The San Antonio bus terminal was a nice reminder that I am a consumer first and a citizen second. My experience with Greyhound stations revolves around the Houston station, with its seedy downtown surroundings, screaming kids, and drunken hobos lurking about waiting for the cops to shoo them off. But if you look closer, the bus terminal is America at its finest.
The Houston station is a mash up of bored bureaucracy and the entrepreneurial hustle of the guys who hang outside the station hawking cabs and parking spaces. People mill about doing what they want. The ladies running the ticket counter are remarkably efficient, despite their obvious contempt for the human cargo they have to shovel along. The men hustling cabs are Adam Smith's bastards. Telling one guy "No, I've got a ride coming" will not stop the guy right next to him from asking you the same question. They are as relentless as TV commercials and as charming as freeway billboards. As harmless as they are annoying, they are in your face advertisers unapologetically racing for the next dollar. This is main chance spirit that built the Ship Channel and made a city 60 miles inland the second largest port in the country.
In contrast, San Antonio's station is the sterile face of the future, for all practicalities, a little police state. Customers are marched about to stand in line waiting the bus or waiting for an overpriced midnight snack. Rows of brightly lit drink and snack dispensers line the walls with corporate logos and the absurd pricing of a command economy—two-twenty five for a 18-ounce Coke. Giant screens spaced thirty feet apart blare out CNN at volumes that make independent thought impossible. Not the ideal place to try and write eloquent travel essays. But why should sheep write?
A poor black kid—he seemed to be about the age of 20, so the term "kid" is relative—obviously in some kind of trouble, was hustled to a side wall by the refectory (I won't call it a cafeteria). He was shoulder to the wall—no physical contact—with four beefy cops huddled up around him. They were from two different agencies—sheriffs and metro cops, maybe. It doesn't matter, every government institution has its own police force these days. They could've been UTSA and park police for all it matters. They had guns, uniforms, and the right to isolate "troublemakers" like white blood cells pouncing on a bacterium.
I set my bags down to get my camera out, but the kid and two of the cops were gone before I looked up again. Double-plus gone, Citizen Troublemaker, you never existed. The remaining two cops stood at the rousting wall, scanning the room. Wolf Blitzer's voice screamed about failed federal budget deals and a train crash in Spain. A mom with a thirsty 8 year old daughter, waiting for the next train to Dallas, finally broke down and started plunking change into the wide and brightly lit Coke machine. She came up short and asked me for a quarter.
I was a bad consumer and helped her out even though I didn't gain anything by it.
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