“So, did you enjoy the flight?” I inquire to Nat. He volleys a reticent scowl shoved back into my direction which makes me ashamed of having enjoyed the flight. I discern a decade and a half later that I never endured more than a two paragraph conversation with Nat Pflederer that I did not instigate. Nat seems vexed that I am holding my book bag over my shoulder. He seems irked that I am walking next to him. The glassed skeletal ribs allow the sunlight to permeate the interior of the terminal at O'hare. Nat and I walk to the stacks of televisions toppled on top of each other as if on clearance, displaying departures and arrivals There is free coffee in the lobby and I help myself to two cups during the interim. When I inquire to Nat if he would like a cup to pass the time he looks at me as if to say don’t be disgusting. I take a slurp of my coffee, not realizing that in the daily caffeine count I am up somewhere in the vicinity of approx. 14 cups over the discourse of the past three hours, granting my eyelids an all-nighter cramming for midterms semblance.
I tell Nat I’ve been anticipating this trip for three years. I tell him the first two years I struck out swinging.
Nat tells me that he felt like it was no big deal.
“I pretty much knew I had the trip won after the speech."
“Really. I wrote it out and like worked on it for two months.”
“I didn’t.” He responds sounding perturbed. Sounding as if he s somehow insulted because I am trying to usurp his oxygen. I wonder what I did to piss him off, internally musing what inbred fowl leftover from the annual Tremont Turkey festival crawled up his ass and died.
“I thought the newspaper article said that your mom made you go over your speech a million times.”
Nat makes a little grunt as if he is choking on mahi-mahi before looking the opposite direction and down and saying the word yeah completely ignoring my query. We continue to walk in the direction of the stacked television and the heralded signs written in three different languages announcing arrivals and departures. I look into my ticket like a bouncer verifying legal alcohol consuming date on a state driver’s license. Nat continues to walk slightly ahead of me so that it doesn’t appear we are traveling together.
I try to quash my elation to his caliber of verbal insipidity. I try to sound like its no big deal. Only I can’t. He seems intent on holding his nose up into the ceiling like some sort of snorkel indicative of snobbery every time I ask him a question. I wonder why he hasn’t decided to ask me a single question. Why he seems to have made up his prerogative well in advance that he wants nothing whatsoever to do with me. I am still trying to melt an ice breaker. I am still yearning for conversation. I am inkling for a fellow Young Columbusian to share in my enthusiasm in traversing over the Atlantic ocean.
“It’ll be nice to see London. I can’t wait to see Big Ben.” Thinking of Nat’s inane 'I have-a-friend-name-Ben-and-he’s-really-tall' aside published in the paper on Easter Sunday. I tell him that I also can’t wait to see St. Paul’s cathedral. And the castles. And that I can’t wait to scale the globe and to meet fellow burgeoning intellectual savants and have conversations about the political clime of the globe.
Nat shrugs.
The christened deep blue swells of morning echoing the altitude above has now permeated to ground level. It feels like an azure swills of the ocean has been tipped over and that I am walking in swirl of molecules and light. I take another swig of my coffee. I add more sugar. Nat is still standing near the ARRIVAL/DEPARTURE sign not talking to anyone but refusing to acknowledge my presence in the slightest.
. Nat says that our United flight to Newark is right on time without looking down at his ticket.
. Nat says that our United flight to Newark is right on time without looking down at his ticket.
I refuse to give up.
I alight my PARADE backpack like hunter-gather and a fresh kill over my back. I walk in light in his direction. He looks at me and turns the other way as if he under strict covert allegiance not to make eye contact. I talk to him again anyway. I begin by saying the word sew.
“So, I hear you wrestle for Tremont? Any good?”
Nat snaps his eyelids down at me as if it is causing him a certain amount of calculated physical pain to interface with this south-side Peoria peasant.
“I wrestle Varsity.” He announces stoically, before informing me that he has been wrestling Varsity since mid-sophomore year and that he has lettered successively and that he made sectionals in his weight class last year. I feel like inquiring if he weight class he so adroitly donned tights and wrestled in was labeled assholes. Instead I tell him that I run Cross-country. Nat tells me that he could tell that already because he read the back of my jacket. He then rhetorically asks me if I think he is illiterate or something. I tell him that I ran Varsity and that I was on the verge of going to state and incurring some serious damage in terms of setting local records only I got a stress-fracture mid-season.
He responds back by saying that’s nice, but then adds that he’s never really felt there was much technical skill associated with running.
