The Shelf-life of Lemonade

Hey folks. I decided to post one of my more entertaining stories so you don't get the impression I only write dark, brooding diatribes. The story below is entirely true and when I finish building my website it will be posted there as well. I wrote it several years ago while on a trip to Eastern Washington to visit my ailing maternal grandfather. Hopefully, the story will produce more smiles rather than knitted eyebrows.

The Shelf-life of Lemonade

It took no time at all to realize that the Greyhound bus terminal in Seattle was a tough place to be. The shrill lights dried out my eyes instantly and the video game arcade assaulted my ears with space-rifle blasts and karate-chop grunts. Amid the commotion and noise, I felt lucky to avoid a seizure. And good grief, the bathroom was ahead of schedule for the apocalypse–busted tiles, indestructible stains, exposed pipes, glass-scratch graffiti, the imperfect aim of men, the unfortunate guy sitting in the one stall with no door and sinks that seem to serve the purpose of spreading disease instead of keeping it at bay. It was unclear how old the station was, but the janitor, a rough-looking man in his early seventies, seemed he might have opened the place sixty years ago. He knew his job well, but he was slow and beaten down; he wouldn’t be rushing to stock the stalls with toilet paper.

My curiosity pointed to a particular passenger who had fallen asleep at one end of the ticket counter. He laid face down on the floor, sprawled between two duffle bags with his head resting on a third. I couldn’t understand how a person could put themselves in such a vulnerable position. There is no way I could fall asleep in such conditions. It’s too dangerous. It’s also too filthy. He didn’t seem to mind, however, as he rubbed his body and clothes all over the trodden tiles. Maybe he had some sort of pact with the janitor, something about cleaning the floors while feigning the tossing and turning of sleep. After all, the sluggish janitor did need the help.

The hysterical antics in the lobby began to grow when I observed the rent-a-cops on duty. The first one, an average Joe white guy, masterfully depicted the persona of the Terminator, only, he looked more like a fucking dork instead of a killing machine. Try to think of someone you know with a really big head and then double it in size. This would be the exact size of rent-a-cop boy’s head. He patrolled the area, moving at about the same speed as the janitor and for some reason he thought it very important to inspect the vending machines on a regular basis. I mouthed the word “creep” as he hovered over people who were napping. He stood over them, zooming in absurdly close to their faces, appearing to contemplate on whether to wake them or not. Each time, however, he just shrugged his shoulders, filled his cheeks with air, squinted through his thick-rimmed glasses–to look intimidating I assumed–and continued walking in circles. Twenty minutes later, the second rent-a-cop, a short and street-hardened African-American woman, relieved the thick-headed one and immediately woke up all the people the first guy had ignored. Some people are just better Terminators than others.

About halfway through the trip we arrived in Yakima, a city whose name translates to “runaway.” Legend claims that a Chief’s daughter disobeyed some tribal rules and fled from her home to later settle in the Yakima valley, a region that is now more well-known for its successful vineyards. It wasn’t until we pulled into the Yakima international bus station that things, once again, started to become interesting.

I started seeing walruses.

As people around me shifted uncomfortably, worrying about who would sit next to them, I became very curious about a cop-related situation brewing about a block away.

One of Yakima’s finest, lights flashing and all, had pulled over a man driving a crappy, white-trashified Trans-am. The driver of the Trans-am was a white man wearing a turquoise tank top, a baseball cap, sandals, and a pair of flimsy gym shorts. He got out of his car before the officer could meet him at his window and they met halfway. After I got over the initial glare of the Trans-am driver’s “Top Gun” sunglasses, I noticed his absurdly huge push-broom moustache and his belly hanging dangerously low over his shorts, dangerous in the kind of way it pulled the shorts a little too low in the back. He looked like a walrus.

The man pleaded his case to the officer, pointing his fingers dramatically in every direction and raising his voice to the sky–as if God would summarily answer all of his complaints. The cop deserved a lot of credit; he listened to the whole tirade patiently. Then, matter-of-factly, the officer whipped out his citation tablet and promptly wrote the turquoise walrus-man a ticket. I enjoyed this whole play of events, and the most interesting part . . . the cop was Hispanic-American. This made it nothing short of a bona-fide racism role-reversal, only the cop was just doing his job well. I couldn’t help but draw some kind of odd pleasure from the situation.

I looked away from the cop scene to the front of the bus and saw another heavy man with a push-broom moustache waddling down the aisle toward me. And boy, he was the real deal. I had officially laid eyes on the royal king of the walrus clan. He looked twice as big as the turquoise walrus-man because of his “humpback” backpack, which swung precariously close to passengers’ heads each time he turned to the bus driver to shout about his hungry belly.

“Yep, uh-huh, I’m starving! Fact is, I was almost late ‘cause I was gettin’ this here food.”

“Great,” the bus driver said, feigning interest.

“Yep, yep! So hungry I got me some french fried taters and tacos right here. Mmm, good stuff. Yes sir!”

Showing his loot, the man dangled two grease-stained paper bags in the air. I winced while I helplessly watched his overstuffed backpack knock a plastic superhero out of a little boy’s hands. Incensed by the plundering backpack, the boy punched the walrus king in the back of the leg. His Highness didn’t notice.

