Essays: EMAIL RELATIONSHIP MEEETING IN REAL LIFE
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Aborted Airport Mission by Andrew Hicks Let me tell you why I won't be going back to Lambert St. Louis Airport for a while. It was Sunday, January 4, 1998, one of those days that reminded me that, when it comes down to it, my life is a bad sitcom. The day started at 6:00. I don't usually get up that early for any reason, but this time I was going to meet Her. There's a 22-year-old woman I've been e-mailing almost daily for the past sixteen months. Yes, and feel free to laugh all you want, I've got a cyber buddy I've never met. I'm one of those cynical people who makes fun of weak individuals who actually care about people they've met over the computer, but somehow I've become one of those hypocrites. And I don't care. Even if I did originally meet Her in TV Chat in my Dick Assman days, She's still one of the three coolest people I've ever known. So why do I capitalize pronoun references to Her? Because I'm starting to think She doesn't exist, not just because She's so impossibly awesome, but because both times I've tried to meet Her at the airport, it's been an aborted mission. The first time was last June, in the heat of the student painter fiasco. Stress was on, so maybe that's why I screwed up something so simple as flight information. I wrote down the time She told me, but when I got to the airport, the board said the flight would arrive twenty minutes later. So my best friend and I went and rode the moving sidewalks for awhile and, by the time we got to the gate, found out the plane had arrived on time after all and She was nowhere to be seen. This time I resolved to resist the temptation of the moving sidewalks and make a beeline for the right gate. Of course, Her flight was getting there at 7:45 in the morning, which I know would significantly diminish my enjoyment of the moving sidewalks. I had planned to go by myself, but my best friend volunteered to come with me again, since he'd already walked a few miles looking for Her in June. Plus it's a deed that earns you ten bonus friend points. Everything seemed to work this time. We got to the airport on time, got a good parking space and went to the gate the board told me to go to. I got there at 7:42 and went to the desk to double check. I asked the woman behind the desk, who looked just like Mrs. Ockmonick from "ALF," if the flight had arrived yet. She told me, "It'll be here in a few minutes, sweetie," in that patronizing daddy- will-be-home-soon tone you always see mothers telling their children in old Westerns. So we sat and waited. The plane arrived promptly at 7:45 and people got off. A lot of people, in clusters of two, three and four, for about fifteen minutes. I waited patiently until no one else was coming. Then the three flight attendants moseyed out and I realized, "No, Andrew, even if it is a new year, even if your life has been on a steady incline the past few years, you still have bizarre streaks of comic bad luck no one else seems to experience." Slivers of doubt began to stab themselves into my brain as I went back up to Mrs. Ockmonick. That was the first time I thought that maybe I should have brought more information with me than flight airline, time and city it was coming from. I switched to Plan B, remembering She was going to set up a connecting flight to San Francisco. I got the time and gate number of the next two connecting flights and led my best friend back down the moving sidewalks to another huge terminal. Surprisingly, he didn't tear me the new exiting orifice I would have ripped him in a similar situation, but the early hour may have restricted his malice somewhat. It didn't matter, though; I was exercising enough self-loathing for two people. And when we got to Gate 45, home of the 8:45 San Francisco flight, I wasn't really expecting to see anyone fitting Her description. I was already waving the mental white flag of the disorganized guy who finally realizes what he's up against in a huge airport full of strangers. Searches at gates 45 and 51, where the second San Francisco flight was leaving, yielded nothing. That was it for me, I was ready to get the hell out of the airport for several months at least. We trudged our way to the car, me wondering how She slipped through my fingers again, why I didn't demand more information like flight number, gate number, seat number, description of outfit to be worn and number of people on the plane. It seems like missing Her twice in the face of such seemingly foolproof instructions can't be coincidence. I came to the conclusion that, either some cosmic force didn't want us to meet, some subconscious part of my mind is making sure I screw up or, my favored theory, She doesn't exist. She's part of some diabolical computer program written by Bill Gates in his spare time to mess with the heads of teenage boys everywhere and make them frustrate themselves in airports all over the country. I wouldn't be thinking about any of this two minutes later. A whole new crisis arose. As we pulled out of the airport parking lot, I pulled the parking lot claim ticket from my pocket and set it in the empty ashtray to have it ready. This because I also have bad luck with parking lot tickets -- the same night I lost $14 at the baseball game last summer, I lost my parking lot ticket and had a frustrated Aiesha standing there while I frantically searched my car. She finally threw her hands up in exasperation and yelled, "Just get out of here!" saving me some no doubt exorbitant fee. Since then, I've always stuck my claim tickets in my wallet with the logic that, this way, if I lose the ticket I'm going to have much bigger problems than pissing off some employee stationed at the exit. That day at the airport, though, it was firmly stuck in my ashtray until I looked down and saw about ninety percent of it had worked its way into a horizontal crack separating the ashtray from the inner mechanisms of the car. I couldn't do anything because I was driving and, besides, I was almost at the ticket booth. I figured I'd easily pull it out for her. When I got up to the booth and looked down into the ashtray, I saw nothing. No ticket. An R-rated exclamation shot through my mind. I looked up at the ticket woman for some sign of sympathy, to which her worn-down face replied gruffly, "You lose your ticket, it's 18 dollas!" I assessed the situation. I was a poor college boy who parked in an airport lot for less than an hour; I'd be damned if I was going to give Afeni the satisfaction of making me fork over a twenty for only two dollas change. So I threw the car into reverse and flew back about fifty feet to tear my car apart in search of that ticket. I looked around for any kind of miniature tweezer apparatus, now cursing myself for not carrying one of those tacky Swiss Army knives around for just this kind of emergency. I tried futilely to remove the ashtray to give me better access to the crack. My only option, it seemed, was to pull the entire storage unit / armrest up from its footing, but even in my adrenaline-charged airport anger, all I could manage was a slight ripping sound amid a flurry of naughty words most sailors would probably think twice about using. I was inches from just flipping Afeni the bird and plowing my '87 Grand Am through the wooden gate when the inner casing of the storage unit came up, revealing a stack of missing papers. In one split second, I saw my report card from second quarter tenth grade, a year- old insurance card and, yes, oh yes, the airport ticket. I threw the car into drive and squealed my tires up to my adversary's booth with great haste. "I've got it!" I announced in a triumphant tone of voice. Afeni begrudgingly took the ticket and ran it through her computer. "$2.25," she announced. Highway robbery for an hour's parking but still much more acceptable than "18 dollas!" I handed her the twenty and she counted out my change -- three quarters and seventeen one-dollar bills. She thought that, even though I'd thwarted her plan to bilk my butt out of that money, most of which she would undoubtedly pocket, she could at least make my life a little bit less convenient by having to carry around seventeen one-dollar bills. Wrong, sister. I wouldn't have given a damn if she gave me 1,775 pennies; I would have proudly displayed my trophy. Take that, Afeni. And there's a postscript to the story. Yes, I went to the wrong gate, but it turns out My cyberbuddy, my e-mail girl, Her flight was cancelled. She had to take a later flight into St. Louis. So it turns out this aborted airport meeting wasn't my fault. Still, in the back of my mind, I think Bill Gates was laughing his head off that day. From the Internet humor diary "A Fourth Year," housed in its entirety at the Andrew Hicks WWW Extravaganza homepage (http://students.missouri.edu/~ahicks). |