The Night Bus to Louisville

The Beginnings... 

The night bus from New York City to Louisville leaves from 59 Canal Street in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan at 10:30 p.m. and lasts for 13 hours. I know this because I took this very bus in November 2015 with my girlfriend to get to Louisville, Kentucky for Thanksgiving. Before anyone gets any ideas, first let me avail you to the most important part of bus travel: people only travel by bus because they can’t afford the alternative. There is no other reason a person would choose to travel by bus. I can’t imagine anyone thinking, “Gee, I have too much time to get where I’m going, I better hop on a bus for 40 hours to get back to Denver,” or “It’s just so much easier than dealing with the airport. All that security and the crowds….”  Yes, you are generally saving money by traveling by bus, but there is a cost to your penny-pinching.

If you are wondering if 13 hours on a bus is as bad as it sounds, it is. If you are wondering if the seats are as uncomfortable as you are imaging or if the odors are as pungent  as you fear, they are. If you are wondering if there are people who would dare to eat cottage cheese out of a brought-from-home Tupperware on a crowded, overnight, 13-hour bus ride, there are. And if you are wondering how one person could stand such horrid conditions and still retain enough of their mental faculties to captain a bus around the highways and byways of America, don’t worry, they do not.

Every time I tell people I have taken a Chinatown bus I am asked, in various forms, if this type of travel is worth it. In other words, is the money one saves by buying a bus ticket over another form of transportation, actually worth it? Honestly, I don’t know. But the fact remains, once you’ve endured something like this, once you’ve entered into the inviolable contract that constitutes an overnight bus trip—allowing your will and humanity to be so stripped away and your notions of reality so altered and then emerge on the other side—you are, undeniably a changed person.

As most great adventures do, ours started in a foreign environment. The Chinatown neighborhood is located in Lower Manhattan with borders alongside Little Italy, Tribeca and the Lower East Side and it is a curious and enthralling location. Chinatown sober is a lot like everywhere else drunk. The immediate adjectives that jump to mind are loud, smelly, disorienting, exciting, frightening, shameful, claustrophobic, and aggressive—this is especially true at night. With a perpetual blanket of dark cigarette smoke hanging in the air, it is exceedingly difficult to catch your bearings as you bound between fish markets and claw machines that are inexplicably filled with knock-off watches and small cellphones. The harsh and ever present neon begins to diminish your vision the longer you stay in Chinatown, turning smiling faces and Peking duck into would-be assailants. Garbage and animals crunch and reel beneath your feet as you stumble along the uneven pavement in search of some obscure, vaguely remembered address; “The Bowery, right? Is that a rat? No, it was by the Bowery, off Grand Street, but wait this says Chrystie Street? That was a rat! Why is there a park named after Columbus down here? Why are there so many rats?!” All the while the ubiquitous smell of fish seeps into everything and everyone.

Chinatown isn’t so much unsafe as it is uncertain. The outsider has no point of reference there. There are no familiar sites, no context clues from which you could decipher your assumptions. It is a buried neighborhood. Everything is new and everything is strange; it’s not un-welcoming, it’s indifferent. You are either stared at or wholly ignored in a way that not even other New Yorkers are capable of competing with, and you can never shake the feeling of disassociation or even accept the fact that this is where you are supposed to be. It just doesn’t ever connect.

At this point it is fair to assume that one may be thinking there is no way that an overnight bus ride out of Chinatown is safe. And the truth of it is, no, not really. In 2006, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, demanded the Department of Transportation get tougher on the Chinatown buses after it was revealed that where Greyhound Buses routinely receive a zero on the safety scale (zero being the best on a 0-100 scale) the Chinatown buses average a score ranging from 71-99. Adding to that, was a string of rather alarming and particularly gruesome attacks between 2003 and 2004, which are as follows:

“The bus lines have drawn scrutiny from law enforcement authorities for possible connections to Chinese organized crime gangs. In 2003 and 2004, a number of bus arsons, driver assaults, murders, and other gang violence in New York City were linked to the possible infiltration of Asian organized crime gangs into the industry.

Among the crimes believed to have been associated with gang activity was a deadly shooting in May 2003, on a busy street, which may have been in retaliation for a driver having backed his bus into a rival; as revenge, two buses were set on fire in 2004. There was a fatal stabbing in October 2003, as well as another, unrelated stabbing in 2004. In January 2004, the boyfriend of a bus worker was lethally shot in what appeared to be a bus feud, and in March 2004, a Chinatown bus operator was killed in yet another fatal shooting. In a June 2004 incident tied to criminal gangs, two people—a Chinatown bus driver and a bystander—were murdered in a bar in Flushing, Queens, and another was shot in the leg. The accused shooter was arrested in Toronto in 2011 and extradited to the United States. After the 2004 shootings, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) started enforcing Chinatown bus rules more strictly.”

