At Times I Am Downright Maniacal

On Saturday night I sat in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International waiting to catch the red eye flight back to Jersey and bring an end to a highly successful two week vacation/assignment in Arizona. As I sat and waited for the flight to start boarding so that I could go get my stand-by tickets I quietly read my book. An airport, I thought, is actually a great place to observe people. I could see a great cross-section of society. (Or at least a cross-section of the part of society that would be flying out of Phoenix late on a Saturday.) I closed my book and looked around at my fellow travelers. Thoroughly bored with the lot of them I went back to my book. Shortly thereafter, the row of seats across from me was filled with a small family jabbering away and effectively forcing me back into people-watching. I tuned them out for a while until I caught a snippet of what the high-school aged son was saying. He was talking about Final Destination.

For those of you not of the film-appreciation slant, Final Destination is the tale of a high school French class going on a trip to Paris. They board transatlantic flight 180 but, before the flight can take off, one student has a vision of the plane exploding and his subsequent panic gets a group of his friends chucked off the plane. Then the plane really does explode. Death, annoyed at his master plan being upset by this budding clairvoyant, stalks the survivors and kills them off in ways that would make Rube Goldberg proud. I shook my head and went back to reading. That is poor form- talking about a movie about horrific airline deaths just before you get on an airplane is terrible. Then I got up to stretch my legs and looked at the board. Phoenix to JFK. 11:45 PM. Flight 180. Thanks a lot, jackass kid, that’s not going to haunt me through takeoff.

I stretched my legs up and down the terminal and came back to find a little line in front of the desk. Standby? I get on the line and wait. A voice chimed up behind me. “Standby?” I turned and met Alberto.

“Uh, yeah, I think. Well, I’m standby, I assumed that’s what’s going on.”

You know when you have a little exchange and then the thing dies into this awkward silence and you just sort of stand there? I prayed for that. Hell, I achieved it. I achieved it five times. But every time my new best friend Al brought it back from the dead like a conversational Dr. Frankenstein. After a little while I began to suspect that my companion might have been hitting on me just a bit. Upon learning that I was not online for standby and I still had about a half hour, I decided to escape my possible paramour with a carefully crafted lie.

“So, since we have some time to kill I’m gonna hit the toilet.”

I took a few proud steps toward the bathroom (which I didn’t really need to use) and then considered what I’d said. If he had been hitting on me, had I just said used code to tell him to come sodomize me in a public bathroom? Oops! I practically walked there backwards. I returned from the bathroom unmolested to find the plane boarding. Alberto returned and revived our awkward conversation for the sixth, seventh, and eighth times.

Airline gods smiled upon me that night, and our seat assignments were far far apart from one another, which meant I was able to read in peace and then fall asleep with the fear that I’d tip to one side and awaken using the shoulder of the man next to me as a pillow.

Now all I have left to do is shake this little three-hour jetlag I’ve developed. That and the aching pit of regret at passing up a shot at the mile-high club.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS