I’m in South Carolina picking up stuff from my in-laws and driving it back up to Boston. Just me, a Budget rental truck, an iPod and a laptop. I’m thrilled.
9am
I haven’t taken the subway during rush hour in almost four years. Previous, I lived on the subway, not in a homeless kind of way but rather in a Mr. 9-to-5-Stop-Standing-So-Close-To-Me and Why-The-Hell-Won’t-You-Get-Out-Of- The-Way-Of-The-Doors-When-They-Open kind of way. This is one of the perks of working for yourself – less soul-crushing lemmingness. In the end, the daily descent into the literal and figurative Hell of subwayland left me contemplating jumping in front of an oncoming car just to break up the monotony of it all.
The subway brings out our base animal nature. In this technological age, we no longer defend ourselves against tigers. Instead, we defend our spot right next to the door against any and all predators looking to unseat our quick, sleek exit. What? Yes, of course I heard the announcement to move to the center of the car. Did you hear the announcement to go fuck yourself? No? Then here it is – Go Fuck Yourself.
9:30am – Airport Security
“Guess what,” the gnarled little gnome of a woman grins, waving my boarding pass at me, “ya won the lottery.” It takes work, but I think I detect a faint note of embarrassment in her croaky voice. “Pass your boarding pass over the man behind the machine. Please walk slowly straight ahead and enter the security room to the right.”
Only after “security room” do I connect the dots. Oh, dear God, no. I’ve been pulled for special screening? I shaved and everything! Pre-911, my wife and I went to Canada and while waiting to cross the border discussed who gets pulled over and why.
“I really wish you’d shaved before we left,” she sighed in a tone I’d gotten used to. Her sighs generally don’t signal the start of a fight. It’s more of a resigned “I know what I got into but still…” kind of thing.
“If anything, it’s the clean shaven ones they should be searching,” I told her.
“What?!”
“Yes,” I went on calmly and a little condescendingly, too, probably. “Let’s say that I wanted to smuggle a trunk full of babies into Canada.”
“Babies?,” she groaned.
“Hypothetically, mind you. Now, if I’m smuggling babies, I don’t want to get caught, right? So, am I going to try to look like a baby smuggler or am I going to look like, I don’t know, a CEO?”
An even louder and longer sigh. “It doesn’t work like that!”
“I know that. And that’s what the problem is. They base off the assumption that baby smugglers look like baby smugglers and the successful ones don’t. Sure they catch a few low-level baby smugglers…”
“Would you stop saying ‘baby smuggler’?”
“Sorry. But the ones who deal in bulk babies are getting through in droves because they don’t look like…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Like…um…that kind of person.”
“But you can’t just pull over normal ordinary looking people all the time. It’d create chaos.”
“Which is what…they…count on and why they continue to do good business. The thing is – why, then, bother to pull over people that look like scumbags?”
“Because they look like scumbags and…”
“…and probably ARE scumbags but on an almost pointless level, crime-wise. Sure, you pick up a joint here and there. Maybe a kilo of coke once in a while. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s getting through. I mean, entire nursery schools of…”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh…just shut up.”
So there I stood in the security room at Logan with my legs spread and my feet covering the dingy yellow blobs on the floor that looked very much like a sand-timer, mocking the fact that my flight boarded in the next fifteen minutes or so.
The screener, with his squat, square body wanted to catch a terrorist badly and the scornful look on his squat, square face reproached me for not being that terrorist. The guy must be a horrible poker player as every sentence he uttered betrayed his interior monologue.