But, that was more than ten years ago and we, as Americans, are nothing if not accepting of change.

The Offerings...

As for options for which Chinatown bus you are going to take, there are many. Similar to Atlantis or El Dorado, the Chinatown bus is not so much a location as it is a corrupted ideal. You cannot take the Chinatown bus, you take a Chinatown bus and depending on where your final destination is, that is how you discover which vaguely ethnic bus line you have to get on to get there. For instance, if you want to go to Boston, you could take the Fung Wah or the Lucky Star bus. If your destination is D.C., you could take the Eastern or Dragon bus. If you were going to Baltimore you could travel there on the Double Happiness bus. Or you could take the Fook Sing if you are going to Cleveland. As you make your way deeper and deeper into the heart of Chinatown you begin to see signs reflecting variations on the same theme; a white background with blue or red lettering—only a few of which are in English—showing things like, NYC -> DC -> VA. or NYC -> CT -> BOS. Those are the embarkation points for these landside cruises and they are the only things that can point you in the right direction. They feel a little bit like competing dojos as they are scattered throughout the Chinatown, but instead of promising to teach you martial arts skills and peace of mind, they offer you low fares to many destinations and spotty Wi-Fi.

Of course, there are more traditional, slightly pricier bus services that you could take such as Greyhound, or Megabus or even Boltbus (Greyhound’s attempt to compete with the cheap fares of its ethnic competitor) but I have never traveled on one of those bus lines so I am unsure of what amenities they promise or what the interiors of their buses look like. However, I can say with almost absolute certainty that whatever they are offering it doesn’t change the fact that you are still spending an extended period of time on an enclosed, over-sized steel sarcophagus with a bunch of strangers—so you might as well save the most money when you do it.

Our bus line for the trip to Louisville turned out to be the Jaguar line. Not the Panda or Panther like we’d hoped, but a noble Asian animal nonetheless. The Jaguar Line makes its first stop out of New York City in Columbus, Ohio. Then, for some unknowable reason, it stops twice in Cincinnati, Ohio (there is apparently a large contingent of Cincinnatians that live in New York and like to get home for the holidays). Its final stop arrives in Louisville, Kentucky. That was our destination: Louisville, KY. Holiday season. My kinfolk is from there and that’s where, since my mother moved back home about a decade ago, I spend my Thanksgivings.

The time of departure, according to our ticket was 10:30 p.m. Having never traveled this way before, Erin and I decided it might be wise to arrive a few hours early assuming that it would be somewhat like airport departures and the earlier you check in and get your ticket stamped, the better precedence you receive when boarding. This assumption was so far from the truth that I was stricken by an embarrassment that I had not been afflicted by in my whole adult life.

 We had huffed our bags throughout the subway system from our Upper West Side apartment down into the treacherous reaches of the Grand St. exit and made our way east to the corner of Canal and Allen at about 7:45 p.m. We arrived and were horrified to see that there was already a clogged mass of people gathered around the entrance of the office that seemed to be growing by the minute. Some looked as though they had been camped out for weeks.

How could we not have figured that on the busiest travel day of the year there would not be a slew of equally poor and underprepared travelers trying to get on a bus from New York City into the heartlands of America? Despite the fear and dejection, we braved our way into the makeshift office/refugee camp. The interior was littered with bodies sleeping on, and in, spare luggage bags or splayed corpse-like across the folding chairs that lined the walls. There seemed to be a never ending cry from a panicked baby reverberating off the wall and directly into the ear of every person there. Desperate travelers were covered with spare garments from torn open suitcases. Children ran around aimless and unsupervised. The sick and the elderly appeared to have been abandoned in the back corner by what looked like a trophy case. Anxiety and fear rendered me incapable of investigating why a trophy case was present in this office.

