I was at the bus station hitting a pint of Wild Irish Rose and smoking bowls in a Port-O-Let waiting for my bus. Ripped-apart drug dealers and male prostitutes lounged around picking at lesions, tying each others' shoe laces, and trying to make eye contact with itinerant workers. Men who lived on the bus line, traveling from place to place and living in the stations, lounged in chairs and stared off into space at something that wasn't actually there. Wacked-out kids ran around the place trying to invite people to a party in some barn somewhere where they would have ecstasy, LSD, and beer. I was on edge, the pot was making me paranoid and I was tweaking out of my mind, by now I was probably addicted to that synthetic bilge. I just beat down the withdrawals by doing bumps off my keys in the bathrooms. My bus arrived and I boarded, sitting in the back next to a window. I was stoned, drunk, twisted. I remember thinking that I should try to get some 'shrooms, before the bus started, and drove off. It was late September, 9/11 had come and gone. The leaves were turning, red, vermillion, orange, yellow, striking colors that shown sunlight off of water droplets waiting to fall from the leaves into the moist clay. It became a fury of changing leaves, as the bus roared by. I could not turn my eyes away. It was an endless innocuous fire, coating everything, forever changing, spinning, latching on. It was a wild fury of reds, oranges, licking flames that encompassed everything, danced, never stopped, a fantastic illusion that would not die until it would die, blurred by speed and drugs in my reflective eyes. White blue gaps in between trees, the fire reflecting in crystalline lakes as I made my way north up from the tobacco farms and factories of the south, back up into northeastern Ohio, beacon of meth labs, pot droughts, and the OxyCotin black market. Before I knew it they had re-routed our bus to New York City. I let out a groan and went into the bathroom to piss and drain another pint of Wild Irish Rose. It was dark in New York City when we arrived. It was chaos in the bus station. Paranoid Christians huddled around in circles holding candles chanting and praying. Family men and stock brokers got into fist fight over pay phones. The place was crowded up to the gills with travelers lying around trying to sleep in the bad sober night smacking mosquitoes off of sweaty necks exposed to sick fluorescent lights. I called Onyx and found out that the manager of that drug store actually drowned himself in the toilet during his intense LSD trip that he could somehow not explain, after the store closed of course. My bus came eventually. There was nowhere to smoke pot, and my meth was running out. I could drink in the stalls, but had no booze and nowhere to go to get some because the bus terminal was locked down like a prison during a riot. After a couple hours, my bus arrived, and I made it back to my apartment, where I smoked pot until I blacked out for a couple weeks.
