A.M.: Departure
Early, at the airport.
Look around: some of the pretty people, many of the mediocre, and the rest of us, all sizes and shapes: men trying to look like the human mannequins who sold them their suits, women with bodies stolen from a Robert Crumb cartoon.
I can’t help overhearing the woman across from me who has not discovered her indoor voice, agitated and unabashed, wire growing out of her ear to prove she is not, in fact, arguing with herself. To tell the truth, she is yelling—there is simply no way around it.
And look at this joker, walking in purposeless circles, mouth in constant motion above the ice cream cone he’s carrying in the hand not holding his carry-on. Not everything I just described is accurate, I realize, as I see how he’s sizing up the innocent bystanders: his circles are serving a purpose after all—he is seeking out the amateurs. I myself am more or less an amateur, but I’m not as much of an amateur as he hopes I am. Direct eye contact is out of the question, yet I’m practically daring him to say something just so I can ignore him. After all, if 9/11 gave us anything, it ensured that all the actually dangerous people now avoid airports. But then, there’s no reason to invite annoyance. Just because he can’t hurt me doesn’t mean he can’t kill me with kindness.
Some of the people in airports are leaving town to escape their problems; some are heading toward their problems; and the rest are either unaware or unwilling to accept that they are the problem. These are the otherwise inscrutable citizens who shout into cell phones even as they bump and grind down the unfriendly aisle.
As I warily edge my way forward, trying not to touch or eyeball anyone, I am certain the capricious airline gods have assigned me a middle seat between the ice cream man and the woman whose main problem seems to be herself.
No one should be happy to be on an airplane at 7 AM. No one should be happy to be awake at 7 AM. Unfortunately for me, it appears that the only two people happy to be awake, in the air, and alive at 7 AM are on this same flight. Sitting directly in front of me. Speaking. Loudly.
What could anyone possibly have to say, to someone else, on a plane, at 7 AM?
Like virtually all of us, they are required by work to be here. Unlike virtually all of us, they are inexplicably tickled about it. And there is only one conceivable excuse for being delighted to be on a business trip at 7 AM: money. To be fair, they don’t seem to be talking about money—yet—they are talking about love. Then again, if they are actually enjoying this ritual, love is just a metaphor for money.
And then, before smug self-approval allows me (for once) to shut my eyes in peace, there is the maddening intrusion of alternate explanations. Perhaps this exultant young man in front of me is in the unfathomable thrall of fate. Perhaps, against all possibility, and in accordance with the inviolable intricacies of Cliché, this fortunate fellow has met the stranger meant to be his soul mate.
And then: perhaps if I did not always sit here, moping and miserable, I would meet my soul mate one of these mornings, enabling me, finally, to make some sense out of these strictly-business excursions. After all, isn’t this how it always happens?
(Dad, how did you meet Mom?
You’d never believe it, but we met on a plane!)
Why shouldn’t that be me?
It could.
And yet. It’s not likely. After all, any time I’m on a plane at 7 AM, the smart coin is on the certainty that I’ll once again opt to remain silent, in my shell, eyes ironed shut, wishing I was anywhere else in the world.
Up in the air, alive, the sun shows off all it can see, up here where to be or not to be gets decided every second. I look around at befuddled businessmen, suppressing panic attacks because they can’t use their cell phones. The woman next to me, hunched over her laptop, keeps snatching suspicious glances in my general direction. I am, of course, reading what’s on her screen, but what does she expect? The stewardess stares me down sweetly, daring me to accept a cup of coffee that was most likely brewed last week, reheated this morning, and has spent the last several hours roiling around in its airtight cask, asphyxiating on its own fumes. Politely, I decline.
Just as I’m drifting off into a cantankerous catnap, the pilot interrupts the silence to announce that air traffic control has not given us the go-ahead for landing, whatever that means. Even up here you can’t catch a break, even the unfriendly skies are backed up, impeding forward progress, inviting exasperation. Even up here the clouds won’t part until the big money has cleared customs and changed hands.
In the air less than an hour, there is collective anxiety amongst the people who can’t plug something in. The second tires hit the tarmac it quickly becomes a contest to see who can turn on their phone first. How did people exist in the world before cell phones? Before e-mail for that matter? Before computers? I lived in that world. Recently. And I have no idea.
Touchdown. Everyone leaps to their feet, elbowing each other for the honor of not getting off the plane first. I pretend to be patient and enjoy making the woman next to me, who obviously can hardly stand not having her portable computer opened and available, wait her turn. After a few near rumbles, shouting matches and rugby scrums in the aisle, I stoically join the clustered masses on the concourse, reluctant but ready to throw myself on the mercy of the big apple that will chew me up and spit me out before I even know what hit me.
Welcome to LaGuardia, the man moving past me does not say. I’m in too much of a hurry to stop (like always, like anyone else), but there is something so familiar about him that I’m compelled, despite everything I’ve learned, to pause and look behind me: he is still there, off to the side, shabbily clad, immediately recognizable by his contrast to everyone around him; he wants to approach one of these businessmen, but all of them are walking too fast, too deliberately, too purposefully.
Automatically, the doors move aside and frigid air earnestly greets everyone headed its way. It takes about five seconds (as always) to feel the cold and then the money dread: if it weren’t for the money, it wouldn’t take much—in a strange city, lost, alone. Cold. Broke. That’s how shit like starvation and sleeping on grates gets started. Quiet in the corners, huddled under bridges, working the frenzied crowd for a friendly face, hoping for the handout that never comes.
