Rewrite
Lead ImageThe Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ Ministries, as seen from a Greyhound bus, Groom, Texas, 2023Photography by Joanna Pocock
The following excerpt is taken from Greyhound by Joanna Pocock, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
At Toledo, Ohio, only an hour from Detroit, the sky was glowering. I got off and stretched my legs, waiting for the clouds to let loose. A message popped up from the hotel asking me to rate my stay. I ignored it and reboarded the bus. A guy with a southern accent also embarked and told the driver that he had been trying to get to Atlanta, but his bus had broken down and dropped him at Toledo. He got there too late to get the connecting bus to Atlanta. He’d spent the night on a bench outside the station. The driver called the Greyhound dispatch and pleaded this guy’s case: a broken-down bus, a missed connection, not his fault, no money to buy another ticket. Then he asked if he could take him to another connecting bus even though the man’s ticket was for the previous day.
“His ticket was for yesterday?“
“Yes,“
“Then it’s not valid.“
“So I can’t take him?“ The driver paused. You could hear the mounting frustration in his voice. “I’m trying to do a good thing here.“
“No, you can’t take him.“
The driver hung up and then said, under his breath,
“Well, God bless America.“ He got off and went into the station to break the news to the guy stranded in Toledo with no money.
We had a stopover in Lima, Ohio, so I wandered around taking photographs. Shops were shut or having ‘Closing Down’ sales and the streets were empty. Every now and again a train whistled in the background, lending a feeling of longing to the atmosphere. A Guardian headline popped up in my email inbox: “Ohio train derailment: levels of carcinogenic chemical near site far above safe limit“.
I boarded the bus in Lima at one o’clock. We were due in Columbus, Ohio at 2.40 p.m.
This particular bus was old and dirty. The seats were lumpy and encrusted with what looked to be solidified food (Ketchup? Bubble gum? Cheese?). People took their places by the window, stuffing their plastic bags and blankets onto the seat next to them hoping no one would ask them to remove them. Watching passengers board and scan the bus for a free seat was a kind of anthropological study. Each person measured up who might be OK with taking their belongings off the seat next to them to make room and who might protest and cause a scene.
A woman across the aisle was laughing and calling out, “Praise Jesus!“ We passed the Allen County Fairgrounds on the outskirts of Lima. There were piles of scrap metal, yellowed fields, a white clapboard church of the Christian Assembly, small houses still displaying their off-season Halloween and Christmas decorations, now deflated and dirty. Steeples poked into the blue sky like giant needles.
I didn’t see any birds. We passed Rudolph’s Pork Rinds, which was hiring at ‘porkrindjobs.com’.
The passengers on this bus were quiet. Everyone just wanted to get where they were going. I dozed off and was woken with a hard lurch over a pothole.
We arrived in Columbus, Ohio, where my journey would hit Route 66. The bus depot consisted of a parking garage the size of a small airplane hangar.
My bus was scheduled to leave for St Louis at 3pm I looked around at my fellow passengers, all of us stuck on the concrete island between bus lanes: one man sitting on the ground eating an orange; a couple pacing with a muzzled black Labrador; an elderly man with a walker and four large zip-up bags printed with ‘Patient Belongings’; a woman with a child who sounded like he had croup sitting face-level to the exhaust pipes of the incoming buses.
A man arrived hugging a couple of worn plastic bags with broken handles. He spotted his bus just as it was revving up to leave. The door closed and the bus pulled out. He ran after it, but the driver didn’t stop.
5pm and still no bus. People were arriving with blankets and pillows, preparing for overnight trips. We were looking up other buses, Amtrak trains and car shares on our phones when a Greyhound employee showed up and took a seat in the little kiosk on our concrete island between the bus lanes. Desperate passengers trying to get to bedsides, parole hearings, jobs and loved ones instantly swamped her.
At 5:30pm, our bus showed up, but we were further delayed while passengers getting off waited for their luggage. Apparently, a faulty hold had opened and bags had scattered along the highway. That was one story. Another was that their luggage was locked in the hold because the door got stuck. Yet another was that the delayed arrival was due to an oil tanker overturned on the highway. You never quite know with these tales from the bus. What happens on a Greyhound journey can take on a mythical dimension.
Eventually, we filed on and our driver was telling anyone who would listen that she had never done the Columbus – St Louis route before. She was doing someone a favour, she told us, and she was already regretting it.
The bus itself was falling apart. Some of the armrests were missing, many of the seats were torn and tilted at odd angles. One whole row of seats had been ripped out, the floor was caked in something sticky, the luggage lockers above the seats didn’t close properly and I just knew that every time we rounded a corner, the little doors would flap open and bang shut.
