(Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica) “Baltimore, Maryland.”
Collin Gallagher
Connector Staff
The engine grumbled as the Boston night swallowed us, Miguel and I, rolling southward on a $60 Hail Mary of a bus ride to D.C. We barely had time to settle in before the driver laid out the grim itinerary: Manhattan, Philly, Baltimore, then D.C. The bargain ticket turned into an endurance test, a no-frills marathon through the late-night bowels of the East Coast.
First stop: New York City. The skyline blazed like a fiery fever dream, but on the ground, the sidewalks were piled with bags of trash, everything wrapped in a foul haze. Not the postcard New York I’d seen in movies; this was New York with the makeup rubbed off, the gutters piled high as the billboards beamed with products no one needed.
By 2 a.m., the bus turned into a rolling frat house as a raucous crew of half-drunk souls piled aboard. Laughter and slurred words ricocheted off the metal walls, slaughtering any hope I’d had for sleep. In Philly, they stumbled off, leaving the quiet like a wave of relief. But before I could shut my eyes, they were back, hollering and hollering like banshees in an echochamber.
Baltimore. The stop was a brief time out, a stretch of the legs and a smoke, the last relic of quiet before a new kind of chaos shuffled into the seat next to me. A man I’ll call Jack—washed out, eyes half-lit from who knows how many cups of Hennessy he had finished in the past hour. He leaned into me, and asked with a scheming smirk if I was in a frat.
“No,” I said, deadpan, “I don’t pay for friends.”
He laughed, and in that moment, his swagger cracked open like an eggshell. Jack—a man molded by Bronx streets, grew up and joined a gang, scarred by ten years behind bars—looked at me with eyes that’d seen a hell I couldn’t fathom. He rattled off a life story, each word a bullet casing dropping to the floor, a life lived on the edge.
Between Baltimore and D.C., Jack told his tale, leaning too close to me, showing scars like they were badges of some warped honor, as if to say, I’m still here. He told me about his daughter in Florida, his own battles in the Bronx, each breath a confession he didn’t owe to anyone. When I finally asked what he did for work, he chuckled, a sound thick with irony: “This is it, man.” Each stop was a business transaction, a grip on survival in a world that wouldn’t let him live clean.
He kept repeating, “I’m not a bad man.” Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or maybe it was something deeper, but I believed him. It wasn’t an excuse, just the reality of a man stuck between survival and salvation. Somewhere along the line, we got on the subject of homelessness. His face hardened, the fight in him sharpening as he talked about the people he knew, the families trying to make a go of it with nothing but guts and grit. The city did nothing, he said, anger flaring up like a flash of neon on the pavement. Here was Jack, fighting his own wars but aching to fight theirs, too.
We finally hit D.C. Miguel’s family was waiting, their home a sanctuary of warmth and groundedness, an America as different from Jack’s world as day is from night. Miguel, son of Colombian immigrants who’d built their own American dream, had a future waiting for him. It was hope and stability, the promise of something more than survival.
Jack, Miguel, me—we were all Americans, bound to the same flag but torn between different worlds. Miguel’s life was one of comfort, growth, and plans that stretched into decades. Jack’s was a battlefield where tomorrow was a whisper, where all that mattered was making it to the next dawn. It was America in split-screen—one side looking ahead, the other locked in a rearview mirror, trapped in the everlasting struggle to survive.
Miguel had dreams; Jack had scars. And here I was, a bystander on this midnight bus, rolling through the real America, seeing just how deep the rift could run between comfort and chaos, hope and courage, freedom and fight.