We made our way through the human detritus, careful to avoid any outstretched hands or pleading eyes, to the back counter and waited until the young Chinese girl behind the counter finished texting to present her with our pre-printed bus tickets. Pre-printed bus tickets are a rookie mistake. Validation and documentation are frowned upon as a paper trail is antithetic when you are (possibly) transporting bodies or guns or stolen cigarettes across state lines. But we did not know this. When we showed our pre-printed tickets to the girl behind the desk, she was barely able to contain her laughter. She scanned her paper for our names then checked them off a box drawn on a sheet of crumbled loose-leaf paper. She extracted two small square sheets of paper from a shoe box on the counter with the words Louisville and the number 4 scrawled across them and then went back to texting. My memory is not perfect but I am fairly confident that we exchanged zero words during the entire encounter; no greetings, no clarifications. Nothing. In fact, I would be surprised to learn it if I was told we even made eye contact at any point during the ticketing process. Erin and I looked at each other, feeling a bit like child immigrants recently handed deportation papers and tried to make sense of the horrific landscape before us.

This was the exact point that we discovered the glaring difference between this mode of transportation and something like a plane or a train. Whereas those operations require maintenance, planning, logistics, HR departments, marketing teams, etc., to be ran efficiently and effectively, the Chinatown bus system operates solely on bewilderment and confusion. It is more of a large taxi for extended trips but with no governing body. Meaning, there is no face to confront when a problem arises. We have all gazed on horrified as countless stewardesses and ticket takers were berated and harassed by angry passengers in an airport, all the while hoping one day that those employees could escape that hell, but I don’t wish that any longer. I need those employees to be yelled at now. It’s confirmation. It reminds me that I am in civilization. I am amongst semi-civilized people, and even as depraved and heinous as travelers can be, they are no match for the hopelessness and dread that overtakes a person trying to figure out how to board a Chinatown bus for the first time during the holiday season. Even if we were to raise an objection, where would we go? The girl behind the counter was glued to her cell phone and any other person of seeming authority was drowned in the vast sea of human expanse quickly overtaking the lobby and sidewalk outside. The situation had deteriorated to such dire circumstances that questions like, “how will we know which bus to get on?” or “do you know if there is overhead storage?” seemed elitist to the point of insanity—there was a woman sleeping with her arms stuffed into the legs of sweatpants—I’m not going to be the guy asking about leg room.

Erin and I jointly decided that the three hours it would take till the bus arrived would surely kill us if we were to remain in the vicinity of such unparalleled bedlam so we took off down the street in search of food and strong drink. I have been told that Chinatown has some of the best food in the city and if I were taken there by a local or someone that knows how to get to those places, I would be inclined to believe them. As it were, Erin and I were stranded and alone; every place looking as equally grim and unwelcoming as the last. After a fraught 20 minutes of indecision we were mercifully delivered unto the hilariously titled and now defunct, Pies ‘N Thighs, a southern comfort food restaurant specializing in handmade pies and hand-dipped thighs. It was there that Erin and I ate as if it were to be our last meal on earth: chicken biscuits coated in honey and hot sauce; crisp and juicy fried chicken; mac ‘n cheese thick and creamy; coleslaw more flavorful than any I have ever had. We shoveled it all and more into our waiting gullets. We ordered round after round of drinks as we tried to subdue the horrors we had subjected ourselves to with the belief that if we were forced to endure this road trip, it was better to do so while interred in a food coma or by being blackout drunk.

The Fight...

Around 10 o’clock we made our way back to the pit, well fed and liquored up. We had only been standing a few minutes when a bus pulled up to the curb and opened its doors. That’s when the horde descended. As soon as the luggage bays underneath the bus were open, people began flinging and tossing their bags as hard and as far into the depths of that steel beast as they could get them. It was akin to a Black Friday stampede the way people trampled over one another to throw their luggage recklessly underneath and then scramble aboard the bus with a horrific disregard for humanity and social norms. It was absolutely astonishing. The only thing that could have made it worse was if an identical looking bus were to have pulled up directly behind the first one half a minute later.

“Aww, fuck! What is this fucking bus?” Screamed a woman holding two children at the waist attempting to shot put three cases of luggage beneath a bus. The confusion spread like a shock wave through the crowd as people began shouting and cursing and searching for answers.

“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”

Yelled an elderly Chinese man, with thin glasses and a fading hairline as he emerged through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke to command the mass of humanity still throwing their luggage beneath the first bus.

“DIS BUS FOR!” He shouted to a growing number of stunned onlookers. “YOU NO GO! BUS FOR!”

They halted as about half the swarm now realized that they had been throwing their luggage beneath the wrong bus. Then came the frantic and overlapping shouts as people began rummaging through the bowels of the bus looking for recently discarded cases and bags.

