An old woman screams at the the driver in a foreign tongue, most likely related to the cigarette smoke he is blowing back over his shoulder and directly into the face of the wailing infant struggling in her arms. The middle-aged bus driver is on his second pack already, and there's still at least two hours to go. By the end of the trip, the entire bus will reek of the driver's butts, of course, but the seasoned rider prefers this to the overpowering smell of fifty people's body odor which usually permeates the tiny, smoky vehicle that has no air conditioning or functioning windows. It's uncomfortable in November, downright inhumane in July.
The bus driver shouts back at the old woman in the same dialect, turning all the way around in his seat to face her as the steel tube of death hurtles towards certain catastrophe on the interstate. He glances back in just in time to slam on the brakes and make a hard right, avoiding a collision with the barrier a mere mile from the spot his colleague wrecked a week ago. In the last ten years, the Fung Wah bus has had dozens of such accidents, like the time in March, 2007, when a bus plowed into the cement tollbooth divider, getting stuck there for hours. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ranked Fung Wah drivers in the worst 2% of drivers in the nation, but it's not always the driver's fault. The buses have also fallen to a host of mechanical disasters, ranging from the time in January of 2007, when the back wheels of a bus spontaneously fell off on the highway, to October, 2009, when a bus caught fire while driving down I-84.
Riders in the back of the bus actually welcome the driver's cigarette smoke. The bathroom door has been completely torn off, likely as a deterrent from using illicit drugs in the private space (that, or it was torn off by a customer in a blind rage after the sixth hour in Hartford traffic). With no barrier to the odors wafting out of the waste area, the back of the bus is a torture chamber. Coupled with the risk of turning around and glimpsing an old Chinese man emptying his bowels into the broken-down toilet, no sin is great enough for this sentence.
Yet passengers still come in droves. Low income Boston and New York residents alike use the $15 bus regularly to visit friends and family. They are herded - like cattle to the slaughter - in excruciatingly long lines onto the rickety old deathtraps. Almost every bus in rotation was acquired as an unwanted heap from some respectable busing company adhering to safety standards that forbade them to let the piece of junk anywhere near paying customers. Usually, white spray paint is applied to the old company's logo to form the canvas where "FUNG WAH" is crudely tagged in crimson.
The bickering between the old woman and the bus driver - put off in the face of immediate danger - picks up steam again. The other riders have all tuned out the baby's crying like white noise, but the poor woman doesn't realize that this is her only recourse. The driver has been doing this for five years, made thousands of runs between the two cities, and smoked hundreds of thousands of cigarettes in that time; he wasn't about to stop because some lady chastised him. In fact, if he had a nickel for every first-time rider who had yelled at him for the conditions of the bus, he certainly wouldn't be working this shit job anymore. He much preferred students - hung over, don't talk much, used to both the unsanitary conditions and the unique smell of smoke, vomit, and body odor that defined the bus. He'd never heard a complaint from these ilk; they knew what they were getting into when they signed up. The grizzled driver rolls his eyes and glimpses a bright spot on the horizon: that familiar rest area he'd been stopping at since the first day he made a southbound run.
The McDonald's stop in Connecticut is a custom formed out of necessity more than preference. The run-down building is an appropriate haven for this hardy bunch. The chance to stretch one's legs, albeit in the smell of car exhaust and french fries at a highway rest area, comes as a welcome relief to riders who have been subjected to human rights violations for the last three hours. They also use this opportunity to defecate in a toilet that has a seat, a door, and a sink. In no other situation would a rest area bathroom seem like such luxury - at least there's usually toilet paper at a rest stop, even if you have to pick it up off the floor.
After stocking up on fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the riders gain their second wind. The aisle becomes a flurry of activity, with passengers calling their loved ones to notify them of their imminent arrival: "Yeah, looking at an hour, hour and a half...Canal and Bowery, right by the bridge...yep....well, I'm definitely gonna need a shower before we go out...yeah it's especially bad today...okay, I'll call you when we're in Brooklyn...see you soon, bye." With the finish line in sight, the last hour is by far the longest.
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