“It’s always like those guys who run all day are just really skinny and afraid of getting their ass kicked. It’s not a real sport like wrestling or football.” He says.
I look down and press my glasses up the slope of my nose back into my forehead. I notice he is wearing his gratis PARADE fanny pack, something I adamantly refuse to buckle around my waist in the slightest out of principle. I want to tell him that wearing that fanny pack just looks plain wrong, like some sort of a vestigial codpiece leftover from a sparsely attended renaissance fair. I want to tell him that only girls wear fanny backs and that I honestly didn’t want to bring it and sort of gave it to my youngest sibling Jenn until my mom insisted that I place it in my suitcase because obviously if PARADE sent it they must want me to have it.
I refrain. I go back for another refill (java refill 15/16), pressing the plastic nozzle and filling my receptacle.
I am in O'Hare. Less than a month ago I was endeavoring to mosh at the Hyatt across the street from this international traveling hub where I find myself walking with someone from my own area-code traveling across the sea with me who wants nothing to do with me. How last month I ended up trying to impress the red headed ended girl and up skidding across the dance floor in my boots like skis in a rink of lube.
The red headed girl who also wanted nothing to do with me.
I continue to search for an icebreaker that won’t melt in medias snobbery. I ask him if he travels much. I tell him that the furthest I have been away from home is Washington DC two summers ago. And then Michigan.
Nat tells me he was born is Brazil, something I already know, but fails to mention that his parents were God fearing missionaries. Briefly I wonder if his mom fast and prays the way my mom has been fasting and praying for the past week—asking her highly individualized spiritual surrogate for good weather for her sons pending sojourn, asking her deity that he bless her eldest progeny with safe travel and that his mind is open and that, somehow, this trip will draw her son closer to Jesus by availing to him the ever fluctuating wonders of the globe.
“Yeah I actually tried to call you several times. I was hoping you would want to talk about the trip. Maybe hang out and get a cup of coffee or something.”
“Yeah, that was really annoying how you always used to call. One time I was with a chick. You should really be more respectful about people you don’t know and their personal lives.”
I wonder what I did. I immediately apologize. I tell him that sorry I didn’t know.
He responds by offering a lackadaisical shrug.
We pass a bookstore. There is a kiosk showing a magazine with Dave Gahan on the cover. The magazine has the word DETAILS bannered across the top. It is a cheap periodical. Only two dollars. I stop inside the book store. . With the searing cantata’s of I FEEL YOU still lodged in my head like some sort of whirring metaphysical migraine. I pick up the magazine. There is only one left. The employee behind the counter seems to recognize me somehow—like he expected I was coming. Like he knows me from somewhere.
“Good to see you.” He says. I smile back, lifting the magazine from its rack. The first picture I turn to is Dave Gahan scrutinizing the voluptuous anatomy of what looks like graffiti'd angel. I set the magazine down in its place. The gentlemen behind the counter continues to smile.
As I peruse the magazine Nat shoots me another of his signature lip-scowls.
"That band is like so gay."
"What kind of music do you listen too?" I inquire, waiting for him to say something Tremont hickish like Garth Brooks or Clint Black. Nat responds to my query snidely by stating a wouldn't you like to know. For the second time in a month I am back in O’hare accompanied by the isolated silhouette of my own thoughts and for the second time in a month the individual I want to talk to wants absolutely nothing to do with me. I wonder if Jason was like this to Karen Christmas last year. If she was confused and lost and if she felt both excited and alone at the same time.
Nat walks on ahead of me out of the bookstore.
As I peruse the magazine Nat shoots me another of his signature lip-scowls.
"That band is like so gay."
"What kind of music do you listen too?" I inquire, waiting for him to say something Tremont hickish like Garth Brooks or Clint Black. Nat responds to my query snidely by stating a wouldn't you like to know. For the second time in a month I am back in O’hare accompanied by the isolated silhouette of my own thoughts and for the second time in a month the individual I want to talk to wants absolutely nothing to do with me. I wonder if Jason was like this to Karen Christmas last year. If she was confused and lost and if she felt both excited and alone at the same time.
Nat walks on ahead of me out of the bookstore.
I pick up the magazine with Dave Gahan on the cover, slapping it down on the counter while reaching in my back pocket in one motion.
The gentleman behind the counter smiles in the same fashion as if we are attending a family reunion.
“This is my favorite band,” I tell him.
“I could tell.” He says, still smiling. He asks me if I’ve heard the new album. I tell him that I own it.
