Riding to Ann Arbor

I SAW ONE DOCTOR in Mississippi says Mr. Lee softly to be more polite to Mrs. Ellis by quietness, "and he say it don't do any good to rub it No, no rubbin arthritis don't make it any better and I never do because of what he said A hot bath helps though sure does"

"Yesss, that's true," Mrs. Ellis replies a little tentatively. The two are sitting behind me chance seat mates on a Greyhound hound for Detroit from Chicago She speaks with good sharp mid western is and I think maybe she was from Nebraska before she became a butcher's wife in Chicago. She's a widow now and sounds like everyone's grandmother: prim, alert, congenitally sympathetic.

Bus etiquette doesn't require you to talk with the person you will next to not as much as plane etiquette does: For one thing they're darker and it you're embarassed by silence you can go to sleep or pretend to. This is how Mrs. Miller (next to me) and I treat each other lot most of the ride I figures there's no need to talk, and I don't feel like talking In My mind. I've planned this bus ride to be six hours of suspended animation. I will roll in a dark bus along a section of Interstate that starts in Chicago a place I hardly know and ends in Ann Arbor a place I've never been Outside the window there's only flatness more space between gas stops and shopping centers than I'm used to the Midwest is foreign to me It may be that the older I get the more attached I become to the Fast where I grew up I once thought it would be the other was around.

But Mrs. Ellis and Mr. lee have a good conservation going Mrs. Ellis tells Mr. Lee she's going to Detroit for Christmas to visit her son, who is in the Air Force and will retire after 17 more years to Florida. Where his pension will allow him to become a happy landlord Mr. Lee is going to Detroit to visit his daughters. They sent me money to take a plane, but I didn't want any of that I sent the money back told them your daddy's coming to visit you but he's coming on the bus. I don't to be any trouble to them. And I don't stay too long.

"Yesss," says Mrs. Ellis When you stay too long sometimes you know you're in the way I'm going to live alone as long as I can I don't want to live too long anyway."

"Oh, don't say that now," he says objecting gently.

WHEN THE SUN has almost set behind the bus I begin to smell something burning not a cigarette smell, and I turn in my seat to look toward the college students in the back. It smells like grass, but there's nothing going on, and nobody else seems to notice Maybe it's the smoke from some factory. There are whole cities, each with its own strange smell in this country, and may be we're passing one out there in the darkness.

Mrs. Miller, grey haired and compact, has been silent until now, but we both start to trade good-natured complaints about how long the trip is. Now she pulls up her bra straps and twists a little in her seat. "I'm going to get my Ma in Detroit. We'll be flying back to Chicago tomorrow. When your rear goes to sleep you know you've been driving pretty long. When we get to Detroit, first thing I'm gonna do is get a six pack, take it over to my Ma's and drink it all myself."

West of Jackson we have a half-hour rest stop. I get in line for some food. A guy I remembers seeing in the Chicago Greyhound station, who looks my age and wears waffle stompers and a moustache, is sitting at the empty end of a table, and I sit down with him. Before I've finished my soup I find out we're both getting off the bus in Ann Arbor, where I'm visiting for a day and he's doing a psychiatry clerkship at the Michigan Medical School. He is very friendly, and very unassuming. He asks where I go to school and if I have a place to stay, which I don't and he offers to put me up for the night. His name is Paul.

Since Paul's been sitting in the back of the bus. I tell him about the smell awhile back. "Yeah," he says, not embarrassed, smiling. "I was smoking in the rest room on the bus. When I came out everyone asked me if I had some more, but that was all I had. "I've seen rednecks brown-bagging in the back seat before, but never any dope on a bus. I wonder: did Mrs. Ellis Smell it. Does she even know what it smells like? "For a while in Ann Arbor the penalty for dope was a $5 fine. People smoke it in public, in the movies all the time."

