“Michael Backus?” said the wired Asian lady working the passenger side of the United Airlines Customer Service counter at Gate D17, Washington’s Dulles Airport. She radiated an off-putting intensity, it seemed to rile everyone she came in contact with. “You’re in charge!”
“What?” I said. “What did you just say?”
“He’s in charge?” said a black woman with sculpted hair and bright yellow fingernails that looked like talons. She said it first to her friends, then to no one in particular, as if complaining to the heavens. “She said he was in charge.”
“How am I in charge?” I asked.
“How is he in charge?’” said Sculpted Hair, stepping in front of me, making sure I understood this was my fault. Others murmured in agreement. There were as many as eight of us, though it was difficult to tell if people were traveling together or just randomly milling nearby.
The situation to now: up at 3:30 am, left Albuquerque at 6, got to Dulles by 11:30. My connecting flight to LaGuardia was scheduled for 2:50.Then 3:15. 3:45. 4:10.The LED board stayed on 4:30 until it was well past 5:30.They canceled the flight an hour after that, setting off a mad rush for one of two customer service areas. Not liking to backtrack, I headed left, thinking that was the general direction of New York City. By the time I (walking) got to Gate D17, I was back three turns of the pedestrian maze. There were two service reps not counting the intense woman, 20 people in front of me, and every customer to that point had taken at least 10 minutes.
Yet people weren’t as testy as I thought they might be, mostly some low level grumbling and whispered threats (“I will never ever…”), but no snappishness or petty guarding-their-place-in-line moments. I encouraged the middle-aged woman ahead of me who was just there to pick up an iPad she’d left on a plane to jump the line and go right to the counter, a pretty Israeli journalist two places ahead looked around the suave-looking African businessman who had been lightly hitting on her and agreed.
“This is going to take awhile,” she said and a gentle murmur of “Uh huh,” “That’s right,” and “Oh yeah” rose in agreement. The iPad woman went for it and reappeared a moment later holding the tablet for all to see and mouthing the words “Thank you.” We didn’t exactly cheer, given the circumstances, but it was a moment of lightness and hope in the middle of what was looking like one of those squalid travel dramas people typically endure a couple of times a decade. That was the general mood, grumbly acceptance. “What can you do?” I heard it a half dozen times, I said it myself.
Enter Intense Asian Rep Lady, who had the benefit of being the only customer rep on our side of the counter, a gesture I at least appreciated. Her name tag said Cindy Wu. Those of us in line wanted her to be helpful, she just wasn’t. She told us what we already knew, what they had in fact announced over the airport intercom over an hour ago, and kept repeating it in an increasingly shrill tone. When she disappeared, the crowd indulged in a collective sigh, she was offering no information and was an enervating presence besides. Ten minutes later, Cindy Wu was back, talking in a loud voice about some nuance with JFK-bound passengers, an angle in which she could to some degree blame them for their predicament. She kept going on about it in the aggrieved tone of a misunderstood bureaucrat.
This was too much, and tin-eared besides. We are all adults, we understand stuff happens, flights get delayed, get re-routed, get canceled. And no airline service rep was anywhere near the decision to cancel the flights, so all we ask is they not make things worse. Cindy Wu was making things worse and people pushed back.
“What are you talking about?” said the African businessman. He had been quite enthusiastic about the Israeli journalist and she was polite, but took the first opportunity to turn and dive into her phone, and there was a hint of petulance in his voice, his complaint as much a reaction to her non-interest.
“I don’t know why you’re talking about this,” Sculpted Hair said, then to her friends, “I don’t know why she’s talking about this.”
“All I’m saying is, there are some people here who think they are booked on a flight to JFK, a flight that’s been canceled, but they really are booked on tomorrow’s flight, they made a mistake…”
“Quit telling us about a flight that has nothing to do with us,” I said. “It makes it seem like you’re trying to blame us for your fuckup.” This was greeted with appreciative nods from people, but the woman showed no awareness she’d heard anything, she simply turned and disappeared a second time.
