Chapter 8: The Big Orange
Sample Chapter/New Edit - going to FL to NYC to FL again, trying to get clean
Chapter 8: The Big Orange
I asked for help. Real help. Not help with a Western Union wire but help to escape. Was it sincere? Yes, but as I’ve said before sincerity isn’t enough in the long run. In the short term it can be enough to get what you want, and that’s what I got: a Greyhound ticket to Fort Lauderdale.
It took me about an hour to get from my outing with Richard to Alex’s doorstep, where he let me use his phone to contact my dad. Although Alex wasn’t thrilled about my unannounced arrival, he was relieved once I explained that my Dad would be buying me a greyhound ticket out of the state. In fact, I would be leaving for Florida that very evening. Alex, despite loving me, knew that my lack of drive to better myself had made me the worst kind of burden. He had done all he could, and if anything, he kept me alive for the better part of a year. But moving across the country to reunite with my father was much more promising than continuing to waste away rent-free at the cost of Alex’s peace of mind.
Alex dropped me off at the Oakland Greyhound station with a bag full of snacks, ten dollars cash, and a pack of Camel cigarettes. He waited with me until my bus left out of fear that I wouldn’t get on it. Had he not, I probably would have left with those ten dollars and tried to get high one last time.
The trip would be four days in total, with over twenty-five stops and seven bus changes. Despite the major inconveniences of bus travel, it isn’t much cheaper than flying, but can be the preferable form of transportation in several specific circumstances. For example, if you need to leave town ASAP, you can drive to a bus station and most likely be gone within the hour. Air travel usually requires more time and planning. Another key benefit of bus travel is that you don’t need an ID or a passport. This is convenient for transient folk like me that aren’t responsible enough to hold onto a form of identification. It also comes in handy if you’ve just committed a major crime and need to skip town without leaving a paper trail. These three types of people make up a significant portion of bus travelers, including myself. We may not be from the top tiers of society, but we certainly have some grit. Let’s just say that people who’ve taken a cross country bus ride usually aren’t the ones who would complain about a crying baby on a three-hour flight. When a baby cries on a Greyhound bus, everyone takes turns holding it and tries to calm it down. There’s more of a “Grapes Of Wrath” feel to bus folk, unlike the sniveling nature of those that stick to commercial flight.
I brought some weed with me (Alex gave me about a joint's worth), even though I didn’t much care for marijuana anymore. Before the bus departed from a pit stop in Arizona, I smoked it with a random kid on his way to Texas. I charged him five bucks because I would need as much cash as I could get to help feed me along the way.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, this would be the last time I ingested drugs for several months; the longest period I’d stay abstinent since I was twelve years old. I would have much preferred some heroin at a time like this - and I most likely could have found some on my bus - but with the little amount of money I had my chances were too slim to put much of an effort towards it. If a conversation was struck up between me and a fellow degenerate passenger, I’d pry to see if they had any drugs available to share. Either they didn’t have enough to give away, or I didn’t have enough money to buy a hit. After a few failures I decided to utilize my time on the bus to get some much-needed rest.
My nerves spiked as we rolled past the Georgia/Florida border a few hours after a layover at the Atlanta Greyhound station. There I was offered heroin outside of the bus terminal, but by then I hadn’t a dollar to spend. This wasn’t the source of my anxiety though, for I was nervous about seeing my father for the first time in many years. It had been many more years since we’d had anything close to a normal parent-child relationship, long enough that I was wary of even the possibility of rebuilding an untarnished connection.
The father that I grew up with was an imposter of sorts, having kept his double life of addiction and criminality hidden beneath a veil of the all-American working-class fantasy. Exhausted of all identity, Dad was heavily medicated throughout the entirety of our relationship, and now I was a couple hundred miles out from seeing the man truly sober for the first time.
I arrived in Fort Lauderdale after midnight, where to my surprise it was still nearly ninety degrees despite the sun being nowhere in sight. This soiled my first impression of the city, but with the way my life had been going back in California, I was in no position to be judgmental. However, I was still emotionally erratic from the meth comedown, so the obnoxious amount of humidity wasn’t helping convince me that I’d made the right decision. My first thought was that if it was this hot in the middle of the night, what sort of hell awaited once the sun rose in the morning?
I borrowed a fellow passenger’s cell phone to call Dad and requested to be picked up. He arrived shortly after in his 2006 Toyota Tacoma, which although just a few years old, looked like it had survived several accidents. Silver haired with a vagrantly long goatee, he exited the truck and we approached one another. He was old. Wide-shouldered and stout, he appeared to have shrunk a couple of inches in height, which he made up for with the extra inches of hair that sat shoulder length behind his skull. He was now a mulleted Jew, wearing a thrift store purchased Tommy Bahama shirt and a pair of jean shorts with oversized cargo pockets. Florida had conquered every fiber of his being.
Before we went in to hug, I noticed the silver hoop earring dangling from his right ear, which only further confirmed this notion. This was far from the dad I remembered - a blue collar Bostonian with the smell of liquor on his breath at most moments - but it was the dad that I’d be more than willing to accept. The guy was clearly sober, with a twinkle in his eye and timidness about him that was so far removed from his inebriated former self. I was more than happy to meet this man.
We embraced for a long hug and then shared a moment of simply observing each other in the damp Florida moonlight. The feelings were as pleasant as they were awkward. We hopped in the truck and did our best to conversate during the drive back to the halfway house where he - and now I - lived.
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