We had left Columbus, Ohio now, but instead of the usual beeline to a highway, we were winding our way through unlit back roads. Passengers were calling out “Take a left!“ when we got to intersections or “You’re going the wrong way!“, but the driver carried on.
The sun had set and all I could make out was a featureless landscape, lit up every now and then by brightly illuminated petrol stations. The bus was jiggling like mad. The overhead lockers banged away. The plexiglass between the driver and the passengers was streaked with grease and the remnants of masking tape. The bus pulled up in the parking lot of the Love’s Travel Stop in Springfield to let some people off. A few passengers headed to the front of the bus with cigarettes in hand, and the driver freaked out, “This isn’t a stop! We aren’t stopping here! Stay on the bus!“
A woman called out, “How much longer is this freakin’ bus going to take?“
The driver replied, “Do you want to stay here?“
“If I wanted to stay here, I’d get off the bus,“ came the reply.
Then they shouted at each other.
Finally, the passenger said, “Look, I’ve been on this fucking Greyhound for three days and I just want to get going.“
The driver made a phone call. “Yeah, in a black T-shirt,“ I heard her say.
Then she announced, “We’re gonna be here for fifteen minutes until the police show up if y’all want to get something to eat.“
I got off to go to the bathroom but I was worried the bus might leave without me if I joined the queue to buy food. So I stayed close and watched the flashing lights of a police car approach. The woman in the black T-shirt got off the bus and got in the police cruiser.
Back on the bus, the driver did the usual head count. “Is everybody here?“
Someone piped up, “That dude in the front seat isn’t here.“
“Nah, he ran off when he heard the cops were showing up.“
The Marine behind me had been on the Greyhound customer services line for most of the trip – either on hold or giving them a blow-by-blow account of our journey peppered with expletives. We pulled out of Love’s and once again ended up winding through back roads in the dark.
The driver pulled over on the side of the road. She kept repeating, “This isn’t my normal route.“
The Marine who had been calling customer services finally snapped. “Use my goddam phone,“ he said as he ran to the front of the bus.
She put his phone on to speaker mode, and I heard the GPS say, “Stay on Highway 41 for 127 miles.“
It was 9:15pm and we were nowhere near St Louis. We were still in Ohio.
Just as we were approaching Indianapolis, two Italians stormed to the front of the bus shouting “Dayton! Dayton!“
They didn’t speak English and were trying to get the driver to look at their tickets.
“I’m driving, I can’t look!“
“Dayton? That’s an hour behind us!“ the driver shouted and brought us to an emergency stop on the shoulder of the highway.
There was nothing else for us to do but drive back towards Springfield and let them off in Dayton. It would add over two hours to our journey.
“I wasn’t supposed to do this route,“ the driver repeated as she turned the bus around and headed back to where we had come from.
The Marine behind me was still swearing at the Greyhound customer services people: “She’s just done a U-turn on the highway!“
Backtracking to Dayton, Ohio, the driver, despite using the Marine’s phone, got lost again. She pulled into an unlit parking lot and, as we came to a stop, another car drove up alongside our bus. The woman driving the car honked and got out.
She walked to the bus driver’s window.
“Where you going?“ she asked.
“Trying to get to Dayton, but I’m going in circles!“
“OK, follow me.“ She got back in her car, and we followed.
“She’s a guardian angel,“ someone shouted.
I overheard the driver on the phone telling someone on the other end that she was quitting. “OK, not until Indianapolis. I’ll get them all there and then that’s it.“
We arrived at Indianapolis around 2am. Our driver got off and walked away.
While we waited for the new driver to get ready, there was a commotion in the station. A thin, nervous man was running around shouting “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK … I’m stuck here!“ It turned out his phone had been stolen and his ticket was on it. He was wild with panic. His face was covered in open sores.
The harsh lights of the station, the crowds, the shouting, the late hour – I was starting to lose a sense of time and place. I was starting to feel deeply unmoored. A sentence kept surfacing in my mind, “Something in the US has broken.“
The diners were closed. The telephones had been ripped out of the walls but their ghostly outlines had been left behind along with some of the wires sticking out of the plaster like fingers, reminding us of a time when we didn’t all have our own phones, when they were communal, when we could call ‘home’ and there was a home to call.
