Fear of Flying

 “Every creature is made up of both ugliness and beauty, and must be granted the time to manifest in all aspects.” Italo Svevo, A Very Old Man

Traveling by air in the US sucks -- unless one has the money to fly first class. If you sit with the paupers in coach, as I do, it all feels like one continuous rip-off. Cramped seats, endless exhortations to sign-up for the airlines’ credit card, WiFi that should be complimentary but isn’t, limited overhead storage, exacerbated by baggage fees that force passengers to carry their luggage onboard. Paupers board last, after the passengers who need assistance, those with small children, active duty military (our knee-jerk, thank-you-for-your-service obeisance), Platinum, Silver, Gold, or Bronze club members, and, of course, the elite in First Class. By the time paupers reach their seats all nearby overhead storage is invariably taken, which means you have to stow your luggage in a bin in a row behind you, a real problem if you have limited time to make a connecting flight. Good luck retrieving your bag once the plane lands, stops, and the scrum to exit begins; you might as well try to swim against a tidal wave. All you can do is sit and wait, while the minutes slip past and your chance of making your connecting flight fades. 

Then there’s TSA, that lovely gift from 9/11 and the War on Terror, still part of our lives two decades later. What I most hate about TSA is the inconsistency, and I’ll give you an example. On Saturday at the Portland airport, I was required to remove my shoes and place my Kindle in its own bin; on Sunday, at the same airport, I was ordered to leave my shoes on and keep all my electronic devices in my bag. Is the inconsistency designed to keep the terrorists guessing or just a cruel joke on passengers, decided each day on a whim or by coin flip? The TSA lines in Portland were long, snarled, slow, and maddening.  

I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. 

The bus from Tillamook, where I went to visit my brother as I have done every September for the past five years, was thirteen minutes late leaving the transit center, and that thirteen minutes proved to be crucial. The bus was scheduled to arrive at Union Station in Portland at three p.m. and my flight to San Francisco departed at four. I knew it was going to be tight and making the flight to San Francisco and then on to Santa Barbara depended on everything coming off just right. I had to catch an UBER from Union Station as soon as my feet hit the pavement, hope the traffic to the airport wasn’t heavy, and get through TSA. As usually happens when you’re in a hurry, everything conspired against me: my UBER driver hit one red light after another and with uncanny skill got behind every slow moving car, bus or truck, and never once exceeded the posted speed limit, which I completely understood from his point of view, but his strict adherence to the law of the road was not advancing my cause. I watched the minutes pass on my phone knowing my chances of getting home were slipping away. I dashed into the airport and headed for the TSA line. When I saw the queue of people waiting to be screened I thought, “Well, I’m fucked.” I had about five minutes to catch my flight and the queue was  barely moving. TSA agents barked commands. There was a snafu with the boarding pass of the man in front of me. When I finally cleared the screening process, I grabbed my bags and shoes off the conveyor belt and hightailed it toward my gate in my socks. Too late. The flight had left. “Oh,” the lady behind the United counter said, “we waited for you as long as we could.” Fuck, fuck, fuck! I thought. Motherfucking fuck fuck. The gate agent re-booked me on a flight the next day, leaving at eight a.m. I sat down in the empty waiting area, caught my breath, put my shoes on and called my wife. It was just after four. The thought of sixteen long hours in an airport wasn’t appealing, but I also didn’t feel like spending money for a hotel room. My wife thought otherwise and said she would do some quick research and call me back. Ten minutes later I was in an UBER headed for the Howard Johnson Portland Airport on northeast Sandy Boulevard. “It looks decent enough,” my wife said. 

