Standing By
It was one of those headaches that befall every airline passenger. A flight is delayed because of thunderstorms or backed-up traffic—or maybe it’s canceled altogether. Maybe you board two hours late, or maybe you board on time and spend the next two hours sitting on the runway. When it happens to you it’s a national tragedy—Why aren’t the papers reporting this? you wonder.
Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is. “They told us we’d leave at three instead of two thirty, so I went to get a frosted-pecan wrap, and when I came back they changed the time to four on account of the plane we’d be riding on hadn’t left Pittsburgh yet. Then I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that an hour ago?’ and they were like, ‘Ma’am, just stand away from the counter, please.’”
Because I’m in the air so often, I hear this sort of thing a lot. In line for a coffee. In line for a newspaper or a gunpowder test on the handle of my public radio tote bag: everywhere I go someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can’t help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, “F*ck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!”
On Halloween, when I see the ticket agents dressed as hags and mummies, I no longer think, Nice costume, but, Now we have to tag our own luggage?
I mean that I mistake them for us.
The scariness, of course, cuts both ways. I was on a plane in the spring of 2003 when the flight attendant asked us to pray for our troops in Iraq. It was a prickly time, but brand-new war or no brand-new war, you don’t ever want to hear the word “pray” from a flight attendant.
You don’t want to hear the phrase “I’ll be right back” either. That’s code for “Go f*ck yourself,” according to a woman who used to fly for Northwest and taught me several terms specific to her profession.
“You know how a plastic bottle of water will get all crinkly during a flight?” she asked. “Well, it happens to people too, to our insides. That’s why we get all gassy.”
“All right,” I said.
“So what me and the other gals would sometimes do is fart while we walked up and down the aisle. No one could hear it on account of the engine noise, but anyway that’s what we called ‘crop dusting.’”
When I asked another flight attendant, this one male, how he dealt with a plane full of belligerent passengers, he said, “Oh, we have our ways. The next time you’re flying and are about to land, listen closely as we make our final pass through the cabin.”
In the summer of 2009, I was trying to get from North Dakota to Oregon. There were thunderstorms in Colorado, so we were two hours late leaving Fargo. This caused me to miss my connecting flight, and upon my arrival in Denver I was directed to the customer service line. It was a long one—thirty, maybe thirty-five people, all of them cranky and exhausted. In front of me stood a woman in her midseventies, accompanying two beautifully dressed children, a boy and a girl. “The airlines complain that nobody’s traveling, and then you arrive to find your flight’s been oversold!” the woman griped. “I’m trying to get me and my grandkids to San Francisco, and now they’re telling us there’s nothing until tomorrow afternoon.”
At this, her cell phone rang. The woman raised it to her ear, and a great many silver bracelets clattered down her arm. “Frank? Is that you? What did you find out?”
The person on the other end fed her information, and as she struggled to open her pocketbook, I held out my pad and pen. “A nice young man just gave me something to write with, so go ahead,” the woman said. “I’m ready.” Then she said, “What? Well, I could have told you that.” She handed me back my pad and pen and, rolling her eyes, whispered, “Thanks anyway.” After hanging up she turned to the kids. “Your old grandmother is so sorry for putting you through this. But she’s going to make it up to you, she swears.”
They were like children from a catalog. The little girl’s skirt was a red-and-white check, and matched the ribbon that banded her straw hat. Her brother was wearing a shirt and tie. It was a clip-on, but still it made him and his sister the best-dressed people in line, much better than the family ten or so places ahead of them. That group consisted of a couple in their midfifties and three teenagers, two of whom were obviously brothers. The third teenager, a girl, was holding a very young baby. I suppose it could have been a loaner, but the way she engaged with it—the obvious pride and pleasure she was radiating—led me to believe that the child was hers. Its father, I guessed, was the kid standing next to her. The young man’s hair was almost orange and drooped from his head in thin, lank braids. At the end of each one, just above the rubber band, was a colored bead the size of a marble. Stevie Wonder wore his hair like that in the late ’70s, but he’s black. And blind. Then too, Stevie Wonder didn’t have acne on his neck and wear baggy denim shorts that fell midway between his knees and his ankles. Topping it off was the kid’s T-shirt. I couldn’t see the front of it, but printed in large letters across the back were the words “Freaky Mothafocka.”
I didn’t know where to start with that one. Let’s see, I’m flying on a plane with my parents and my infant son, so should I wear the T-shirt that says, “Orgasm Donor,” “Suck All You Want, I’ll Make More,” or, no, seeing as I’ll have the beaded cornrows, I think I should go with “Freaky Mothafocka.”
As the kid reached over and took the baby from the teenage girl, the woman in front of me winced. “Typical,” she groaned.
“I beg your pardon.”
She gestured toward the Freaky Mothafocka. “The only ones having babies are the ones who shouldn’t be having them.” Her gaze shifted to the adults. “And look at the stupid grandparents, proud as punch.”
It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.”
If the grandmother’s criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she was just being petty and judgmental, we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks and side with the Freaky Mothafocka, who was, after all, just a kid. He may have looked like a Dr. Seuss character, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t love his baby—a baby, I told myself, who just might grow up to be a Supreme Court justice or the president of the United States. Or, at least, I don’t know, someone with a job.
Of course you can’t just ask someone whom they voted for. Sometimes you can tell by looking, but the grandmother with the many bracelets could have gone either way. In the end, I decided to walk the center line. “What gets me is that they couldn’t even spell ‘motherf*cker’ right,” I whispered. “I mean, what kind of example is that setting for our young people?”
After that, she didn’t want to talk anymore, not even when the line advanced and Mothafocka and company moved to one of the counter positions. Including the baby, there were six in their party, so I knew it was going to take forever. Where do they need to go, anyway? I asked myself. Wherever it is, would it have killed them to drive?
Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It’s sort of like time travel. One minute you’re bending to unlace your shoes, and the next thing you know you’re paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?
No sooner had I alienated the grandmother in Denver than I was trapped by the man behind me, who caught my eye and, without invitation, proceeded to complain. He had been passed over for a standby seat earlier that morning and was not happy about it. “The gal at the gate said she’d call my name when it came time to board, but hell, she didn’t call me.”
I tried to look sympathetic.
“I should have taken her name,” the man continued. “I should have reported her. Hell, I should have punched her is what I should have done!”
“I hear you,” I said.
Directly behind him was a bald guy with a silver mustache, one of those elaborate jobs that wander awhile before eventually morphing into sideburns. The thing was as curved and bushy as a squirrel’s tail, and the man shook crumbs from it as the fellow who’d lost his standby seat turned to engage him.
“Goddamn airline. It’s no wonder they’re all going down the toilet.”
“None of them want to work, that’s the problem,” the bald man with the mustache said. “All any of them care about is their next goddamn coffee break.” He looked at the counter agents with disdain and then turned his eye on the Freaky Mothafocka. “That one must be heading back to the circus.”
“Pathetic,” the man behind me said. He himself was wearing pleated khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt. A baseball cap hung from his waistband, and his sneakers, which were white, appeared to be brand-new. Like a lot of men you see these days, he looked like a boy, suddenly, shockingly, set into an adult body. “We got a kid looks like him back in the town I come from, and every time I see him I just thank God he isn’t mine.”
As the two started in on rap music and baggy trousers, I zoned out and thought about my last layover in Denver. I was on the people mover, jogging toward my connection at the end of Concourse C, when the voice over the PA system asked Adolf Hitler to pick up a white courtesy phone. Did I hear that correctly? I remember thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling their son Adolf Hitler, so the person must have changed it from something less provocative, a category that includes pretty much everything. Weirder still was hearing the name in the same sentence as the word “courtesy.” I imagined a man picking up the receiver, his voice made soft by surprise and the possibility of bad news. “Yes, hello, this is Adolf Hitler.”
Thinking of it made me laugh, and that brought me back to the present and the fellow behind me in the khaki shorts. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly one man can completely screw up a country?” he said.
“You got that right,” Mr. Mustache agreed. “It’s a goddamn mess is what it is.”
I assumed they were talking about George Bush but gradually realized it was Barack Obama, who had, at that point, been in office for less than six months.
The man with the mustache mentioned a GM dealership in his hometown. “They were doing fine, but now the federal government’s telling them they have to close. Like this is Russia or something, a Communist country!”
