Haresh Shah
Lonely And Lost On The Road
I have just flown in from Mexico City. I’m sitting at the bar having a beer at United terminal of Los Angeles International Airport. I have almost an hour before the departure of my connecting flight to Santa Barbara. I’m probably scribbling some notes in my agenda while slowly savoring my beer. Mine is one of the last flights to leave the terminal and there are only a few of us lingering at the bar, waiting. Among the people, I notice a middle aged woman at the other end of the bar. I feel her gaze pointed at me. Must be in her mid-fifties, longer than shoulder length frizzled hair and dull grey eyes, she looks haggard and somewhat drunk, twirling a glass filled with a yellowish liquor, probably some Scotch or a Bourbon based cocktail. I get back to my scribbling and am absorbed in it when I feel a human shadow shuffling next to me.
‘Mind I sit next to you?’ Seeing me a bit confused, she doesn’t wait for my answer, instead she eases herself on the next bar stool, as unsteady as she is on her feet, and asks the bar tender for ‘one more of the same.’ I try to ignore her, but she is intent on making small talk.
‘So, where are you off too?’ she slurs her words.
‘Oh, not far. Just a quick hop to Santa Barbara.’
‘I’m going there too.’ I don’t respond to that.
‘My daughter goes to school there, you know, at UCSB.’
She is in the mood to talk. I’m not. Besides, I’m somewhat repelled by the way she reeks of alcohol and is slurring her words and is so close in my hair. I try to be polite and plot my getaway. In the next few minutes I find out that she is divorced, and is having hard time with her daughter at the UCSB, that they don’t see each other that often, and even though she lives in LA, she doesn’t drive and she is hoping she and her daughter could be more of friends. I don’t remember her name, or not sure even if I asked, but I will call her Ellie, I think she should be Ellie. I converse with her in monosyllables and when they announce the departure of the flight, I excuse myself to run to the bathroom and make my escape from the bar.
I purposely take longer before boarding and then leisurely walk to the plane. It’s a small city hopper jet and is sparsely occupied. I don’t see her anywhere on the board. I walk as far into the front as I could and duck my head below the head rest. But wouldn’t you know? She comes striding down the aisle just when the plane is about to take off and plumps herself right next to me. I am not welcoming, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Fortunately, its such a short flight that before we know, we have landed in Santa Barbara.
The few passengers scurry away while my friends Mark and Ann (Stevens) receive me with their usual, welcome back feel good brother. Mark picks up my suitcase and standing there by the baggage claim is Ellie. She looks so alone and abandoned.
‘Is your daughter coming to get you?’
‘No, she doesn’t have a car.’
‘How are you getting to her apartment?’
‘I was hoping to get a ride from someone, she doesn’t live far, in Isla Vista.’ Which is only a few blocks away from where we all live in Goleta.
Normally the most generous and helpful Mark and Ann are not forthcoming. First because their little blue Datsun pickup can hardly seat two people comfortably. With me in there it would already be a squeeze. Plus seeing Ellie the way she is, I am sure that like me, they too weren’t kin on all of us squeezed in together, even though it would only be a ten minute ride.
Santa Barbara airport is only a little more than a shack. Surprisingly, it has frequent jets landing and taking off to and from Los Angeles and San Francisco and I believe Las Vegas and Phoenix. For someone like me it’s a heaven, because it serves almost like an airlift to Los Angeles Airport to connect with whichever parts of the world I am asked to go during those two years of me returning back to Playboy as a freelancer while still being continue to live in the yet not overly crowded sunny southern California. But there is no public transportation between the airport and anywhere else and there certainly aren’t any cabs cruising by. The one man operation of the United too has thrown the last piece of the baggage on the small conveyer belt and has already driven away. So however begrudgingly, we squeeze Eliie into the little cabin of the Datsun, her perched atop my lap, and we take her to Isla Vista. We somehow survive her reeking of booze and her slurred pronouncements. Fortunately, a young woman comes running down the stairs from the second floor of the strip of student apartments.
‘I was beginning to worry!’ We breath a sigh of relief in that however repulsive we found her, we have now safely delivered her into the hands of her daughter.
●●●
On another night, I find myself in a similar predicament. That evening, I have unexpectedly decided to return home. Normally, if not Mark or Ann, I am always picked up by someone upon my arrival and taken to the airport by one of our close circle of friends – curiously, often in my own Buick. But in this instance, I wasn’t able to get hold of anybody before I left, not even when I tried to call someone from Los Angeles. They all must have been some place together. So I board the plane and hope that I’ll still be able to call someone from the airport to come pick me up. Fortunately for me, on the plane I’m seated next to a middle-aged man with a weathered face, who too is quite drunk but is still coherent and introduces himself as an off duty airline pilot heading home. Let’s call him Joe. He tells me that he used to fly commercial jets but now in his semi-retirement, he flies small corporate type chartered planes. Seeing that I am rushing for the public telephone upon our arrival, he offers to give me ride home.