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and is out on 14 August.
in HTML format, including tags, to make it appealing and easy to read for Japanese-speaking readers aged 20 to 40 interested in fashion. Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), translating all text, including headings, into Japanese. Retain any existing
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Lead ImageThe Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ Ministries, as seen from a Greyhound bus, Groom, Texas, 2023Photography by Joanna Pocock
The following excerpt is taken from Greyhound by Joanna Pocock, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
At Toledo, Ohio, only an hour from Detroit, the sky was glowering. I got off and stretched my legs, waiting for the clouds to let loose. A message popped up from the hotel asking me to rate my stay. I ignored it and reboarded the bus. A guy with a southern accent also embarked and told the driver that he had been trying to get to Atlanta, but his bus had broken down and dropped him at Toledo. He got there too late to get the connecting bus to Atlanta. He’d spent the night on a bench outside the station. The driver called the Greyhound dispatch and pleaded this guy’s case: a broken-down bus, a missed connection, not his fault, no money to buy another ticket. Then he asked if he could take him to another connecting bus even though the man’s ticket was for the previous day.
“His ticket was for yesterday?“
“Yes,“
“Then it’s not valid.“
“So I can’t take him?“ The driver paused. You could hear the mounting frustration in his voice. “I’m trying to do a good thing here.“
“No, you can’t take him.“
The driver hung up and then said, under his breath,
“Well, God bless America.“ He got off and went into the station to break the news to the guy stranded in Toledo with no money.
We had a stopover in Lima, Ohio, so I wandered around taking photographs. Shops were shut or having ‘Closing Down’ sales and the streets were empty. Every now and again a train whistled in the background, lending a feeling of longing to the atmosphere. A Guardian headline popped up in my email inbox: “Ohio train derailment: levels of carcinogenic chemical near site far above safe limit“.
I boarded the bus in Lima at one o’clock. We were due in Columbus, Ohio at 2.40 p.m.
This particular bus was old and dirty. The seats were lumpy and encrusted with what looked to be solidified food (Ketchup? Bubble gum? Cheese?). People took their places by the window, stuffing their plastic bags and blankets onto the seat next to them hoping no one would ask them to remove them. Watching passengers board and scan the bus for a free seat was a kind of anthropological study. Each person measured up who might be OK with taking their belongings off the seat next to them to make room and who might protest and cause a scene.
A woman across the aisle was laughing and calling out, “Praise Jesus!“ We passed the Allen County Fairgrounds on the outskirts of Lima. There were piles of scrap metal, yellowed fields, a white clapboard church of the Christian Assembly, small houses still displaying their off-season Halloween and Christmas decorations, now deflated and dirty. Steeples poked into the blue sky like giant needles.
I didn’t see any birds. We passed Rudolph’s Pork Rinds, which was hiring at ‘porkrindjobs.com’.
The passengers on this bus were quiet. Everyone just wanted to get where they were going. I dozed off and was woken with a hard lurch over a pothole.
We arrived in Columbus, Ohio, where my journey would hit Route 66. The bus depot consisted of a parking garage the size of a small airplane hangar.
My bus was scheduled to leave for St Louis at 3pm I looked around at my fellow passengers, all of us stuck on the concrete island between bus lanes: one man sitting on the ground eating an orange; a couple pacing with a muzzled black Labrador; an elderly man with a walker and four large zip-up bags printed with ‘Patient Belongings’; a woman with a child who sounded like he had croup sitting face-level to the exhaust pipes of the incoming buses.
A man arrived hugging a couple of worn plastic bags with broken handles. He spotted his bus just as it was revving up to leave. The door closed and the bus pulled out. He ran after it, but the driver didn’t stop.
5pm and still no bus. People were arriving with blankets and pillows, preparing for overnight trips. We were looking up other buses, Amtrak trains and car shares on our phones when a Greyhound employee showed up and took a seat in the little kiosk on our concrete island between the bus lanes. Desperate passengers trying to get to bedsides, parole hearings, jobs and loved ones instantly swamped her.
At 5:30pm, our bus showed up, but we were further delayed while passengers getting off waited for their luggage. Apparently, a faulty hold had opened and bags had scattered along the highway. That was one story. Another was that their luggage was locked in the hold because the door got stuck. Yet another was that the delayed arrival was due to an oil tanker overturned on the highway. You never quite know with these tales from the bus. What happens on a Greyhound journey can take on a mythical dimension.
Eventually, we filed on and our driver was telling anyone who would listen that she had never done the Columbus – St Louis route before. She was doing someone a favour, she told us, and she was already regretting it.
The bus itself was falling apart. Some of the armrests were missing, many of the seats were torn and tilted at odd angles. One whole row of seats had been ripped out, the floor was caked in something sticky, the luggage lockers above the seats didn’t close properly and I just knew that every time we rounded a corner, the little doors would flap open and bang shut.
