Sub-MARTA

The Atlanta Greyhound station sits underneath the elevated MARTA tracks on the south side of the city’s core. Its surroundings are stark and warehousey, monochrome and shabby. The city’s mild winters smile on asphaltum, but decades of neglect have left the narrow streets and sagging sidewalks down here looking as weary as any south Chicago side street in February. In a former life this place, by virtue of its central location, must have served some vital economic function, but no more. The convenience store across the street stays open 24-7, or at least whenever the station is, its parking lot serving as a focal point for locals to peddle essential products and services like luggage-portering (from bus station to convenience store); direction-giving (from bus station to convenience store); and crack. The store’s Arab owners take a typically pragmatic view of the situation, letting the victimless stuff slide and only lifting fingers or making phone calls as parking lot arguments threaten to spiral out of control.
Thousands of people pass through big Greyhound stations like this every day, at all hours. This is obvious to everyone who’s ever been to a Greyhound station and especially obvious to the poor bastards who make their living squeezing bucks here and bucks there. These poor bastards come in all shapes, sizes and colors; some are quite clever and some are thick as bricks. Thankfully a certain common spirit of enterprise, dulled or drilled-through perhaps by years of self-neglect and self-medication in some yet present in all, identifies them to those of us who exist outside of their world, or else this subgroup of humanity might lose its definition by virtue of the sheer variation present within its ranks. This spirit manifests itself as, among other things, a fantastic creativity-in-scamming. Each of the station’s several luggage-porters, for example, has carved for himself a relatively lucrative niche suited to a particular segment of the Greyhounding population.
There’s the direct-approachman, stinking of malt liquor, who asks for change and then offers his carrying services as an afterthought. Argue if you’d like, but at least the man is honest. He knows he’ll rarely have to pick up a bag; he targets naïve white kids or family men used to giving older black men who stink of malt liquor change because it’s the right thing to do.
There’s the odd couple who bicker their way through a bidding war with each new prospect. Their relationship is symbiotic; observe them long enough and you’ll see that their desperation is manufactured, their behind-the-scenes behavior genteel. Indeed, if one gets too hot he’ll take a back seat and let the other catch up—within reason, of course.
There’s the older, soberer direct-approachman, his shirt fresh and free of dried bits of vomit. He comes straight into the station when the security guys are busier or friendlier than usual and makes a quiet, reasonable pitch to marks he’s drawn upon his years of experience in the business to size up in advance. Anecdotal evidence suggests he’s the most successful of the lot, and rightfully so.
And there’s the whippersnapper thinks he knows better than the old hands. His racket is simple and dishonest, employed against the grain: he waits outside the convenience store for prospects preparing to make the return trip across the street, warns in vague terms of crackheads and no-gooders offering to carry bags in exchange for exorbitant fees, and then alternates hopeful eye contact with furtive glances towards any luggage-pieces that might happen to be nearby. Time will tell if such cynicism can flourish outside Five Points Convenience.