COLUMN ONE : Riding Out the Battle of the Buses : A cross-country trip on strike-bound Greyhound produces moments of humor, fear and despair--a forced lesson in the human condition.

I rode the Greyhound from New York to Los Angeles last week, hopping from bus to bus on a zigzag course intended to capture how America has coped with a strike of its main bus system.

What I experienced, in nine days and 4,000 hard miles, was chaos, misery, a hint of danger, loads of seat-numbing monotony, humor, and the melancholy moments that come when strangers are brought together by common hardship.

Signs of the strike were abundant. People slept on cold tile floors in seedy depots waiting for buses that never arrived. Others were locked out of terminals because of layoffs and cancellations. Strikers wearing ski masks tore at the outside of our bus. The driving was left to strikebreakers, some of whom seemed overwrought by skittishness.

No one seemed happy with the situation. For most of the passengers, though, options were limited. My fellow travelers aboard the 47-seat Americruisers formed a diverse collection of humanity. There were down-and-outers in search of vague opportunities elsewhere, teen-age runaways, soldiers, blue-collar workers, retirees, the mentally disturbed and more. All shared a need to travel--and a shortage of cash.

“If we were rich, none of us would be here,” said Laura B. Largen, a 67-year-old widow from Nashville, Tenn., who was riding the bus to Florida to visit her son. “We’d all be flying.”

Unlike most other modes of travel, buses can present forced lessons in the human condition. Along the way, I would be hustled by a homeless woman hungry for cash, hold the baby of a pimple-faced girl who regretted motherhood, hear the secrets of a fugitive hobo as he described how he had tried to kill a policeman, and share the anxiety of a divorced handyman, en route to see his son for the first time in 23 years.

Those sorts of things never seem to happen to me on a 727.

Also, the scenery was nice.

SUNDAY, March 25

New York City to Philadelphia

The journey began at the Port Authority bus terminal in mid-town Manhattan, which is as much a way station for New York City’s depraved as it is a transportation link to the outside world. It was early morning, and the main Greyhound ticket booth was closed because of the strike. The restaurants were littered with panhandlers who had pulled together enough change to share a cup of coffee and a day-old doughnut.

Downstairs, at the subway level, a handful of striking drivers circled outside a second Greyhound ticket counter, urging passengers to boycott the bus or at least be wary of poorly trained replacement drivers.

“Just because nothing happened on the last bus, doesn’t mean it won’t happen on your bus,” striking driver Michael Simmons warned. “You may be unlucky.”

Many striking drivers from New York to Los Angeles seemed genuinely concerned about passenger safety. It was as though they were still behind the wheel and not walking a picket line.

Conversations with drivers inevitably became depressing. They would get angry and rattle on about being cheated by the company. Few I spoke with held out hope of driving for Greyhound again. The hunt was on for other jobs.

Greyhound management, one driver told me, had “destroyed an institution.”

I bought an Ameripass for $189 and asked the ticket agent about the next bus to Atlantic City and Philadelphia. He was irritable. The whites of his eyes were bright pink. He snapped rather than spoke, warning that I might never make it to Philadelphia because of the strike.

He was the first of many short-tempered ticket agents at work across the country. Most bus terminals were operating on a shoestring because of a sharp drop in business. Information booths were closed virtually everywhere.

In Knoxville, Tenn., only four of 21 depot employees were still on the payroll. One night in Denver, three dozen passengers waited for a single agent to issue tickets and deal with schedule problems. A despondent agent in Richmond, Va., complained to me that she was tired of dispensing unreliable information to frustrated--and increasingly hostile--travelers.

“Just tell them what it says in the book,” her eavesdropping supervisor barked.

It was quickly revealed that local information was only as good as the ticket agent who gave it, and it was best to verify-- to dangerously stretch the definition of that word--everything with Greyhound’s toll-free telephone number.

“They tell you one thing at the station, something else on the bus, and then something else on the phone,” said a resigned Kindra Lee, who was stranded for several hours during her trip from Chicago to Atlanta with two toddlers. “That is bad business.”

It turns out, though, that the cranky agent in New York was correct: It wasn’t possible to take Greyhound to Philadelphia. At Atlantic City, we were told to take a New Jersey Transit bus the rest of the way.

The loss of service was costing Mark Carter. Before the strike, the lanky, one-time drug dealer had commuted by Greyhound to his hotel job in Atlantic City. By taking advantage of travel discounts offered by casinos to Greyhound passengers, Carter was able to save more than $100 a month in travel expenses. The arrangement had helped Carter escape his former occupation.

But with no discounts and a $6.90 hourly wage, Carter was struggling to make it. He had just moved into a new apartment, was planning to marry and was putting aside a few dollars each month for his mother. He ruled out moving to Atlantic City. That city, he said, was too tough and filled with temptations.

