Once, while waiting for a 1am Greyhound, I witnessed a cocktail of domestic violence and straight fucking crazy.
A kind of crazy normally found on Jerry Springer.
Not in a bus terminal. More importantly, not in the queue to board a bus that was still an hour from port.
In most situations, especially in more chivalrous parts of the globe, a Good Samaritan (or three) may jump in to help a woman being beaten by her man – in public.
When the opposite occurs, however, no one does a damn thing. Not for lack of desire, but for fear of the law.
Such is what happened in that bus terminal at 12am. A woman lost her shit and began beating the everliving shit out of her boyfriend while verbally abusing him and chasing him around the terminal.
To sum up the situation in a fellow traveler’s words “this shit (was) messed up.”
Aside from the unnecessary violence perspective, it was messed up under US law. To my knowledge, the law stands such that a woman can hit a man during a domestic violence dispute, call it self defense, and be safe from legal repercussions. A man, on the other hand, can only block blows from his woman. The second he hits back, he gets arrested. With or without her.
As for bystanders, all we can so is sit by and idly watch or intervene and get a busted nose – like a Good Samaritan cousin did in a Georgia parking lot. The law may or may not protect us. I certainly don’t know.
Eventually the police came, arrested her, and took statements. He boarded the bus. What became of the pair? No witness in that terminal may know.
Part of me hopes he left her.
Part of me believes there was something more to the story – something none of us witnessed at that station.
A victim of my own body 