Car arrived prompltly at 930. Driver friendly, professional
demeanor. Gregarious, and we banetered for much of the
hour drive to JFK. He’s originally from Jamaica, has a wife
and 27 yo kid in the Navy down in SC. --proud of him. Had
him when he was pretty much a kid himself. “He was more
like my little brother.” The son is buying a condo for 160, and
the old man is putting in 12,000 for the down payment. Got
talking about pets, cause he once drove a FOX animation creative
to the airport with his six cats. The dude loved his cats.
“Takes all types to make the world go around. In Jamaica, the
dogs live outside the house. They come to the door and look
around, but they know their boundaries.”
He had other stories about driving folks from Bluesky around,
most memorably the guy he picked up at his house in Mahopac,
“Big guy,” who’s odor forced him to open the windows. “I think
he was a programming genius or an editor. Didn’t dress well, wore
dirty jeans.” You’d think somebody would tell him. I asked hold
old the guy was and the driver guesses middle age, “mid-thirties.”
I really have no clue (nor want to find out), other than more than
few collegues are from that area northern Westchester. At one
point I wonder whether this guy angling for a tip with the bonhomie,
but I know I’m too much of a knee-jerk cynic when it comes to
parsing human motives, so I settle for him just being a good guy.
Because of this, I feel I should offer thr gratuity when we pull up
to the curb at the American terminal (almost spooky lack of traffic
at 10am), and this leads to the obligatory social faux pax moment.
Knowing n the past I’ve been informed not to tip the driver as
gratuity has been pre-paid, I figure ten bucks would be a reasonable
over-tip if this guy has in fact been pre paid (I have no clue what the
deal is this time). So, bags offloaded I hold out a twenty and say
“Great ride, man” and ask for ten back. Well, he can’t find a ten in
his wallet, so I stand there awkwardly for a beat thinking “Don’t tip
him a twenty, no way, its too much!” The guy ends the impasse
with “don’t worry, next time boss”. Striding off into the terminal,
I wonder when the next WTF moment that I am responsible for
will occur.
For now, I’m 38,000 feet over the mid section of the country,
crammed in next to the mid-deck gally on a 767. My ass hurts.
Then we're descending somewhere over the Nevada desert, ground
invisible under a rolling meringue landscape of cloud tops.
Soon enough, its time to plunge into the meringue and make
a wide, slow turn to land from the east, which air traffic control in
the wet and windy LA basin has deemed necessary.
To be banking and maneuvering through solid clouds for
anything longer than a few seconds has always made me un-
comfortable. For my primitive id, there be monsters, mountains,
and other passenger jets here in this gray nothingness. So I
examine each moment that passes during the fifteen minute descent
f0r some sense of bearing and relationship to the ground.
Then, from below, the gray void darkens and dissolves and there
is the storm dark ocean dotted with white caps. So, a landing
from the east it is.
The limo driver who picks me up from LAX looks a bit like the
actor Luke Wilson, doing nothing to dispel the old saw that everyone's
an actor or writer out here, biding their time. The limo is beyond
clean, it appears to gleam with cleanliness on a molecular level.
So the limo patter starts with observations about the differences
in appearance between New York and LA Towncars. Its ap-
parent to me during this trip, and again a week later in Miami,
that it really is more about a certain visual here--nobody wants
to experience old and ugly. Back east, the grimy and grim
aspects of things are more taken for granted, maybe simply
because the weather gets bad and the bricks and mortar are
much older and crumbling and nobody can afford to keep
it all clean.
The limo patter--yes, I get the guy's story in broad strokes,
of growing up in the snows of Minnesota spinning the Jeep
around in the local ice rink for chuckles, the year in Sydney with
his girlfriend, and the philosophy the crept up on him from time
spent in other cultures that you should work to provide only
what you need--the simple daily joy of life in many places
can be had without spending much at all.
Soon he'll be heading to Bolivia to spend time with a girl from
La Paz--a lawyer for the government. He says he may try
again to convince her to bring her skills and education to the
States, but the subtext of everything he's been sharing makes
me wonder if he knows that maybe she's getting too old for the
career upheaval that such a displacement would demand.
What unfolds when even scratching the surface of people's lives.
The limo's at the hotel.
The dank Culver City vista.
No comments:
Post a Comment