There is only way to get through mornings like this: drink heavily. Right now the coffee and orange juice are kicking in, caffeine battling c-vitamins, engaged in a Dostoyevskian struggle for my soul. Or, at least, my nervous system. A million little meetings imploded into one agenda, it becomes an endurance test to see who will blink first and ask for a bathroom break, or delegate more action items for the unfortunate underlings lucky enough not to be here. Mostly I try to maintain eye contact with the most important people and stifle the incessant anxiety that someone might ask my opinion or a question I actually know how to answer. Not unimpressed, I watch possible futures unfolding from the projector, purgatory via PowerPoint.
P.M.: Arrival
These day trips ask a lot of you, almost so much that you find yourself fondly reminiscing about the good old days you never knew, the days when horse-drawn carriages signified cutting edge business travel, days when people might have fantasized about a few hundred miles in less than an hour, not anticipating planes that make your mind feel microwaved.
Outside. Of course the line for taxis is indefensible. One look at this mess and it seems safe to wager that it will take longer to get a cab than it just took to fly a few hundred miles. On the bright side, the cab and its driver are both clean and smell inoffensive, even nice, even (dare I say it?) sexy. And yes, it’s an odious—smelling—stereotype, but until we cease to be surprised by a painless experience in a pleasant-scented cab, we’ll continue to appreciate them as the exception and not the rule.
I don’t wear the seat belt in cabs—cabs never crash; besides, why attract attention? Why give potential tragedy the time of day?
Moving fast—too fast for any circumstance other than getting me where I needed to be, and I wasn’t even in a hurry—each person he passes and each grunt of approval I offer signify the following, mutually understood assurance: every car in the rear view is another ten cents tacked on to the twenty percent tip he’s already got working. We each appreciate the rules: if I was in the car beside us—if I was anywhere on earth except his backseat—we’d be mortal enemies, but as it stands, we are on the same team, this is our war and we’ll endure much and suffer stoically and make it to the promised land, one man together.
True, some cab drivers don’t want to talk; (some don’t speak your language, some may not even speak) but some want to talk, some want to talk very much indeed, and will initiate the action and then wait, like de-fanged cobras, ready to pounce, aggressive yet harmless, at any opportunity. In fact, with some folks you get the vibe that they are so starved for conversation, solidarity, or just that elusive human touch, that they would not only waive your fare, but pay you if you’d let them pull over and shoot the shit; or even better, slide into some bar and order a round of anything on the rocks, or best, take you to their modest but clean and adequate abode, where their plain but polite wife would whip up some of the best home-cooking you could never pronounce or even describe other than to say it was as impossible as the entire incident. In sum, it’s unlikely.
And yet, they are out there all the same, waiting.
Am I sleeping? No, but I can see a building that I’ve never noticed before, waving to me from the side of the road. It wants me to notice, as if I’m not going to notice. Office buildings, especially ten-story monstrosities, do not just pop up overnight, do they? Even in this town, where anything is possible, this couldn’t be happening. But there it was: people, who had presumably been up and at ‘em since before the sun came up, streaming in from the three story parking garage, putting in their time before they’ll enjoy a well-earned rest: dinner, maybe a cocktail or two and several hours of somnambulant sit-coms before the nightly newscasters lulled them to sleep.
Sleep. Somehow while I’d been asleep, the dirty work of industry had struck again. Overnight, it seemed, a miracle of the modern age had occurred: clandestine plans had been approved, blueprints implemented, construction commenced. Trees had been felled, brick and mortar meticulously amassed, offers had been made, salaries negotiated, moving vans hired, new houses occupied, paychecks deposited, kids sent to imprudently priced daycare, new dentists and family doctors consulted, second children conceived, extramarital affairs instigated, divorce papers served, summer softball leagues formed, cutbacks announced, departments laid off, stock options doled out and quickly cashed, inestimable hours and dollars spent on alcohol, cigarettes, dangerous as well as non-addictive drugs, pornography—always the pornography—and unused health club memberships.
Industry and big money are all about initiative; they don’t sleep until the job is done. And the job, of course, is never done.
Cooked on the surface but still raw inside, it’s all in a daze work as the cab carries me down the home stretch through disorienting yet familiar streets. Survival suburban-style; a metropolis in transition, trying its best to live up to the image it was designed to imitate—sprung from the minds of forward-thinking people who are trying to recreate the past. On the corner high school punks stand beside a phone booth, making no calls; a quick right turn and I’m feeling the money dread as we cruise past several blocks of four car families. Being outside the city is safer, particularly if you prefer the sound of crickets to cop sirens. Eventually, I am deposited in the middle ground of this middlebrow town, and for lack of any other options, I am relieved.
And yet. This is supposed to happen later, with wife and kids and a basement to be banished to after hours. I’ll deal with that later. I think.
My front door is the one mystery to which I have the key, but for some reason I still feel as though I’m sneaking up on a stranger every time I return from a trip; I’m not sure who I expect to see, who might be hiding from me, who possibly could have found the way into my modest refuge from friends and memories.
With Pavlovian precision, I make my way to the medicine cabinet and pour myself a bracing plug of bourbon. It’s more than I need or deserve, I think, but I don’t want the bottle to suspect I was unfaithful in another town, waiting for my return flight for instance, in a cramped and crappy airport bar at La Guardia. If this were a movie (I think, mostly in the past, but even today), I would grab my crystal decanter, filled with obviously expensive spirits, and administer that potion the old-fashioned way, needing no ice cubes, especially since I would never get around to drinking it, as it’s only a prop, a cliché. No one reaches for that tumbler these days (except in movies); the question is: did they ever? Even in the ‘50’s? Or has it always been part of the script?
