This is the most surreal feeling ever.
It is now nearly midnight and I am stuck at New York’s JFK airport, waiting for an 8:15 AM flight since I missed my evening return to Orlando.
Because there was nothing to do/eat/see/amuse myself with at Terminal 3, Delta’s terminal, I decided to come over to Terminal 4.
Terminal 4 is the international departures and arrivals terminal at JFK. Flights are coming and going at all hours of the day and night, and there are people here waiting for connections for hours at a time. I had almost forgotten what this was like; the ungainly choreographed ballet of cross-border flights that leave either precious few seconds to race from one connection to another, or leave gaps the size of days between your Atlanta-New York arrival and New York-Jordan departure.
The international terminal in New York is a reflection of the city itself in many ways. It never sleeps, is multicultural to a nearly absurd degree, and is made up of the same glass and steel megastructures (adjusted for scale, of course) that one sees so often in parts of the city that have chosen to ‘modernize’ and have left the basic requirements of good taste somewhere in their wake. Donna Karan New York vies for space and customers next to a Duty Free shop hawking Omega and Cartier, like some bizarre emulation of Park Avenue, with the notable exception that at nearly midnight, the Duty Free is still open and will, ostensibly, stay open through the night. The overpriced Ale House knockoff at the end of the terminal may or may not be open - I can’t see - but its boring fare is about as un-New Yorkish as you can get, and its presence here is about as exciting as the Friday’s on Times Square. Call it the invasion of the corporate chains. Whatever.
What is truly bizarre about this are the children. Kids, ranging from six to sixteen are still awake, even as their parents yawn like gaping whales, making no effort to hide their fatigue. For the children, this is a grand adventure, and they stay up, forcing their parents into card games or just walking around, talking on a cell phone with friends that I can only presume are on the other side of an ocean or a continent. They, the kids, will remember this for a long time. “Remember that time we were waiting in New York for our plane?” they will ask. “We stayed up till two - TWO! - and played cards, ate sandwiches that were really good and drank juice and soda and then we went on the plane and then we drank more soda and saw New York from the sky and it was awesome!”
The sandwiches suck, and your teeth are going to rot from the soda.
My feet are hurting as bad as feet can, and my lower back feels as stiff as can be. Noticeably absent from this terminal is any seating facility with a soft surface. No padded chairs, no stuffed benches, nothing. The benches - if you can call them that, are stone and cement hunks that are as comfortable to sit on as, well, stone and cement hunks. Yet there are people still bravely attempting to steal precious few moments of sleep on them.
I tried. It hurt.
In walking the length of the miles-long terminal (fine, it’s shorter, but it felt like that to me - bad shoes, remember?), I found only four power outlets, all in the same place: near the floor and yards away from a seat. Still, since the seats are no softer than the floor, I guess it doesn’t really matter where I sit, since I’m tired, stiff, considerably broker and just overall ferklempt. I have another six hours and change to go before I can tear through security and get close to an aircraft, another eight before that aircraft actually noses towards the open sky, and it looks like I’m going to be awake for all of them. Any second now, I’m going to rip my socks off in protest (the shoes came off ten minutes ago) and just wiggle my toes, granting them a modicum of freedom before sequestering them in their polycotton blend of a prison with pleather walls surrounding them as they scream agony in concert with my heels, soles, insteps, arches, ankles and, yes, every part of my body north of my gnads.
The consequence of a missed flight is not so much the inconveniences, though that is a factor. It is the sheer gall of the airport designers, who, in pursuit of some mystifying aesthetic, chose to limit the installation of soft surfaces exclusively to the rarified air of the VIP lounges run by the various airlines. Since I’m not a Silver-, Gold- or Platinum-anything, I don’t get to use those lounges. I suppose I could social engineer my way into one of them, but not now - now, I look like a starving college grad trying to get a job in a cheap wool jacket and a pair of pants that haven’t been their original color since the re-election of George W. Bush.
My neck feels like the joints are rusted and someone forgot the WD-40. Part of the reason is the Versace glasses I wear that look so chic but are hopelessly inadequate in terms of coverage area. They present me with a narrow, rectangular strip of normal vision that flat-out refuses to consider peripheral vision as a necessity. So, I either bow my head as type on my laptop (ouch ouch ouch) or I simply slide the glasses down my nose till my head can tilt back at a normal angle and I can still see the screen.
The effect is like that of Grandpa, peering learnedly at an object of great interest. It lends me a scholarly air, and it ages me about forty years. Obviously, it’s the forty-year thing I have an objection to.
Randomly, security announcements are made over the PA system. They are made by a female who could really be a hot and sexy librarian, if she wasn’t so damn cold and antiseptic. I usually love the sound of a female voice (that isn’t coming from a member of my family, anyway). I think female voices are sexy, and I love listening to them. They turn me on, like the gentlest caress from a silky-smooth female hand. This woman, over the PA, does the equivalent of fumbling clumsily with my hand in a confusing attempt at either coaxing me to pay attention to strange packages left unattended, or seducing me into committing unspeakable acts. It’s the sexy librarian with chronic indecisiveness.
The preponderance of brown people is another thing - oh Jesus, a whole clan just showed up - is another thing that leaves me flummoxed. I can’t tell if they’re all leaving, all coming, or if only one person is leaving and they’re all here for the party. Brown people are like that. They/we like to convert everything into a celebration or a tragedy. There’s no middle-ground - everything must be an event, expediency and efficacy be damned. So what if it doesn’t take the whole clan to send off the thirty-year-old son? What is required is inconsequential - what matters is that the clan considers it a matter of absolute necessity that the send-off party consist of at least one third cousin, twice removed.
There are just so many of them, and not all of them are beaners. Most are dotheads, dressed in their finest airport livery.
Don’t fool yourself, my friend. They do have fine airport livery.
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