First, a humble opinion:
This is an ewok.
Ewoks live on Endor. Endor figures prominently in the film Return of the Jedi, the third Star Wars film to be produced.
In the film, the ewoks help save the day, while being cute little big eyed cartoons. They tested well with children and females, back in the 80's. Makes sense, right? But the 80's sucked balls anyway, with the few random exceptions (like Madonna and Reagan's real life Star Wars Program, which we should have finished.)
You have ICBM's, Russia? That doesn't matter, because our President designed, by himself, a gigantic shield with Madonna's sexy face on it that will sit in the sky and block them all. You can't hurt us you caviar eatin' commie pricks!
(or at least, I think that is how Star Wars was supposed to work...)
Anywho, these goddamn ewoks were the beginning of something bad. They were, essentially, the prototype for the next three movies. The ewoks were designed to market toys to children, and were not actually serious or cool enough to be in the Star Wars universe. But, the American public didn't say word one, because the ewoks weren't too annoying, and we wanted to see how the love triangle between the Emperor, Vader and Luke would end up (those are three dirty girls.) But the ewoks were the start of a slippery slope which landed us in a poison tipped spike pit that looked like this:
I know I am, like, a decade late bitching about this, but believe me, I did plenty of bitching a decade ago too. Or however long ago it was. George Lucas: you suck balls. The first few movies were good 'cause you still had drugs left over from film-school. As soon as the dope ran out, so did your film making ability. Please, have the common decency to kill yourself definitively and slowly with mind altering substances for the sake of our entertainment, like Keith Richards and Dakota Fanning, or go the fuck away. Thanks.
Also, while looking for the Jar Jar picture, I found this:
I'll just leave this here....
Next:
Ok. Next, I gotta tell you that I was on my favorite NPR program the other day, in tweet form. The program is "Talk of the Nation," hosted by my radio hero, Neal Conan.
This is Neal.
I never get an opportunity to call in to talk shows, because I listen to podcast versions, and never the live radio versions. I am not even certain I know what a "radio" looks like. Are they smaller than iPods?
I do follow the "Talk of the Nation" twitter feed, however, and I tweeted them a question as they were discussing the last minute budget deal in Washington late last week, and lo and behold, they read it on the air! I know that this doesn't sound like a big deal, probably, but I have been listening to Talk of the Nation for years, and I had a little nerd-gasm when I heard Mr. Conan say my name and treat my question as if a sane person had asked it. If you want to hear what I am talking about, press the play button below.
Isn't that awesome?!?
I remain optimistic about NPR. The flagship station can certainly stay afloat, even as a private corporation, so no one needs to worry about Talk of the Nation disappearing anytime soon. Of all the budget slashing I would do if I was in charge of that fetid swamp we call our capital, NPR would be almost very last on the potential chopping block.
Republican congressmen: we aren't in a cold war anymore. Why does our defense budget look like we are? I have a fair trade: let's give up the war on brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and use that money to create forty NPR's and a new Sesame Street. You stupid fucks.
I remain optimistic about NPR. The flagship station can certainly stay afloat, even as a private corporation, so no one needs to worry about Talk of the Nation disappearing anytime soon. Of all the budget slashing I would do if I was in charge of that fetid swamp we call our capital, NPR would be almost very last on the potential chopping block.
Republican congressmen: we aren't in a cold war anymore. Why does our defense budget look like we are? I have a fair trade: let's give up the war on brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and use that money to create forty NPR's and a new Sesame Street. You stupid fucks.
Shit... I am really nerding it up with this post, today.
Moving on:
I submitted a poem to a very professionally done 'zine published out of San Francisco, or as Jack Donaghy calls it, "The People's Gaypublic of Drugafornia." Makes me giggle every time.
The 'zine is published by a fellow blogger, and her blog can be found here.
For those of you don't know what a 'zine is, I think it is another one of those few cool things to have come out of the 80's. I think Reagan and Madonna collaborated on their own 'zine that enjoyed a limited circulation around D.C. in fact. I think it was called Like a Virgin, Because Alzheimers Disables Me From Remembering My First Time. But let me allow our ol' friend Wikipedia to explain it a little better. Wikipedia says that a 'zine is:
...most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier.
A popular definition includes that circulation must be 5,000 or less, although in practice the significant majority are produced in editions of less than 1,000, and profit is not the primary intent of publication.Way to go, Wikipedia. And way to go, 'zine publishers. This sounds awesome to me.