The bus got moving again and everybody took their preferred Greyhound positions. A few people tried to catch naps by constructing impossible pillows out of jackets and jamming their heads between windows and seats. Others sought solace in blaring music through their headphones. Some tried to hush screaming babies; and the folks in the back, they inevitably found a sneaky way to get wasted without getting kicked off the bus. Not me, though, I was engrossed with the walrus king. Hmm, “The Walrus King,” that’s a Disney movie I hope and pray they don’t make. Regardless of that ugly thought, I decided that the walrus king would be my entertainment for the next fifteen minutes, and that turned out to be an excellent choice because . . . well . . . he began eating.

The man fisted his paper bags, making obnoxiously loud crinkling noises, and began shoving food into his mouth, moving like a well-oiled piston. He consumed a total of six tacos and about two pounds of french fries. The only portion of his lunch he did not eat was the half-chewed taco shavings that either fell surreptitiously from his lips or launched from his mouth during several bouts of coughing. Now, it’s perfectly normal to accidentally spit out a bit of food from a surprise cough or sneeze, but the last time I checked it’s customary to cover one’s mouth. The walrus king, in all his glory, seemed to have missed the class on that bit of etiquette. The splattering came out in chunks, thudding against the seat in front of him and sounding a lot like cumbersome raindrops falling on the roof of a tent. I wondered if I should have informed the woman sitting in front of the walrus king, but thought against it when I realized that her hair, overdone and teased with heaps of hairspray, served as a perfectly good helmet to deflect the food projectiles.

We arrived in the town of Toppenish a little while later for a forty-minute meal break. The view of the town gave me the uneasy feeling that we had just driven into an episode of the Twilight Zone and that Rod Serling was outside, lurking in the parking lot. I stayed on board, trying to avoid Toppenish altogether, but the driver started to get on my nerves. He began hitting on the “cute girl” passenger by asking her to translate everything on a menu for some local Mexican restaurant.

“Heh, heh. And what did you say “Carnes” was? Something about beef, is that right, sweetie?” he said, draping himself over the seat in front of her.

Sickened by the driver, I decided to exit the silver Twinkie anyway, not giving a damn if Rod Serling suddenly materialized. He didn’t appear. But I think he was there in spirit, however; Toppenish was imprisoned in a fucking time warp.

The great metropolis of Toppenish seemed to be stuck in several different decades, but none more recent than the eighties. In every direction I saw vast, empty fields spotted with broken-down farm equipment and various decaying automobiles. And in front of where I stood, at the center of these fields, a group of slightly more youthful cars – but not that much younger – rested around a small-town diner. The restaurant mimicked the state of transportation surrounding it, appearing to have been reluctantly dragged from the happy-go-lucky fifties into the coke-crazed eighties and left for dead. Like the Seattle bus station, it was a hard place to be. The only thing probably keeping the business afloat was its convenient location next to the highway.

I entered the restaurant with the intentions of charging the battery in my laptop and reading more from Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I was able to charge the battery, but only after some cool Mexican-American man, who seemed to be in charge, joked with me about paying rent for the use of his electrical outlet. I ordered an over-priced orange juice and started reading.

And then, I stopped reading.

Some kind of aggravating sorority-type girl had become enamored of the juke box, which isn’t that obnoxious in and of itself. You see, the real problem was that she had a particular affinity for the song I Will Always Love You, by Whitney Houston. The girl played the sappy tune three times in a row and on the third round she came up to me to introduce herself.

“What’re ya reading?” she asked, smacking chewing gum between her teeth.

“Uh, The People’s History of the United States.” Mentioning the author seemed irrelevant for some reason.

“Do you study that?”

“No, I just read it for fun.”

“Oh, I’m going to Spokane,” she blurted, not paying attention.

“Great. What’s in Spokane?”

She smiled triumphantly. “I’m going there to take the A-C-T.”

I congratulated the girl and wished her well, but my words didn’t seem to have any affect on her because she immediately launched into an award-winning presentation of how much she loved the screeching love ballad that still wafted through the air.

I said nothing.

She stared at the ceiling.

I waited.

She chewed her gum.

I waited some more.

After a couple squeaky sighs and a bit of hair twirling she finally said goodbye. I wished her luck on the ACT again and she sat down, thankfully, away from the Whitney Houston machine.

My urge to read had faded during the conversation with the ACT girl so I focused on my surroundings instead. A waitress mistakenly offered to warm up my orange juice with coffee. I politely declined. The juice looked nuclear, but it was refreshing. The walrus king had just gobbled up a full plate of tamales. What would he eat next? His plate and silverware? His seat cushion? The insatiable appetite of the walrus king made me afraid – no, very afraid – to go back onto the bus. Enter Rod Serling stage left.

The entire bus ride took close to eight hours to drive just four hundred miles. This could have made me bitter – maybe, in some way, it did. Nevertheless, I boldly pretended to be one of those ultra-cheesy, positive reinforcement counselors who preach the gospel of lemons. We all know this gospel. Our grandparents taught us this gospel; that is, the gospel of turning lemons into lemonade. With a bit of naiveté I had figured this lemonade trick would be effective for the whole trip. But when, with only thirty miles to go, our bus driver suddenly pulled off the road and aggressively confronted two people in the bathroom who were “doing something,” I learned that lemonade only lasts for so long. On such a bus ride and in many other life situations lemonade just flat-out rots; it simply goes bad before anyone can enjoy it. Maybe our grandparents already know – it’s likely they do – but, just in case they don’t, we should let them know that even lemonade has a shelf-life.

© Chance Wolf Koehnen