Tuesday, April 04, 2006

On the road

So dedicated to you am I, that I’m writing this post on a motherfucking plane, somewhere over the west coast. Or the Midwest. Or the Atlantic. Who the fuck knows? A plane that’s nearly four hours late to where it’s supposed to be going – parts unknown, of course – because of some nasty thunderstorm action going on in the southern United States. Hailstones as big as softballs, I heard. The skies opened up and night descended sometime around five in the afternoon, I heard.

I heard a lot things today and tonight, but mostly, just now, what I heard - all I heard - were the two coked-up, cocksucking sons-of-bitches sitting two rows ahead of me. And they were talking how I’m writing, f-bombs and all, and it’s the middle of the fucking night. Evidently, they made good use of O’Hare’s bathrooms during the layover, because they were quiet as churchmice on the initial leg.

What do you do on a plane, when someone’s making a nuisance of themselves, and everyone’s looking around, but nobody wants to be the one to say anything? What happens then? Who speaks up? Who advocates for you?

What you want to do, is you want to choke the motherfucking life out of them. You want to reach around, without saying anything, mind you, and choke the life out of these two pricks until they turn blue, but you don’t, because with your luck, there’s an air marshal on the plane, and he’s gonna put a bullet in you for instigating a riot.

So you sit. And you stew. And you throw on your headphones and try to work on the book for a spell, but you still hear these two drug addicts over the music. So you turn it up, as high as it’ll go, and still there’s a din. And now you’re pissed.

What you do then, is you glare at them. Stare at the backs of their heads and hope something pierces there. You’ve already made your displeasure felt. You’ve shushed them repeatedly, you’ve made eye contact – hellacious eye contact – a half dozen times, and nothing’s gotten through. At one point I sat here and stared at the guy for a good couple of minutes, my hand on the back of the seat in front of me, planning on giving him the finger. Baiting him into something. But he never turned around.

So what do you do when you’re The Bouncer? When you’re the biggest, baddest dude on the plane – or so it seems - and your blood pressure’s about to go through the roof, and everyone’s probably waiting on you to be the one to say something? You ask the crew to do their job, is what you do.

Oh, stewardess?

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Listen. Those two people up there haven’t shut up since they got on the plane, and everyone in here’s trying to sleep. I don’t want to sound like a jerk or anything, but if you don’t tell them too keep it down, I’m going to.”

“Would you like to switch your seat?” she asked, eyeing my laptop, my double trayed paperwork and drink setup, and the elaborate nest of pillows I’d lovingly placed about myself an hour before. “I think we have some room up front.”

“Not really. I’d simply like some peace and quiet, and I think everyone else on the plane would agree with me. Enough is enough already.”

And, yeah, maybe I’m a pussy, but it’s been quiet enough for me to have written this, and I haven’t taken a bullet. So I guess I’ve won.

Again.