Anyway, The Tsaritsa (the girl publishing the 'zine, called Be About It) put a poem I wrote in the most recent issue, and that tickled me pink. I have read over some of the other stuff in the 'zine, and it is all good stuff. I must recommend that you all read it. You can get a copy by visiting this link here.
You need to use PayPal to pay $2.60 (two for production cost, sixty for shipping and handling.) Then she will send the 'zine right out to you, and also, if you need, e-mail you a PDF copy of the 'zine, so that you can see it right away. My poem is way toward the end. In fact, it's the last piece in there. I am not sure if that is good, or bad. Either way, this is awesome and you should go buy a copy, since it is dirt cheap, fantastic indie literature.
Last thing, for today:
A piece of short fiction I wrote. I'm going to put the story here, in its entirety, but if you don't want to read the whole thing here, you can also download it for your e-book, or to print, or whatever.
You can download the short story, called Airport Escaping, by clicking here. On that page, on the left, just above the story, there is a button that says "File" which you can click for a drop down menu. Inside that menu, there is a "Download original" option. Click that to download the PDF, so that you can put it on your Kindle, iPad, your smart phone, or (for lame-o's) your Nook.
Once you have attended to all of this, come back here and tell me what you think about ewoks, and Jar Jar's resemblance to that prostitute "Fergie." Also, tell me if you have ever been on talk radio. Did it make you all giddy like it did me? Tell me if you are going to get a copy of the 'zine from San Fran. Tell me what you thought about my little foray into short fiction. All of that. Also: bonus points to anyone who points out typos in the short story for me. I edited the best I could, but I'm sure I missed something.
Here's the story:
----------------
Airport Escaping
By Charles M Emerson III
Seven-hundred and fifty milliliters isn't that much. I mean, the root “milli” is built right into the word, anyway. Milliliter. Millisecond. Millimeter. We're dealing with infinitesimal amounts here. Seven-hundred and fifty milliliters. One fifth of Jim Beam's Kentucky Bourbon. About fifteen bucks worth. Cost me another five bucks per day for the Coke to mix it. Another fifteen, give or take, for the drive out to the airport, and back, every day. Five for the sandwich and chips for lunch. No breakfast. Dinner was soup and a couple of eggs, totaling about two or two and a half dollars.
Rent was paid through the end of the lease, about a year. The car was insured for the next year, and I had purchased a commuter parking pass for the airport, so I never had to pay to leave the vehicle on one of the thousands of expensive vacant pads of asphalt. My father paid for my cellular phone. If he wouldn't have, I would have gotten rid of it, and my mother wouldn't have been able to sleep. She's one of those anxious types who has trouble letting things or people go. So she would call me on the cell phone once or twice a week and remind me that she wasn't letting go. It didn't really feel real, then, because nothing really felt real. Nothing had that heavy, tactile quality of reality anymore. Life was ephemeral, then. Like light. The steering wheel, wrapped tight like an anniversary gift by my hands, felt like it wasn't even there.
After I'd sold the PC and the TV and the stereo and most of my clothes, and after I'd had a big payday with a short-fiction contest and a tax refund, I calculated that I could keep it up for about a year, as long as I didn't deviate from the dimensions of the plan. The meticulous calculations included oil changes, the fee to get my small amount of clothing laundered, and a bi-monthly trip to a local buffet, where I would eat as much as was humanly possible, alone in the farthest eastern corner of the establishment. Thursday nights were the best, for this. The place was near empty. These extra calories sustained me through the thin times.
If I had had an unexpected expense, my options were few, and mostly included switching from Jim Beam to something cheaper, perhaps a poor quality vodka, or a high-proof schnapps. I tried not to dwell on this scenario. Revolting, to think of having to choke down cheap vodka mixed in Sprite, instead of my Beam and Coke. Revolting, to think about the days of recalculation it would take to switch doses and dollar amounts to a higher-proof alcohol.
I had that life down to a science. When I woke up in the morning, to the alarm clock function on the cell phone, I would take a shower that lasted precisely five minutes. The water bill, although small, was calculated into my next year very carefully, like everything else. The day started at five-thirty. At around five-forty-five, after having grabbed a new bottle from one of the boxes of bottles stacked up in my living room, it was into the old Honda, and down to the corner store to get a copy of the newspaper and to fill up the “Giant Gulp” soda cup that I used daily. There was always one of two people working at the counter at that time in the morning: an older lady named Gwen, or a younger guy, maybe my age, named Sean. Neither ever said a thing to me as they took my cash, but both always looked at me like I was more familiar than I should have been.