She came storming back with an idea. For LaGuardia passengers only. “If your flight was into Kennedy, this isn’t for you!” she said, seemingly taking delight in one last shot at the Kennedy-bound. The idea was Amtrak via a paid van ride into Washington’s Union Station where we’d get a train to Penn Station. She wanted to know who was interested.
It wasn’t clear what to do. She seemed overly combative, she refused to explain herself much (details like whether it was free and could we get our bags were unclear) and none of the other reps were paying any attention to her, though she clearly worked for United–she had the United vest on and no one was stopping her from using the phones–but trusting her seemed something of a leap.
“What do you think?” I said to the pretty journalist woman. The businessman had left to try the other customer service line and the journalist and I had exchanged the smallest of small talk, with me being careful not to show too much interest, hoping, I suppose, that she’d notice my (lack of) effort and be interested. But mostly I was just in line and my question was sincere, I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, she doesn’t, you know, engender…well…”
“Confidence?”
“That’s the word.”
I went because I was still at least an hour from the service reps at the counter and didn’t think they could do anything for me anyway since the few planes flying to New York City were completely booked. After it all shook out, there were seven of us and it took another hour of milling about in a chair-less corner of the gate before it could be finalized.
Then Sculpted Hair asked about their luggage and everyone around her agreed, myself included, though it was really just to be sociable. I was pretty certain given the current state of airport security that the luggage wasn’t happening and I was against anything that slowed getting home.
Cindy Wu didn’t like the question, though, she clearly considered it beside the point and ungrateful.She hemmed and hawed and said she didn’t think it could happen before we’d have to leave, she didn’t know where the bags were right now and had no way to find out, one elaborate and realistic sounding excuse after another.
“I don’t know why not,” said an older black man whose name I would learn soon enough was Pharaoh. “It’s just downstairs, someone could get it. You have all our names.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said, her voice showing strain, and I felt some sympathy because I was sure it wasn’t that easy.
“I don’t know why not,” Pharaoh said.
“It’s just…”
“I don’t see why not,” said Sculpted Hair.
“You can either get home or get your luggage,” Cindy Wu yelled, finally finding her footing in the tone of a grade school teacher at the end of her rope. “You can’t do both!”
This shut down the rebellion, the choice between bags and home was no choice, though Pharaoh and Sculpted Hair made it clear they remained unhappy. It was shortly after that she put me in charge of the voucher for the van ride, so I was from the start tainted by our proximity.
My group included Sculpted Hair with (I’d decided) her sister and daughter, a gabby black man named Linus who was always either talking to us or into his phone and had just a hint of a southern accent, Pharaoh who was at least in his 70s, and Eric, a congenial dude (the word fits) with red facial hair and a wry demeanor. He was the youngest of us, maybe mid-30s.I wasn’t fully comfortable being a 50ish white man in charge of other adults, especially people of color who are older than I am. Being a leader has never appealed to me, though I’m no fan of being lead either. It’s true I’ve taught college for the past decade, so I’m okay with lecturing to 20 year olds, but it’s not the same as this. I used to joke when the apocalypse happens and the surviving alphas and betas are working things out, I’ll be that odd, possibly crazy, hermit who lives on the edge of the woods by himself and waves across wide fields to the other survivors in a way that may or may not be friendly.
I can’t imagine anyone could screw up the job of Voucher Leader any quicker than I did. Eric said he was hitting the john and to wait for him, and at almost the same moment, Cindy Wu gave everyone their train tickets, handed me the voucher for the van, and told us to get going in exactly the tone of an announcer at the beginning of a race. “GO!” And everyone did. It was an hour’s van ride to the DC train station and if we missed the 10:50 train, we were looking at 3 a.m. Except Eric wasn’t back yet and I as leader had been given his ticket for the train. So I waited 30 seconds, then 60.90. The other six people were well down the terminal and already doing double-takes in my direction.
