An Airport Story

An Airport Story

I’m one of those suckers who takes the “Arrive two hours before your flight departs” warning seriously, so I was wandering around the airport with nothing to do.  My bags had been checked.  The man who took them was far too cross-eyed to win my confidence in his ability to screen luggage, and I’m convinced that if someone told him all the new Samsonites tick like that he would have let them through without a problem.  I was worried, and frankly it doesn’t take much to worry me at airports.  Yes, quote all the statistics you want about the odds of my choosing the flight that nose dives into one of our finer monuments—unless the chances of the U.S. Senate singing “God Bless America” in my honor are precisely zero, I’m not satisfied. I had an old copy of The Great Gatsby in my carryon, but I was far too nervous to read it.  I needed to calm down before my flight.  Oh, and to answer the obvious question, I was off to South Korea—a lovely country that would be much improved by relocating within walking distance.

You’d think that an airport would be an exciting place what with the adventures everyone is about to have and the melting pot aspect of it all, but as I wandered around it occurred to me that nothing exciting ever happens in one that doesn’t require ducking for cover.  So my quest for a solid bit of fun in the terminal ended in a bar called Kelly’s, where one guy in the corner was loudly explaining the biological effects of Viagra in locker room terminology.  I plopped down on a stool on the other side of the bar and ordered a beer. Next to me was a woman wearing so much lipstick that her mouth could easily have lined a runway at night.  The filter on her cigarette was stained red with it, and I noticed a nice blotch on the rim of her martini glass.  This was just before New York started cracking down on smoking in bars (I think smiling is next) so I told her she was lucky to be getting out of the city.  “Oh, I’m not leaving,” she said.  “I’m waiting for. . .someone.”  She said the last word with a meaningful emphasis, as though I should know who she meant because the three of us had once been arrested in Monte Carlo for performing lewd acts in public.  Then, as though she had desired nothing more than to make me believe she was insane, she turned around and yelled, “Stop it!”  She turned back with a smile, and took another drag from her cigarette.
         
I’ve never been able to ask a complete stranger, “What the hell was that?”  It’s just a quirk, I suppose.  But I’m glad I didn’t this time.  I noticed there were two children standing just outside the bar, and they had evidently been doing something that only a mother’s trained ear could hear over the easy listening jazz and the drone of a Fox News commentator on TV and the man in the corner letting us all know about his eight inch erection.  Stop it they did. 
         
“So, their father’s coming home?”  I asked.
         
“No, I’m not sure where their fathers are.  No, I’m waiting for Rasheed.  He’s coming in from Egypt at 1:27.”  And oh what a look in her eyes there was.  It told me that Rasheed was the sun and the moon to her as well as a fairly accurate clock, and that any jerk who thought he could pick her up in some airport dive was barking up the wrong tree, though he’d be free to buy her another drink.  She had obviously practiced being a barfly so much that even with her children in the background and a mysterious gentleman flying in from the farthest reaches of the planet, she couldn’t help but look at her empty glass and sigh.  I ordered two more.  Like I said, I’m a sucker, and she made my afternoon with her next comment.  “He’s really good at sex.  I’m so excited.”  This is probably the place for a standard “more information than I needed” remark, but actually it was right up my alley.  I had time to kill, and hearing about some woman’s sex life was as good a topic as any.  Our drinks arrived, and I sat back, waiting for more about her and the Egyptian lover.  But she quietly took a sip of her martini, and then asked me if I liked olives.
         
Two anchors on Fox were discussing the possibility of war in Iraq, a slightly more intriguing question than the olive one.  It was a more innocent time then, before S & M aficionados were able to get their porn from “60 Minutes”.  There was an enthralling debate going on.  Did the situation bear more resemblance to Munich or to the early days of the quagmire that was Vietnam?  Whenever I became convinced that a few hundred Neville Chamberlains roamed the halls of Congress, I’d suddenly be reminded of that helicopter evacuating the American embassy in Saigon, 1975.  Tough call, that, but Red Lips cut through all the nonsense for me.  “You know, Bush will just be starting World War III if he goes to war in Iraq.  It says so in the Bible.”
         
I nodded in understanding as I considered making a run for it.  But my curiosity got the better of me.  A fundamentalist barfly?  This was too good to pass up. 
         
“Uh, where does it say that?”
         
“You want chapter and verse?  It says so in Ezekiel and Daniel, and I think Isaiah.”
         
Well, this was comforting.  I had grown so used to thinking that all airport lunatics would be wielding box cutters and shouting out bits of the Koran that I’d forgotten their more modest siblings were still around.  I’d come to believe that terrorists had a monopoly on all the insanity around here, but the lovely bit of insanity next to me was living proof to the contrary.  God bless her for it. 
         
“Now does the Bible say how this can be averted?”  She wrinkled those velvety lips of hers and thought for a moment.  “Well, I guess if there’s no war in Iraq, but I think that’s inevitable.”  She sighed a bit, and I could see why.  Most people only have their past woes to ponder, but she was carrying all of mankind’s future around in that pretty little head of hers as well.  It was too much for her to bear, and she went back to her sole consolation in life—aside from the martini.
         
