Totally Boned

Well played, Google Image Search.

I had finished the last of my finals on Tuesday, first getting up at 7:00 and braving the penis-inverting cold of the early morning to take my anthropology exam before stumbling through my physics final with all the grace and poise of Kanye West. I was done at 5:00, and at roughly the same time, one of my friends from class was loading up his car to drive back to Portland.

“Why don’t you ride home with Jake?” Some people asked me. “It’s way cheaper and faster than taking the Amtrak bus on Wednesday.”

“Because,” I responded. “Taco Tuesday comes but once a week.”

So I went to Taco Tuesday at Taylor’s and enjoyed five tacos and an Amaretto and Coke,* then returned home to pack.

*I found out the hard way on a non-dollar well drink night that a double Amaretto and Coke costs $9 ordinarily. Liking bitch drinks is one thing – paying as much for one as a footlong Philly Cheesteak at Subway is another.

Packing for me is dictated by how much stuff I can fit into the green Nike duffel bag I won in a trivia contest when I was in middle school. I know from several years’ experience that it can hold 70% of my clothes, my toiletries kit, my slippers, and, when necessary, my laptop. Every time I pack I try to bend or break the laws of space and time by cramming more stuff in, which always results in failure and occasionally an uncomfortable ripping sound. After I graduate I may take the bag out back and shoot it.

Into my backpack I stuffed my XBox 360, the necessary cords, and three controllers, along with my external hard drive and a few other laptop doodads. I brought along my trumpet in its 600 pound black case, and a few of my music books, stuffed into a plastic Safeway bag because there was no room for them anywhere else.

Wednesday morning I rose at 10:00 and went to the bookstore to sell back my textbooks, netting me a clean $75 in cash. I celebrated with a burrito at Qdoba (which still cost less than a double Amaretto and Coke on any day but Tuesday), then returned home to gather my things and meet the bus.

I’ve spoken a lot about Amtrak’s bus service versus Greyhound on here before. I’ve made it clear that both outfits will screw you in the end, but Amtrak will screw you on a bus that doesn’t smell like pee and is populated by 30% fewer serial killers, thus making it the best choice. One of the advantages to Amtrak is that their buses offer service to the University of Oregon, picking riders up outside MacArthur Court.

I had bought a ticket on the Amtrak bus scheduled to leave Eugene at 1:15 PM, which was slated to stop at Mac Court at 12:50. Thus, I lugged all my bags up the hill and perched on the steps, waiting for the bus, the cold slowly sapping my will to live.

I had booked my ticket by calling JILL, Amtrak’s automated telephone ticket vending robot – and while I believe that robots are, in general, pretty cool, being the robot whose sole purpose in life is to shill out tickets for the obsolete train company is pretty sad. While JILL clearly got dealt a bum robo-hand, she remains one of the friendliest women I talk to on a regular basis, if not a little fuzzy about important details.

“Please spell out your last name, followed by your first name.”

“C-A-P-P-S, -T-R-*cough*-U-M-A-N.”

“I heard, C-A-P-P-S, T-R – is that correct?”*

“Yes. Wait, no!”

“Great! Moving on, would you like to pick up your tickets at the station?”

*My name on the ticket was TR Capps, which, I have decided, stands for Teodor Roosevelt Capps.

After speaking with JILL, I talked to a live operator who informed me that I could meet the bus on campus, ride it to the train station, and pick up my tickets there. I asked her, just to be sure, if the bus still stopped outside Mac Court, and she said yes.

So there I was, sitting outside Mac Court, when I see the bus come rolling up the street towards me. I was the only person outside Mac Court, the designated stopping place for the bus. I had baggage scattered around my feet in plain view. I stood up, waved to the driver, and turned around to gather my things.

When I turned back, the bus was just truckin’ on down the street.

I stood there for a second, watching it, wondering if this was some sort of weird bus driver prank. But he just kept on going and going, like the Energizer Bunny of boning all my best laid plans.

I left all my bags, packed with some odd $3500 worth of personal affects, unattended by the basketball arena and took off sprinting down the street like the T-1000, bemoaning the fact that I would once again have to write a blog about my continuing frustrations with Amtrak. What I’ve found is that while buses never seem to go fast enough while you’re inside of them, when you’re running along behind them they floor it like they’re John Cusak in 2012.

