It has been indicated that I should probably put this somewhere slightly more permanent, so here it is, unabrogated: the story of the single strangest human being I have ever encountered in my natural life. It involves a 34-hour bus trip and a man named Earl.
So! To date this story, this happened while I was still living in Pittsburgh. I believe this was when I was 19, which would put it somewhere around 2007. I had been living in Pittsburgh for about a year at this point, having moved there when I was 18 in 2006. For Christmas in 2007, my mom wanted me to come home, because she hadn't seen me in a bit and wanted to make sure I was doing well. Our only financially viable option for this was Greyhound transit, so, I got a ticket for the Greyhound from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Marietta, Georgia.
If you've never ridden Greyhound before, the name is a misnomer. It's about the slowest way you can travel cross-country in America, largely because of frequent stops in middle-of-nowhere places to pick up people who may or may not even be there. So this ride from Pittsburgh to Marietta, which is down the East Coast a fair bit, was solidly about 28 to 36 hours on this bus. Same bus, same seat, the whole damn way.
Initially, I was thrilled to get a window seat. The problem is a window seat means that you are COMPLETELY at the mercy of whoever sits next to you as to whether you get to get up and go anywhere. For a little bit, I had space to myself, and all was well. Until we hit a stop outside Pittsburgh, still somewhere in Pennsylvania, and my aisle seat picked up its intended cargo. His name was Earl.
Let me describe Earl to you.
Earl was easily around 340+ pounds by visual estimation and somewhere in the range of 6'2. He was an older gentleman, frizzy graying hair, t-shirt, windbreaker, jeans, ballcap, fairly normal in those regards. He did, however, have the largest, filthiest beard I have ever seen in my natural life. I'm not talking 'oh, a bit shaggy,' I'm talking chewing tobacco stains, bits of food, yellowed from cigarette smoke, and so enormous I believe a family of raccoons could have lived inside comfortably and never seen daylight. You could hide several WEAPONS in this beard and it stank like chaw and old sandwiches.
Earl, it should be noted, was not a... quiet or reserved fellow. Earl loved to talk. Or, rather, he loved to speak and anyone in his vicinity would hear it; whether this qualified as conversation or not was entirely secondary. At first I was like 'well, takes all kinds, I suppose I can be patient with a guy who just likes to yammer a bit.' And so within 20 minutes of sitting down next to me Earl was eagerly telling me about his theories. Earl had a lot of theories, you see. The most important one he needed to impress upon me was his belief that the entire world's economy was being controlled by a secretive cabal of twenty-one Jewish bankers who lived at the center of the Earth.
Have y'all ever played Disco Elysium? There's a character in it called Measurehead. Measurehead, for the record, is a racist. He is proud of being racist. The problem is that almost all of the things Measurehead is racist about are races that do not fucking exist or do not demonstrate ANY of the characteristics he actually describes. When I played this game for the first time, Earl came to my mind entirely unbidden, because that is the kind of racist Earl was.
Earl was racist in a way so profound that if you took everything at face value, he sounded like he was discussing a fantasy setting. He went on, and on, and ON, at length, about racial traits so sensationalized and absurd he may as well have been describing entries in the Monster Manual. He believed things so outlandish I've never even heard OTHER racists bring them up, the kind of insane pseudoscience that was considered hackneyed in the 1800s. He was very fixated on skull shape, for example, and how it could 'provably demonstrate' people's moral character. But that was just one facet of Earl, because the other major distinction was a belief in massive conspiracies that underpinned all of the settled world. Like, this motherfucker talked about Bigfoot like he was a real person, and not just a person, but one involved in politics as an enforcer for, I shit you not, the Gnomes of Zurich. Which, while that is a very old aphorism for Swiss bankers, I think he believed that literal, actual fantasy gnomes were involved with goddamned yeti mobsters.
Did I mention the length of this trip? 34 hours. THIRTY. FOUR. HOURS. For about 26 of those hours I was pinned into my seat by this enormous, smelly cryptid who spewed nothing but racially-charged conspiracy word salad and stopped only to intermittently pass out mid stream into fits of droning, oppressively-loud snoring, which after a while started to feel like breaks. He wouldn't move to let me use the bathroom while conscious, so in order to actually extricate myself I had to very gently clamber over him without waking him up lest he go back to whatever well he drew all this up from.
We were somewhere in Tennessee around 6 or 7 AM when Earl finally left the bus. It was a very small stop somewhere in the Appalachians, barely anything there but a bench and a Coca-Cola machine and a small shack for ticketing and storage. He bid me goodbye, and in lieu of speech, I... nodded.
And then I watched him get up, walk off the bus, walk past the bench and vending machine and shack, and walk into the treeline and keep going. He was still marching into the foggy depths of the brush as the bus pulled away. To this day, I have no idea where the fuck he thought he was going. For all I know he is still somewhere out in the mountains to this day.
Anyway after that putting up with my family's more garden-variety stripe of conservative nonsense at Christmas dinner was a lot easier.
