the voice on the other end of the phone, who clearly feels bad about the realities she is forced to convey, is likely to be able to do to change his situation. It is what it is. I hear three different people announce that they have been here for at least two days now. No doubt, they had entirely different sets of expectations and coordinates by which they located themselves, which hour by hour have been taken away.

The cost of an Uber from Pittsburgh to Columbus is $250. If I call one now, I can take the Uber to my connecting bus, which will hopefully then take me from Columbus to Nashville, and then on to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where I can watch the ducks.

Reaching Columbus, I get out at the bus station, which is located across the street from a Waffle House, in a structure that looks like it was once a combination convenience store and gas station. A group of people with suitcases is gathered outside around some metal benches, smoking cigarettes and talking. More people are gathered inside, in the ghostly shell of the old convenience store.

“You in the right place,” a large man in a stained red T-shirt calls out to me good-naturedly. “You can be sure of that.” 

I join the crowd by the benches and bum a smoke. The atmosphere here is equal to if not better than a Florida Waffle House at 2 AM. One guy, a repentant and handsomely bearded sinner, or so I am guessing by the density of the tattoos covering his arms and neck, is talking about Jesus, offering wisdom to his fellow sinners. “There was only one perfect man,” he declares. “His name is Yeshua. He said, ‘Call me by my name.’

The unmarked bus stop is hopping. One bench over, an Amish-looking man is offering an impromptu lecture about different greenhouse crops. A truck driver, or so he claims, retails a yarn about being gifted with 400 pounds of Kraft Singles during his last run, which took him through something he calls the “Springfield Underground,” which I imagine from his description as a Pynchonesque landscape of tunnels and subterranean structures beneath the town where Abraham Lincoln grew up and is buried. The mention appears to ring a bell with other men in the circle, which suggests that something of what I am imagining might be real. That his eyes are pinwheeling in their sockets suggests that he might also be high on meth.

It’s a lonely job, I offer, attempting to strike up a side conversation for my own purposes. “Yeah, I’m a truck driver,” he answers. “Pick up the freight. Deliver the freight.” Up close, my truck-driver radar tells me that what he is high on isn’t meth, but more likely some mixture of Red Bull and his first human interactions in over a week. 

He has already given me a gift. As it turns out, the Springfield Underground is a former limestone mine in Illinois that is currently used as a business park, featuring 3.2 million square feet of underground space. The temperature is kept at a constant 62 degrees, reminding me that reality is always stranger than fiction, for the simple reason that the products of our own brains are exponentially less complex than the products of the compounding interactions of billions of humans across many generations. Therefore, anything you can imagine already exists someplace real, in some weirder, darker, or simply more interesting form.

A woman in uniform has now taken command of the plaza.

“This bus is only going to Cincinnati! This bus is only going to Cincinnati! This bus is only going to Cincinnati!” she repeats. I am now going to Cincinnati, too. She is dark, wide-hipped and militantly fierce. The premise of her entire being is that she will not be Shanghaied or pushed around, at least that is what she is advertising. The exuberance of her performance proclaims that she is playing a character. Soon, everyone is setting in on the bus.

The darkness outside creates a sense of privacy, which encourages conversation, along with the rhythm of the road. “It’s the military,” the guy in front of me is explaining to the Amish-looking farmer. “When I get angry, I can’t turn it off.”

The Amish man looks concerned, and asks, “Is the Marines the same thing as the Army?”

“How can I explain this…” the veteran starts.

This is a Barons Bus. According to the informational video, it belongs to the newest fleet of buses in the Midwest, its parent company having apparently taken over large portions of Greyhound’s former routes. “You will ride like royalty on a Barons Bus,” a voice promises us, and compared to my recent experience with Greyhound, this is true.

Meanwhile, the bus driver continues her HBC drum majorette routine. “You will need to use heaaaaadphones. While. On. This. Bus.” She warns us in advance that she will have no mercy in her heart for rule-breakers. “I will find you a nice safe place by the side of the road,” she promises. “The address of the Cincinnati station is three ninety-eight East Galbraith.”