Along the inside of the big white plastic cup, I had marked off several lines running around the circumference. A line closer to the bottom, drawn carefully with a black permanent marker, was, what I called in my head, the “First Fill Line.” This spot marked the precise level to which half of a fifth of Jim Beam would reach. I would pour bourbon into the cup, up to that line, and fill it the rest of the way up with Coke at the fountain inside the store. Going into a convenience store that early in the morning is your only chance to enjoy the place clean. They wipe all the sticky soda syrup off of the buttons on the fountain, so you can pour your drink without your finger fusing itself to the disgusting plastic. This had nothing to do with my schedule. Just a nice unintended luxury.
I was sometimes afraid that the stream of Coke would come out too fast, and splash some of the bourbon out of the cup. I held the cup at a precise angle, kicking the bottom to the right, the way one holds a beer mug under a tap. I moved the cup so that the soda poured out and hit the same spot on the inside of the cup each time. The same line. The little black lines, the little black circles on the inside of the cup, would slowly get covered up by sweet brown liquid. I had to hold the vessel with two hands, once it was full. It was a testament to human-over-doing-it. The cup was heavy with my drink.
I paid, and then back to the car. The drive to the airport was about an hour, and depended more on traffic lights than on the density of the traffic itself. Traffic density is predictable. The traffic lights, however, seemed to me to have minds of their own. Their pattern was one of those ugly ones, to be found scattered all over life, that was so complex and intricate that their order was imperceptible to the untrained human mind.
The drive was about an hour. I didn't drink on the way out. I listened to the news on the radio, and then I parked. I grabbed the newspaper off of the vacant passenger's seat, and wrangled it along with the burdensome cup of liquor and pop. The parking garage was well lit, and often abustle, even at six-forty-five in the morning, but otherwise it was like a cave: damp, cool, and seemingly separated from the world surrounding.
There are a lot of reasons it was an airport, and not a train station, or a book store, or a public park. I could have drank and read the paper and burned nine hours every day almost anywhere else. In fact, it being the airport was the reason it wasn't going to be able to last much longer than a year. The bookstore down the road from my apartment could have been walked to. I could have sold the car, and either upgraded the brand of bourbon or extended the time allotted for my practice.
But the airport, like its parking garage, felt wonderfully separate from everything. I felt as though I had a secret, there. An existence to myself, where no one I had ever known could find me. Some people get indignant at this suggestion, but I find isolation to be virtuous, and the airport allowed for the maximum amount of isolation. A warm calm, to be separate from the real world, with people coming and going so fast that they didn't ever have time to acknowledge anyone else around them. Nameless and faceless. It was the airport for a lot of reasons.
I liked to watch the airplanes taking off and landing, I liked to hear the lady on the intercom try to pronounce the last names of foreigners, and I liked that it felt like an alternate reality. There, it was as if we had all been raptured off of the Earth.
I would walk in, take a brief walk up an escalator, and move briskly past the rotating (or, sometimes, not rotating) luggage claim carousels. Then around a corner to my right, a few yards down a faux-marble tiled walkway, and around another sharp corner to my left, where there was a bank of waiting seats, connected together in groups of four, facing opposite directions from each other. The ones facing into the airport faced down to the security check area, where you could watch people lining up, taking their shoes off, throwing out bottles of baby formula that were too big to be carried on, and sometimes getting frisked in front of the entire crowd. The other chairs faced directly away from all of that, out a giant window that opened up to the plains, where you could see cars driving in and out of the area, and planes landing at a concourse about a mile off in the distance to the south. The windows gave a wonderful panorama of this perfect, secret world, which was so big it even encapsulated this vast scene, sheltering it from the rest of the universe.
I sat down.
I opened the paper.
I rolled the cup back and forth slightly to give it a good mix, and then took a long drink. Then, there I would sit for the next nine hours. Every day. I didn't end up getting a whole year out of it. And, to be technical about it, it wasn't every single day. Once, during the winter, when I had been at it for only a couple of months, there was a bad ice storm and I decided to stay home. I felt very sick, staying there in that apartment, missing my terminal seat and my fountain Coke. Also, my mother insisted that I spend Christmas at her house with her and dad. I hated this, and did it out of some primitive childhood instinct to obey, and not out of logic or love. I lied to them about what I had been doing.