What He Said
|
What he meant
|
Sir, would you mind placing your feet on the two yellow shapes, please.
|
This whole thing is utterly fucking pointless.
|
| Sir, I’m going to have to pat you down now. Please do your best to stand still |
If they’re not gonna let me catch terrorists, could they at least flag some hot Latino chicks instead of these middle aged white guys?
|
Sir, I’m going to ask you to sit in that chair while I search through the rest of your luggage.
|
Ahmed, I oughta blow you the FUCK away for trying to smuggle a bomb on this plane. I oughta crush your fucking towel-head between my hands and snuff you out like the maggot you are. But that’s not how we do things in America, you piece of shit. That’s not how we do things.
|
He finished rummaging through my backpack and waved me off with a grunt. I smiled and, given that TSA employees rarely get jokes, did NOT ask if I qualified for a t-shirt that read “The Transportation Safety Authority went through my luggage and all they found was this stupid t-shirt.”
Maybe the system works, though. After all, a single male with a one-way ticket to Columbia, SC with a layover at Dulles? The sad thing is, they pulled my wife on her trip to Columbia because the airline switched her flight. Shew. I almost felt reasonable for a moment.
10am – On The Plane
The woman next to me tells me about her husband who owns a body shop on the South Shore.
“Our house is here,” and she extends her square-nailed fingers over her right knee, “and our shop is here,” the other hand moves to the left knee, “so he comes home, has dinner and right back to the shop. And we’re trying to have children! We just got married 18 months ago. And I’m saying to him, how’re we ever gonna have kids if you’re never home?”
I love that strangers tell you that they’re not fucking. I fight back the urge to pursue the issue in depth.
She’s going to Hilton Head to visit…somebody. I don’t remember who. Also, I don’t remember why she discreetly told me about how her mother would be jealous of her new “upgraded” wedding ring. “It was 1 carat, but this Valentine’s Day he surprised me and upgraded it to one and a half carats. Of course, my mom’s is, like, three carats.” So that’s who buys into the DeBeers commercials!
11:30am – Dulles
A nice flight made nicer by the fact that my row mate did NOT want to chat for the entire trip. Once we were in the air and the TV dropped from the ceiling like a deus ex machina our social contract ended. I really wish the world operated like this more often – quick, fast, efficient and somewhat anonymous without a lot of time to get all heady and neurotic. We landed, said our “have a good trip”s in clear, friendly voices and parted on the best of terms. Even when we ran into each other in the Smoker’s Lounge, we were pleased to see each other and branched off on idle chat about cell phones.
Smoker’s Lounge? Yes! Well – bring that font down a couple of points and lose the exclamation point. Once upon a time, smokers walked the earth like dinosaurs, bludgeoning those with weak lungs and whiny voices under the weight of their non-filtered cigarettes. For the most part, smoking indoors – ANYwhere indoors – will get you lynched or at least tut-tutted. But I’m “down South” where the tobacco industry rules and although they can’t roam the praries as they once did, smoker’s frequently get their own special, closed in section…that make you want to quit smoking. There’s something about 20 smokers in a room with a weak exhaust system that…well…it’s just gross. (Speaking of which, during the Alito hearings, NPR describe debate between senators as taking place in “smoky backrooms”. I assume this was figurative and not literal
1:42pm – Atmosphere
Please return your seatbacks and tray tables to their upright and locked positions as we prepare for landing at Columbia Airport.
Although, at first, there were no steps to get off the plane. The chirpy, slightly rotund steward – sorry, flight attendant chatted chirpily in the front of our tiny plane. I wasn’t really listening until I heard her exclaim (chirpily) that, “well, that was supposed to be kind of a joke. Just a little humor.” I believe the context was that she suggested that if the passenger she was talking to didn’t want to wait, they could jump off the plane.
After a couple of minutes, she announced that, yes, we had steps now. Everyone stood up, gathered there belongings (that they had hopefully not left unattended) and pushed forward. But it was pointless, since Chirpy McChirpenstein informed us that our deplaning would be delayed until the ground crew removed the baggage under the plane. Five minutes later, as the plane got warmer and warmer, someone voiced the thought that us of us secretly harbored. “Um, Miss…I don’t have any baggage under the plane. Can I go?”
“Ohhh, I’m sorry, Sir,” she twittered like an automatronic kindergarten teacher, “I take my orders from that fellas on the ground and they’re tellin’ me we have to wait.”