IN ANN ARBOR, Paul lives on Fourth Street, near the center of town, a quiet block with old trees, square two-story small houses, and big yards. The street corner has one of those green signs on a post with white reflecting lettering, the exact kind of sign they have in my home town and in almost every town I've seen in the last few years. Above the part that says Fourth Street, someone has made another sign, with reflecting letters from the hardware store, that says Positively.

When we walk in the door, one of Paul's house-mates Greg, is doing an experiment in the kitchen. He teaches science to ninth graders, and he's showing the experiment to Susan and another woman whose name I miss. The experiment makes hot ammonia gush up into a glass bulb, turning red in the process. It works. Greg is pleased, Paul introduces me to everyone.

Right away, Paul goes upstairs and drags down a big blue tank, like a balloon seller's tank of helium, and a bag of balloons. It's a tank of nitrous oxide. NO2, what dentists use, laughing gas. He offers me the first balloonful. I've never been to a dentist who used gas but it seems like fun, and he doesn't have to persuade me to take it. As I suck in the gas, cooler than the air in the living room. I feel giddy but not dizzy, and I laugh a little. It feels like the moment before I passed out in the grass during recess in fourth grade, When Egghead sat on my back and I breathed in and out hard forty times as hard as I could. I think about explaining how it feels, but figure it's too involved for people I don't really know yet. By now, everyone has a balloon.

THE SECOND LAW of thermodynamics says that, given a chance, everything will spread out and mix in with everything else, losing energy. We are sitting in the living room breathing in and out on balloons, listening to the new Grateful Dead album pouring out of two huge speakers I've living room is well furnished, in fact the whole house is very comfortable, and brightly lit. A photograph of the New Riders of the Purple Sage sits on a fancy easel to one side, and there are poster for Ann Arbor rock concerts on the walls. I think: It's strange to relax in a strange home with strangers. Paul graciously keeps handing me a full balloon when mine's empty and refills the old one at the tank. If I were really taking it easy with friend I'd play thus album first, too. Probably in every voltage town in the country they'd put on the same record first. My friends in Cambridge--no everyone I can imagine who would offer a stranger a place to stay for the night almost everyone anyway--would put on thus album.

Paul is sprawled back over his chair, rolling his head backwards and around, rolling it with his eyes closed, not drunkenly, enjoying the feeling of the music. Susan is puffing on a balloon. Her lips look a little blue. Maybe from the nitrous oxide. But I don't remember whether they were a little bluish anyway before Paul got the tank old and it might be my vision and not her lips. I really can tell.

The television is playing on the table, with the sound turned was down Kris Kristofferson and some long-haired rock musicians are playing on the Flip Wilson show TV didn't used to be like this: you rarely saw long-haired musician and there were some bands who were never on TV the good ones. I was the type who got excited the first time Jefferson Airplane played Ed Sullivan with Grace slick in blackface. But I was a little sorry too. You couldn't hear the music right over TV; and you guessed they just did it for money. And there were certain bands expected to stay away from TV, to scorn the commercial networks even to charge lower prices for their records out of kindness. They were someone to identify with against them, all the ones who aren't in on the secret of the lyrics. We were like the musicians, we two knew what all the neck-tied Agnews didn't know and wouldn't ever know.

It was all very fun but we knew it was silly, too, and because it became so silly, we some of us thought we'd wised up again.

The rock musicians stop stroking their guitars. It's the end of the program, and Flip Wilson is standing at the front of the studio stage flipping the final wave as the theme music must be playing and the audience clapping, flipping the V. peace sign, and the show is over. We are still sitting sucking balloons like so many colored nipples of ambrosia. The album is still playing, and I'm still sorry those musicians wanted to play to videotape machines and cued audiences between commercials. But things are different now. I suck on my balloon, hard. It doesn't matter. I'm happy, sitting there. Things just change and there's nothing you can do about it. I such on my balloon thinking this is one of the things that really doesn't matter, but this the way some things are lost, lost in the moment, you or someone else says what the hell. Later we drove into town and bought groceries and more balloons.