“What have you been doing lately?” she had asked awkwardly. She wasn't even sure she wanted to know.
“I'm working on a book. A lot of research. I spend a lot of time at the University,” I growled.
She didn't ask again.
Almost every single day, for nine months, I was at that airport. I picked the seat farthest to the east, at the end of the row. When picking a seat anywhere, it is best to pick the one at the end of a row. It allows for your maximum potential mobility and minimizes the risk that a real weirdo will sit next to you at any point. After my first week of airport drinking, I realized that the seats in question never got used, and that I didn't have to worry about anyone sitting next to me. But I still sat in the same seat day after day, at the end of the row before the window. My window.
I know that I hadn't gone completely crazy, because I kept wondering if I had gone completely crazy. The truly crazy never wonder about their own sanity, I've been told. I'll never be able to say what drew me to the airport initially. Of course, initially, I had still been a semi-normal person. I had brought a computer with me, and I had eaten breakfast, and I was merely desperate for a change of scenery. I was trying to make a muse out of the airplanes. I hadn't been writing, and thought that the booze and a day sitting in a terminal watching people and planes would help.
It was only three days before I stopped brining the computer. I wouldn't be writing.
Five days before I began to plan around the airport before anything else.
Ten days, and the computer was sold, along with a lot of other stuff.
It was obsession and compulsion in a way that I hadn't thought myself capable of. I didn't feel okay if I wasn't there, vigilant, staring out that window. Something on those plains called to me, and it wasn't a muse. Certainly, without the bourbon, I would have wandered back to some semblance of a real life... but...
-------
I met a janitor there whose charge it was to sweep and mop the area around my chairs on a daily basis. Every weekday, at least. Ricky. He noticed me in my dress jacket and khaki pants. My button-down shirt and brown loafers. I dressed decent to avoid trouble with any security people. He noticed me and made eye contact with me every day for the first month. He was always around sweeping my little area at about eleven in the morning. There was a permanent marker line on the inside of my cup that corresponded to eleven in the morning. It was near the bottom, and I hit it precisely at eleven each day. I did not have to pace myself, necessarily. I just had to follow the rules of the cup, and drink according to the lines. It was all calculated to precision.
Ricky saw me get to the eleven o'clock line daily. He saw me reach the bottom of the cup at noon, from around the corner where he swept and mopped another swath of his fake marble domain. He saw me leave, at twelve. I would go to the parking garage to pour the second half of the bottle into my cup. It was on to the second set of lines when I filled the cup back up with soda at the sandwich shop, purchased a bag of corn chips and a small roast beef sandwich, and sat back down in my spot. He saw me eat quietly.
Daily, I got this eye contact from him, this acknowledgment, but not a word. For the first two and a half months, maybe. If he would have been any other person, I think I would have been ashamed or embarrassed or, at the very least, uncomfortable knowing that he knew what I was doing with my life. But I didn't feel that way, because he was a short, older man with a salt and pepper beard and childish blue eyes, and he pushed a cart of cleaning supplies around with him in the afternoons on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, rather than mopping, he would spend a half an hour in front of me cleaning the gigantic glass window. He cleaned the window as if no one would ever look through it. He left huge ugly streaks down the run of the glass with his squeegee, and there were days when he would completely skip washing one of the four panes. The whole time I knew him, I had only seen him bring his step ladder with him, to clean the entirety of the glass a handful of times.
He was a terrible window cleaner. So terrible that I didn't feel bad allowing him to see what had become of my life.
One day, he walked directly up to me at about twelve-twenty. I had just sat down in my warm seat, the fake black leather of the cushion creaking just a bit under my weight. I was opening the bag of chips, which I always ate first. I had assumed from observation that noon was Ricky's lunch hour. I had never been able to confirm this, but he had a paper bag in his hand then.
“Let me eat lunch with you.”
My ears were appalled at the sound of him talking to me, and my mind reeled, but something inside of me breathed a sigh of relief, too, and the sigh came out verbally.
“Sure.”
He sat down right next to me. I squirmed. I thought that he should have sat one seat down. He opened up his paper bag and pulled out a sandwich made on plain white bread wrapped in a cheap plastic baggy. He pulled the food out, and seemed to get almost a quarter of the sandwich broken off in his mouth on the first bite.
He chewed quietly. My face was angled out toward the plains, but my eyes watched him out of their right corners.
“What's your name?” I asked briefly, not bothering to swallow the chip I was chewing. The alcohol warmed my body, and caused me to eat slowly.
“Ricky. You?”
I gave him my name and a handshake. He was probably twice my age, and I yielded the handshake to him. A younger man ought to let an older man crush his hand upon meeting.
“So... why, man?” he asked.
I picked up the cup and took a sip. I would leave the airport at around three-thirty each day, so the lines in the cup would be reached at faster intervals in the afternoons. I could take longer drinks. I knew what he was talking about. I could smell cleaning products wafting off of his blue uniform.
“I don't know. I'm a writer. I ran out of stuff to write.”
He moved his jaw up and down and slightly across, considering the window. Perhaps considering the streaks he had left on it the day before.
“You're not even thirty. You didn't run out of stuff to write.”
I shifted my weight to my left and stared down at my loafers.
“So... why are you here, man? You know, eventually they're going to notice you and think you are up to no-good. They don't screw around either, around here. They can arrest you for lookin' at them crooked.”
“That's ok. Maybe that would give me somethin' to write about.”
He bunched up the baggy quickly in his hand, and then placed the little ball of plastic on the floor before him near a thermos he had brought with his lunch. It had been futile. The baggy lost its balled shape as it immediately began to expand. He extracted a second sandwich from the brown paper. I imagined his wife making him the bag-lunch in the mornings before he left for work. His lunch got two sandwiches. Their son, an only child, only got one in his bag. The boy thought it unfair.
“What are you drinking?” he asked.
I hesitated, but then my eyes focused on his poorly washed window.
“Bourbon and Coke.”
He laughed, and glanced around us, to his left and then to his right. He reached into the left breast of his uniform and pulled out a small brushed-steel flask. An unremarkable thing, and certainly very cheap. He twisted off the lid, and tipped it toward me, waiting for me to grab my “Giant Gulp” cup. I grabbed it, and touched its side to his flask.
“Salud,” he said, and took a cautious sip.
“Salud.”
I took a cautious sip, and ate a corn chip.
“How long you think you can do this?”
“What, drink? Or come here?”
“Both.”
“I can do it for about nine and a half more months.”
“And then what?”
“And then I will be out of money and, maybe, homeless.”
“You could work...” he suggested.
“Yeah. I know.”
We ate in silence then. He finished his food, and I knew he would have to get up soon. The watch on my wrist indicated that it was nearly one. My sandwich was almost gone.
When he stood up, he asked: “what would change your mind about all of this?”
I couldn't tell if he was reading more into my life than he should, or if I wasn't reading enough into it. This was almost a revelation for me. I looked right into his eyes. They were soft , and I trusted them, but they looked like they could be cruel. The skin around them was creased and used severely. He let me into his eyes. Maybe he didn't have a son. Maybe he had lost someone. He was letting me into his eyes and into a void that had been full once.
“I want to see one go down.”
“One what?”
I pointed out the window behind him. A big jetliner was approaching the runway in the distance. His trajectory was perfect. The weather was ideal that day. The jet touched the ground and slid out of sight after a moment as Ricky and I watched. He turned back to me with a sad look on his face.
“If you're waitin' for a crash, I got news for you: it will never happen. Planes don't crash. I have been here for ten years and not so much as one crash.”
“I know.”
“We'll have lunch again sometime,” he said, shaking my hand again. He smiled and walked away, leaving me to finish my roast beef.
Ricky was the only break in routine that I came to be able to bear. I despised all else unexpected. I hated when mother would call, checking to see that I was okay, and asking me how my book was coming along. She would call on the most random of days. A surprise Tuesday phone call would all but ruin my week. I loathed the unpredictable traffic lights. Weather. Changes in the price of gas. Every night, I would take out my notebook and recalculate everything for the coming months according to the new gas prices, or according to sale prices on Jim Beam that I was able to find at nearby liquor stores. I would recalculate the number of days I had left every single night before I would lay down and fall asleep. I was asleep by seven on most nights.
Ricky would eat lunch with me occasionally, but he never talked to me again like he did that first day. He would just ask: “can I eat with you today?” and maybe comment on the weather or on how busy the airport was that day. Occasionally, he would insist that I look over the rail down on a high school girl's volleyball team making their way through the line toward the security checkpoint. I had little libido, but on some level could share in Ricky's attempt to connect with me. I would nod my head in approval of the young girls and their soft skin.
One day, in the spring, maybe six months into my airport journey of self-denial, Ricky was sitting and eating lunch with me when we heard running behind us. The footsteps were frantic, and we both turned to see a man in a tailored suit running around the same corner I walked around every morning to get to my seat. He was nearly sprinting. He was carrying two duffle bags and a briefcase, and was very clearly late for a flight and lost, because he was going the wrong way to the escalators that lead down to security. Ricky and I watched him carefully as he turned the corner and ran toward us. I could hear him breathing heavily, and the glisten of perspiration on his brow was the first thing one would notice, looking at his face. It was not his first time running, this morning. Maybe it wouldn't be his last.
He was approaching us, and about to pass us, running awkwardly as a man does in dress shoes, when the impossible happened. I mean, the unthinkably impossible. Somehow, he lost himself, or his grip on his briefcase, at least, and the black Samsonite (which looked brand new, and was obviously one of the pricier models, judging by the heavy and solid sound it made when it hit the ground) slid across the floor away from him and straight for me.
“Shit!” he screamed. His short black hair was frazzled, and he was close enough now to see that his tie had been tied either in a huge hurry, or by a five year old.
I groaned out as the briefcase approached my feet, but my sandwich was balanced in between my legs, and my reflexes were dulled slightly by the drink. I was immobile. I could do nothing but watch the black object hurtle toward me, spinning. The Samsonite crashed into my “Giant Gulp” like a Army Jeep into an outhouse. There was no saving it. I reached toward the ground to my left in a vain attempt, but the Coke and bourbon poured out all over the tile.
“No!” I screamed. I had never planned for this. I didn't have an extra bottle in my car. The man's briefcase sat there soaking up some of the liquid. The smell of liquor was immediately recognizable in the air, even to a guy who had been drinking all morning.
I was immobile. I stared down, and I knew that this was worse than unexpected weather. This was worse than a call from my mother. This was bad. The man growled.
“Well?! How about it?!” he said. His voice was pitched up loud, as if he was ready to yell at me. He had maintained a grip on his duffle bags, and had his hand stretched out to me, waiting for me to help him by putting the handle of the case back in his hand.
“What?” I asked. He had no concept of my situation. I forced myself to stay calm while I nudged the case back across the floor to him. He glared at me, and Ricky, who had placed his food onto the seat next to him, stood up and placed the dripping case into the man's hand.
“Thanks,” he said, rolling his eyes a bit. He turned and began to run again, but at a slower pace this time. He left a trail of bourbon and Coke droplets in his wake.
“Fuck!” I exclaimed. I stood up with my sandwich and turned to look at the pool of liquid still expanding on the floor behind me.
“It's okay, man. I'll clean it up,” said Ricky, still standing.
I walked briskly to a trash can where I threw the sandwich, its wrapper, and a few napkins. I returned to my seat and put my head down on my knees.
“Fuck!” I repeated.
I didn't know what was happening. I had lost control. I had not seen this coming.
And then it came. I didn't expect it, but I didn't try to stop it, either. It didn't start soft and then build up. It started as a full-on sob. My body ached and shuttered and I wept as if at a funeral. I kept my eyes closed and hoped that Ricky would go away. The sobbing was loud at first, but I was able to at least muffle the noise between my knees.
Minutes passed. I felt like it had all been for naught. I became cognizant of the walls closing in around me. I wouldn't be able to make it. Not to a whole year. Not even to the next day. Everything was unravelling and the only thing I could sense was the darkness and the heat of my snot and tears and, somehow, the cool, already evaporating puddle of cocktail behind me and around my feet. The mother fucker had spilled my entire drink. I was devastated.
After a time, I felt a hard hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, man...” Ricky said. But that's all he said. His hand stayed there for minutes while my sobbing became crying and then deteriorated to sniffling and down to nothing. It had to be past one, now. I wondered if Ricky would be in trouble for not being back on his shift.
I lifted my head, and looked out the window to the brown, rolling landscape before me. I saw a hawk in the distance circling, briefly, before turning his beak to the ground and swooping in after its prey. Ricky stuck a couple of clean napkins in front of my face. I didn't grab them right away, but saw the calluses and scars on his knobby hands. Black hairs contrasted against his pink skin. He had done work, and lived.
