writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

Order this writing in the collection book
Life on the Edge

this huge volume is available for only $2395
Life on the Edge

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.

cc&d v176

The Airport Talk Show

Peter Magliocco

    .05 GROUND VISIBILITY LIMITED//
    A hand. Moving, gyrating. Colored with freckles: gesticulating, a filtered cigarette between fingers. The mammoth purse of a cyber-magnified icon, glimpsed by the airport screener. In some antiquated cosmopolitan city of future schlock. Against the bluest of color fields comes the X-rayed jewelry like the golden harbingers of unkind fate.
    O the bright shadow of consciousness Which each passenger Thinks is his or her own ... Or the bright ring of consciousness Which each wearer thinks/ is his or/ her own.
    Budda-bing! Off goes the metal detector with its untuned bell, sounding a trespasser’s presence. I don’t see, I don’t hear, I don’t feel, I don’t know ... at times I do all of the above, ‘cause there are times when you have to look away, pretend you’re in another world&not the hypocritical 21st Century one.
    *
    Tableau: outstretched hands of the X-ray screeners. Begging the monied passengers as they file through Vegas International, having cleared the X-ray screening security area. Young mothers shamelessly begging, resembling housekeeping help in their long blazer-blouses and drab skirts. The male contingent standing by stolidly in blazers and slacks, trying to look official, not just musty -- or tacky.
    Budda-bing! Off goes another alarm with the offending passenger asking incredulously, “Is that me?”
    “That’s just your magnetic personality,” cracks the seniors’ crabby gentleman, Horney Huthkins, monitoring traffic through the upright doorway-like metal detector, or “Rens.”
    “Please step back and empty the metal in your pockets into a tray and pass it through on the moving belt. Then try it again, ma’am.”
    Huthkins looks half-blind and uses a cane, so the passengers don’t feel intimidated by any routine screening nonsense. In fact it becomes like a game to them, eventually, something they can deign to patronize along with the screening personnel.
    “Made it this time, Gramps!” beams a whiskey-smelling yahoo wearing Stetson, cowboy boots, and a huge jade belt buckle turned over to reveal nothing suspicious behind it.
    I, Leo Carello, am in love with the pretty young divorcee (and mother of two) who sits watching luggage pass by on the black&white X-ray monitor screen. Her eyes seem transfixed, or maybe Amber James has been hypnotized by it all, to a point of eyestrain. I, Leo Carello, am the night supervisor -- or Checkpoint Security Screening Officer -- and stand by in my shiny orange coat officiously watching this endless parade of bewildered people and their carry-on luggage.
    Why shouldn’t they be testy and uptight? Next door to Terminal C a temporary morgue’s been set up following yesterday’s fatal runway crash of a 747 that landed the wrong way. Windshear was the cause, say the news reports; but local airport gossip has a different cause. Field cargo and ramp workers are suspects in a sabotage of sorts, in keeping with the 21st Century’s age of domestic terrorism. If the F.B.I.’s right, it wouldn’t be surprising. Everybody’s scared. Some cast threatening looks. Nobody can figure out the ambiguous mess of the now dangerous civil aviation world in America, especially not the F.A.A.
    And everybody’s wondering: Who’s next?
    *
     If I wasn’t such a drunk maybe I could have ended up with a better job than trying to get grannies in wheelchairs to put their purses on the moving belt -- and not keep clutching them with white knuckles for dear life.
    I, Leo Carello, am a son of a bitch. Without home, without country. By choice. To myself a third world refugee who nonetheless almost thrives in Sin City, where hustlers abound like generic poker chips on The Strip.
    Let the Middle Eastern terrorists come to V.I.A.! They all but have huge investments here in Vegas anyway. Let them come if there’s an official Terrorist’s Convention at the convention center that the town can profit by, and nobody gets hurt.
    Especially not Ms. Amber James and her two girls -- one retarded, though “highly functioning,” Amber reminds me. As if that term could explain so much, including the state of our problem-plagued international airport, right?
