The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [68]
I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt. My trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shovelling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate the gross national product of Lesotho that night. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons from our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombie-like into the night.
We got in the car, too full to speak, and headed towards the distant greenish glow of Three Mile Island. I lay on the back seat, my feet in the air, and moaned softly. I vowed that never again in my life would I eat a single morsel of food, and I meant it. But two hours later, when we arrived back at my brother’s house, the agony had abated and my brother and I were able to begin a new cycle of gross overconsumption, beginning with a twelve-pack of beer and bucket of pretzels from his kitchen and concluding, in the early hours of the morning, with a plate of onion rings and two-foot-long submarine sandwiches, full of goo and spices, at an all-night eaterie out on Highway II.
What a great country.
Chapter fourteen
IT WAS TEN minutes to seven in the morning and it was cold. Standing outside the Bloomsburg bus station, I could see my breath. The few cars out this early trailed clouds of vapour. I was hung-over and in a few minutes I was going to climb on to a bus for a five-hour ride into New York. I would sooner have eaten cat food.
My brother had suggested that I take the bus because it would save having to find a place to park in Manhattan. I could leave the car with him and come back for it in a day or two. At two in the morning, after many beers, this had seemed a good plan. But now, standing in the early morning chill, I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or – and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America – you cannot afford a car. Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison, or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students. You can tell they are Norwegian students because they are so pink-faced and healthy-looking and they wear little blue ankle socks with their sandals. But by and large a ride on a long-distance bus in America combines most of the shortcomings of prison life with those of an ocean crossing in a troop-ship.
So when the bus pulled up before me, heaving a pneumatic sigh, and its door flapped open, I boarded it with some misgivings. The driver himself didn’t appear any too stable. He had the sort of hair that made him look as if he’d been playing with live wires. There were about half a dozen other passengers, though only two of them looked seriously insane and just one was talking to himself. I took a seat near the back and settled down to get some sleep. I had drunk far too many beers with my brother the night before, and the hot spices from the submarine sandwich were now expanding ominously inside my abdomen and drifting around like the stuff they put in lava lamps. Soon, from one end or the other, it would begin to seep out.
I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. Through the gap in the seat I could see it was an Indian man – by that I mean a man from India, not an American Indian. ‘Can I smoke on this bus?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke any more, so I don’t pay much attention to these things.’
‘But do you think I can smoke on this bus?’
‘I really don’t know.’
He was quiet for a few minutes, then his hand was on my shoulder again, not tapping it but resting there. ‘I can’t find an ashtray,’ he said.
‘No fooling,’ I responded wittily, without opening my eyes.
‘Do you think that means we’re not allowed