The Curious Case of Daryl Springsteen

Whenever you’re writing a story about your life, it’s difficult to start in media res. It’s difficult to drop down in the middle of events-you want to say, well, first, I was here, and this is why I was doing this, and oh, yeah, did I mention this?, until you realize that the only place to really start a story is at the very beginning, or even before that, so I will admit that this story might not be as resonant to you as it is to me, and I will just begin by saying, I got on a bus in Olympia, Washington, and I hadn’t eaten or slept properly for the previous two weeks at least. I had ten dollars left to my name, a bag of white Wonder bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a gallon of spring water. I was going home.

My first traveling companion the bus picked up in Eugene, Oregon, perhaps one of the worst named cities in the US. His name was Brian, he was a software engineer, and he smelled like clove cigarettes, leather jacket, and some kind of soft cheese. He was nice enough, and we even split a cheese pizza the first night of the trip, effectively halving my trip funds. But I wasn’t worried, because I had planned on spending the six days living off of bread and peanut butter. Unfortunately the following morning, while the bus was making a breakfast stop at Denny’s and I was making a restroom stop after my ill-advised decision to follow two weeks of meager eating with half a roadside stop cheese pizza, someone went on the bus and stole all my reserves. I would have to make the rest of the trip relying on the kindness of strangers.

Brian and I had stayed up the entire night before just shooting the shit, because sleeping on the bus was impossible. We made an agreement that once an open seat became available we would split up, with the hope that being able to lie down across two seats would allow each of us to maybe get some sleep. I’m not really sure what we talked about, because as nice and inoffensive person as Brian was, he was also terminally uninteresting.

Our big break came at a stop in Salt Lake City, where most of the bus passengers departed, because really, 800 miles or 12 hours on a bus is really what most people can reasonably tolerate before going insane. Brian grabbed his backpack and jumped into the seat behind me, and now we both had two seats each to ourselves in order to lay down and try and sleep away as much of the miserable trip as our bodies would let us.

We were maybe two minutes out of the Salt Lake City bus terminal when the driver got a call and we made a U-turn. One of the other buses had broken down and we were going to take on as many of their passengers as would fit. I was laying down across my two seats, feigning sleep, hoping that I looked unfriendly enough that nobody would wake me to try and take my extra seat. And then I heard his voice.

“Mind if I sit here?” The voice was like a cross between early Elvis and Tommy Lee Jones in “The Fugitive.” I doubt I would’ve been able to ignore anybody, but there was no way I could ignore someone with a voice as Southern Gentlemanly as that. So I sat up and opened my eyes, and as I began to slide over to the window seat, I looked up and saw that I was going to need to slide myself as far over as I possibly could. The kindly sounding Southern gentleman who was inquiring about the availability of the seat adjacent to mine was 400 lbs if he was an ounce. This is how I met Daryl Springsteen.

I tried my best to sleep with my head resting against the glass, but all Daryl would have to do was shift slightly in his seat and it would jostle me awake. And Daryl loved to talk. Here was a man who enjoyed the company of new people, and who loved listening to their stories, and probably loved listening to himself talk more than anything else. And he told me his life story. You see Daryl Springsteen was a millionaire, the former CFO of a company whose name I think he assumed I’d recognize but I didn’t. And a few years prior, after a life of working 60-70 hour weeks, of allowing himself to become hundreds of pounds overweight, the stress of all that made Daryl Springsteen’s heart just quit on him. And laying in the hospital bed, recovering from a massive heart attack and quadruple bypass operation, Daryl Springsteen made a decision: man was not meant to live this way. So, according to his story, he quit his CFO job, took his not inconsiderable savings, and bought himself a little house on a pond in Tennessee, which allowed him to spend the rest his life just fishing off his back porch. He also decided that he wanted to increase the power of his brain, and read books on how to do exactly that, although it seemed that the only thing he really learned how to do was to improve the power of his short term memory, as he would demonstrate his new found brain powers by having me list seven random things and then he would recite them back to me. So his life consisted of relaxing, catching different fish, and then being able to remember every detail about them.

Eventually, the story continued, he found himself kind of bored with this life of leisure and came to another decision and decided to follow one of his childhood dreams and become the driver of a big rig. He got a job as a truck driver, pretty happy knowing that he could only take the jobs he wanted to, only drive routes that took him to places he thought it would be fun to travel to. He didn’t need the money. So when, somewhere in Salt Lake City, his big rig broke down, the company shipped the truck back for repairs and gave Daryl money to take a bus back home. And that’s how he came to sit down next to me.

There are a dozen stories about those three days with Daryl. The bus driver we had between Cheyenne and Lincoln stopping the bus in the middle of nowhere for a cigarette break and disappearing for over an hour. (Daryl was close to taking the bus; he could drive a big rig, he could drive a bus, he figured.) Daryl waking up from a dream in which he came up with a fool-proof business proposal that he claimed I had somehow inspired: a website where men could send in photos of their wives/girlfriends that would then superimpose their wives’ faces onto the bodies of porn stars. (I am horrified that I could have in anyway inspired an idea like that, and when Daryl offered to send my 10% of his profit from the site, I tried to think of what kind of charity I could donate that money to in order to offset the evil I inadvertently unleashed.) Almost getting thrown off the bus together for discussing whether the moon landing was faked or not. (That bus driver was a veteran, and felt that such speculation was unpatriotic and he threatened to leave us along the side of the road somewhere in the middle of Kansas.)

I was hesitant to mention anything about my plight to Daryl, because even though I was almost completely broke (I was holding onto my final $5 in order to take the commuter rail from Boston back home) I didn’t want him to feel like I had believed his tale of being a millionaire and was trying to grift him. And to be honest, I don’t know how much of his story I believed, but as the trip carried on, however much I believed in his story, I increasingly was believing in Daryl Springsteen. And so, one snowy morning somewhere in Kansas, when the entire bus disembarked at a local breakfast joint, I told him I was going to stay on the bus and try and get some sleep. A few minutes later, he knocked on the window, waved me off the bus, and told me he had bought me a plate at the breakfast buffet. “You can have as much as you want,” he told me. The joke of the story is always my response: “I know how a buffet works, Daryl,” but that belies just how much that breakfast buffet plate meant to me.

I’d like to pretend that I spent three days sitting next to an eccentric millionaire who gave up a life of opulence and greed so he could fish and increase his brain power, instead of a lonely trucker who decided to lie to people about his life in order to entertain himself. I’d like to pretend that late one night between Wyoming and Nebraska, when I was telling Daryl about my plans to become a teacher, and about the kids I’d worked with as a substitute back home, and he told me that he thought those kids were lucky to have someone like me in their lives--that that was Daryl believing in me, instead of just playing the role of Southern gentleman. I’d like to pretend that a man who looked to be one prime rib away from certain death is living a long and happy life of leisure somewhere in the backwoods of Tennessee, instead of thinking about him on some long overnight drive behind an 18-wheeler trying to make ends meet.

But maybe part of the fun of long bus rides is that you can pretend to be whoever you want to be. And maybe my mistake was sitting on that bus for six days and not pretending to be anything other than what I was. But when I got off the bus back home in Boston, and I thought about the man Daryl Springsteen told me he was, and I thought about the Daryl Springsteen that I sat next to for three days, well, it makes my world richer to think they were one and the same.

He got off my bus somewhere around Indianapolis to catch the next leg of his trip back home to Tennessee. We shook hands like men, and went about our lives as people in the world, and sometimes when I think about that world, and my place in it, I think about what I would tell someone if I were sitting next to them on a bus right now. And I think about where I would be going.