I slowly opened my eyes, blinked a little, stretched, and then looked around. It's amazing what a little T.M. can do to perk up your day. If you haven't experienced it, you can at least understand it in reference to a good night's sleep. But it only takes twenty minutes and your mind comes out into activity feeling alert rather than with that initial grogginess you get when you're waking up from sleep.
So, I felt better, which was good because I had been meditating in the bus station after taking a bus ride to Dallas from Austin, and I hate taking the bus. So, I got to put that behind me and start afresh. Plus, I was about to need all of the alertness I could muster, since I wasn't quite home yet.
Home was the apartment of one very beautiful girl that I had spotted up in Iowa a few months earlier. She lived in Texas, and when I called her from California, running out of steam on another relationship, she said the most beautiful words I had heard in a long time: "Come to Tayxis." I had done just that and ended up in Austin where she planned to move and we would date happily ever after.
But her move didn't happen, my job in Austin became a joke, and when my California gem dealer boss called up to ask me to help him with a gem show in Dallas, I went for it. The girl told me I could stay with her, which was a miracle, since I later found out that she had never done that before for anybody.
Still, she was at work and I was at the bus station until she could pick me up. It ended up being quite a wait, too.
But not completely event free.
I was dressed in a three piece suit, since I had nothing appropriate to carry it in and I decided to wear it. It was a hand me down from my ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend, the wrong color and not fitting that well, but I still hung on to it for some reason.
But the suit must have marked me as someone with money. Because I attracted attention. The wrong kind.
A guy came up to me after I made a phone call and asked me for directions to a particular hotel in Dallas. He seemed to have a Jamaican accent, so I assumed that he really didn't know his way around very well. So, I took his question on as my personal project.
First I asked another guy who seemed to work for the bus company. He looked like some kind of security guard, or at least a porter, or something. But he wouldn't respond to my questions about the hotel in question. That was strange. He just shook his head as if he knew nothing about such a hotel. And volunteered nothing else.
So I took the Jamaican sounding guy over to the phone book and looked up the name of the hotel that he had mentioned. But it wasn't in the phone book. That was pretty strange, too.
When we first went out the east door of the station to look for the place, the guy had kept pointing off in the distance to the north, saying that he thought it was over in that direction, and could I help him find it. So after going back inside the station to the phone book I finally walked with him over to the north door of the bus station to have a look from there.
To get there we had to walk through a fast food restaurant that was built on to the north end of the bus station. It could have been McDonalds, Burger King or anything else, I can't recall which. But as we walked through the restaurant I quietly moved to position myself behind my apparently Jamaican acquaintance, and I let him go out the north side door first.
Then I smiled, backed up, and walked back into the bus station. Because standing around the outside of those north doors were three other guys trying real hard to act like they didn't know the guy ahead of me.
But my New York City street sense had begun to kick in a few minutes before. It just didn't make sense. The doorman wouldn't talk. The phone book with no mention of the hotel. I started to get careful.
And it was good that I didn't walk out of those doors first. I might have been robbed of as much as five dollars.
Plus, I got ticked at myself for not seeing the scam coming earlier. If I had actually gotten robbed I would have been really disappointed. Because getting robbed once in New York taught me how to avoid trouble from then on in New York. And if you can avoid trouble in New York, you can party in comparison in Dallas. But I had been in California, Iowa and Austin recently, and had almost lost my alert edge.
TM made me alert that day. But I got my edge back by remembering New York. It almost made me wish that I had laughed at them all as I turned and retreated into the station to await my Natalie Wood look-alike. But that would have been pushing it. And in New York, you don't push anything. You evaporate. So I did, and blew out of there with the first breeze that came along.
And if you are an African, not a fake Jamaican, you know what that means.