“YOU NO GO FURGINYA! DIS BUS FOR!”

“LUEYFULL! BUS FOR! YOU NO BUS FHIVE!”

The elderly man was neither disingenuous nor easily startled as he walked amongst the chaotic legion smoking and screaming. You could tell that this was a man who had seen tragedy in his life, and he wasn’t about to lose control of a situation like this.  

“NO! NO! NO! NO NO!!” he would scream in face after face as people attempted to decipher which of the equally unmarked buses went to Furginya or Lueyfull. After receiving some insider information, Erin and I barreled for the first bus, throwing our bags underneath like seasoned veterans and scampered to the end of the line to board as the chaos on the sidewalk continued.

On the inside, our Van Hool c2045 bus looked a lot like every other traveling bus interior. The blue, two-by-two seat pairs with their gaudy Vegas themed upholstery, showcasing neon tinted roulette wheels and Aces of Spades, stretched on ad infinitum reflecting awkwardly in the dim light. The seats are angled at an inhospitable 120 degrees which requires a near-constant flexing of one’s abdomen in order to keep the head and neck in any sort of usable position and there is a noticeable stench attached to each headrest that is impossible to place. We passed a thin, and fidgety middle-aged Asian man with a wispy goatee sitting alone in the first pair of seats as we parted our way down the aisle. There was already a line for the bathroom when we boarded the bus, which confirmed that its use was absolutely out of the question for the entirety of the trip; any restroom related problems would have to be our cross to bear. We found two seats next to each other about half way down on the right hand side and staked our claim next to an elderly Puerto Rican couple who gave weak, accommodating smiles. They were dressed as if they had either just finished Salsa dancing or intended to do so immediately after they arrived at their destination. Knowing that the first stop on the bus trip was at least nine hours away, their outfits and possible holiday plans made them incredibly endearing.

It was about 45 seconds after Erin and I sat down and failed to make ourselves comfortable that we heard the first inklings of dissent brewing. We tried to ignore it, or at least pass it off as perfunctory grumblings before traveling, but we couldn’t. As the noises grew louder it appeared that everyone on the bus seemed to sense that danger loomed. People began clutching purses and backpacks, mothers tried quieting children by brightening their screens to further cement their attention and the Puerto Rican woman across from us closed her eyes and grabbed her rosary as the decibel levels creeped from disturbance to dangerous.

The shouting started at the front of the bus. Like the rest of the creatures on the bus, Erin and I gazed on confused as we were forced to watch the impossibly frantic screaming match between the elder Chinese man who loved to smoke cigarettes from earlier and the middle-aged Asian man from the front of the bus. It was single-handedly the most aggressive screaming I have ever heard in my life. It easily doubled in aggression its next closest competitor: a black woman I saw screaming at scaffolding about tax hikes in South Carolina on the corner of 79th and Broadway.

What they were screaming about is perhaps of the least concern—but it may have been about a misplaced ticket. Where the real beauty and terror came from was unrestricted vitriol with which these two men hurled insults at one another. There is nothing that these two could have been arguing about that requires as much intensity and energy that these two men put into screaming at one another. Nothing.

It started with quick fire shots—a loud scream that would cut the other one off, then the opponent would return the volley. Then the other and then the other, back and forth. It steadily grew in hostility until the two men were inches apart, rage-spewing into each other’s faces—the Puerto Rican woman was absolutely beside herself whispering prayers into the cross wrapped in her hands.

Lesser men, surely, would have surrendered to the thousands of insults, taunts, and humiliations that these two men must have been hurling back and forth at each other, and physically attacked their opponent, but these were not lesser men. These were great men. Capable of great things. Their weapons in this war were words and hand gestures; their shields were upturned chins and abrupt shoulders, and the occasional, particularly heinous, smokescreen created by exhaling a cigarette drag directly into the face of their enemy. Their armies were measured against how many breaths they didn’t take, while launching wave after wave of onslaught onto their adversary. Weaker generals and lieutenants tried to come to the old man’s aid, but they were brushed aside. This was the old man’s war and he didn’t need their help. He wasn’t going to yield to some wispy, bitchy, filtered-cigarette-smoker, who may or may not have a ticket. He wanted complete and total victory.

This war, like most great wars, was fought on multiple fronts. On the bus, on the street in front of the office, inside and around the interior of the office; wherever the cause for victory took them, that’s where they fought. After an egregious curbside battle they returned to the bus storming and stabbing and screaming. Have I mentioned that this entire fight was in Cantonese? I don’t think that I have.