    Semi-drunk again. One night I’m sitting at the desk writing nonsense into the log book to pass the time. “If I wasn’t such a drunk ...,” I write, then laugh and cross the sentence out. I don’t want my boss, Tara the transsexual, to see any of it.
    But screw Tara, I think. This airport is my forum, my talk show. The Airport Talk Show. An endless re-run. So I resume the log:
    //+BUD LIGHT> SOMETIME BEFORE THE CRASH:
    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Security Checkpoint Station at Vegas International Airport (or “V.I.A.,” as it’s more popularly known). I’m your host, Leopoldus Carello -- and also your Checkpoint Security Screening Officer, or C.S.S.O., as the Federal Aviation Agency deems it.
    Boy, have we got a great show tonight! Thanks for stopping by. If you’re arriving at our wonderful city (premier gambling Mecca in the world), then Welcome. We’ve got some great guests lined up, including cameo appearances by some of your favorite show business celebrities as they pass by to catch (or miss) their flights.
    I’m new to Vegas myself, and also to this airport security business. Now why they chose me as your late night supervisor I have no idea, and won’t bore you with too many details. I’m 35-40 -- kind of good-looking -- 5' 10, 160 fluctuating pounds, never married, of Italian-Mexican descent; Gemini; love L.A. Dodger baseball; already miss Southern California; and am generally a clumsy fucker. Well, I’m glad to see nearby Hunter’s Bar doing good business, because people in my business like a tall, cold, “good one” at every possible chance. Cheers!
    Say hello to my already favorite boss, big Mr. “Pig Iron” Jones ...
    “Good evening, Leo. Getting the hang of things?”
    “Sure am. Or they’ll hang me, right?”
    Pig Iron laughs his huge baritone. He’s the poor man’s Pavarotti, firmly against the city’s opulent glamour and criminal money-making. In other words, Pig Iron’s a real cop, freshly retired from some boring bureaucratic job the state tenured him on. Corpulent, balding, awkwardly bespectacled (with scotch-taped specs) -- Pig Iron, my man! He loves to laugh at the carnage around him.
    “Quite a few delayed flights tonight, Leo, so you’ll have a lull over at the B-Gate.” The B-Gate’s where I run things. Pig Iron runs the whole show from the A-Gate, where the larger screening area is usually, and greatly, passenger-busy. “Plus be sure not to breathe all the fumes from the endless construction in progress.”
    Endless is right, ladies and gentlemen. Vegas International Airport is being completely remodeled -- and reconstructed -- at a tremendous cost to the taxpayers. Supposedly six months from now (or deep into the fall), V.I.A. will have its “Grand Opening” and officially be reborn. A gigantic new L-Terminal will be in operation. Also a sleek and space-age “People Tram” will be scooting along its monorails like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a film much older than anything by Spielberg, unfortunately, or Disney.
    “That construction’s purt-near the noisiest thing around here,” Pig Iron Jones adds, lighting another Indian Reservation cigarette. His eyes look scary-huge behind his double-thick Lens Master glasses. “And this place is damn noisy enough as is.”
    Please don’t be alarmed, folks, that Quasar Air’s flight 602 from Dallas has apparent mechanical complications -- and might have a rough landing with its now defective landing gear. I get such information because I’m an official part of the airport grapevine, but of course downplay any negative aspects. Delayed flight 602 will be landing shortly, all right, and somehow that talented flight crew will have that sucker safely on the ground. So, folks, go play another video poker machine or have another drink at Hunter’s, because it’s “not-to-worry.”
    At his A-Gate desk Pig Iron begins doing his endless paperwork. Both he and the paperwork seem formidable ... And now please say hello to one of the airport’s most personable custodians, Harvey of Washoo County. Harvey’ll be kinda sweeping up around us and making snide comments simultaneously.
    “You’d never believe it, but somebody just died in the men’s room. Metro found him dead on the toilet. Heart attack. Talk about the last shit.”
    Harvey moves on, expertly wielding his small broom and dust pan, looking himself in need of cleaning or reconstruction.