“I am trying to be a role model for my friends to help them get away from the drugs,” he said. “But they’re making $500 in an afternoon. And money is short for me. It is hard for them to see it.”

At least that is how Carter told it late that night as we rolled down the Atlantic Seaboard. A lot of stories get told on buses, and many of them might even be true.

While the narrative details varied, sad tales of the strike’s toll on working men and women were common. Mike Huskey, who travels frequently by Greyhound in his work delivering garbage trucks, summed it up best:

“It has put a big damper on things,” the young father said, describing how the strike had further complicated the already tangled logistics of his Tennessee home life. “A lot of working people rely on the bus. It is all we have.”

MONDAY, March 26

Philadelphia to Richmond, Va.

“This is my first trip. . . . If I make some mistakes, pray for me.”

With that brief announcement and an awkward wave, 67-year-old James Kears--a soft-spoken Baptist pastor from Baltimore who had just been hired as a strike replacement--steered the half-empty Americruiser onto busy Market Street in central Philadelphia.

“Geez, was that the wrong thing to say to us,” James Starke, a cook from New Jersey en route to his father’s wedding in rural Maryland, would say later. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you would want driving the bus.”

Seated in the front seat just behind Kears was Leroy Edward Smith, another driver-in-training who had been appointed navigator. Smith had worked for years as a local charter bus driver and knew Philadelphia well, but he had not yet passed the Greyhound driving test. That Kears apparently had passed the test seemed a small wonder.

“Stay in the center!” Smith ordered, as Kears attempted to negotiate a turn onto 13th Street. It was too late. The silver-haired bus driver had turned the bus directly toward a beige van parked along the curb. We were stuck in the intersection.

Kears collected his thoughts, checked his side mirrors and carefully shifted into reverse. We slowly rolled back onto Market to a chorus of honking motorists. Inside the bus, no one dared make a sound. We leaned toward the aisle anxiously, craning to see if our journey was fated to end in a gridlocked Philadelphia intersection.

Eventually, Kears extricated the bus and pointed it south. On the expressway near Baltimore, Smith the navigator seemed almost giddy with success.

“We’re doing good,” he said, pointing to the back of the bus. “You see all those heads back there sleeping?”

In Baltimore, we picked up seven passengers, including a woman in a leopard-skin cap who nursed a bottle of Andre champagne and giggled a lot.

Last to board was Carol, a frail 34-year-old homeless woman who stumbled to the rear in a pair of loosely tied oversized boots. Her hands trembled when she spoke.

Carol related a disjointed tale about being attacked by employees at a grocery store where she shopped and eventually being sent to a mental hospital in Maryland. She was released several years ago, she said, and has been living on the street since. Last year, she was picked up for prostitution.

“Would you like to have sex?” she asked, stuffing her hair into a brown ski cap. “I can look better than this. I don’t feel well today.”

In Washington, Carol waited for me just inside the terminal.

I handed her a couple of dollars and told her to go find her mother, who she had said lived nearby. She clutched the handout, thanked me and wandered away.

TUESDAY, March 27

Richmond to Knoxville, Tenn.

Spending the night at a bus depot is never pleasant. There are drunks, panhandlers and people speaking nonsense. Deep sleep is not advised.

The strike indirectly improved the overnight ambience of the Knoxville terminal. Half a dozen striking drivers camped outside, a security guard patrolled the building and a county sheriff’s deputy was on duty. There was security in numbers.

Like most depots, this one was littered with cigarette butts and was well-equipped with video games that filled the night with electronic clatter. At the Smokey Mountain Cafe, a microwaved cheeseburger came wrapped in wax paper for $2.35. The gift shop specialized in crossword puzzles and Tennessee memorabilia, as well as a paddle called “Mom’s Helping Hand.”

About six stranded travelers curled up against the wall near the ticket counter, dozing. Gail Patterson, traveling from North Carolina with her 2-year-old daughter, wasn’t so brave. She took one look around the terminal and decided to reboard, forgoing her plans to find a motel room. She would sleep on the road rather than risk being stranded in the terminal.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you have to do things you just don’t want to do.”

WEDNESDAY, March 28

Knoxville to Jackson, Miss.

We arrived from Knoxville into the crowded Atlanta terminal shortly before noon. As was the custom in most large cities, the bus was greeted by a handful of striking drivers shouting obscenities and a protective phalanx of security guards. In many cities, a Greyhound employee recorded each arrival with a hand-held video camera.

Inside the Atlanta depot, a weary young mother in a green Army uniform and heavy black shoes fed pieces of a Burger King hamburger bun to her 10-month-old daughter. A jovial woman she met at the station watched her other daughter, who at 22 months was more interested in exploring than eating lunch.

Army Spec. Wendy Bassett had been waiting for her bus to Birmingham, Ala., for more than seven hours, and the delays were taking its toll. She was tired and running low on diapers and baby food.