Finally, after pushing through an aisle filled with babies and bags and purses and pillows, the old man stopped and pointed at an unoccupied seat and screamed one last syllable and then walked off, seeming to end the war with what many passengers, Erin and I included, thought was an acceptable cease-fire. The young woman with the cell phone from earlier came on board and began counting heads. The middle-aged man, apparently unsatisfied with his accommodations, started screaming and chased after the old man up the aisle, an action which resulted in a unified release of disgust from the entire congregation. The elder turned around and ended this final attack by putting his index finger vertically in the air, then pointed to the man, then to the seat.

Like almost every other question about this situation, why this particular gesture was enough to pacify the beast will, unfortunately, go unanswered. But it worked. He settled into his seat and at 11:23 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the bus and the city were finally quiet and we pulled away from the curb and headed off to Louisville, Kentucky. 

The End...

Despite every inclination to do so, I did not give up on my faith in humanity, though perhaps I should have. Instead, as we passed from state to state, over a never-ending tarmac and through the bird-like squeaks that erupted from the rickety machine after every minor disturbance in the road, my thoughts kept wandering toward the safety and aptitude of the person tasked with captaining our bus to its destinations. More importantly, I was wondering how a person ever becomes qualified to handle this type of torture. It was just after the seven hour mark or so when I started to get concerned for our driver’s health and our safety. He appeared to be the same driver that was present with the bus when it pulled up, though my hope is that it wasn’t. That someone could be subjected to doing a trip like this more than once in a day seems like it should be illegal. A little after the thought came to mind, my concerns were assuaged.

How the driver changes are implemented is still hazy to me, but I do distinctly remember being scared. We pulled off the highway into a corroding parking lot behind an Elks Lodge on the outskirts of somewhere. Then, without warning or notice, the driver simply walked off the bus, into the darkened parking lot and continued on into the distance until the foreboding, and recently accumulated, fog enveloped him whole, disappearing from our lives as mysteriously as he entered. If the slim number of people who were still awake on the bus were as terrified as I was, they showed no signs of it.

After about six minutes sitting driverless and afraid in an abandoned parking lot, a small green Miata tore around the corner of the Elks Lodge skidding into an imaginary parking space about 10 feet away from the bus. There, a small Asian man exited his convertible, snubbed out a cigarette and boarded the bus. He gave one small, disconcerting look to his new crew and then picked up a clipboard that had been left on the dashboard. Apparently finding no use for it, he tossed the clipboard to the side and began marching down the aisle counting heads. Not checking tickets or names, mind you, simply making sure the body count was correct. He reached the end of the bus, then sprinted back to the front startling everyone that was awake and almost scaring the poor Puerto Rican woman to death. He got to the front of the bus and turned around to face his prisoners. After an interminable few seconds, he bent down a little and delivered a thumbs up and shouting, “Yeah!”—That was the last I heard of him the rest of the trip. He started up the bus and headed back towards the highway.

I was introduced to a lot of new things during this bus trip, one of the most interesting of them is the term, “wet lease.” Aside from being the most atrocious nickname imaginable, the term fits fairly well into the overall concept of the Chinatown bus apparatus. What a wet lease means is that one company (this is usually done with airlines during peak holiday traffic, though not exclusively) will rent out a vessel, crew, fuel and insurance to another company so that they may operate at peak performance. I was never told definitively whether or not we were on a wet lease bus, and I am unsure whether or not I would even be able to tell, but it felt like we were. At the very least, I felt like a “wet lease” the whole trip. All 13 hours of it. Every bump in the road, every jerk of the wheel, every smell wafting from beneath the bathroom door or out of a sweaty armpit. Everything about the trip tore further and further into the fibers of my humanity until the bus finally pulled into a strip mall on the outskirts of Louisville and we were forced to disembark. The fate of the Puerto Rican couple and whether or not they did end up going dancing is unconfirmed.

It was a hard trip. I had been hurt and abused. I felt powerless in my efforts to protect myself and my girlfriend from the nightmare we found ourselves in. Erin didn’t mention it, but I knew she could feel it—something had changed within me. We had endeavored upon this trip and had seen and done things that could not be undone or unseen. We were a part of it now. We were accomplices. Exiting the bus into the harsh reality of morning held no pleasure as we knew that after our short 72 hours in Lueyfull, we would once again have to return and face our abuser for the 13-hour ride back to New York City.