‘It’s not too much out of my way.’ He says, even though taking me to Goleta would mean driving north first and then turn around and go south to Carpentaria, where he lives with his wife. I thank him and we walk to his Toyota Corolla parked in the airport parking lot. Like an old-fashioned gentleman, Joe opens the door and lets me in first. He gets in on the driver’s side of the car, puts the key in the ignition and then nothing. For a flicker of a moment, I think of the similar encounter in Chicago with an older man who turned out to be gay and had some amorous intentions for us. It took some doing for me to have him stop the car in the middle of the street and me getting out of it in a hurry and walking a mile home. Instinctively I put myself on the psychological alert.
When he still doesn’t start the car, I’m getting nervous. I sense his face turning to look at me, as if to lean sideways to kiss. But instead, I see a sudden string of tears rolling down his eyes. And then he just plain breaks down and like a lost little kid, begins to sob in big and loud sobs. Uncontrollably so.
‘I’m sorry. My life is all fucked up! I need to talk to someone.’ He mumbles through his tears, his voice cracking like a badly scratched vinyl record.
Imagine this. Santa Barbara airport is in the middle of nowhere. There are no houses, no commercial areas, no motels and the little airport itself is now closed down. Lights turned off. The only lights are on the airfield, which must have been a farmland at some distant past. I am sitting there with this stranger in his little Toyota sedan – the lone car standing in an empty parking lot. I no longer feel any danger of being made pass at. But I am alone, with this man who is probably in need of some professional help for which I don’t in the least qualify. All I could do is, what another human being would. I first let him cry, howls and all. When he has calmed down, something he says guides me.
‘And I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything in the last twenty four hours. And I’ve been drinking!’ Suddenly I am hungry too. He is not familiar with this part of the town. I direct him to the nearest pizza joint that’s open late. We order a large pizza and beer. Now I’m in need of a drink.
Here is the story he tells me. Just the day before, he has wracked an airplane while landing. He has survived without a scratch, but his job as a pilot is in jeopardy. He couldn’t help having a few drinks before flying, feeling down and out and devastated, because his wife is lying home dying. Had an argument over her care with his step-son who punches him in the mouth. I see his hand automatically reach and touch the clear bruise on his face. Haven’t had a piece of ass in more than two years, man! He tells me. Probably alluding to his wife’s long drawn out illness. What I don’t ask or no longer remember. He is absolutely out of it, besides himself and is so miserable. He keeps saying all evening long: ‘You know, I am going to drive that thing off the cliff as soon as I drop you off.’ He is dead serious as he says it, every time ever more so. The more I try to pacify him, the more he wants to end it all.
Not knowing what to do, I think of my friend Janice (Maloney) in Chicago. Bless her heart, as she would say. She volunteers a night or two a week at the local crisis call center on the suicide hotline. She is trained to talk to the caller until she is relatively certain that she has succeeded in pacifying and talked the person out of the suicidal track. I wish I had her training, her patience and her compassion. Nothing I can do about the training, but I can certainly conjure up some patience and compassion. I put myself on a sympathetic friendly stranger’s mode.
We demolish a large pizza washed down with beer while I let him talk. I try to tell him about all the positives in life. I try to tell him that the test of a real man is to survive the storms. I tell him, that his ailing wife loves him and needs him more than ever. I try to paint a pretty picture of how everything’s going to turn out alright in the end. At the end of two hours, I feel I have helped him sober up enough that he doesn’t repeat his threat of driving off the cliff. Would have been an easy thing to do, as there are many of them along the coast, especially near Carpentaria where he lives.
But I feel reasonably certain that having had a chance to unload what had him so devastated, he seemed no longer a threat to himself. Before he drops me off, he apologizes profusely for burdening me with his problems, but thanks me as profusely for letting him pour out all that had bottled up inside of him. Thanks again. You just may have saved my life! He self consciously hugs me before getting back into his car. I watch him go around the cul-de-sac of Linfield Place and then swing out and turn left on the main road. I take comfort in the fact that his driving is straight and steady and he observes the turn signals. I watch the tail light in the distance and can’t help but imagine it going down a cliff. But I don’t think so.
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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OF PINOT NOIR AND THE BURLAPING
Jan Heemskerk, the editor-in-chief of Playboy’s Dutch edition and I take a trip to California’s wine country north of San Francisco and visit various wineries and their owners and the winemakers. Quite sophisticated, and then take a long and winding mountainous road to a little town called Boonville, which prides itself in its exquisite Pinot Noir. Nothing had prepared us for the wonderful evening we spent with the men and the women of the Pinot Noir country.
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