    I finish checking over my own paperwork and sign in on Pig Iron’s register. People dourly move through the metal detector. Known officially as the “Rens,” for some obscure reason, it resembles a doorway’s wooden framework removed from a mobile home -- or house of ill-repute, probably. People act like they’re passing into the Twilight Zone, into that “sterile” dimension where civil aviation thrives best. Oh well ... Some people even contort their bodies, freezing underneath the strange wired-and-wooden framework emitting its prohibitive buzz-sound whenever detecting too much metal.
    “Must be the iron fillings in my shoes,” one such violator tells me, shocked by the unpleasant buzz-sound. “These damn steel-toe work shoes.” They all say that. Or usually it’s: “Kind of sensitive, isn’t it? All I’ve got is some loose change. It didn’t buzz in St. Louis!”
    Vegas is a long way from St. Louis, chief. But in his inebriated condition, what difference does it make? At least he’s still walking, able to board his flight without passing out under the Rens, like some joker did last night.
    At the small, poorly equipped B-Gate a threatening man asks, “What’s the story with flight 602? My wife’s on that plane.”
    I tell him I don’t know what’s wrong, but it feels like I’m lying. It even sounds like it. The man resembles a brawny construction worker and wants to punch me out. Probably he’s had a bad day polluting the airport’s atmosphere. In my inimitable way I manage to insult him without his immediately realizing it.
    From her seat behind the X-ray machine where she’s screening luggage, I can hear Sophie laughing. “That’s telling him,” Sophie says, a vision of old age preserved as effectively as dairy products in a bad refrigerator. “Just let me know if you want Metro called and I’ll hit the button.” There are a couple of buttons under her work station which alert the airport police in their substation. Fortunately for Sophie the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police are everywhere patrolling the airport.
    The phone rings and Pig Iron wants to know if everything’s all right. I assure him it is. The phone is Pig Iron’s lifeline, his second umbilical cord. Only our head supervisor Tara Chavez uses it more.
    “That late Quasar flight has me worried,” Pig Iron admits. In a way I’m like a wayward son to him, and have to humor him through his weepy moments. (The price we pay working for Coldwater Security, notoriously the lowest paying company in town, and arguably the worst.)
    Bernie Coldwater, President and owner of the company, is so cheap he hires basically senior citizens who can’t find work elsewhere. Bernie owes his wealth to America’s “golden panthers.”
    But what have we got here, wall-to-wall dweebs&newts tonight? The mass return of the nation’s unreconstructed nerds? Who else would clog these terminal corridors with their sunless features almost demanding indulgence. These passengers are lost, disoriented, unhappy because they can’t find what they’re looking for and signs only get in their way. These passengers, for some reason, experience a group amnesia and collective illiteracy upon setting foot on Vegas International Airport’s hardly crimson carpet. Why isn’t everything they’re looking for right under their snotty noses where it should be?
    Ladies and gentlemen, these questions are hardly rhetorical. I tell myself that after settling in at the B-Gate podium, where I discover a mound of incomplete paperwork awaiting me. Incomplete because the swing shift supervisor, Harry Besco, feels it’s my duty as “a kid” to help his senior corpus out and complete his paperwork. In other words I have to guess which times his people took their breaks, etc., and just what times they sat at the X-ray machine. Harry leaves cryptic notes like, “Fill in the dots, Leo ...” or “This is more of the F.A.A.’s goddamn bureaucracy. Bingo. Nobody gets out of here alive.” As I tediously complete his paperwork I know exactly where Harry is right then. He’s out getting drunk and playing keno somewhere at a local casino, trying to forget who his sweetheart was/is in life. Ah, well ...
    All the while I’m recalling God, Time, The River and what I didn’t have for lunch that day. It’s not easy living practically in a business office where your basic shower is the latrine sink. But the rent’s cheap and it will have to do until I can afford real apartment digs featuring “basic cable.” When you’re an aspiring poet-thespian like I am, ladies and gentlemen, you have to make do and steal whatever opportunity presents itself. I, Leopoldus Carello, well remember the riot-terrors of L.A. and its street gangs. So right now Vegas is heaven, and I’m not fleeing for my life from some burning office building.
