“Mid-day Express”

Last Friday, I took a near-full early afternoon Bolt Bus bound for the Tiny Fun House. The Internet went down shortly after we got underway, but I had some paper-based work to do too. A young couple in the row in front of me commenced giggling and smooching as I tried to settle into marking up some drafts.

A few exits down the N.J. Turnpike, the bus stopped at a travel plaza for what was supposed to be a 15-minute break. Nearly everyone got off the bus, including me. I had just re-read Melissa’s draft, and I gave her a call as I bought a diet soda and some kind of high-end Twix to snack on. I returned to the bus; the driver wasn’t back yet, so I waited by the door so as to avoid irritating my fellow riders (kind of like the guy across the aisle from me now is irritating me). I was pacing back and forth, as is my way, when I noticed the young couple and an affiliate of theirs on the far side of the bus.
The couple and their friend—all dressed in disheveled-trendy–were having an animated conversation with a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and dark casual pants. The man shot me a look that made me instinctively duck back behind the bus, but I could still see the group through the bus’s front window.
Something he said set the young woman off, and she held a pack of Marlboro lights up in the air. The man reached up and snatched at the pack, and there was a brief, stiff tug-of-war. The boyfriend figure said to the man, “Let me see your badge,” and the man lifted the edge of the hoodie to reveal something on his belt, and the three got really compliant. They were patted down, and the girl got a nice set of handcuffs (the real kind, too, and behind the back).

At this point, the driver returned from the Popeye’s inside. She walked right past the four of them and put a foot on the bus steps when she stopped dead and turned to me. “Wait—are they with us?”

“The three of them were on the bus,” I replied.

“Is he arresting them?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Oh, #@$&.”

We both got back on the bus. Everyone was on board was spectating, either sitting in the arrest-side seats or craning from the aisle. The driver set her food and drink down and went out to talk to the cop. Pretty soon, the students, the cop and the driver were on their cell phones. The boyfriend was trying to feed Popeye’s to his handcuffed girlfriend. It was all very romantic.

The third wheel (the couple and their friend were college students going to the city for the weekend) got back on the bus and started gathering the couple’s stuff. The driver followed him up and asked if they had anything in the hold they wanted to take—or wanted to leave on the bus. He first said no, but wait, yeah, maybe that would be a good idea. But then he remarked that it didn’t look like he was going to get arrested, just the couple or maybe just the girl. He would escort the luggage to the city.

Eventually the cop led the couple away to an unmarked SUV behind a utility shed at the back of the plaza. A number of armchair defense attorneys (they were mostly magazine people, I believe) started talking smack about probable cause, etc., as if they knew anything beyond T.V. drama. At the SUV, the boyfriend was also handcuffed and helped into the back seat.

The driver strolled down the bus aisle, and asked if anyone was missing or anyone was sitting next to you but isn’t sitting there now. Then she paused. “Unless they got arrested.” The bus pulled away, and everyone forgot about the nonworking Internet. As we rolled onto the ramp, the driver got on the intercom and asked the couple’s friend to write down their names for her. Then she told all the riders that though she’s “been doing this a long time, but y’all are the baddest.” This made all the young laptop-dragging professionals like myself laugh and feel really cool inside, scofflaws by proxy.
Later, she was informed by Bolt Bus mission control that she’d have to fill out an incident report, but Bolt Bus would get the errant youth to New York once they’d been released by what we now knew to have been an undercover N.J. highway patrolman. (There were cheers. And then a pause, sideways glances among the passengers and visions of the shiny red bus pulling up to the jail.)

The third college student then sat in the now-vacant seats and made some calls. There was speculation that the couple had gone behind the utility shed to smoke something that you go behind utility sheds to smoke. And that would be the same utility shed that undercover highway patrolmen park their unmarked SUVs behind as well. The surviving student also remarked that he thought there was a point in the exchange with the cop that everything might have turned out OK, but the girl got snarky, the cop got angry and their New York weekend turned into a New Jersey Turnpike weekend.