Charlie Sixteen

14OCT2010 – MSY – I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to leave New Orleans…

The piece of paper that sent me down here in the first place clearly stated that I was to be “(*)repeatedly stretched to the breaking point, ground into paste, ingested and excreted from the assholes of both September and October for a period of no less than sixty days at the leisure of the King of Hawaii for no good goddamn reason at all.” That I should find myself in the departure lounge, boarding pass in hand forty-four days later is a lucky break, and I have no true business staring into the mouth of a gift horse.

Howe’er.

I arrived at Louis Armstrong International only to discover that my 1130 flight back to LaGuardia had been canceled, and the next one wouldn’t depart until almost 17 p.m., getting me home at 21 p.m.  Lesser men would have screamed, possibly taken hostages.  And still others might have hailed a cab and headed back out in search of debauchery.

But in some weird and admittedly perverse way, this makes me happy. I’ve got the entire gate to myself, I’ve got a seat next to an outlet, and I came prepared: laptop, iPhone, headphones, journal, Sharpies, a brand new copy of Cory Doctrow’s “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”, a lightning fast Wi-fi connection, and a damn good cup of coffee.

Pending a zombie invasion, a Die Hard-esque shootout between a burned-out cop and Ze Germans, a colicky baby or some other natural disaster: I’m aces, thanks for asking.

One hour till departure: Seat near the window, bonus! Listening to: Dead Can Dance, Led Zep, Deftones.  Charging: my gadgets.  Checking: my email. Watching: Several hundred tons of taxi gather the much-needed speed to fuck its way into the unresisting sky.  Gravity, lift, drag, and thrust.  Peanuts and Sprite.  Over and over, these common theme of my travels.  All those people, all those aliens, all those dress shirts.., (X) ft of white headphone cord, and (Y) lbs worth of “Compounded Negative Body Issue Monthly” being spread like a fucking virus, their once-glossy corners now gently bent and fetal against the protective interior leather of designer carry-ons.

My eyes move around the room, mining the details, but wholly unable to keep pace with the flow of arriving passengers, the rolling rectangles, the designer sunglasses and three thousand other items of little to no consequence. It makes me wish I could sketch.  Finally, my oculars come to rest on the matched set of thigh-high silver cylinders guarding the entranceway to Charlie Sixteen, my home of record for the next hour.

Trash cans they are, and trash cans they will stay. When one finishes ones damn good cup of coffee, one is expected to do the decent thing and force the empty paper cup into the mouth of said cylinder, where it will tumble briefly southward before coming to rest in the whispered clutches of a petroleum-based, quasi-disposable stomach lining, later to be gutted and gathered by minimum wage taxidermists whose first language is probably not English.

Look at the trash can, now look at me, NOW BACK TO THE TRASH CAN:

Out of sight, out of mind. But when you throw something away, what does away really mean?  The more I stare at the cans, the more I begin to see them as something else, slowly rebuilding them in my head, swapping the plastic intestines for something else:

Suppose that when you tossed a piece of trash into the can, it was instantly incinerated, and that the energy extracted from the incineration process went toward creating the energy required to incinerate the next piece of trash, and so on, and so forth.  How far ahead in our technological evolution would we have to be to pull off a stunt like that? Get back to me on this.

There’s my flight,

TWM

(*not really.)

Dawn of The Lifesaver

March, 2001 – Food court of the Amtrak Station, Philadelphia, PA.  I missed my train by five minutes, so I’m stuck here for the next 24 hours with less than ten dollars in my pocket.  No contacts, no plastic.

Proper context – I’m coming home from sixteen weeks of hell, wherein I lost twenty pounds, learned to fight fires, excelled at push-ups, and a buncha people in funny hats kept me awake by screaming at me.  Plus, they kept shaving my head. This made me sad. I haven’t eaten or slept since – well, I can’t remember.  All I know is that I feel like an exposed electrical wire just waiting to pop.

Dunkin’ Donuts is open twenty-four hours.  The nice Arab man behind the counter assures me that their largest coffee, at a low, low price of $1.39, is very hot and very strong.  He seemed pretty confident in his product, and I appreciated that. So when he said, “You like, O.K!”  I replied with an equally enthusiastic, “Sold!”

Behind me now, they’re locking the inlaid glass doors to a chocolate and candy boutique. Damn, just when I was about to burst in there screaming like the anal-birthed love child of Ozzy Osbourne and Pat Boone and bite the heads off all the Peeps in the display window. Alas, my plans lay in ruin at my feet.

I sit cross-legged on the floor for a few hours watching the panhandlers chase New Money from one bench to the next.  Then I read all the wall plaques.  Then I did push-ups in the corner.

Almost 9 o’clock. The Nervous Hours have slipped around my shoulders like the arm of an overbearing stranger.  I’m bivouacked in the corner booth of a Mickey D’s for the Mentally Gone, my back to the wall.

The remains of dinner lay before me. It might have looked like a motel room crime scene and tasted like hate, but I didn’t care – I wolfed it down and gnawed the cheese off the paper. It’d have to do.

A pair of gnarly-looking homeless guys are sacked out in the booth across the aisle. Nearby, an elderly woman buried in layers of clothing rocks back in forth, mumbling to herself.  French chamber music flows freely from the McSpeakers, and a mural of the universe framed in purple neon watches over us from above the cashier counter.

I’m breathing French fries with undertones of homeless trousers, and my hands are vibrating from the coffee. “My God, I can almost see the table through my skin…”

Still, I’m just passing through. For these people, the train station is all they’ve got when the rains come, when it gets cold. Where are their families? Wish I could say or do something useful, but all I’ve got are lame jokes and empty hands.

Pushing four-thirty in the a.m. Every time I start to nod off, I’m awakened by the kind of noise beggars make when they’re shuffling toward your bench to ask you for the same money you didn’t have an hour ago. Across the room sits a blind man I spoke to earlier. “How are you able to trust the world when you can’t see what’s coming?”

“You just have to,” he replied.

Outside, the plaintive wail of fire trucks… it’s last call on planet Earth, closing time is right around the corner. When God flicks on the lights, the stars are the first to go. Frightened mobs pack the streets, hands clutched, fists balled, eyes open wide. Some simply shrug and move toward the door; others remain seated. It’s cool, they know the Owner.

“O.K.,” says God. “Let’s go. Closing time!” He claps His hands and starts herding them toward the door. “Time to go home! I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here! Finish your drinks and go, come on, get out! Let’s go, I wanna to go home. I have a life, you know!”

Fear grips the seated. They thought they had it all figured out, and spent their lives doing as they were told. “But you said…you promised. It just isn’t fair!” Sorry, we’re closing up.  When the last soul has been ushered out, He wipes the counters and the forests disappear.  He dumps the volcanoes into the trash, rapping each of them twice on the edge before polishing them smooth again.  He vacuums away the plains and scrapes the trashed remains of our greatest achievements into the tip jar.  He mops the bathrooms clean of our sins and counts the till. Finally, He turns the jukebox up while He restocks beer from the cold polar caps, nodding along to an old Black Sabbath tune…

I jerked awake, picked up my bag and found another corner to nap in.  Eight more hours before my thirteen-hour train ride home.