“It's ok. You can start over tomorrow. You can start it all over tomorrow,” I heard him say. His voice was softer than usual.
I wiped my eyes, and blew my nose, and then returned my face to my knees. I thought, for a moment, about calling my mother. I thought, for a moment, that I might need help.
When I looked back up, Ricky was gone. His flask, though, was sitting in the seat where he had been eating. I hadn't heard his footsteps as he had walked away. I hadn't heard him leave the bottle. It was full. I drank it down in a couple of gulps, and gagged on the last bit of it. It was a strong whiskey. I got in my car and drove home. I didn't get out of bed for the next few days. I didn't drink. I didn't eat or shower. I just slept, and woke up briefly to recalculate the number of days I would be able to go to the airport again. I was able to gain a day and half back, at least.
-------
Three months passed. My constitution was being altered by my proximity to the end. I only had a few months left. I couldn't tell if I had spiritually deteriorated from my condition, like a man in a solitary cage, slowly going insane, or if I had become closer to God, or at least some kind of self-comprehension, like the ascetics of the old Indian Hindu practices. I had grown a beard, like the ascetics. But I still wore my dress coat and a nice shirt every day. And the ascetics didn't drink nearly as much as I did.
Three months had passed and there I sat, one day, after having had my lunch. It was a Tuesday, and the summer was starting to warm up. My isolated airport world was full of cooled, recycled, sanitary air, though. Once I was past the threshold of my parking garage, the elements of nature shrank to little more than a joke, to me, and heat outside meant nothing. I was recalculating more frequently, then. I had even taken to bringing my notebook to the airport with me. I would recalculate based on various hypothetical situations. I bargained with myself on things like food and shelter.
“I could... I could stop buying the sandwiches here. I could bring food from home, like Ricky. That might be cheaper, if I buy the stuff in bulk. But it will take more time...” I would whisper to myself, scribbling numbers across the page in loose rows and columns.
“I could switch to cheaper liquor, and learn how to drink it straight...” I suggested.
“I could sleep in the parking lot here, a few nights per week...”
The closer I got to the calculated end, where I would be reduced to true and forced asceticism, the more desperately I began to calculate and bargain, and the more ridiculous the scenarios in my mind became. I thought about trying to write again, or maybe returning to school, but these didn't seem like options anymore. I thought about suicide, but it didn't appeal to me. At night, laying in bed, I would sweat and toss and turn and I had trouble falling asleep before ten anymore. Sometimes midnight. Sometimes, I couldn't sleep, and I would lay there wondering whether I could afford to open a new bottle, just for one night.
I never did end up drinking any of it at home. I stuck, more or less, to my plan. I was coming undone quickly.
Three months had passed and it was a Tuesday and I lifted the plastic lid off of my “Giant Gulp” to check which line my drink was down to. I was right on schedule. I was feeling warm from the booze, and I popped the lid back down and took a sip through the ridiculously long red straw. Ricky had streaked the window up terribly, the week before. It didn't bother me. It never had. A plane could be seen far in the distance, probably in a holding pattern waiting for a place to land. Sometimes I liked to imagine the radio chatter that went along with the arrivals and departures.
“This is flight one-nine-five from Boston requesting clearance to land, over” I whispered to myself, staring at the plane.
“This is tower three, one-nine-five, please diverge to a heading of four-two-seven and hold for clearance, over,” I whispered to myself in reply.
I knew that that wasn't how they talked. I didn't care. To me, they were my planes, and they would talk however I wanted them to.
My big white cup sat underneath the black chair and behind my legs. I had never left it out in the open since the day of the briefcase. I had, however, bought Ricky a flask of Wild Turkey with which to pay him back for his kindness that day. He had taken it, without a word, and neither of us had ever talked about it again.
I wondered what would become of me. I sat and tried to keep as perfectly still as possible. When my journey had began, I had been very jittery. Months before, I had almost always been moving. My legs would bounce, or I would tap my fingers, or I would get up and pace a back and forth line across the length of my window. But I was stronger, now. I could sit perfectly still for a very long time. Sometimes, I would force myself to read every single word, including the words of every advertisement and classified ad and stock price, in the newspaper that I had brought with me. Sometimes I would try to count the tiny flecks of grey in the otherwise pinkish faux marble tile before me.
