Bad Luck and Hard Times on the Menu at a Bus Terminal in West Virginia

[groovedaddy]

WEIRTON, W.Va. — 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.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11weirton.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23