“Why are you still here?” Cindy Wu said in a cracking voice. Her intensity was gone and I had to look twice to make sure it was actually her, she seemed ten years older.
“This guy, I got his ticket but he took off to the bathroom and he’s not back.”
“Give me the ticket, I’ll give it to him when he returns.”
I hesitated but not much, I was annoyed he’d had the temerity to so badly time his bathroom break. I got about 50 feet down the corridor before Eric appeared, looking for his ticket. I rushed back, explained, returned with him to get it, and we set off.
“I kind of threw you under the bus there, didn’t I?” I said.
“You did,” he said, finding the humor in the situation.
“Pretty fast too.”
“Like record speed.”
Dulles is big, it feels like you could fit five LaGuardias inside. And Pharaoh being older with bad knees and sore feet fell behind. Eric and Linus stuck with him, Sculpted Hair’s party was well ahead, rounding corners out of sight, and I was somewhere in the middle, more or less by myself (heavy weighs the mantle of leadership). When we finally arrived at the inner-airport train to take us to the terminal where our transportation van was waiting, everyone piled on.
Except Eric, Linus and Pharaoh weren’t even in sight behind us, the shuttle train was leaving, the women were on and involved in what seemed a rollicking conversation, and I was pretty sure they didn’t know where to get off. Whereas I’d told Eric, Linus and Pharaoh which terminal and what to do once they got there. Let it not be said I put no thought into it. Still, the key issue, if you’d ask the trailing group, was that in less than 10 minutes, I’d tried and failed to leave Eric and then succeeded in ditching the three of them.
At first things were smooth and easy, no one in Sculpted Hair’s group had any reason to complain. I got us off at the right terminal, explained where we were going, and led the way. At the shuttle bay, I found the van company, produced the voucher, explained who was here and who was coming. It was all good.
Then Pharaoh, Linus and Eric appeared, Pharaoh limping.
“You left us,” he said. He was serious.
“I made sure you knew where to go.”
“That don’t make any difference, she said you’re the leader and then you left us.”
“Okay.”
Eric smiled and held up one, then two fingers, marking both my betrayals.
“Man, if this was Vietnam, you’d have just abandoned your platoon,” Linus said. He was kidding, sort of, but there was an intensity in there I wanted no part of.
“Well, I guess, except it’s not…”
“That’s right,” Pharaoh said. “You just took off and left your platoon behind.”
“Not all of it,” I said, nodding towards the women.
“That ain’t no excuse.” Linus wasn’t letting this go, though he kept his tone light. “Someone ought to frag your ass, Lt. Dan.”
“Ha,” Pharaoh said. “Right.”
“Right? Lt. Dan. This here is Lt. Dan,” Linus said, exaggerating his accent. “When the shit comes down, he abandons his man.”
“Lt. Dan,” said Pharaoh, like just saying the name was pejorative.
In my advanced film studies class, I’d spent an entire class period on Forrest Gump, detailing all the horrific conservative subtext in that atrocity, and prompting one student in her evaluation to write, “The professor said mean things about Forrest Gump and hurt the feelings of several class members.” I wanted to tell Pharaoh and Linus and company how much I detested that film, how inappropriate it was to call me Lt. Dan, but there was no way to do it without seeming an even bigger tool.
“Come on, Lt. Dan, really?” I said, struggling. “Guy had no legs. Besides, he didn’t abandon any…”
“Lt. Dan!” Pharaoh said, with more force, as if annoyed I refused to play my part.
“Dude was an asshole,” I said, helpless. Linus caught my eye, raised a single eyebrow, smiled and I couldn’t help but laugh.
The drive to downtown DC was almost an hour and I was jammed in as tight as I’ve ever been on any airplane, the result of Pharaoh claiming the front seat and putting it all the way back, pushing my knees towards my chest. I wanted to complain, but Pharaoh was making demands about the music (louder), the heat (higher), and the driver’s driving (too fast for a rainy night), and it was clear he was in no mood to compromise. And I had abandoned him…with an explanation, but still… Linus spent the entire drive whispering into his phone, Eric pulled up his hood over headphones and closed his eyes, the women shot pictures on their cells of the Capital Building and the Washington Monument that came out blurry (they held them up for me to see), though they had a grainy beauty to them. I closed my eyes, the driver lowered the car radio, Pharaoh lightly snored. The women kept talking. Sculpted Hair’s name was Rosalind and I gathered she was some sort of corporate executive for an Atlanta-based cosmetic company.