“Only I don’t like it nearly as much as I like their earlier stuff. Their earlier stuff just really blows me away. Especially Catching up with Depeche mode. And Construction Time Again. Construction time again was actually the first CD I ever owned.”
He looks at me as if he knows all this already but still enjoys hearing me tell him about it. I think about Dawn Michelle and how the only song she would ever dance to at Stage Two with the rest of the socially-privileged youth from the North side of town is Just Can’t Get Enough. I think about how I always correlated Depeche Mode with High-brow European culture. Same with Enya and Tori Amos.
I tell him I don’t need a bag. The fingers over my overturned fifteen-year old uncalloused palm snaps like a castanet as I accept three dollars change and scroll the magazine up like a night-school diploma, thanking the man for his time telling him to have a good one before turning around and heading back in the direction of apathetic counterpart.
“Hey Depeche Mode,” Yells back the man behind the counter, “Simply have an amazing time!”
I look back him and watch as his body transitions into Serault like pebbles and then smile before heading back to Nat. Somehow I feel like the benevolent man in the bookstore who shares my enthusiasm about DM already knows all about me. Somehow I feel as if he already knows my name.
***
The two boys appear to be my age and our both wearing hats with different state college university emblems enlarged and single lettered above the brim of their foreheads. They are standing in front of the stacked ARRIVAL/DEPARTURES televisions brandishing PARADE bags over their shoulders. They look disoriented and lost. As if someone has just blindfolded them and then spun them around a oscillating chair and shouted out the word Marco .I set down my coffee. I place my magazine in my PARADE bag. I imminently lance out my arm in the direction of their mid-torsos and shake their hand. I tell them that my name is David. I tell them that it is a pleasure to meet them. There names are Chris and Justin and they are from Nebraska City and Lincoln, Nebraska respectively.
While meeting with Chris and Justin in front of the bating lashes of the televised board promulgating with hyphens and city names the arrival and departures of the planet, two more YC winners, notice our bags and waddle up next to us. One is a slightly overweight female with crisp short altar boy haircut. The other is a young lad wearing a Seattle Mariners cap who appears to the purported size of a stalk of corn come the first week of July.
I again introduce myself as if I am a host on a syndicated gameshow, shaking their hands, telling them that it is a pleasure to meet them. Since Nat has been avoiding me I become gregarious. I am anxious to meet fellow Young Columbusians who are capable of communicating in more than a series of aggravated grunts. Nat seems vexed that I keep inquiring how fellow recipients won the contest. Justin and Chris are both paperboys but won it based on some kind of point system inherent on their respective routes. The overweight shy girl says that her name was simply entered in a drawing she can’t remember entering containing all the carriers in the Oklahoma City area. Same with the young kid, who seems scared as fuck of all the high schoolers surrounding him. He seems like he thought he was entering a contest for a complimentary Super Nintendo instead now finding himself now in an airport ready to board a flight overseas.
There is a boarding call for Flight 276 from Chicago O’hare to New York. While he has failed to barter a complete sentence with me, Nat begins to heavily monopolizing the conversation between Justin and Chris, blathering on about weight division in rural central Illinois single class wrestling. The girl with the altar boy haircut and the young boy have been completely coy. I half-refill my styrofoam chalice again (java refill #17) and hear Justin very innocently inform Nat that I used to be hardcore into pro-wrestling all the time until he realized it was fake. Nat makes a notion as if he is trying to intentionally ignore the last comment. I ask the kindergartener if he is excited to be going to New York. He shakes his head as if slowly becoming asphyxiated. It feels weird that our luggage has already been stowed on the flight. I take another swig and stand in line, entering the airplane with a smile.
The stewardess on the plane is wearing inky tights and owns a curtain of blonde hair. Unlike the skipper from Peoria which had two seats, a slim aisle and then two more seats this plane is larger, it has three seats on each side before yielding to a strip of aisle.
My seat is the window. It is 8:25 in the morning.
I flap open the magazine with Dave Gahan’s visage on the cover and look out the window waiting again for that moment when the plane slowly circumambulates the runway before waiting and then accelerating and then skidding and then levitating, waiting for that moment when the wisps of clouds are transcended and I am rising above. The engine on the plane appears to be putting. The passenger seatbelt sign alighted five minutes past. Once in the air the stewardess with the curtain of blonde hair will inquire if I want tea or coffee and, of course, looking out at the continents of peach-hued clouds splattered below, I will say the latter.
Java refill #18 of the day.
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