We are back on the map, one that might have been drawn by a young Thomas Pynchon trying to imagine a secret transportation network that would reveal our true selves, and the reality of the ways in which we are connected, as Americans. The bus station itself consists of a double-wide trailer, previously belonging to a satellite company, which has been put up on concrete blocks by the side of yet another parking lot. A highway passes overhead. Unmarked locations are apparently how the Greyhound Bus Company and its affiliates do business in a paranoid reality in which they must stay one step ahead of the tax collector and other agents of power who are bent on erasing the few remaining pencil lines that separate their corporate existence from fiction.

Inside the hut, there is an actual ticket clerk wearing a uniform with the Greyhound logo. She’s selling Styrofoam cups of coffee and hot chocolate for $2, along with an assortment of candy bars and chips. As I step up to the counter to check my ticket, I am distracted by a low moan from a room to my left. I see motion in the murky dark, where I count three people in comforters and sleeping bags trying their best to sleep on the hard floor. This is not a good sign.

As I am wondering, the bathroom door, which has been locked for the past half hour, springs open, and a bald little man with a long ginger-colored beard leaps forth with a black garbage bag full of clothes slung over his shoulder. Behind him, the bathroom floor is covered in water. He’s like a character from a fairy tale, a dark one. A group of four Mennonites in full traditional garb observe his entrance to the scene with zero change in expression. For all they care, he might as well be naked.

“Oh, the bus isself hasn’t arrived yet,” the woman behind the counter explains. “But your driver is here, though.”

On the face of it, what she is saying sounds promising. However, the mischievous lilt of her emphasis on the word “driver” catches on the edge of my suspicions about the existential status of the Greyhound Bus Company, which were lulled into semi-abeyance by the Barons coach, but have now been goosed again by my surroundings, which suggest that the Greyhound Bus Company itself is broke and on the lam.

“That’s the same bus that’s been here for three days though,” an excitable young black man in what looks like a sailor suit proclaims to the entire population of the unmarked double wide. “Fuck all of this, bro,” he says, bestowing a glittering smile on the clerk. “Been up since New York. I’m going to get delirious with this bitch.”

I go outside, to see what information can be gleaned from the parking lot. By the steps to the double-wide, I locate a square-shaped woman with at least some Native blood, of a demeanor that I have frequently observed in different parts of the country to indicate she actually runs things. She confirms my fear about the bus drivers. “There’s a limit on how many hours they can drive,” she explains. “So, you need both the bus and a driver who is cleared for the route.” The last bus for Nashville, she says, left two days ago, which means that it’s a “fair bet” that the next bus for Nashville might leave two days from now. “It’s like Russian roulette,” she says stoically. “But it’s good to keep your hopes up.”

Stray human atoms careen across the parking lot like windup toys, while others rotate slowly in place. “My name is Bill Murphy, I been all over the country,” an older white man announces. He then recites a long list of states according to a logic that is internal to himself. “Nebraska, Idaho, St. Louis, Florida, Oklahoma, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont.” If I cared to investigate his logic, which I don’t, I might start with the proposition that St. Louis is a state. What I want is to get out of here.

The best generalization I can make about the five or six dozen people stranded in the parking lot is that they are normal people who are trying their best to get home. An older black man in his early sixties stands with a white woman of approximately the same age, both carrying suitcases. They are a couple, traveling together to Nashville. They look like poorer, more beat-up versions of the parents of Derek Jeter, the former New York Yankees parents, standing together in the parking lot, holding hands. They are in love, or at least mutually dedicated to providing solace. I imagine their home as a happy place, and I wish them the best of luck getting there.

The man in the sailor suit has now taken his glittering smile and wild laugh out to the parking lot, where he has gathered a circle of five young men around him to witness his antics. “Dat nigga name Mohammed!” he says, pointing at a man with a neatly trimmed beard standing off to the side. Four Amish men who are standing together by the side of the next bus all turn to stare at the guy in the sailor suit, perhaps sensing some more general insult to beards. “Ain’t nothing funny, I been waiting here a full day,” the guy in the sailor suit assures them.

Meanwhile, the arrival of the driver turns out to be a tease. “I been here for two days, please just put me on a bus back to New York City,” a tall, older black man pleads. “I need to get home. I got a family. Put me on a Flexibus!” When it’s my turn, the clerk explains that the best she can do is offer me a refund for the unused portion of my ticket, provided that I fill out the requisite paperwork online. If approved, I will receive a check from the Greyhound Bus Company for $27.11, which is the remaining value of my ticket.

