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2. Arrivals
- University of Texas Press
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No hay nada. On the Trailways bus headed south on the New York State Thruway, I spoke to a guy who had just been released from of one of the prisons upstate. He was heading back to New York City and said he had some people down there who would look out for him. I was kind of envious, since I had always liked the city and my journey wasn’t even going to bring me close to it. In Albany, I transferred to a bus that was destined for Buffalo. It was already late afternoon, and I knew that I was in for a long ride. Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland: it was like a trip through the twilight zone, standing outside the bus station, waiting to reboard in the wee hours of the morning. I knew that the ride was going to be tedious. It seemed as if every little town and gas station on the route had to be visited. I had run this route before as a line driver, but that was like the express compared to this monotonous journey, which dragged on through the night. As the sun came up, we arrived in Louisville, Kentucky. As the bus chugged through the depressed areas of Louisville, I remember thinking to myself, asking myself, and telling myself, “I know that they have got to have some dope somewhere around here—just look at how messed up this whole place is.” I got off the bus and had a ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, the kind that a hungry bus passenger can get in most greasy-spoon diners and truck stops anywhere in mainland America . The bus serviced various little towns along the route, and by the time we got down to Tennessee, the sun was going down again. I was bound for El Paso—more specifically, for Juárez—and had been on the road for twenty-four hours. We stopped in Nashville, then Memphis, and drove on through the night into Texas, down I-30. I Two A r r i va l s 16 Border Junkies felt as if I were on just another run, another line haul across country to some remote destination that I would figure out once I got there. As the sun rose, the bus pulled into Dallas, and it reminded me of Hartford. How had my life come to this? It was beyond my ability to comprehend. Life had turned into one hell of a roller-coaster ride, and the down slope seemed long and relentless. Thankfully, though, I was in pretty damn good shape, the result of having spent the better part of my early adult life working in the moving and storage business. In Dallas , a drug dog sniffed at a luggage rack. I remember thinking to myself , “Who would be stupid enough to try to transport illegal drugs on the bus lines.” I suppose that after driving a tractor-trailer across country for all those years, I just couldn’t fathom transporting drugs any other way. A bus ride through West Texas can be a very enjoyable experience . What had previously been a monotonous peddler’s run, skipping from one town to the next, was transformed into a series of longer trips through scenic landscapes that kept me spellbound with an almost natural elation for the duration of the journey. Dallas and El Paso are nearly 600 miles apart, so there was a lot of time to think. As the bus pushed ahead, the ride became more and more euphorically refreshing. I began to sense the good times ahead in Juárez and El Paso. Near Pecos, the bus stopped at a fast-food restaurant, and a small group of people got on. A young Mexican woman sat down across the aisle from me. Not long after, a couple of U.S. Border Patrol officers got on the bus and asked anyone who looked Mexican for identification . They took the young woman away, into custody. On the rest of the ride through the desert to El Paso, the remaining passengers were silent. It’s funny how a piece of paper can make all of the difference in the world. In El Paso, the sun was shining, and although it was only early spring, the whole place seemed baking hot. I didn’t want to waste any time, so I went directly to the Plaza Hotel in Juárez and rented a room. I had about twenty-five hundred...