“This trip has worn me completely out,” she said. “I didn’t even know there was a strike.”

Bassett had a leave of 30 days from her post in Nuremberg, West Germany, and two of them had been lost to the bus trip. She was still there in the terminal, juggling babies, when I caught a bus for Mississippi.

Qit Stube boarded outside Atlanta. Stube said he was 17 and had been on his own for four years. He wore a silver earring in his left nostril, a black dog collar around his neck and a long black overcoat. He carried a black briefcase with a pet rat inside, and a bag stuffed with a skateboard and a large toy dog.

The dog, he said, belonged to a brother who had drowned years ago in Galveston, Tex. He spent much of his time cuddling the stuffed animal, letting go only to slip corn chips to the rat through the top of his briefcase.

“I don’t know much about it,” he said of his younger brother’s death. “I have a mind block. It is the one thing I can’t get over. It hurts too much.”

Stube was moving back to his hometown in Texas to stay with friends. He had arranged to work at a fast-food restaurant there since he wouldn’t be able to go to school. He had been expelled for allegedly selling drugs--something he denied doing.

There were lots of teen-agers like Stube riding the bus. The runaways were easy to spot: They never had money for food. In Virginia, I met two 16-year-old girls who said they were models, traveling the nation in search of work. I watched one of them in an oversized sweat shirt lift an apple out of another passenger’s bag and, glancing about warily, gobble it down.

Teen-agers being teen-agers, most didn’t seem to care about the strike one way or the other, and they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. They were lonely and often suspicious. And once they started talking, they usually became depressed.

THURSDAY, March 29

Jackson to Wichita, Kan.

We pulled out of Dallas for Wichita in a light evening rain. Three picketers moved in front of the bus and refused to budge--a standoff. The strikers swore at the driver and shouted, “Scab!” The driver, a longtime Greyhound employee who had refused to join the strikers, inched the bus carefully toward the depot exit.

A striker grabbed the windshield wiper and snapped it back. He then struck the side-view mirror, twisting it out of position. By this time, almost everyone on the bus was standing, unsure what to expect. It was ugly.

In the end, there were no gunshots or rock throwing and no one was hurt. The mirror was easily readjusted. But now there was fear on this bus--mostly fear of the unknown. It was not an uncommon emotion. From coast to coast, drivers talked openly to passengers about their encounters with picketers, and the stories scared many of us.

In New Jersey, our driver frightened passengers when he pulled down the front window visor and explained that it would help keep glass from shattering should the window be shot out. Nonsmokers on several buses endured thick smoke in the rearward smoking section because it seemed safer.

“They’re after the drivers, not me,” one woman explained.

In Tennessee, replacement driver David Knight showed passengers where three bullets had hit his windshield the day before on the same route. In Alabama, a driver for Capital Trailways--an independent company that picked up some canceled Greyhound routes--warned that there might be trouble ahead when he turned over the bus to a Greyhound replacement driver.

Drivers were on edge. “Under normal circumstances, I am one of the easiest-going country boys you’ve ever seen,” driver J.C. Wright announced over the loudspeaker. “But you’re a little nervous when you’re being shot at.”

In Virginia, a driver named David summoned me forward and instructed me to turn off my reading light or move to the back of the bus.

“I feel like I am in a turkey shoot here with those lights on,” he told me, his voice charged with emotion, his brow soaked with sweat. “People are getting shot at, you know. The light is reflecting on me, and I feel real uncomfortable.”

FRIDAY, March 30

Wichita to Topeka, Kan.

Sometimes, the stories of seatmates become wearisome, and the window provides a convenient escape. Virginia’s rolling hills seem alive this time of year. The Louisiana swamps fascinate. The Rockies are stunning.

In Kansas, however, there wasn’t a whole lot of scenery to admire, not even any wheat.

The woman in the second row insisted that in the summer the wheat fields are as beautiful as any mountain. Today, though, the roadside looked brown and desolate.

Even the small roadside towns seemed closed for the season. The kids on board passed the time counting grain elevators. Almost everyone else slept.

Outside Wichita, a small herd of bison grazed along the roadside. We were past them in seconds.

SATURDAY, March 31

Topeka to Denver

Most people who board a Greyhound bus bring a clear idea about where they want to sit.

Those with cigarettes head directly for the rear, where in most states smoking is permitted. Those who like to drink, take drugs, make noise or flirt with strangers join the smokers in the back. The smell of smoke mixes with the distinct odor of the chemical toilet, but there is a cheery, tavern-like feel to this rogue section.

Conversely, grandmothers and young mothers with children rarely venture past the 10th row, which forms something of a moral demarcation line.