    As I assault the Daily Log with my white-out various folks pass by the desk podium. Some kibitz, some stand around gawking, some expect to be recognized as celebrities (though they’re not), and others await my official introduction before feeling comfortable:
    “... She was a wonderful fashion model and today, though divorced, remains a breaker of male hearts and other vesicles. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sasha McCoy, Quasar Air’s flight attendant extraordinaire ...”
    “Sasha, how you doin’ tonight?”
    “Just fine, Leopoldus. Just fabulously fine.”
    Blonde and radiant, Sasha sits down in the guest podium chair and sure shows a lot of leg, kids. She must wear super-silk Hanes stockings. Sasha is one of the many guests welcomed at the desk, at all hours of the unending nocturne. Some guests are not so welcome, such as my weekend gate guard MacCreedy Richards, age 74. Just kidding. Mac is a terrific, near-limping fixture at the A&B gates each weekend; no one casts a more commanding presence, even in sleep. Old Mac for some reason dislikes airline personnel like Sasha McCoy (“What kind of life is that for a young woman to live? She’s like a paid escort or part-time prostitute ...”), but that’s his problem.
    With that I excuse myself for a jaunt to the rest room (the men’s, of course), begging Sasha to remain seated while I briefly -- very briefly -- attend to amenities. Boy, this horse-chicken better be ready, I joke in parting, crassly trying to put Sash at ease. Because if anybody’s ill-at-ease, it’s a beautiful young woman faster than a thoroughbred at the Kentucky Derby. Yes-suhs.
    The problem with going to the rest room is it’s hard to get there. First I have to leave the fantastically talkative Sophie in charge -- a mistake. I know the moment I’m gone she’ll start yakking away at the provocative flight attendant, scaring her away. But, being short-handed as always, there’s no choice. Sophie’s the only worker there. The others have called off sick; even terminally so.
    The only problem is every time I attempt to leave the screening area, several flights seem to arrive simultaneously. Suddenly swarms of hurrying passengers clog the moving walkway and retard my forward progress to a standstill. (Just like in an old Jerry Lewis movie?) So it takes a good few minutes just to bob and weave through this influx of humanity, to finally get by the cactus souvenirs and the overcrowded gift shop, and eventually approximate the rest room’s vicinity. But before I can slip in there I just have to say hello to our resident shoe shine operator extraordinaire -- Mr. J.J. Rapp, super-soul brother, ladies and gentlemen. “How ya doin’, J.J.? Are they tippin’ big tonight or what?”
    “Shit,” J.J. usually responds, looking pretty bad behind his twenty-year-old dark glasses. A perfect picture of an aging John Lee Hooker in this post-Motown era, My Man likes to kid me about being a Dodger fan. “Man, that ‘blue machine’ ain’t shit,” he likes to remind me, especially if they’ve lost that day. It’s deep into a merciless Vegas summer of baseball, minor and major, and J.J.’s my alter-ego as far as being cool goes. He’s got enough cool to spread it around, I tell him, just like it’s something contagious.
    “Don’t be spreadin’ no bad mouth now,” J.J. warns me, and I hear some familiar cackling nearby. It’s Laverne and Shirley, the county’s finest custodians, emerging from the women’s room which they’ve just cleaned up. “Any good graffiti in there?” I joke warmly, doing my best P.R. bit, even if it kills my urinary tract.
    “I just saw Dolly Parton in there,” Shirley cracks. “She was in front of that mirror a damn long time.”
    Shirley’s white, Laverne’s black. They’re a great team, and those are their real names. Their names will never change so that the guilty among us remain protected. They know incriminating secrets about all of us at your airport, my friends, and that’s why they’re so seriously respected. I suck up to them all the time. They think I’m “funny,” but they like me.
    By the way, I remind them now and then that I’m part Hispanic, part Italian. Just like a well-bred show dog. It’s an ethnic p(l)ug. They like it.
