It is a mistake to write this essay. My neck has gotten an origami treatment from an airport terminal chair that is designed to look comfortable to anyone bereft of information about the design of chairs. I have been awake for twenty-five hours, with twelve more on deck. I’m being treated to an endless loop of someone slicing a steak over and over, with no food available this time of night but vending machines that only accept debit and credit cards. I am trying to picture the circumstances that would compel me to push my debit card into a vending machine in an airport. It’s an especially piquant proposition because nothing in the commerce boxes has a price on it. One of the vending machines even has unpriced Lego sets in it instead of Cokes. I’ll play Russian roulette, sir, but not with four bullets in the gun.
It’s inevitable that I’d write something that makes Kafka sound like Suess. I should avoid the subject. Talk about the surprise of great, green swards of Dallas spread at my Airbus feet as we cruised over the city. Dallas is as green as Kent. Who knew?
But the interior is just a terrazzo rash. I have encountered terrazzo beforetimes. I have appreciated terrazzo under different circumstances, trod on it willingly, and even admired it. But terrrazzo, morning, noon, and night, terrazzo for breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner, with no intermezzo, it’s too much. And as much of a shock as it might come to you, architect-dude, terrazzo has, in the past, been laid in other than indistinct, blobby patterns.
But a lack of style is the style these days. And where am I? I should know better. They call it a terminal, and they’re determined to live up to the name. It is not possible to be comfortable in a place like this. It’s a sciatic purgatory, a desolate desert of color, and texture, and sound, and vision, and succor of any kind.
A kind of devolution happens overnight in an airport. We walked past the saddest room outside of Dante. It was set aside for people who had missed their flights because their connections were late. Their expressions ranged from rage to extreme rage…
Hold on. Look out. Good God. I am currently being exhorted to get on the good foot by none other than James Brown, via a television bleeding out of a closed convenience store like an audio gunshot wound. It is currently 4:13 AM, and I regret to inform the Godfather of Soul that I’m not currently in possession of a good foot to get on. And my bum hurts. There are no other takers for his offer of good-footedness, either, because the only other people within earshot are a man watching off-color videos on his phone in Spanish, and an incredible, douche-tastic, tattooed love boy brosephus who has been talking loudly to the second-least interesting person in the world for six straight hours. This has interrupted my attempts to perform amateur chiropractery on myself while trying to sleep.
But we found the last eatery in the concourse that served food before the terminal flatlined many hours ago. It was a shrine to the Cowboys. Tom Landry stood guard by the door…
Whoah. Wait a minute. I ask you: Who’s the one who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? It’s 4:28 AM Shaft! Can you dig it? You can? Right on…
Listen, before the Jimmy Castor Bunch shows up, let me get back to the concourse dinner. The Cowboys shrine had foodstuffs! We sounded slightly more than quizzical. More like dazed. Can we get something to eat? Here? Now? Really? We’ve been turned away from more places than Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and a Jehovah’s Witness.
The young lady behind the counter was failing at failing, which is hard to do. Her skin was marked up like a men’s room wall in a punk club, and she had enough fishing tackle in her face for a striper tournament. It was a form of voluntary failure, but she couldn’t pull it off. She said, “Of course, darling, what can I get y’all?” and the clouds parted and her true self was revealed.
“Hamburgers and fries, times two, please.”
“The fryer’s broken, sorry. Are Cool Ranch Doritos OK?”
So I’m outside a generous portion of Cool Ranch Doritos, and the last Guinness in the place, because it was the only Guinness in the place. But I am sanguine, because I got my first Goth Y’all.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stop typing now, and Let It Whip.
8 Responses
“terrazzo rash” …. “sciatic purgatory” …. “audio gunshot wound” … “offer of good-footedness”
These are the literary bonbons that keep me coming back every day and paying for this man’s coffee once a month.
Why is he not Poet Laureate of the Intertunnels?
Hi Gerry- Many thanks.
I was reading your comment too rapidly, and at first I thought you wrote “literary bonobos,” not “literary bonbons”. Which would have been a fair assessment as well, because I was throwing my poo a fair bit.
I don’t think bonobos are the ones into throwing poo. They’re lovers, not fighters.
My first ever encounter with a terrazzo floor was in an apartment building that had once been a motel on a small fork of the Miami River near the 27th Ave. bridge. This was back in the 1980s. It was one block away from the pharmaceutical plant where I worked. I had rented a studio apartment, so I did not have to continue to drive like Mad Max on I-95 every day to go to work, and I could just leave my apartment in the morning to walk for 5 minutes and be at work.
After I moved into my apartment, I was talking to my father one day, and after I told him where I had moved, he told me I should go speak to my aunt that I didn’t know I had.
My parents divorced when I was young, so I didn’t know much about his side of the family. I found out his family had owned property all the way down to the Miami River back in the 1920s, but lost everything in the crash, but his sister still lived in a house a block away from where I was.
The apartment building had once been a motel on 27th Ave., which was the far western road; everything to the West of 27th Ave. was the Everglades back then. One of my relatives managed the motel during the war.
The current landlady of the apartment was a big fan of John F Kennedy. Apparently, she found out that during the war, JFK had undergone training in Miami with PT boats, and from time to time, he and other Navy personnel would take small boats up the river and live in the motel off base. She had a bust of John F Kennedy in her office and pointed to a chair that she said Kennedy had sat in. Sometimes, the city, state, and federal police authorities would stay at the apartment building up on top of the roof with binoculars and spy on the little freighters that they suspected of handling large quantities of drugs. Back in the 80s, there was a waterfall of cocaine coming into Miami.