“You know, this is the second time I’ve come out to meet Rasheed here.  The last time he was turned away by some jackass customs official who didn’t know his ass from elbow.  They sent him back to Egypt.”  She pulled a piece of paper out of her hand bag and unfolded it.  It was a picture of a Middle Eastern man, obviously taken with a web cam, and I got the feeling that I was supposed to comment on his dark brow or ask to borrow it for a trip to the bathroom.  Instead I asked, “Why’d they send him back?”
         
“Oh, you know,” and she pointed up at the TV, where a man was discussing Saddam and Osama and the sighting of them together at a strip club in Dallas.  Now, I realize that our airport security has been known to make women drink their own breast milk, so I’m hardly arguing that the man was guilty as charged.  Most likely the official who sent her boyfriend packing just thought it was his patriotic duty to turn away anyone with hummus on his breath.  Still, I have never heard a woman announce that her boyfriend had suspected terrorist ties with such nonchalance before.  But then I’d never heard a woman announce it at all before.  Most would see it as grounds for breaking up, I suppose, or they’d at least seriously rethink the relationship.  Not her.  “I’m so excited.  I can’t wait to meet him!” 
Now I was confused.  The word “meet” has a few meanings of course, but this one really set off my mental metal detectors.  Was this their first time seeing each other?  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a little boy try to get a piggy back ride from an even littler girl, and here was their mother telling me that she was inviting over a suspected terrorist for dinner. More importantly, how did she know he was good at sex?  I mean, I could understand having sex without knowing your partner’s name, but it seems to me that the two of you would have to meet in even the most perfunctory manner before the act began. 
         
“Er, not to pry here, but you guys haven’t met before? How do you know him?”
         
“Well, we met on the internet.  But I mean meeting face to face.  He’s really fun to chat with.  Do you ever chat online?” 

Now I was incredulous.  The man was good at cyber sex?  I don’t think such qualitative terms should apply to the ability to masturbate while typing.  But no matter.  She had a touching faith that his arousing instant messages would translate to expertise in the bedroom, and who was I to argue?  “No, never really got into it,” I said, wondering if it might not be the way to go after all.  I bet you meet some interesting people that way.  Her son was now pushing her daughter around in a luggage cart, and the cute little rascals were headed straight for the escalator.  This could only end in the most adorable tragedy ever, I thought, as their mother sipped her second martini of the afternoon, but an observant European told them to stop just in the nick of time.

“You know, Rasheed gave me an idea that I think could work to bring peace.    I might do it.  I think it will work.”  I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in on an Arab-Israeli conference, but if not, you won’t understand the thrill I felt as she outlined her roadmap to Middle East peace.  By “roadmap”, of course, I mean the sort you draw on the back of an envelope to let your buddy from out of town know where the 7-Eleven is, and we’re talking the sort of buddy you don’t like much.
         
“I’m going to go there and talk to them.”
         
With a bit of prodding she expanded on this plan.  “There” was the Middle East and “Them” was a vague set of people with a cruel agenda—I think she meant al Qaeda but couldn’t think of the name.  Still her idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounds.  “I’m very good at talking to people”, she said, which was true.  Hell, she kept my interest.  Unfortunately she neglected to mention whether she was good at talking to people in Arabic while being stoned to death, but I took that as a given.  “You know this is all Mohammed’s fault, and if one man can start this mess…”
         
“One woman can clean it up!” I finished for her.  Alright, I was a bit buzzed by now and her excitement was contagious.  Of course, I was trying to figure out how her new-found distaste for the Prophet squared with her assertion that Bush would be the one completing the trilogy of World Wars.  But she smiled at me, and said, “That’s right.  They just have to learn that Americans aren’t as bad as they think.  I can do that.”

I have to give her credit.  Here I was fighting my own little war on terror (namely my terror of exploding at thirty thousand feet and raining down in bits of ash somewhere over the Azores) and this fundamentalist was helping me out.  Oh, of course I still had the old fears once I actually got on the plane, and I’m sure the flight attendants would later have trouble figuring out what those claw marks were doing in my arm rests.  But for now, she was helping me out.  “So what do you think of a nuclear North Korea?  Does the Good Book have anything to say about that one and how we could handle it?” 
She wrinkled her brow, and I figured her knowledge of world affairs ended with the Middle East.  “I don’t know.  But do you really think that man over there had sex nine times in one night?  That seems a bit unbelievable, even if he was on Viagra.”
Enjoyable as a conversation on sexual stamina with her would have been, I looked up at the clock and saw I didn’t have time for it.  The citizens of South Korea were awaiting my arrival, and I started thinking I could end the whole nuclear standoff with a few words once I arrived.

“Well, I have to go board my plane now.  Best of luck with everything with your boyfriend and, you know, saving the world.  I hope to hear about you soon.”  It does seem that the peace initiative failed, but I hope at least Rasheed got through this time and lived up to her expectations.  On my way to the gate I noticed her children were heckling a janitor, and I took out my boarding pass.