We had left Columbus, Ohio now, but instead of the usual beeline to a highway, we were winding our way through unlit back roads. Passengers were calling out “Take a left!“ when we got to intersections or “You’re going the wrong way!“, but the driver carried on.
The sun had set and all I could make out was a featureless landscape, lit up every now and then by brightly illuminated petrol stations. The bus was jiggling like mad. The overhead lockers banged away. The plexiglass between the driver and the passengers was streaked with grease and the remnants of masking tape. The bus pulled up in the parking lot of the Love’s Travel Stop in Springfield to let some people off. A few passengers headed to the front of the bus with cigarettes in hand, and the driver freaked out, “This isn’t a stop! We aren’t stopping here! Stay on the bus!“
A woman called out, “How much longer is this freakin’ bus going to take?“
The driver replied, “Do you want to stay here?“
“If I wanted to stay here, I’d get off the bus,“ came the reply.
Then they shouted at each other.
Finally, the passenger said, “Look, I’ve been on this fucking Greyhound for three days and I just want to get going.“
The driver made a phone call. “Yeah, in a black T-shirt,“ I heard her say.
Then she announced, “We’re gonna be here for fifteen minutes until the police show up if y’all want to get something to eat.“
I got off to go to the bathroom but I was worried the bus might leave without me if I joined the queue to buy food. So I stayed close and watched the flashing lights of a police car approach. The woman in the black T-shirt got off the bus and got in the police cruiser.
Back on the bus, the driver did the usual head count. “Is everybody here?“
Someone piped up, “That dude in the front seat isn’t here.“
“Nah, he ran off when he heard the cops were showing up.“
The Marine behind me had been on the Greyhound customer services line for most of the trip – either on hold or giving them a blow-by-blow account of our journey peppered with expletives. We pulled out of Love’s and once again ended up winding through back roads in the dark.
The driver pulled over on the side of the road. She kept repeating, “This isn’t my normal route.“
The Marine who had been calling customer services finally snapped. “Use my goddam phone,“ he said as he ran to the front of the bus.
She put his phone on to speaker mode, and I heard the GPS say, “Stay on Highway 41 for 127 miles.“
It was 9:15pm and we were nowhere near St Louis. We were still in Ohio.
Just as we were approaching Indianapolis, two Italians stormed to the front of the bus shouting “Dayton! Dayton!“
They didn’t speak English and were trying to get the driver to look at their tickets.
“I’m driving, I can’t look!“
“Dayton? That’s an hour behind us!“ the driver shouted and brought us to an emergency stop on the shoulder of the highway.
There was nothing else for us to do but drive back towards Springfield and let them off in Dayton. It would add over two hours to our journey.
“I wasn’t supposed to do this route,“ the driver repeated as she turned the bus around and headed back to where we had come from.
The Marine behind me was still swearing at the Greyhound customer services people: “She’s just done a U-turn on the highway!“
Backtracking to Dayton, Ohio, the driver, despite using the Marine’s phone, got lost again. She pulled into an unlit parking lot and, as we came to a stop, another car drove up alongside our bus. The woman driving the car honked and got out.
She walked to the bus driver’s window.
“Where you going?“ she asked.
“Trying to get to Dayton, but I’m going in circles!“
“OK, follow me.“ She got back in her car, and we followed.
“She’s a guardian angel,“ someone shouted.
I overheard the driver on the phone telling someone on the other end that she was quitting. “OK, not until Indianapolis. I’ll get them all there and then that’s it.“
We arrived at Indianapolis around 2am. Our driver got off and walked away.
While we waited for the new driver to get ready, there was a commotion in the station. A thin, nervous man was running around shouting “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK … I’m stuck here!“ It turned out his phone had been stolen and his ticket was on it. He was wild with panic. His face was covered in open sores.
The harsh lights of the station, the crowds, the shouting, the late hour – I was starting to lose a sense of time and place. I was starting to feel deeply unmoored. A sentence kept surfacing in my mind, “Something in the US has broken.“
The diners were closed. The telephones had been ripped out of the walls but their ghostly outlines had been left behind along with some of the wires sticking out of the plaster like fingers, reminding us of a time when we didn’t all have our own phones, when they were communal, when we could call ‘home’ and there was a home to call.
Greyhound by Joanna Pocock is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and is out on 14 August.
and integrate them seamlessly into the new content without adding new tags. Ensure the new content is fashion-related, written entirely in Japanese, and approximately 1500 words. Conclude with a “結論” section and a well-formatted “よくある質問” section. Avoid including an introduction or a note explaining the process.
