The Reading Road: Bus rides and Chicago nights

I booked my tickets for the Megabus to Chicago rather hesitantly. I pictured myself sitting on some sticky seat, no air conditioning, pressed against some smelly
wanderer.

The phrase, “I’m gonna take a Greyhound” always seemed to be associated
with escape.

For Jack Kerouac in “On the Road,” the bus was always a last resort. After desperately trying to hitch a ride, he would dig his last remaining dollars out of his pocket and catch a bus. His descriptions of his journeys fueled my own fantasies about traveling by bus.

I was pleasantly surprised when boarding the Megabus in Indianapolis. The air conditioning was blasting, the seats were orthopedically shaped for comfort, there were little reading lights and electrical outlets. I could tell this trip wasn’t going to be that bad.

Reserving a seat on the bus was simple and affordable, and it saved me the hassle of attempting to navigate a car on these ridiculous city streets.

Plus, the Megabus presented me with the opportunity to indulge in one of my favorite activities, eavesdropping. I was able to sit back and relax and listen to the conversation flow.

In Aldous Huxley’s travel guide, “Along the Road,” he goes to painstaking lengths to describe the merits of eavesdropping with traveling.

“There are few pleasanter diversions than to sit in cafes or restaurants or the third-class carriages of railway trains, looking at one’s neighbors and listening to such scraps of their talk as are wafted across the intervening space,” Huxley wrote in his travel guide.

This was one of the pleasures that I missed while in Italy — eavesdropping in a country where you don’t speak the language is far less enjoyable.

On the Megabus, I overheard a woman telling a man the only thing you can do with an English major is clean hotels in Hawaii — not too bad of a fate if you ask me.

I overheard a man telling a woman that when he wants to be romantic he only speaks in Spanish, followed by some whispers.

This was greatly entertaining until I saw the horizon of the Windy City rising up in the distance. Despite the fact that I grew up in Indiana, I had never been to Chicago before this trip. I got excited like a child and longed to press my face and hands against the window.

Stepping off the bus I felt like Chicago was just how Kerouac described it, “Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking.”

Particularly after nightfall, I felt like I was really in a foreign land.

Choppers zoomed down the road, people were walking everywhere and every one of them wanted to talk to us. The nightclubs were swinging, the music was playing — it was nothing like a night on Kirkwood.

Kerouac described the club scene in Chicago as a totally wild, all-night
extravaganza.

It’s the truth — the bars stay open until the sun comes up.

“At nine o’clock in the morning everybody, musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny unhappy trombonist staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep again until the wild bop night again.”

Just like a character from one of these wild adventure stories, I lived up my Chicago experience. I witnessed the whirl of this great city and found myself totally swept up in the wind.