    “If you find Sammy Davis, Jr. in there, please notify Metro.” They don’t really get it, but laugh anyway, just like my parents would.
    “Dodgers should lose a hundred games next year,” J.J. yawns, warming me. He’s seated alone on his stand like a regal phony Rap artist on his throne. He’s a Prince of Kiwi, my friends, and dresses for overkill. He won’t touch my own scuffed brogans because, he says, they disgust him.
    “I hear there’s trouble with the Quasar flights tonight,” Laverne confides, pushing her cleaning wagon like it’s a shopping cart in Vons. “I swear that airline’s gonna go bankrupt.”
    “It’s the last one that ain’t,” Shirley guffaws back, and J.J. raises an acknowledging forefinger. Stee-rike!
    I wave to the young cashier girls working in the cafeteria as I sidle into the men’s room entrance. I can’t believe I’m finally in there. My bladder’s about to burst like a transplanted baboon liver. The problem is there’s like this small and winding hallway you have to navigate before really getting into the rest room. It’s crowded as heck once I’m in there, and naturally there’s only one unused urinal left for me to stand over. The sound of flushes goes off around me like gun salutes at a military funeral. It’s really all just a bad Jerry Lewis movie, this life, I remind myself.
    I also note that the men’s room is filthy, and that Laverne and Shirley should clean it pronto, rather than shoot the bull with J.J. Or maybe old Harvey of Washoo County should have cleaned this sucker hours ago, instead of napping back in the secluded wheelchair area. Oh well ...
    Outside I run into a huge cardboard cut-out of “Silver Gabby,” a cartoon miner figure with a written warning in the thought balloon over his head. “Folks, I’m Silver Gabby! Please Watch Your Step During The Airport Construction ... Pardon Our Dust!” Gabby holds a miner’s pick-axe rather formidably, smiling through his beard all the while. What a totally inappropriate cartoon mascot! These things remind me of what Reno must have been like in the 40s. (Obscure reference here to old Hollywood stars who should saunter along at any minute, like Porky Pig?) Of course, hey, I wasn’t alive till 1963 for any trivia buffs.
    I wave to a couple of passing Metro officers on my way to the cafeteria. The place is more crowded than a local swap meet. I desperately crave an overpriced cup of coffee, since I forgot my thermos. The airport coffee is bad: it’ll either wake you up, or put you to sleep. Maybe permanently.
    *
    -AD 2000: RADAR REDNECK INCORPORATED
     There are many potential hazards in this airport, and the cafeteria is certainly one of them. Privately I call it The Auschwitz Cafe. The pastries under the cabinet glass look terrible, like removed portions of human anatomy. Other gruesome specialties are displayed with the aplomb of autopsy day at medical school. With no appetite, I realize this is the perfect diet center.
    “Did that Quasar flight come in yet?” one of the cashier girls asks. “I hear it’s pretty delayed.”
    “I really don’t know,” I reply in dumb face. Ignorance is my hallmark. I expertly represent it, like professionals do knowledge. Privately I suspect another fatal crash at Love Airport in Dallas-Fort Worth area, ladies and gentlemen, but why alarm you? Greater security consciousness only makes you more nervous. You want your in-flight cocktails to forget about any potential unpleasantness, don’t you?
    Is it time for a commercial? We’ll be right back, folks, after these important messages.
    
    Back at the B-Gate X-ray screening area the curvaceous flight attendant is long gone, and Sophie is dreaming about The Movie. Sophie is always dreaming out loud about The Movie. Film companies are always filming something inside V.I.A.’s terminals: public announcements, commercials, T.V. shows, and occasionally -- to all the airport employees’ fascination -- “a major motion picture.” The cameras are always rolling inside V.I.A. (though actually prohibited, for security reasons, around the Checkpoint Passenger Screening Area), and homely, star-struck Sophie can’t wait to glimpse a passing well-known actor, if not an actual Vegas lounge performer/celebrity. Behind her rust-tinted opaque glasses, giving her a rather blind- looking appearance, fabulous Sophie lives for an occasional Star Sighting. And there are many star sightings in the currently-being-remodeled V.I.A., which will soon (according to Washoo County publicists) be the nation’s most glamorous airport, featuring state-of-the-art, pastel colored terminal lighting and giant silver cacti glowing like airfield tower beacons for the overwhelmed passer-by, who’ll eventually suffer the same ocular problems as Sophie’s.