By the time we hit the train station, we had settled into two groups; Rosalind and her party, and Pharaoh, Eric, Linus and I. Inside the station, we saw others from the customer service line at the airport; a sweet and scared-seeming young Japanese woman who spoke only the most rudimentary English, a college student-aged woman I remembered for the obvious reasons, a serene-seeming man with white hair and a musical instrument on his back, the soft-case shaped like a banjo. I thought of the scene in The Great Escape when after the breakout, the Germans stop the trains from running and everyone gets stuck killing time in the station while James Garner tells a blind Donald Pleasance the various fellow prisoners he sees in the crowd of seeming strangers. It was like that.
Everyone was hungry and we set off for a distant McDonalds at the far end of Union Station. I was no longer the leader but I still tried to angle us towards Einstein Bagels because I hadn’t eaten at McDonalds in two decades, some principled stand I’d taken when I bothered to care about such things.
“Look, bagels,” I said, but no one even glanced my way. There was no stopping our forward momentum.
I ordered a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke and we settled into a booth; Rosalind and her people were there, but the two groups had seemingly come to some unspoken agreement not to acknowledge each other. Eric grew up in Boston, went to school in Colorado, lived now in New Jersey, did something with computers. Pharaoh played trombone in a jazz band, though I couldn’t tell if it was a retirement thing or he did it professionally, and lived in Washington Heights. Linus was a limo driver with a daughter and two ex-wives and a current girlfriend, a house on the eastern side of Hicksville in Long Island, and a mouth that just wouldn’t stop. He was friendly, that wasn’t the issue, it’s just every story became so bizarrely convoluted within 20 seconds of the telling, it was easier to tune him out.
It was no surprise Linus was the one with the pills, which he laid out on the back of a hamburger wrapper, the creases smoothed through, though I didn’t expect them to be all aimed in a downward direction, not with his motor-mouth. A pile of Percocets, a few Vicodin, even a scattering of penicillin (“For an abscessed tooth, my fine motherfuckers,” Linus said, just in front of Eric who seemed poised to make a clap joke).Eric and I each took three, Linus swallowed two Percocets and one penicillin, which he washed down with Sprite spiked with something out of a silver flask. Even Pharaoh went in, using iced tea to down his. I had meant to refuse, but got caught up in a moment because no one asked me where I was from or what I did and if I was still part of the group, I had through my “Lt. Dan!” behavior lost favor in their eyes, and was now the lowest of the four of us.
I regretted the pills right away. I’d gone through a bourbon and Vicodin phase, I knew what to expect. And this was without the booze, though I had one of those junkie moments where I almost asked Linus for a shot of whatever he was drinking, thinking what was the point without alcohol? I imagined half the crowd waiting for the train was on some sort of synthetic opioid or anti-depressant, probably more than half, which only made me want a drink even more since I’d spent a lot of years taking pride in never being a user of pharmaceuticals, only an occasional abuser. That distinction seemed silly now, but it was one of the founding mythologies (so to speak) and went deep.
The camaraderie of the pill taking proved the highlight, the way everyone went in without a word, how it seemed exactly the right thing to do in that moment; it gave drama and scale to the eating of a McDonald’s hamburger. Like we were four friends meeting as we do every week, a ritual central to our lives, laughing, touching the bottoms of our Coke cups together like beer bottles, gesturing in the air with handfuls of fries, making needlessly complicated points. It all felt cinematic until it didn’t and once it didn’t, everything deflated.