Armed with a credit card, and after wandering downtown Cincinnati for the better part of an hour, it turns out that I can make all the misery of my bus ride disappear. I find a hotel room, take a shower, go to sleep, wake up, and take a flight to Chicago, where I enjoy the comforts of the spanking new billion-dollar incarnation of O’Hare Airport, the crown of a municipality with a sky-high murder rate, failing schools, no industry to speak of, and a vanishing tax base. Airports are key to the functioning of such places, allowing the wealthy to skip from one wheatgrass-juice-friendly enclave to another while avoiding the favelas. According to my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, a mere five percent of the budget for renovating O’Hare — $50 million — would be enough to ensure that every Greyhound bus on the road at least had a driver, transporting thousands of weary, trusting people to their destinations over the course of a year for a fraction of the annual carbon footprint of a single Boeing 787.

They don’t serve duck at the Peabody Hotel. The reasons why go back to 1933, when the hotel’s general manager, Frank Schutt, went out duck hunting and returned with some live ducks, which he set loose as a prank in the hotel lobby. He woke up the next morning with a historic hangover and staggered downstairs, to find the ducks happily paddling around in the hotel’s ornate marble fountain. It being the Great Depression, Schutt’s decision and whatever subsequent disasters came from it might well have led to his firing, except for the fact that the ducks attracted visitors, which qualified his drunken stunt as a brilliant promotional venture. The ducks stayed, and the general manager kept his job.

Then, in 1940, a man named Edward Pembroke, who had trained ducks and other small animals for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, promised the Peabody that he could improve upon Schutt’s stunt, and further increase the hotel’s business, by training five mallards, one male and four females, to sleep on the roof, ride the elevator down to the lobby, and strut along a red carpet to the marble fountain. They would then entertain guests by splashing around in the fountain all day long until the end of high tea, when they would respond to a trainer’s call by performing the same operations again, this time in reverse. The product of Pembroke’s ingenuity was the city’s most successful promotion after Elvis, who himself enjoyed visiting the ducks.

All in all, the Peabody Hotel has kept the duck gag going for over 90 years, with appearances on Johnny Carson and in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which brings to mind one of my favorite throwaway lines in the last 50 years of American cinema, “How do you use the birds?” — spoken by a tough old prostitute to a frightened ingénue played by Rosanna Arquette, in the film Desperately Seeking Susan. It’s fun to sip whiskey in the lobby of the Peabody and pretend to be Bertie Wooster hoping for a glimpse of Elvis. It’s a fun pose that has saved me from getting killed at least twice, once in Jamaica and the other time on the road to Sarajevo. As I have ever bothered to figure it out, the logic of my survival in both cases is that killing Bertie Wooster isn’t worth the candle. I buy myself a button-down black velvet shirt from Lansky Bros. and wear it over a 2nd Amendment T-shirt like a jacket before heading out.

When I arrive at the Grizzlies game, I find that I am in for a surprise. Standing on the sideline, dressed in orange street clothes, is Ja Morant. His arm in a sling, he dances and jokes and jives with his teammates, leaning dangerously backwards for a moment, like a clown who is about to fall, before righting himself with balletically-perfect body control and timing. It’s as if someone is pulling him by an invisible string attached to his forehead.

The cheap seats directly above his head, in the third deck of the area, are dark. I become aware of their existence only when a group of kids somewhere up near the rafters starts shouting “Ja! Ja!” He shakes his head back and forth, like a stage move, acknowledging their calls. He is getting his teammates hyped up for a game that, without him, they are almost sure to lose. Still, Memphis is his city. Take away his right arm, and the basketball, and he can still focus the attention of the entire arena on himself. His smile lights up the area, a lightning flash of joy in being alive.

The middle-aged basketball fan next to me is distinctly not charmed. “You like him?” he asks, in response to my silent paroxysms of admiration. “Why?” I take a moment before responding; I figure him for an ex-Marine sergeant, a likely deacon at his church, and a current or former basketball coach. “Life is short,” I reply. My answer does not move him. “Depends how you live it,” he answers tartly.

The people of Memphis retain a sense of place regardless. In April of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, bringing a chapter of American hopefulness to a close, and summoning forth monsters that are with us to this day. There are still people, including members of Dr. King’s family, who believe that his murder was the product of a conspiracy that most likely involved the Feds. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father was also assassinated in 1968, believes something similar about his father’s death, and the death of President John F. Kennedy, his favorite uncle.

While I lack the right temperament to be a conspiracy buff — I find the intricacies of most conspiracy theories to be insanely boring — I am capable enough of absorbing the basic gist of the past quarter-century of US antiterrorism doctrine, which is that theories about lone assassins, while fitting in well with the mid-century vogue for anomie, are otherwise bunk. Assassinations are complicated things to arrange, requiring all sorts of advance preparation, information, and logistics. Successful assassinations are therefore almost always the products of networks involving dozens of people, and nearly always backed by states. The idea that three history-shaping assassinations — the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. — that occurred within the space of five years, at the height of the Cold War, were all carried out by lone operators suffering from advanced cases of anomie, and serving no larger agendas, has always struck me as a proposition that only a mid-century American sociologist teaching at an Ivy League university could believe.

Which is not to say that history isn’t mysterious. In addition to being the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a man named James Earl Ray, acting on behalf of unknown parties and/or himself, the Lorraine Motel was also a place where songwriters and studio musicians for the Stax record label regularly met and ate. Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd wrote "Knock on Wood” at the Lorraine. In the riots that followed King’s murder, many properties in the vicinity of the Stax studio were attacked by rioters, but Stax itself was left standing. Between the conspiratorial chaos and bloodshed unleashed by the particular and omnipresent forces that attempt to govern American life — their methods being the deliberate destruction of hope and the setting of men against their brothers — and the distinctly universal power of music, the latter proved once more to be the superior force.

Sun Studios is still standing as well. The original Sun Records logo, consisting of a black rooster in front of a yellow sun, is one of the most indelible symbols that twentieth-century America produced, an earthily perfect synthesis of darkness and light, rooted in the mixed soil of Americana. Put a yellow rooster in front of a black sun, and it gets even more intense. Either way, it sings.

It was here, on the corner of Union Avenue, that Sam Phillips, who began as a local radio DJ, started his Memphis Recording Service to synthesize the blues and hillbilly music, taking the sounds of Beale Street and Paramount race records and the Mississippi cotton fields and refracting them through artists like Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins to make an antidote to the poison that is always threatening to infiltrate our bloodstream, especially now. The motto of the Memphis Recording Service was “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime.” When Phillips stuffed some newspaper into the amp through which Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats played “Rocket 88,” with Ike “King of the Piano” Turner on keyboards, he produced the signature distorted sound that became the hallmark of rock and roll. “Just Walkin’ In the Rain” by The Prisonaires, which Phillips also produced, was the 13-year-old Elvis Presley’s favorite record. 

A delivery truck driver fresh out of high school, Elvis must have driven up and down Union Avenue at least a hundred times before he realized that he was driving past the place where the Prisonaires recorded his favorite album. At which point he famously walked into Sun’s recording studio on his lunch break, ostensibly to record a song for his mother Gladys’s birthday — a cover of “My Happiness” by Connie Francis. When asked by Sam Phillips’s secretary, Marion Keisker, who he sounded like, he answered “Well, ma’am, I don’t sound like anybody.”

Marion saved a copy for Sam Phillips, who didn’t like it. A year later, when Sam was hiring a band, Marion suggested Elvis to accompany Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. Sam Phillips didn’t like Elvis any better then either, until the delivery man busted out with a jittery, sped-up version of “That’s Alright Mama,” an obscure blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Impressed by the driver’s taste in the blues, Sam signed him on the spot. He then put out the first ten Elvis songs on Sun, before selling him to RCA Victor for the magnificent sum of $35,000 — which he used to record an appliance salesman just out of the Air Force named Johnny Cash, and a bunch of other great artists, before investing the proceeds of his recording ventures in a new company out of Nashville called Holiday Inn, which made him ten or a hundred times richer. 

You can still make a record in the old Sun Studio, like Tom Petty did. Or you can pretend to sing into an original Sun Studio microphone donated by Sam Phillips, like I did. Either way, you can experience the magic of the place where this music was born, which remains the truest expression of who we are as Americans. Or you can sit in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and sip whiskey and watch the ducks. Just don’t try to take the bus.