    And why not? Las Vegas loves big, tourist-friendly phenomena seen nowhere else in North America, because Vegas is Vegas. (Insert your favorite Vegas commercial slogan or ringtones here, please ...)
    Sophie believes a movie should be made about V.I.A. in which everyone can appear for a few precious minutes. Almost as Pop artist Andy Warhol prophesied, but not quite. Such a project would have to feature the many Vegas stars that Sophie goes boffo for: Wayne Newton, Siegfried&Roy, Allen&Rossi, Melinda the magician, Liza, Kenny Kerr, Joan Rivers, and countless others. (In fact such a movie’s already been made, I cogently point out to overweight Sophie, if memory bears me out. It’s playing celestially right now around us: LIFE.)
    Eventually one of the black wall phones rings and I’m informed by Quasar’s ticket counter rep that the delayed flight will arrive after all, only two hours exactly overdue as was correctly surmised earlier. Sophie receives the information with her perennial deadpan expression. “I told you that forty minutes ago,” she announces. “One of those delayed suckers has already arrived. Didn’t you hear me?”
    In this noisy environment of everyday pandemonium, I explain to Sophie I didn’t even hear what she just said. Outside the adjacent giant picture windows I espy one Quasar aircraft already docked at a nearby gate, with a ramp agent loading baggage onto his tractor-cart as well. The night airfield scene is a familiar and never-ending one fascinating the terminal passengers glimpsing it, especially from rows of chairs where human bodies slump in anticipation of long waits to flight times. As the early morning hours drag on, the scene outside the B-Gate screening area resembles an airport flophouse.
    “We’re short-handed,” I glumly tell Sophie. “We’ve gotta get somebody for the gate tonight.”
    “Call whoever you can get,” Sophie replies.
    “I just hope somebody’s still sober,” I tell her.
    Later we discover that Quasar Air’s flight 602 has crashed on the runway about 1:35 A.M. local time. Propelling the airport into terminal terror (a hand: moving, gyrating ... severed; gesticulating, with a half-smoked cigarette still elegantly between exquisitely manicured fingers, goes flying by outside the movie still of the A-Gate’s huge wall-size window), the runway conflagration briefly illumines the ink-dark night’s devastation with fiery colors, superseded by a flickering, orange-red flare. Sirens follow ... People panic, approaching me menacingly, some even running the security checkpoint.
    The dream. The movie. The life ... In a numb panic I can’t tell one from the other.
    *
    Then I’m rudely roused from sleep. Head coming back up, neck sore, I look into Sgt. Tara the transsexual’s disapproving face.
    “You been dead drunk, Leo. I’d fire you if we wasn’t short-handed, and so many people quittin’.”
    Standing next to Tara is the beauteous Coldwater employee of the year, Ms. Amber James (now dressed for O.T.), along with her two cute -- but very scared -- girls. Ms. Amber James also glares at me disapprovingly, ladies and gentlemen.
    “Fiddle-dee-dee,” I mutter wearily. Shit. Just break for commercials, folks. Sheepishly I look around, trying to focus and come to. Noting that my face had been resting on the open, bourbon-cum-coffee stained log book I’d previously been writing in. Clumsily I close it, cramming the dog-eared green log into an overstuffed desk drawer, nearly knocking over Tara’s “Pet Rock” from a mahogany ledge. Somehow my eyes focus on the gray stone always kept on the desk (along with the hand-held metal detector wand, several X-ray radiation measurement badges, and other equipment) which is labeled “Rocky III.” That rock is, at the moment, a close friend.