The bus had slowed up to turn the corner onto 18th, giving me a great chance to catch up, and I got close enough to choke on exhaust fumes. I had nearly made it to the door, which I could presumably hit with a balled up fist like Keanu Reeves in Speed in order to get the driver’s attention, but then the bus started to go up the hill. At that point, the bus couldn’t lose – not only was its engine competing with my weak writer’s legs, but its engine hadn’t had 15 pounds of Qdoba earlier in the day.*

*We both were experiencing similar problems with exhau[FART JOKE REDACTED]

I fell behind and watched the bus fade down the street, the bus driver evidently assuming that the guy running after him and waving his arms in the rear view mirror was just saying “GOODBYE! DRIVE FASTER!”

Head hung in defeat, I returned to my stuff. In elementary school I once chased an ice cream truck several blocks before the driver finally stopped, but I was younger then, and there were Choco Tacos on the line.

I called the train station several times, but while the operator had been perfectly willing to pick up a few minutes ago when I called to confirm that the bus was on time, she was mysteriously busy when I was calling to calmly inform them that their bus driver had plainly cornholed me and that they were all a bunch of cocksuckers.

I looked at my watch – it was 12:58. In 15 minutes the bus would leave, taking with it all my dreams of not being in Eugene anymore. I knew that the bus’s next stop would be the Eugene Amtrak station, where it would pick up passengers before leaving town at 1:15, but there was no way I could make it from campus to downtown with four bags in the next 15 minutes on foot.

On my right, I saw a guy of roughly my age walking out of Mac Court towards a pickup truck. Overcoming everything that my parents and the Oregon DMV had told me about hitchhiking, I ran up to the man as he got into his car and asked him if he could give me a ride to the train station if I gave him $20.* For proof, I pulled one of the crisp new bills I’d been given at the bookstore out of my pocket.

*In retrospect, $20 is an awful lot of money for a guy to drive you about a mile. My bus ticket itself cost roughly that much for a guy to drive me about 100 miles. On the other hand, I didn’t have any $10 bills and I didn’t want to give this guy a $20 and ask him for change. “Thanks so much! Not $20 so much, but definitely $10 so much!”

The man – Tim, as he introduced himself – agreed, and I clambered into his truck, throwing my bags into the back. We made light conversation on the way to the train station, and in the process, I found out that Tim was a driver for DoughCo, the local calzone delivery service. It made me feel less bad about approaching him out of the blue – picking up and dropping off was kind of his thing, and while I was hardly a bready pocket filled with meat and cheese, I tipped one hell of a lot better than most college students.

We pulled up to the train station with just a few minutes to spare, and there was the bus. As I thanked Tim and retrieved my bags, I rehearsed in my mind the verbal ass-kicking I was going to give this bus driver – the dipshit who, through his own negligence and inability to do his seemingly simple job correctly, had forced me to just about double the cost of my ticket and, more importantly, physically exert myself.

“Hey.” I said, leaning into the bus as I set my bags down at my feet. The bus driver was sitting in his seat, a newspaper in front of him.

“Yes?” He asked, pleasantly, looking up from his paper. He was in his 60s, a kindly look about him, like he’d be better suited to a job in a candy shop or as a friendly Southern doctor during the Great Depression who didn’t expect payment from needy families.

“You, uh…” Pull it together, Capps! I chided myself. Douchebags can work in candy stores too! “I was waiting at the University bus stop and you drove right on past me.”

“Say!” He said, getting out of his seat and stepping off the bus. “Is that a trumpet?”

He was pointing at my case.

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, sorry – no brass players on this bus. Woodwinds only!” Then he socked me on the arm and gave me a wide, friendly grin – the same grin he probably gave some impoverished hillbilly mother of three after she tried to pay him for curing her son’s measles. “I’m just messin’ with you!”

So I smiled and just sat at the back of the bus, bemoaning the fact that I was, in fact, the world’s biggest pussy.

The moral of the story is that you should always tip your DoughCo delivery boy, because those guys are heroes.

Truman Capps is going to write a nasty letter for this one.