Not sure this is entirely a “greyhound horror story”, but it was a crazy, disorienting and stresssf experience none the less. At one point I thought I was catching a felony. April 2008. Houston. I’m bored as shit, been waiting in the station for hours when this huge, muscular, black dude with a doo rag and sunglasses on blasts through the front door and pretty much yells “who wants to smoke some weed?!? Follow me!” I was hesitant in Houston, but he looked pretty normal and naturally, I wanted to smoke some weed so me and few other guys followed him out the door. We got outside and he explained he didn’t have any weed yet, at which point everybody but me bailed. Once again, naturally. I asked if he knew where to get weed, he said he did and I had like 7 hours till my bus left with nothing better to do so I said fuck it and we walked downtown to a large central plaza somewhere. We hung around for probably an hour, with my new friend who called himself “Jamaica” working anyone there to get a 20$ bag brought to him. Thankfully he genuinely had my back, because a lot of them started asking about “white boy with the backpack” and undercover cops after a while. Little did I know... Anyway, dealer shows up after two hours, and we follow him onto a river walk type thing along a bayou. He pulls out a fake cell phone that’s actually a scale, and as soon as he drops the first nug onto it I hear behind me “STOP, HANDS UP, HOUSTON POLICE” I turn and two under covers have guns drawn on us from 20 ft above on a stair set. The dealer grabs his shit and runs, the cops blast by us chasing him. Jamaica very calmly laughs and says “well shit we better get out of here”. We walked again, for 3-4 miles this time, to a McDonald’s in SW Houston. The whole time he’s reassuring me he’s gonna get us some weed. In the McDonald’s he’s asking around, and eventually is able to straight up seduce a woman who was claiming had “no weed”, into selling him a pre wrapped 20 from her purse?!? That was when I realized this guy was on some other plateau of existence. We smoked in alley somewhere, and I was morbidly stoned. Back at the greyhound an hour later, with an hour to kill standing in line. The whole time Jamaica walks around talking people into sharing their food with him. Many people. At one point, he’s hitting on a teenage girl in front of her grandmother, hand feeding the girl grapes out of a bag her grandma is holding!! That got the police called. They came, and I watched paranoid as fuck from the corner while Jamaica talked the cops down and had them laughing within five minutes. We board the bus late afternoon, I pass out. Jamaica wakes me up in Baton Rouge later that night, where another traveler boards and gives us a bag of crawfish to share cause we’re ripped and hungry as hell. 7 AM, Jamaica wakes me up in Mobile, AL to smoke. He takes me literally inbween two buses 15 fr over, reaches into the back of his pants and pulls the bag of weed out his ass right there in front of me. He made some joke about it. He rolled, we smoked his butt weed. Once again ripped into the outer stratosphere, armed with my own personal can of Pringle’s chips. 30 minutes in, I pop the can and start munching away. I kid you not, the guy hears me eating, realizes it’s roughly my seating area, stands up, takes the shades off, and stares down the aisle. He sees my stoned ass munching away, and literally YELLS “ YO WHITE BOY, GIMME SOME OF THEM CHIPS” and walks down the aisle, takes the rest of the can right out my hands. I’m like WTF, but maybe I earned it for scarfing hard on the crawfish the night before. I’ll never be sure, so much weed. Agreed that we rode on in relative peace and sobriety to Norfolk, VA. Where I gained a internet stalker (different story) and ditched Jamaica. I couldn’t stay on his level for the whole trip north, and he had latched on and just wasn’t gonna leave me be. There were two buses going to NYC minutes apart from Norfolk, so I just got on the wrong bus intentionally. I will never forget Jamaica though, something of a genius and one of the most amazingly affable people I can remember meeting in all my travels.