    Tara curses me. At 4:30 A.M. she’s arrived to relieve me as C.S.S.O. Maybe permanently.
    “Tara,” I begin. “It’s been a long fuckin’ bad night. Quasar’s flight 602 crashed on the runway ...”
    “I know, baby,” Tara says, putting her tote bag under the desk. “There were fatalities. The fire department and police and everybody in the world -- including the goddamn media with their cameras -- is still out there lookin’ for bodies not burned to a crispy-crisp. And you never called us or anybody.”
    I’m sorry, Tara, was written on my beard-stubbly mug. I was just glad that Sasha McCoy -- the beautiful Quasar flight attendant -- had worked a different flight.
    “You crashed too, didn’t you, Leo?”
    “I was practically the only one left here for hours,” I told her. Noticing single parent Amber James and her daughters staring at me like they would at a bug, I meekly said hello to them.
    At this hour the V.I.A. main terminal was as quiet and depopulated as it usually was, except there were more police and civil authorities visible and moving about. I thought Tara would still fire me, but she didn’t. She and Amber (who took her seat behind the X-ray monitor vacated by Sophie an hour earlier) were simply preparing for another typical work morning, despite the crash. Slowly I got my gear together and carefully got out of Tara’s way.
    Once Tara had been a man -- Terry. It wasn’t that hard to believe. Now -- as technically a “woman” -- she was still more masculine than many men. She was barely five feet tall, yet the equivalent, with her muscled physique, of a circus strong man walking around on his knees.
    But even at that height she was a colossal figure who soon threatened to fatally fall over me ...
    *
    Why was it no one listened to me -- especially Tara?
    Was it because everyone saw yours truly, Leopoldus Carello, as the prototypical white trash figure of all time?
    I’d been a drunk who came to Vegas awhile back and lost every cent at the blackjack tables. A drunk who simply collapsed in the main V.I.A. terminal one night, with no money or plane ticket back to L.A., my unconscious body spread-eagled on the floor next to several other sleeping sorts who endlessly waited either for an early morning flight or another day trying to survive in an airport. When I finally came to, Harvey of Washoo County was jabbing the pointed end of his broom into my side and sweeping up the flotsam around me.
    “Why don’t you get a job, buddy?” Harvey asked when I was fully awake and half-sitting up.
    That’s how it began. I was suddenly surrounded by the ancient seniors of Coldwater Security -- Sophie, Huthkins, MacCreedy, and others (including Laverne&Shirley) -- when abruptly the chilling mutant form of Tara appeared authoritatively from their midst, beaming convivially down at me. In her eyes I was the day’s perfect job applicant. In minutes they had a blue Coldwater blazer on me and hot coffee galore force-fed, baby-like, into my ravaged insides where nothing remained but the hollowness following some great, and still lingering, pain.
    That was the beginning. That’s how Tara the transsexual fanged me for good, ladies&gents.
    For days thereafter I was unable, neurologically speaking, to speak coherently. Everybody at Coldwater loved that. I was their perfect dummy: the lovable alcoholic who was no threat to anybody.
    Soon I was promoted to security screening supervisor ...
    The seniors loved it. I had fallen into their wrinkled and hoary midst the way play-acting Cyrano allegedly did from the moon. One bald-headed fellow nicknamed “Whitey,” a former Quasar Air ticket agent for years at V.I.A. until forcibly retired, was actually my first and closest working friend at the B-Gate screening area. Ol’ Whitey ... His skin a mottled map of internal disarray from whatever disease was slowly killing him. Skin flaking away like snow droppings. Had the goodness to tell me: “Watch out for this place, Carello. These people are no damn good. Quasar Air ruined me for good. They’re on their way to bankruptcy, though. That’s why I’m working here. So I can enjoy constantly watching them go under before I die,” winked Whitey.
    Not long after he was dead.
    But I got the message.