On the way to the hotel I saw an abandoned encampment on the side of the road, two pop-up trailers parked back-to-back, amid a bunch of debris, mangled folding chairs, tires, and a red porta-potty with a gaping gash in its side that resembled a lopsided smile. The trailers had been torched. Thoughts of a hot shower, something to eat, and a night of sleep ran through my head, but when the driver pulled up to the HoJo my heart dropped. Sketchy doesn’t do the place justice. The parking lot was full of older cars, some of them with the hoods up and the doors thrown open. The thirty-something woman behind the counter in the office looked like she had firsthand experience with hard-living. It took her a while to check me in because the phone kept ringing. “Well, we need to get her out of 106,” I heard her say. The white walls of the office were dingy, scuffed. “Breakfast Area” read a sign on the wall behind me. My room was on the second floor of Building 3. Up a short flight of stairs, through a metal door with a sign that read, “Keep Door Closed.” When I opened the door to room 231 I caught the sickening smell of stale nicotine. One king bed, nothing on the walls except a flat screen TV, a desk and office chair, mini-fridge, and a dresser with three drawers. The blue-gray carpet was threadbare and drab, the grout in the bathtub dark with mold. One towel was on the floor. I decided against a shower. I pulled the comforter back and examined the bed for bugs, hair, nail clippings, stains. Finding no evidence of any I parted the curtains and slid open the window to let some air in. There were gaps in the rusted chain link fence between the hotel property and the grungy house in the lot next door. A woman’s gruff, pack-a-day voice echoed below. Holy shit, I thought. Where the fuck am I?

I ordered some Indian food and two bottles of beer to be delivered. It was ridiculously expensive, but I don’t eat cheap fast food. It arrived about a half hour later, courtesy of a man named Chris, but when I got back to my room and opened the bag I found no utensils, napkins, wetnaps, nothing, and of course I didn’t have a bottle opener and there sure as hell wasn’t one in the room. I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. With diligent effort I managed to pop the cap from the beer bottles with my belt buckle, spread a towel over my lap and dug into the chicken and biryani rice, eating it with my fingers like an Afghan sheep herder. 

By eight p.m. I was in bed with the lights out and the black-out curtains drawn, reading Samuel Beckett on my Kindle -- appropriately bleak material given the circumstances. Dull light spilled around the black-out curtains. From time to time voices echoed in the corridor, a door slammed, heavy footsteps crossed the floor in the room above me. The alarm on my phone was set for 4:30 a.m. I figured I’d get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, and order an UBER; better to arrive three hours early than late, and at least I could get a cup of coffee and a scone or muffin. Though I told myself not to, I kept reaching for my phone to check the time. 

9:00. 9:17. 9:53. 10:12. 10:47. 11:28.

I didn’t sleep at all, I just lay there with my eyes shut, listening to the noises. Around midnight a pattern emerged that would continue non-stop for the next three hours. First a door in the corridor creaked open and then banged shut, followed by the sound of someone in flip-flops slap-slap-slapping down the hall, through the metal exit door, which banged shut after them. Only minutes later this pattern was reversed, the exit door creaked open, slammed shut, the flip-flops slap-slapped, and I heard the beep of a magnetic key opening a room door and then slamming shut. I could have peered through the peephole to see what was going on but decided it was better not to know. Over and over I heard the same pattern of sounds, punctuated occasionally by a woman’s voice, and once by a man’s. Around three-thirty a.m. I heard three rapid bangs echo from somewhere outside the hotel, but I couldn’t tell if these were gunshots or a car backfiring, nor if they were near or far away. Shortly thereafter I heard a siren in the distance, then another and another, all which seemed to be growing closer and converging before fading away. I resumed resting with my eyes closed.

I was up before my alarm went off. I packed my stuff and ordered an UBER. The car would arrive in twenty minutes. I tracked the car’s progress and left my room when it was five minutes away, plenty of time to get to the pick-up point near the office. When I left my room the corridor was empty and silent, but once I exited the building I found myself in an active police crime scene. Red and blue lights flashed from half a dozen Portland police department vehicles and a large crime scene lab truck, and the entire hotel property was criss-crossed with yellow and orange police tape emblazoned with Police Line Do Not Cross. Cops were milling around in twos and threes, talking. Police radios crackled. My driver was due to arrive any moment and I couldn’t see a way off the property, so I stepped over the tape and hailed two cops by waving to them. “You have to go all the way around,” they said. All the way around where? I thought, starting to panic that I would miss my ride and be stuck in this Twilight Zone of a hotel. I finally made it out to the street and saw the red Tesla driven by Ivan. Salvation.

While I was waiting for my flight to San Francisco I Googled Howard Johnson Portland Airport. While there was nothing about that morning’s incident, I did discover that there had been a stabbing at the property in 2011, and that for months it had been a temporary shelter for the homeless, which explained the junk cars and downtrodden types I saw hanging around. A couple of stinging reviews described open drug dealing and prostitution, brawls and filth. The complimentary breakfast advertised with such fanfare on the hotel website was derided as a piece of dry white toast. 

I think I will stay close to home for a while.