The bus terminal in this old mill town used to be for people who were going places. Greyhound would take them to nearby Pittsburgh and Cleveland and other cities where the steel industry was booming. These days it is a diner where no one goes anywhere, and regulars sit for hours smoking cigarettes, playing slot machines, and talking about sports.Rico says there's a restaurant in his mother's town, Robersonville, called The Filling Station for the same reason, with a clientele not much different...
It still has the same name, Bus Terminal, and a painted map with a clock for each time zone. But the promise of travel has long faded and the faces here remain the same, a cast of characters who fill the hours with verbal boxing.
“Shut up,” Diane Calandros, a former go-go dancer who works here, bellowed to a man in a flannel shirt for some offense that seemed clear only to her.
An obvious question for her: when was the last time she sold someone a bus ticket?
Ms. Calandros— a rail-thin 58-year-old who works as waitress, short-order cook, and energetic heckler of her mostly male clientele— gets angry when asked. In fact, she seems to find most questions irritating, and often answers them with a flurry of expletives that settle over her customers like snow.
Despite the rough treatment, men flock to the diner. Some seem to come because of it.
“I love her,” said one patron, a taxi driver with no front teeth named Dave, who said he was recovering from a heroin addiction and asked that his last name not be used. “She’s my hero,” he added, watching Ms. Calandros as she paced back and forth behind the counter like a lion in a cage.
The diner’s mostly friendly patrons are casualties of the steep decline in manufacturing jobs, which have fallen by nearly forty percent in West Virginia since 1990. That includes the town’s steel mill, formerly Weirton Steel, which lifted families into the middle class. John Greco, whose immigrant family owned a funeral home, remembers feeling poor compared with kids of mill workers, who had health insurance and new eyeglasses every year.
“That steel mill was real good to a lot of people,” said Paul Swiger, 67, a retired mill worker who was able to send both his children to college on his salary.
Now the mill is a rusting monument to a more prosperous past, and much of what remains is low-wage work, like fast food and Wal-Mart. The diner dangles hope to patrons by slipping lottery cards in the napkin holders and running slot machines in a back room.
Dave chose drugs. For a while he sold, and he made more in a month than he had in his lifetime. Then he was arrested and spent several years in a Texas prison. He has found five friends dead from overdoses. One had his baby asleep on his chest, he said. “It’s hard to turn down easy money,” he said, gripping a beer bottle, with the word Hard tattooed on one set of knuckles and Luck on the other. “You can’t judge people,” he added.
Violence is a common side effect of the frustrations of life here, and it runs through many stories of childhood. Ms. Calandros remembers her mother “looking like a raccoon” after her father, a backhoe operator, came home from a weekend of drinking. Bill Greaver, 67, a soft-spoken truck driver who was recovering from prostate cancer, said he spent much of his childhood in foster care because his mother was beaten so badly by his father, a miner. “Men haven’t changed through the years,” Ms. Calandros said, sizing up her customers from under short henna-red bangs. She looked at Dave, who was talking about how he rarely drank while nursing his second beer of the day shortly after noon.
“Tell her the truth,” she shouted to him, listening in on his conversation with a reporter. “He’s an alcoholic. Don’t be telling a lie.”
He hunched apologetically on his red stool. “I’m sorry,” he said. Dave overdosed twice and has been in a serious car accident. In his view, these are signs that he should be dead. One of his tattoos reads: Do Not Resuscitate. The medics who responded to the car accident thought it was funny, he said, but ignored it.
*The post title references The Music Man:
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