The apartments had an odd assortment of residents.
We had several apartments, all of which were one-room studios, filled with non-English speaking Central American boxers that would put on fights every Saturday at the Miami Beach convention hall. They never gave anyone any trouble and were always busy training.
One time, a lady from the Bahamas in a rental car hit me from behind and hit me so hard my radio came out of my dashboard, and my seat broke, so I felt my car being pushed through the intersection while lying on my back staring at the ceiling of the car. Her car smashed the metal in on one of the rear wheels of my Toyota Corolla. One afternoon in the courtyard, I was banging on it with a sledgehammer trying to straighten it out, when all the non-English speaking boxers came out and removed the sledgehammer from my hand, and they all took turns joyfully, almost gleefully banging on my little Toyota Corolla. They did a good job. I propped up the driver seat with a large igloo ice cooler in the back and put the radio back in, and gave the car to my sister when she moved to Miami with her two little kids to get away from her crazy husband in Texas.
We had several apartments filled with gay men, and we had several apartments filled with gay women who would often fight with each other. One of my favorites was a tomboyish young gay woman and the first time I heard her and saw her I was washing my car in the courtyard and she opened the door to talk to a Roly Poly Latina woman who had just left and yelled out to her that she had better not leave the apartment as the woman went down the stairs. Then, as the woman walked down the stairs, she began yelling at her that she had better not walk down the stairs. Then, as she walked through the courtyard toward a car that another woman was waiting in, she yelled at her that she better not get in that car. Then, as she got in the car, the young gay woman yelled at her that she had better not leave as she began leaving. After the car left, she stood at the door for a long time just looking at the empty parking space.
One day, I heard a funny noise outside, and I opened my door and looked out, and it was the young gay woman trying to move a large heavy metal cash register up the flight of concrete steps to her apartment building. It was extremely heavy and I was impressed that she was able to move it as far as she had. With difficulty, I helped her get it up to her apartment door, and she offered me some beers, but I declined.
One day, all the gay women got in a fight with several apartments of gay men, and the brothers of the gay women came and started fighting with the gay men. It was very entertaining.
We had one large and unpleasant-looking gentleman who was Puerto Rican but told everyone he was Cuban, who was seen breaking into my Volkswagen camper to take a briefcase I got at the thrift store for $1.25 that only held my previous year’s tax returns. After he stole the briefcase, he spread white powder all over everything.
I called the police to make a report about my robbery experience, and they were extremely uninterested.
The Miami police were awful at that time. One time, a bunch of people from the islands pulled up to the front yard of my very elderly aunt and uncle in Coconut Grove and began pulling coconuts off of the tree 5 feet from the front windows of their house by standing on top of the pickup truck they had driven across the lawn. The police told my aunt and uncle that they did not come out for coconuts. I told my aunt and uncle that I now lived only 15 minutes away, and if they were ever bothered again, to call me and we would find out if the city of Miami police come out for baseball bats.
When my landlady found out the cops did not wanna come out to investigate my burglary and car damage, she called and spent 10 minutes cursing them quite forcefully and creatively, I might add, until they came out, and when they came, they were very sour and Moody. However they listened to me tell them the story of my common everyday tiny little burglary but when I explained to them how my main concern wasn’t the fact that my window on my Volkswagen was broken or my briefcase was stolen but that I was concerned about all the white powder that was left all over the interior of my Volkswage their face lit up like Christmas trees. They became transformed.
Within a moment or two, the police had discovered that the interior of my Volkswagen camper had not been gifted with a patina of cocaine, but it looked like it was merely some homemade Santeria voodoo powder made from baby powder with some little glittery shiny pebbles to ward off evil spirits to protect the burglar.
Even though I had witnesses, they refused to interact with the Puerto Rican slash Cuban gentleman. I pondered about what I should do to him until two days went by and I found him sleeping under the mango tree in the courtyard where he had been kicked out of his house by his 4 foot 9 tall petite wife and it was at that point I realized there was nothing I could do to him that would be better than what was already happening to him.
The floor of my studio apartment was terrazzo. I had never encountered terrazzo before, it was pretty cool. I would think from time to time that maybe JFK walked around barefoot in the very same kitchen listening to the traffic of 27th Ave. 10 feet away. There were not many apartments, so the odds were about 24 to one that I was sleeping in JFK’s bedroom.
Soon the building will be torn down, and something else will be put in its place.
I just remembered a story about the Seminole Indians that had a tourist attraction on the site of the motel, and my dad told me a wonderful story about them as he would play with them when he was a kid, but this is going on far too long. Thank you for listening. This is all your fault anyway because you got me hungry thinking about Doritos and a beer before I went to bed.
the old motel/apartment where JFK stayed 1701 27th ave https://www.google.com/maps/@25.7911794,-80.2396194,3a,71.1y,140.8h,78.1t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sQlqag66VGXH22lk3ZBv3qQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D11.89791629050417%26panoid%3DQlqag66VGXH22lk3ZBv3qQ%26yaw%3D140.79759164083777!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMzMC4wIKXMDSoJLDEwMjExNDU1SAFQAw%3D%3D
Robert!
A lesser man might claim they could write an entire Carl Hiaasan novel based solely on your epic comment, but I’m no lesser man. I could get an entire series of Graham Greene novels out of it.
You are very kind. I never thought that terrazzo would turn me so talky.
I’m here for it. Robert, save some characters for the rest of us.
Novel characters, that is. Don’t spare the typographical ones. Carry on.