I thinking of topics to blog about, I’ve often thought “Has anything really that interesting happened to me, to my life, that I would share a story from my past and people would find it interesting and amusing?” Initially I thought the answer was “No,” but then I started thinking about some moments that stick out in my mind, and, well, I’ll let this next one speak for itself…
My old job as a consultant put me on the road a fair amount of the time. The company referred to people in my position as “road warriors”.
The more you travel, the more likely you are to have a travel experience that you would just as soon forget. I had heard bunches of stories from my fellow traveling colleagues. Planes skidding off of runways, jumping onto the inflatable emergency slides, air sickness, you name it.
My story is not nearly that dramatic. The planes have worked and the pilots have been competent. But what you can never count on is people, that strange, moody, highly varied collective we refer to as the “human race”. My travel story (and it’s a horror story) centers around one human I had the strange misfortune of sitting next to on a flight out to Kansas City.
The flight was a small one, going from Providence to Kansas City, with a quick stop in Cincinnati to change flights. The airplane was one of the fourteen row/three seats across jobs, with seat A being a window, then the aisle, then seats B and C, with C being the other window. Cramped and unpleasant.
I saw her in the waiting area. My first impression was a biblical one. She reminded my of an Easter marshmallow peep. She was a plump lady, draped in a large cotton-candy pink dress without shape that dropped to below her knees. She wore Chuck Taylors on her feet.
As we boarded, as I squeezed my bag down the aisle, I watched the seat numbers climb. One, two, three, four, five, all the way up until I found my seat. It was an aisle seat, and low and behold, who should I find sitting in seat C but the Peep.
I gave her a polite smile, pulled out my book, and shoved the bag under the seat in front of me. I’m not the kind of traveler who likes to make conversation while he flies. If God had given us signs above our heads, mine would read LEAVE ME ALONE for most of my flights.
But she wanted to be friendly. And she wanted to warn me about her traveling companion. She pointed to the soft, nylon mesh bag she had placed under the seat in front of her. It was a cat carrier. It meowed.
She then began to strike up a conversation. My book open, my eyes on the page, she nevertheless asked me where I was going in a thick accent. Might have been eastern European, but who knows. I limited the conversation as much as I could. “Kansas City,” I muttered with a smile.
“Oh,” she replied.
I went back to my book but stole occasional glances at her, mostly to ensure we had enough space between us. That is when I noticed them. Buried in the thick dark hair on her forearm, not far from the Swatch that had stopped working, were the scabs. Large thick crusty ones, the kind you get from a pretty deep cut. They were circular and there were three of them.
I inched my arm a little closer to my body.
All was (relatively) well until we were halfway to Cincinnati. I was reading. She was thumbing through the airline magazine, then the Sky Mall catalogue. Then, as I stole another proximity-related glance, I realized the scabs were gone and she was bleeding. At some point during this flight, she had picked them off and now they were bleeding
Profusely.
And she did not have a napkin.
So she did the next best thing to help stem the flow of blood. She daubed at the blood with her fingers and then sucked on them.
I wish I were I’m kidding. But honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. She had picked the scabs off her hairy arms and was daubing the blood with her fingers and then licking her fingers in order to clean them.
With a half hour to go, the flight became the longest of my life. I spent the rest of the time in a bizarre game of Dodge ’Em. Her arm would swing this way and that and I would maneuver my own arm that way and this in order to avoid a bloody benediction.
I was so close to success. We had begun our descent, the beverage service was over, the only thing left was to give our trash to the passing flight attendant. As the flight attendant reached our row, the Peep reached across me to drop her trash in the bag. In a mad panic, I flattened myself into my chair as hard as I could, surprising the attendant. My arm acted independently from my body, desperately seeking refuge.
But to no avail. The Peep reached across my body and brushed her bloody arm against my shirt.
My game of Dodge ‘Em folded in furious resignation. I sat and stew in my passive-aggressive anger and waited for the flight to end. I prayed she wasn’t connecting. (She wasn’t). Once we touched down in Cincinnati, I washed my hands three times and dapped at the stain with a wet paper towel. But there was no hope
The moment I got to the hotel, I unzipped open the suitcase, and grabbed whatever was on top. Things get crushed and wrinkled when traveling and I didn’t care. Off came the shirt and into the trash it went.
I liked that shirt, damn it.