The man in the khaki shorts joined in, and I wished I’d paid closer attention to the auto bailout stuff. It had been on the radio and in all the papers, but because I don’t drive and I always thought that car dealerships were ugly, I’d let my mind wander or moved on to the next story, which was unfortunate, since I’d have loved to have turned around and given those two what for. Then again, even if I were informed, what’s the likelihood of changing anyone’s opinion, especially a couple of strangers’? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn’t theirs be?
“We’ve got to take our country back,” the man with the mustache said. “That’s the long and short of it, and if votes won’t do the trick then maybe we need to use force.”
What struck me with him, and with many of the conservatives I’d heard since the election, was his overblown, almost egocentric take on political outrage, his certainty that no one else had quite experienced it before. What, then, had I felt during the Bush-Cheney years? Was that somehow secondary? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to hate,” I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, a*shole? I was f*cking hating people before you were even born!
We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?
Would Adolf Hitler please meet his party at Baggage Claim Four? Repeat. Adolf Hitler can meet his party at Baggage Claim Four.
It’s a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landing. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, “Your trash. You’re trash. Your family’s trash.”
I Break for Traditional Marriage
When a referendum was passed making it legal for gay men and lesbians to marry each other in nearby New York State, the first thing my wife and I thought was What now?
We’d been Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Denny for going on thirty-nine years, and suddenly, on the whim of some high-and-mighty fat cats, it was all meaningless: our wedding, our anniversaries, even our love. “Who are we?” Brenda cried.
And I looked at her thinking, What do you mean, “we”?
Then I walked into the kitchen and yelled for my daughter, Bonita, who was watching TV in the basement rec room. You’d think that at thirty-seven she’d be married with a home and a family of her own, but when she was a teenager she fell in with a custodian at her high school. Next came the news that she was pregnant. The fetus got lodged in her tubes somehow, and to make a long story short they had to yank everything out, leaving her infertile, which is what she deserved, if you ask her mother and me—a custodian, for God’s sake! Oh, she married him all right, we saw to that, but two years later their relationship ended in divorce. Her next marriage ended the same way, as did the one after that. So now here she is, practically middle-aged and living with her parents.
“Bonita,” I yelled, “get up here.”
She’s lazy as sin, my daughter, and in the time it took her to get off the sofa and climb the seven steps to the kitchen, I was more than ready for her.
“Damn it, Daddy, I was just in the middle of—” and before she could finish I shot her through the head. The high jinks in New York made a sham of my marriage, so it logically made the fruits of that marriage meaningless as well. That was one good thing that came of it.
The noise of the gun brought Brenda down from the bedroom. “What in God’s name have you done to our daughter?” she asked. And I shot her in the head as well, just like I’d been wanting to every day for the past thirty-nine years.
This might sound inexcusable, but if homosexuality is no longer a sin, then who’s to say that murder is? If it feels good, do it—that’s what the state legislators seem to be saying. Who cares what all the decent people think?
After shooting my wife and daughter, I grabbed an ice pick and headed out to the garage. A few years back my mother-in-law—Nancy Anne, she likes me to call her—fell out of a tree. She’d been climbing up after her iguana when a branch snapped off, and the next thing she knew she was laid up in the hospital with a dozen pins in her hip. Brenda insisted she come live with us, but what with the stairs, the house was too much of a hassle. So we moved the cars out onto the lawn and turned the garage into an apartment. She’s got a kitchenette, a shower stall, the whole nine yards. You’d think it would make her happy, living there for free the way she does, but all I ever hear is that it’s not insulated and hasn’t got any windows. “You hung my doggone pictures on the retractable door, and every time someone opens it they fall off,” she says.
I say, “Secure them with tape, why don’t you?”
And she says, “I’m not spending my hard-earned money on tape.” As if she ever worked a day in her life. She lives off alimony.
“Oh, Nancy Anne,” I called, and I pointed the remote in the direction of her retractable door. She was in her nightgown but had tights on underneath it—in this heat! Her glasses were on top of the TV set, and she reached for them, saying, “Randolph? Randolph, is that you?”