Eric and Pharaoh wandered off together, leaving me with Linus who kept on talking but when the time came, thankfully showed no interest in sitting next to me on the train. The pills kicked in on the northern edges of Delaware and all my aches disappeared, though they—along with the McDonald’s food—roiled my stomach. I nodded off and had one of those hazy geometric dreams that come with such drugs. I stirred half awake and lay my head on the window, the lights of suburban Philadelphia floating free above the horizon line. I imagined them rising, joining the fast moving stars above, the way a leaf might float until caught in the jet stream. I’d actually seen something like that once while camping in the woods of Wisconsin almost 20 years ago now–really seen it–stars forming into time-lapse streams of light, filling the sky from one horizon to the other, a hyper-awareness I was one person attached to a spinning planet.
We’d driven up for the weekend from Chicago, my friend Lily and a group of Chicago actors, all of them robust, theatrical, very funny and deeply competent. We white-water rafted the Wolf River, built a giant fire that lasted all night and cooked potatoes and salmon in foil resting in the coals. In the afternoon, we played a game of $5, which I hadn’t done since I was a kid. Four guys with baseball mitts, another with a bat hitting fly balls. Cleanly fielded grounders were a quarter, two hops fifty cents, one seventy-five and a fly ball a whole buck. I played right to the point where the two hits of LSD (one on a tiny square of paper with a bright color picture of Foghorn Leghorn, the other a small green pill) we’d taken showed, then got woozy and wandered off.
There was ongoing drama, of course there was. Lily was my closest friend but not my girlfriend; that would be Irene back in Chicago in our apartment who had encouraged me to come knowing full well something might happen between Lily and I––because we had a history and because Irene liked to say in darker moments that Lily and I were destined to spend our lives together. This weekend was Irene’s way of settling once and for all her place in my life. Except no one had really said anything to Lily, who refused to play along, which made for awkwardness, and once the drugs kicked in, romance was off the table anyway. This was a time in my life that was, as it turned out, unique, a 10-year period where I’d lived with three different women and thought I was the kind of person who would always be with someone.
I found a sycamore stump as big as a king-sized bed and sat for the next eight hours. The sky went from bright and crystal clear, the green of the pine trees against the blue especially vivid, to pitch black with the milky outline of our galaxy pressing through. And then it happened, slowly at first, as though the Earth had just begun to turn and was taking time getting going. The stars stretched into slashes and then long streaks and for a period of time––maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour or more––I could see it clearly, the earth was spinning in space and I on my giant tree trunk was riding with it. The buoyancy of that moment felt profound at the time, the revelation I was part of something so much bigger than I’d ever imagined, a witness to a universe revealing itself, made every niggling problem seem beyond pointless. It lingered for years, that feeling and I guess it still does, though mostly it’s a story I tell and re-tell. The idea of a tiny creature dwarfed by the cosmos and utterly alone seems the opposite of reassuring now.
I passed a limping Pharoah in Penn Station; he was alone, head down, and I let him be. Linus in line at the Starbucks caught my eye and saluted and I gave three fist taps to my head in return. Penn Station seemed the perfect end to a very long day, a squalid, low-ceilinged collection of mostly closed food shops and crap merchandise.
A few months after Irene and I split, Lily asked me, “When are we going to get on with this,” meaning us and even though we were crammed into the passenger side corner of my 1973 Chevelle fooling around, I couldn’t find my way to an answer, which was an answer, though I didn’t fully understand that for some time. There is no pain attached to the memory, we as a couple were never going to go any other way, though it fits elegantly (I dare say) into a life-long pattern of behavior, something I had not yet figured out at the time, something I don’t particularly want to think too long on now. I let three taxis pass before hailing a Crown Victoria, it had been close to 24 hours since I’d slept and I couldn’t bear jamming myself into a hybrid. The city was quiet, the traffic lights on Madison lining up green all the way to East Harlem. There’s something glorious about sliding into the back of a roomy NYC cab after a long trip, your bags next to you or safely in the trunk, knowing that with no effort beyond paying, you’ll soon be home.