By Wil Forbis
Airports are a quirky scene. I suppose that’s not an exceptionally
unique or original statement, but I spent a sizable chunk of my last weekend
in and out of airports (going from Seattle to Frisco and back) and it
struck me just how weird they really are. Airports are indubitably the
pinnacle of watered down, middle class culture. There is nothing purposefully
offensive about them in mood or design. They strive to avoid any form
of insult much the way you’d expect elevator music to avoid a discordant
note or chord. But on the other hand, one cannot help but wonder if there’s
a darker side to airports, if the Stepford Wives-esque smiles on the faces
or airline employees and passengers have been augmented by several trips
to one of the many cocktail lounges that dot the map of any American airline
hub. When the stewardess says, "Have a good flight, sir," is she not thinking,
"Burn in hell you social deviant."
I’ve spent a great deal of time in airports; I once calculated that
I’d spent more than a month of my life in the air. I can recall the
crowded, paranoid Iranian airports I experienced as a wee lad in the
seventies, or the eternally mid-western Salt Lake City hub that I’ve
used to switch flights a thousand times, or the gauche decadence of
the Las Vegas airport. (The last time I was there it had a talking David
Cassidy hologram and several hundred slot machines.) My most recent
weekend flight involved both the Sea-Tac and San Franciso airports.
While I’ve become too used to Sea-Tac to find any character in it, the
Frisco airport is the quintessential American airport. Loaded with Newsstand
style bookstores, fast food joints hawking their wares at 40% above
street value, those long flat escalators that allow you to float past
travelers foolish enough to walk, and Smithsonian-like museum displays
on subjects of varying interest (This month it was the history of radio.),
SFO is a hip airport, if such a term can be applied to a place that
has such a perennial seventies feel to it.
But I’m forced to wonder if beneath the blandness of airports lies
something deeper, darker, more sexual. Yes, airports have always had
a certain erotic thrill. This is based on the realization that if you
did manage to have sex with some anonymous person you met at an airport
(A feat I’ve never even attempted) it really could be a random experience,
the ultimate one night stand. They go on to their city, you go on to
yours, with no fear of ever meeting them at an office party or finding
out they’re actually a long lost relative. And the odds of meeting someone
truly different in an airport increase dramatically; someone from another
region, another country (is it not ideal male fantasy purported to be
the Swedish stewardess who comes into town once a month, provides her
services and then is gone before anything messy like a relationship
has time to develop?) A friend of mine once told me of a women he knew
who was an airport groupie: She would hang out in airport bars just
to meet strange, foreign men who could impart on her their strange,
foreign lovemaking techniques (and probably their strange, foreign sexual
diseases, but that’s the cynic in me talking.)
There is another element of excitement that airports offer and that
is the very real threat of physical danger. When you enter, the check-in
personnel queries you whether any strangers have approached you about
carrying mysterious packages onto the plane ("Gosh, I really can’t recall")
Sometimes they physically search your luggage and at the very least
they X-ray it. You are forced to walk through a metal detector set to
go off at your fillings ("Must be that metal plate I got after taking
shrapnel in ‘Nam.") And Lord forgive you if you say something like,
"This Neutron bomb sure is heavy!" or "I think the package of heroin
I sewed into my chest is starting to leak." Everyone is suspect at an
airport, suspect of being an Albanian terrorist, a Jamaican drug dealer
or a mass murderer fleeing the country ("I’m going to France, where
they appreciate serial killers!") For at least a little while you can
transport yourself into a Pink Panther film and imagine you have outwitted
the bumbling fools at InterPol.
That is perhaps the beauty of the airport experience. No-one really
knows who you are. If you wish, you can create a whole new persona for
yourself, a whole new past. Cleanse yourself of your faults and your
sins and become the person you’ve always wanted to be. Want to say you’re
the CEO of a company that makes ornate sexual pleasuring devices? Go
right ahead. Want to state that you run your own modeling agency of
paper thin, heroin chic waifs? No one’s stopping you. And no one will
catch you in the lie.
When my plane set down at the Sea-Tac airport, successfully ending
my weekend adventure, I felt a tinge of sadness. I wanted to stay in
this mythical land where I was free from the drudgery of my day to day
existence. Could I not eternally indulge myself in the airport lifestyle,
downing morning espressos followed by overpriced cocktails while reading
Men’s magazines offering the secret to rock hard abs in thirty days,
and eventually passing out in those little chairs with the built in
TVs? But no, I had a life to return to. So I boarded the metro bus that
takes an hour’s worth of meandering to arrive in downtown Seattle. Within
minutes an angry black man boarded the bus and began spewing forth obscenities
and recounting his experiences in Viet Nam. When a young black woman
approached him about being quiet he effectively chased her off the bus,
heatedly explaining to her that if not for him, she wouldn’t have her
freedom. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we we’re never in
any danger of being invaded by North Viet Nam.) The bus driver did nothing.
The black vet continued his tirade against the now departed women, explaining
that she’d probably spent her life "sucking white boy’s cock." I leaned
back in my seat and thought to myself, "It’s good to be home."