There were thousands of flecks of grey.
“What am I going to do...” I whispered to myself. I couldn't cry. I couldn't laugh. I could just sit and try to discipline myself against some imagined oncoming threat. I was an un-endable irrelevancy.
Three months had passed, and BOOM!!!
My window shook, and my eyes, which had been counting grey flecks, jerked up. I felt the vibration in the seat and the floor and I heard the explosion as it ripped my little world open. A preposterous sight struck me then. A beautiful panorama of rolling plains, clear blue sky, and an airplane, one of the big ones, turning end over end across the horizon, out where they normally landed. The runway had always remained just out of sight. Now, there was just this plane disintegrating before my eyes, and smoke, and the fireball.
I was transfixed, for the moment. Chunks of twisted steel ejected themselves from the jet, and I saw what was barely recognizable as one of the turbines in the wake of its crash. It was on fire, but something inside it looked as though it was still spinning. I recall it all going so slowly. It went so slow that I had time to think that my rate of perception was ironically slow. After a few seconds, there was nothing left of the huge jet besides burning rubble and dark, thick smoke. A couple of seconds later, there was a second explosion, like the first one that had gained my attention. It shook my streaked glass even harder, and I heard people behind me yelling. Flame and plane shot far into the air.
I reached underneath me, grabbed my cup, and forgot all about the lines drawn along the inside of it. The lines were fading anyway. I needed to re-draw them. I took the lid off, and poured the remainder of the day's drink down my throat.
I stood up and walked to the window. By this time, there were others at the window, and I could hear people running up behind me to get a look. Murmurs of shock and awe rippled through the crowd as it gathered, and the people didn't smell like my airport. They didn't belong in my little world. They pressed into my back, as more and more of them gathered. A firetruck could be seen rushing across the horizon toward the crash, almost as if it had been waiting and ready for that particular crash. An ambulance followed. Then two more of both and some police vehicles.
People were soon crying, no doubt worried that loved ones had been on the plane. I could only think how unfortunate it was that I had to bear this burden of having seen some of their kin die, when they had not. It hadn't been fair to me, nor to them.
That afternoon, my little phony-black-leather universe, my universe of recycled air and roast beef, my universe of solitary confinement and ascetic self-denial, was ending, whether any of it was fair or not. My mind turned to the notebook behind me, my precious calculations, but then just as quickly turned from them. I didn't have anything more to calculate now.
I fell on my knees, there, before all of those people, and I joined the ones crying. I screamed and cried. I shook and held my sides for fear that they would split with my heaving. I knew I was being reborn into humanity, then, as if the death I had just witnessed had made room for me. I was relieved and terrified at once. I experienced the spiritual shock of one hundred dying souls in an instant. I rested my cheek against the cool, streaked glass, which ran all the way to the floor, and I wept as if at a funeral. My tears steamed the window, and ran down its length. I cried and cried and I felt better when I could hear and see the others around me doing the same.
There were no more explosions, but there were security people all over, and the crowd around me began to disperse rapidly as hurried commands came over the intercom. No one's name was mispronounced. The voice was grave and slow and deliberate. As people wandered away, shocked and confused, I found room to go completely to the ground. I found my lips kissing the tile. I felt a few tiny grains of dirt press into my skin, as I pushed my forehead down into the same tile. My eyes remained open, and tears continued to pour. I took it all in for minutes, until I finally found my breath again. When I found it, it felt like I had been missing it for years.
I saw Ricky's shoes (I immediately recognized them) appear next to me. He stood there, looking out to the dreadful scene. There were others still standing nearby, taking photos. I twisted my neck upward to see what my friend had to say. He didn't look down. He just stared out.
I recalled our conversation. This is what he had said would never happen. This is what I had said would have to happen. And now...
I realized that it had happened for me.
He took a knee next to me, and placed a hard, strong hand on my shoulder. I laughed, out loud, and shook my head. I looked over to his face, and to his salt and pepper beard. He was smiling, too, but he didn't look at me. He couldn't. He was part of my disintegrating secret world. My world that was burning away as fast as the remains of the crash. He couldn't look at me.
He whispered, so that only I could hear:
“You can start it all over tomorrow.”
I left the airport a few minutes later. I never went back.
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© 2011 Charles M Emerson III
Love.
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© 2011 Charles M Emerson III
Love.
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