Ruby's Diner, Oceanside, CA

LOGISTICS UPDATE

I've just arrived in Los Angeles after a series of day trips to Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tucson and San Diego. That's the order in which I visited them and the smart-eyed will see they're not in geographical order. I've spent five nights on the Greyhound in a row and am exhausted. Hence the lack of posts for a while. In lieu of proper posts, a couple of teasers from the road (unrelated to each other):

1. 'Oh hey! Nice to see you again. How am I? I hurt bad: my hips hurt, I can hardly walk, and check this out!' [pulls aside green Disneyland hoodie to reveal seven bite marks on her neck]

2. Jeannie points up high with her beef jerky, brandishing the meat at the country's political stratosphere. 'Laura Bush called them up about me - ME. I mean, when Laura Bush has to call the State Department to tell them that you are crazy, you know you're doing something right? That's when I knew the Mafia were involved in everything'. Can a crazy person comprehend of someone thinking them crazy?

Bank of the Colorado River, Austin, Texas

It's time I told you about Bruno.

Bruno has been with me on every step of this journey. I've slept on Bruno and under him. He's as shabby as I am, which means we don't intimidate each other, and when we walk together our arms swing to and fro at the same speed without trying.

Bruno is made by the Driza-Bone company of Australia and is probably twenty years old. This means he is seven years younger than me, but, being made of waxed cotton, his scratches and tears don't heal so he has a large amount of visible life experience. He lends this experience to me whenever I wear him.

He is called Bruno because he is brown but really he is tending to black as I keep stuffing him in the dusty lockers of the Greyhound bus. Under the arms, which swing in time, the dust is ingrained and will probably never come out so it looks as though I have sweated heavily. And over the left should and down the front there is the suspicion of a shadow of the strap of my bag, which I should alternate on shoulders but don't. I'm not as good to Bruno as I should be: he needs a clean and a rewaxing but he won't get one as I can't give him up for even one day.

My two favourite things about Bruno are:

First, the hole in the lining of the right hand chest pocket which is an excellent joke on his part. It is big enough to allow my cellphone through, into the fluffy linty abyss in which only gum wrappers and valueless coins dwell. This means I cannot find my cellphone for hours at a time which is a terror particularly piquant given how far I am from my infrastructure. And more, the hole is not big enough to allow the cellphone back out, so for ten minutes I have to milk the phone out of the hole. This action alienates me on public transport, which is where it always occurs.

Second, the poacher's pocket in the back where the buttocks would be if Bruno was human. There is room for a whole pheasant or a half-dozen books. The corners of the books dig into my own buttocks and remind me not to get too comfortable.

Bruno smells, he smells of wax and smoke and he picks up a little of the smell of each state I visit. At the moment I am in Texas and he smells of mesquite, and of mangroves and old water from Louisiana, and of Spanish moss from Mobile, and echoes of every state north, right back to pretzel salt and steam from Manhattan.

What I miss on my travels he picks up after me: smells and dirt which leave tracks on his skin and in his fibres, a dirty map of our progress hand-in-arm.

Lulu's cafe, Birmingham, Alabama

From Studs Terkel's Talking to Myself, Pantheon, 1973:

One day, in explaining how he writes a blues, [Big Bill Broonzy] chose the knife as the subject. 'How many things can you do with a knife? You can cut fish, you can cut you toenails. I seen guys shave with it, you can eat beans with it, you can kill a man. There. You name five things you can do with a knife, you got five verses. You got yourself a blues.'

LOGISTICS UPDATE 7th March 2009

Black and White Taxi, 4.45am, Norfolk, VA:

'Headed for the Carolinas, uhuh? Let me tell you something real quick. Further south you go, the more dirty the folks get on the Greyhound.'

'I'll watch my step.'

'I don't mean more nasty, I mean more dirty, their clothes and bodies and such. Uhuh.'

After four days in Virginia I am heading south. I'm going to:

Charlotte North Carolina
Savannah Georgia
Fort Lauderdale Florida
Birmingham Alabama
Atlanta Georgia
New Orleans Louisiana
Houston Texas
Austin Texas
Santa Fe New Mexico
Tucson Arizona
San Diego California
San Francisco California
Los Angeles California

and that excludes deliveries picked up between here and the West Coast.