Boy, it felt good to reclaim that garage. After dragging Nancy Anne’s bed into the backyard, I returned for her sofa, then her potty-chair. I got her clothes, her cushions, all of her wooden bracelets and hairpieces, and built a raging bonfire. Then I threw her body into the flames and returned my cars to their rightful place. Or what I thought of as their rightful place. For all I knew, in the time it took to kill my mother-in-law with an ice pick and throw her onto a bonfire, some activist judge or group of state assemblymen had decided that cars don’t belong in garages anymore, that they should live in houses and eat chicken dinners, just like people do. Up was down and down was up, as far as the world was concerned, so why not make like the homosexuals and follow my dreams?
Back in the house, I made a list. Everything I’d always wanted to do but didn’t because society frowned on it:
1. Shoot my wife.
That I could cross off, along with:
2. Solve the Bonita problem, and
3. Stab Nancy Anne through the eye with an ice pick.
Next I needed to:
4. Grow a mustache like Yosemite Sam’s.
5. Make a piñata but use precious documents instead of torn newspaper.
6. Eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory and walk out without paying.
There are other things I’d like to do, but this, I figured, was more than enough to start with. Seeing as the Old Spaghetti Factory wouldn’t be open until lunchtime and there was nothing I could do to rush the mustache, I decided to start by going to the bank and withdrawing some precious documents. The marriage license in my safe-deposit box was no longer worth the paper it was printed on, but that still left my birth certificate, my life insurance policy, and my social security card.
While driving to First Federal, I listened to the radio, an all-talk program I’m partial to where the callers were just as riled up as I was.
When I tuned in, Sherry was on the line. “If the gays can stand in a church of God and exchange vows, who’s to say my husband can’t divorce me and marry a five-year-old?” she said. “Or a newborn baby, heaven forbid! I’m not saying he’s into that, but I guess if he was, there’d be nothing stopping him now!”
The next caller identified himself as Steverino. “I remember as a boy we had this joke,” he said. “Your buddy might say, ‘I love this pepperoni pizza,’ and you’d say, ‘Why don’t you marry it, then?’
“At the time it was just a saying, but I guess now you really could tie the knot with a pizza, couldn’t you? I mean, if the guy who cuts my mother’s hair is free to wed his little gay boyfriend, why can’t I marry a slab of flattened-out dough with cheese and dried sausage on it?”
The host of the show is a guy named Jimbo Barnes, and on pretty much everything we see eye-to-eye. “There’s no reason I can think of why you couldn’t marry a pizza,” he said. “Hell, you could probably even marry a mini-pizza, one of those ones made from an English muffin, if you felt like it.”
Steverino said that he didn’t really like English muffins, and Jimbo said that was just an example. “Bite-size pizza or sixteen-incher, whatever floats your boat is what the activist state legislatures are saying.”
This was something I’d never thought of—marrying an object: my refrigerator, say, or maybe the riding mower I sometimes borrowed from my neighbor Pete Spaker. It’s a John Deere X304—top-of-the-line, with automatic transmission, cruise control, and four-wheel steering. Maybe I could just borrow it again, and when he asked me to return it, I’d tell him we’d eloped, that the mower was my new wife and until such time as we divorced, it was living with me!
Of course, by then they’d have probably closed the loopholes. Taking away anything that might benefit traditional heterosexuals, especially white ones and especially especially white males. This is something Jimbo Barnes addresses quite often—“an endangered species,” he calls us. No matter that we made this country what it is today. Thinking about this got me so mad that I missed my turnoff for the bank. This meant taking a side street, where I fell in behind a school bus, of all things.
I know you’re not supposed to pass them, but normal classes were out for the summer, so the only students on board were ones who had failed and had to go to summer school—dummies, basically, like my daughter, Bonita, had been. The bus stopped on the corner, and just as I was pulling around it, this kid—most likely a gay one—threw himself in front of my car. Someone got my license plate number as I was taking off, and the next thing I know, I’m in jail with one charge of second-degree manslaughter and three charges of first-degree murder! Plus the hit-and-run bit. And all because some high-and-mighty legislators in New York State thought they knew better than the rest of us! Of course, if I was gay they’d probably let me off, so I tried kissing my cell mate, an illegal immigrant named Diego Rodríguez, if you can believe it.
And I’m here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it’s really not that bad.