Time at a Magic Gateway

They were scattered through the building like disaster victims at a Red Cross shelter.

Some lay on the floor, heads propped against suitcases, trying to nap in the bedlam that surrounded them.

Others sat slumped in chairs, staring at miniature television screens, seemingly hypnotized by the muted voices that droned in their faces.

And hundreds more waited in lines that snaked through the huge structure, tolerating with mixed anger and despair the fate that had brought them there.

Welcome to the underside of the Greyhound bus strike.

This is where it really matters, beyond the strategy sessions, the bargaining tables and the picket lines.

Here the people suffer--tired, broke, frustrated and afraid. Here the strike has its greatest impact.

The Greyhound terminal at 6th and Maple isn’t an uplifting place to begin with. You don’t go there for the ambience.

It sits in the heart of Skid Row, surrounded by an element of society so removed from the mainstream that even those who love causes won’t touch them.

People come to the Greyhound depot because they can’t afford more satisfying means of transportation, and now they’ve got to face a strike.

“Why do the poor,” a passenger asked, “always suffer most?”

I was at Gate 18, where a line circled back like a strand of rope from a door that had assumed almost mystical quality.

It was like a gateway to heaven.

When the door opened, things would happen. You wouldn’t step into Paradise exactly, but presumably there’d be a bus waiting with someone to drive it, and you’d get to Sacramento, where it was supposed to be going.

Some of those in line had been waiting 24 hours for precisely that kind of miracle.

Getting a driver was the main thing. Since the strike began, two-thirds of the Greyhound buses have stopped running because they don’t have anyone to operate them.

That trickles down to the people at Gate 18. . . .

“It’s taken me five days to get here when it should have taken only two,” Dennis Fox was saying in a voice ragged with weariness.

He was sitting on the floor almost at the end of the line, a lanky man in his 40s with Clint Eastwood good looks. His luggage, a suitcase held together by duct tape, was nearby.

“I came out from Florida to get work and I haven’t slept once during those five days. I look like hell and I feel like hell.”

“Who could sleep anyhow?” Mike Willingham demanded. His rage pierced the surrounding turmoil like a knife.

Willingham and his pregnant wife had come to L.A. from Texas, heading toward their home in Vacaville. A duffel bag filled with their belongings was propped against a pillar.

“We had a dozen people jammed in the aisles all the way from Phoenix,” he said. “I tried to lie on the floor to sleep but either got stepped on or had cigarette ashes dropped in my face.”

“Just outside Tallahassee,” Fox said, “a bus driver stopped and sent a guy into a store for a 12-pack of beer.” He shook his head. “Can you believe that?”

“I can believe anything,” another man said. “We went 16 hours without food. When I asked the driver if we could stop, he said, ‘This ain’t no taxi.’ ”

I wandered down the line toward the magic door.

A student from Denmark leaned against his backpack. He had wanted to see America up close. Toward that end, he bought a pass for $250 that would have allowed him to travel anywhere by Greyhound for a month.

His timing couldn’t have been worse.

“My month is almost up,” he said in an English made precise by practice, “and most of it has been spent waiting. When I complained to the company, they gave me four extra days.”

He shook his head and repeated it in a tone that was a blend of sadness and incredulity. “Four extra days. . . . “

“It’s getting like Beirut,” a woman nearby said. “They ought to issue flak jackets.”

She was talking about the latest assault on a bus. Twenty-one buses have been fired upon since the strike began. She’s terrified hers will be next.

“Hell no I’m not going to give you my name,” she said when I asked. “You think I’m crazy? They’ll come after me. All I know is I’m out of money and I want to get home alive.”

She was the one who asked that question, the one I mentioned earlier: “Why do the poor always suffer most?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

As I left, I looked back at Gate 18. The magic door was still closed.