On this day, however, nobody paid much attention to the rules. Any seat was preferable to the aisle, where half a dozen of us stood for most of the 500-mile trip from Topeka to Denver. One man stood so his 13-inch color TV could sit; for the rest of us, the choice was stand in the aisle or wait another day at the Topeka bus depot. There just weren’t enough replacement drivers to run a second bus to Denver.

There are no rules of etiquette when it comes to standing on a Greyhound bus. In Salina, Kan., a mother and five small children boarded the bus after their van broke down on the highway. Four of the children were able to sit down because two passengers got off at the same station, but the mother stood with her 18-month-old daughter in her arms. Those seated stared straight ahead.

Finally, the bus driver made a plea over the loudspeaker.

“Someone give up their seat for this lady,” he said. “You can’t tell me the men on this bus are going to let her stand there with a baby in her arms.”

Only then did a freshly discharged Army officer headed for Wyoming relinquish his seat.

A few minutes later, a man near the rear caught the spirit and offered me his seat--for $10. I declined, but did sit for a while after the driver instructed mothers with infants to either hold them or pay for another seat. So I found myself next to a teen-age mother with a 4-week-old baby, a bassinet balanced across both our knees.

The young woman clearly was overwhelmed by motherhood. She fingered the acne on her chin and nervously bit her nails.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be a kid again?” she asked.

SUNDAY, April 1

Denver to Las Vegas

As we pulled out this morning, striking drivers again snapped the windshield wipers and twisted the side mirrors. This time, nobody paid much attention. All eyes were on a woman in the back of the crowded bus who refused to let anyone sit next to her.

The woman, with neatly manicured nails and her hair piled high on her head, was snapping photographs of everyone around her.

“You’re going to die when we get to Las Vegas,” she told them.

Within moments, the driver threw her off the bus.

“Let her go stand on the picket line if she wants to threaten people,” he said.

It doesn’t take much to bring people together on the bus. Today, it was the strange woman with the camera. Yesterday, it was an ex-convict with a knife. Several days ago, it was a drunk chugging whiskey and shouting biblical verses.

“This is like a family,” said Tim Phillips, a 33-year-old self-described “Colorado hippie” who said he was riding the bus on a dare. “On an airplane, you can sit next to someone an entire trip, and unless you say, ‘excuse me,’ they will never even talk to you.”

Everyone had a story to tell. In Virginia, I met a 70-year-old grandmother who didn’t know what to do about her 80-year-old husband; he was seeing another woman. In Alabama, I listened to Craig Corley search for the right words to greet his 24-year-old son, whom he had not seen for 23 years after a divorce.

A young man who said his name was Michael Griffith pulled me aside during a coffee stop outside Denver to inform me that several years ago he had attempted to kill a policeman in West Virginia. Now he was running from his parole officer.

“You can put my name in the paper, I don’t care,” Griffith told me. “I’ll be out of L.A. long before you write your story.”

MONDAY, April 2

Las Vegas to Los Angeles

From Denver west, the Greyhound seemed as much a U-Haul moving truck as a passenger bus. It was filled with families from across the country, and into the holding bin beneath the bus were all of their belongings: bulging suitcases, stereos, bicycles, toys, even kitchen appliances.

In the back of the bus, Janice Love, a department store warehouse clerk in Chicago, was on a two-week scouting mission to Los Angeles. “My friend wants me to move, so I am going to check it out,” she said.

Teresa and Loranzy McMakin, married just two months, were Hollywood-bound. She had worked at a fish packing factory in Harrisburg, Pa., and he had performed in Washington. He was headed west to pursue a career in heavy metal guitar playing; she would take whatever came up.

They complained about delays and scheduling problems with the bus, but they were determined not to let the strike ruin their adventure.

“We saved up whatever money we could,” Loranzy McMakin said. “It will be a sink or swim type thing.”

Both were strangers to Los Angeles, although Teresa McMakin said she knew something of the city from watching “Love Connection” on television.

“They’re always going on dates in L.A.,” she observed.

Finally, the bus pulled into the terminal in downtown Los Angeles. The driver had taken back streets into the bus barn, and I hadn’t seen any strikers.

Inside the terminal, the McMakins headed for a telephone to call friends in Hollywood. As I made my way out of the terminal for home, I encountered one last traveler.

Her name was Candy. A 19-year-old from Davenport, Iowa, she was waiting for an eastbound bus. She described herself as a pool hall manager. She had moved west with her husband and two small children only last winter.

“I thought it might work out,” Candy said. “But I couldn’t even walk down the street at night without someone bothering me. My advice to anyone thinking of moving here: You’re stupid if you do it.”

I walked out to 6th Street. Panhandlers begged for some change. I wasn’t in the mood.

AND THE STRIKE GOES ON

A prolonged strike against Greyhound could resemble the job action taken against Eastern Airlines, with labor waiting for the financial collapse of the company. A34