“Bitch,” I heard him mutter quietly.
2:45pm – Budget Rental
Big ass truck. Grunt. Grunt. Fart. Grunt. Burp. Onto the road and glory, motherfucker! We bought the truck insurance with the $250 deductible. I’m not thrilled with the steering wheel. To go straight you have to keep the wheel point to 10 o’ clock. Whatever. I’ll call when I get to the in-laws and ask about it.
3:00pm
BANG! What the hell is all this glass doing in my lap? What the hell was that sound? Why is it suddenly so windy? How th – ?
The passenger’s side window is blown out. Little puzzle pieces of glass hang from the top of the window. The only option is to keep driving since I barely know the area and the in-laws ahead of me don’t seem to know what’s happened. Still – what the hell happened?
I’m oddly non-plussed by it. I check the rearview mirror for anything that might solve the mystery. But – trucks don’t have rearview mirrors. I switch to the passenger-side mirror and see nothing. And by nothing, I mean nothing. The mirror doesn’t exist any more. The arm that held the mirror rests just inside the window that doesn’t exist anymore.
Got it. Somehow I got too close the curb and the mirror stuck a pole sending it into the window which sent it to window Hell. Still, it doesn’t make sense. I look down at the steering wheel in it’s 10 o’ clock position. Now it makes sense. Silly me, working off an old outdated paradigm that the cross piece of a steering wheel stays horizontal to the floor. Duh. The road had curved slightly to the left. On a normal steering wheel, you would have turned it to the 10 o’ position. On the truck, I had turned it to the 8 o’ clock position. Coming out of the turn (again, what a duh-head) my instinct told me to return to the standard 12 o’ clock position. I’m an old fuddy-duddy incapable of adapting to my environment.
At the in-laws, we surveyed the damage, called the rental place and arraigned to take swap out the truck. They were non-judgmental.
“Happens all th’ time. Jus’ glad that no-un got hurt,” said the guy who checked the truck out a half hour earlier. “We got one ‘round back where th’ guy hit a school bus. If some-un’d been sittin’ in th’ passenger seat – they’d be daid.” He told us this matter-of-factly although with a hint of rubbernecking glee.
“Welp,” said a beefy guy walking in from the lot. “That’s a good job on that, that is. Ya see the top there? Bashed in. Still. Nobody got hurt. You got any cuts on ya?”
“Nope,” I told him. “Nothing major.”
“’At’s good. Lemme tell ya sumpin’. Back when I was working as a state trooper, I come across this rig on th’ side o’ th’ road, got his hazard lights on and th’ guy’s standing on th’ side o’ th’ road jus’ kinda standing there. So’s I put on th’ blues thinkin’ that I oughta check it out. And th’ guy…he’s just kinda dazed and I say, ‘Ever’ thing ok here?’ and he’s says, ‘Officer? You got yer ticket book in the car?’ and I says, ‘Yup, I do, sir,’ and he says, ‘I want you t’ do me a favor’ and I says, ‘Well, that’s gonna depend on what the favor is, sir,’ and he says, ‘I want you to write me a ticket fer being a dumbass’, and I says, ‘Well, sir, I don’t think that’s actually a criminal offense,’….”
The point of this five minute monologue – The trucker had a glass bottle of Coke he’d just finished and threw it out the passenger’s side window except that he forgot to roll it down first and blew out the window. And we all had a nice bonding chuckle over that story
The steering wheel on the new truck is much straighter.
5:30pm – Dinner
Jordan, our server, is adorable but like a crack addict with the eyeliner and mascara. Maybe there’s a Goth party later tonight. Plus, she’s just too young for implants. It’s a damn shame. And although she introduced herself as Jordan, she signs the bottom of the check as Josephine.
Father In Law: That’s kind of odd.
Me: I would hate the name Josephine.
Most dinners with the in-laws, either at home or in restaurant, last about two hours. This was no different. Everyone should have dinner with my in-laws.
Hbee Uncategorized
