American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm. This is the American night: queers prowling the men’s room, hustlers and junkies endlessly waiting, and weary travelers, making the best of this sad dish of bad smells, cruel lighting, and general ugliness. And this, in the nation’s capital, where President Nixon’s favorite food was cottage cheese and ketchup and where Gerald Ford, democrat to the bone, prepares his own breakfast, slips his own white bread into the toaster every morning.