    In the midst of all the noisy renovation and hustle-bustle of passengers, the taped and gravel-thick voice of Silver Gabby -- Hollywood’s cartoon miner -- came over the P.A.: “Pardon Our Dust, folks, during the remodeling of your airport! Pardon our dust and make sure when you ride the moving walkway to stay on your right so others can pass ...” Then the startling sound of Silver emitting a cowboyish Ya-hoo! at ear-piercing volume.
    Also in the midst of everything the Las Vegas Metro police department personnel became familiar patrolling figures who added daily to my paranoia. I knew they wanted me to be Tara’s work prisoner forever. That had become my lot in life, along with being a hostage to the seniors. I owed my recovery and “life” to all of them. But of course I soon yearned to escape them and find my old boozy freedom again, no matter what. And they sensed it.
    Poor terrible Tara, once wife to the Mexican bad husband who beat her for not being more of a woman. (Small wonder, I thought.) Sadly I was now a form of therapy for her. She even called me “dear,” saying I was just like her former hubby.
    Only the beautiful women of the airport sustained me and provided hope, ladies and gentlemen. Their beauty and sexiness enthralled me. I was caught between the glamour of Quasar Air flight attendant Sasha McCoy -- with all the wild sexuality of her swinger’s world -- and the more homely attractiveness of the young divorced mother, Coldwater Security’s Amber James, who sized me up as a potential surrogate husband for her two tots, but refrained from encouraging my male hormones towards real, uninhibited sexual fantasy.
    But ladies and gentlemen, we really have to wrap things up here -- there’s only just so much time left on the big airport talk show, as you know ... We’ll be right back with our final guests after this commercial time-out:
    “While in flight on Quasar Air from Vegas to whatever your destination, be sure to savor the good taste of Windshear Ale before you encounter any mechanical difficulties,” says Silver Gabby on the terminal’s P.A. system.
    =OK: FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS FOR SOME REAL P.A. RAP!
    “Welcome back, everybody, to Leo Carello’s last talk show. I know you’re going to love what’s yet to come.
    “ ‘Yeah, right,’ joke Laverne and Shirley from a nearby cordoned-off rest room. They wave their dust mops at me.
    “This is the scene on surveillance videotape, ladies and gentlemen, when your humble host shows you his final hours at the airport: A Hard Day’s Night Dick, you might say. Just call me Crash Carello for paperwork purposes: for the inability to really believe any official by way of the government is what its citizens really suffer from, a blood fever escaping unstoppably through a pierced&oxygen-sucking blown away aircraft’s side (courtesy of Plastic Explosives, Inc.?). Now see the paisano plummeting through the thick fogs of all deceptions -- scummy or otherwise -- yummy as supersleek Sasha McCoy’s rear fuselage in the roving eye of Leo the Crash as he stumbles towards Hunter’s Bar, after fleeing Tara and her terrible X-ray screening shame, where cancerous radiation emissions remain at a reputedly harmless level, dudes&dames, just like your microwave oven; stumbling almost up to her pulchritudinous and martini-swilling side on this very fine 5 A.M. hour, wherein Sasha sits magnificently out-of-uniform in killer cleavage-deep blouse and spandex hip-hugging pants. Her air that of someone drinking a breakfast beverage and nothing more, not that amnesiac’s liqueur of aphrodisia coursing through her fine, barely blue veins. O shit, oh muy merde, silky legs like tapers burning in a cathedral of sin. ‘Let me buy you a drink, Sasha,’ I insist by way of reintroduction: I am your camcorder, baby, let my long lens into that shaded sanctuary of Latin appellations, let this be the mother-of-all-videos in a potent nutshell, my eyewitness tape-cum-coming with a neo-Etruscan T.V. built for-2,&the handy corder I’ll remove from my tote and start training on your transcendental soma is more a part of myself than other bodily appendages running on no batteries, or acid-leaking ones ...
    “ ‘Put that damn thing down, you scumbag!’
    “ ... did you think I was a private pressperson, ladies&gentlemen, with a perfect news-gathering right to invade Sasha McCoy’s space? She, bitch of all bitches, who is now my boss’ not too shabby mistress? ...
    “I envied and hated Bernie Coldwater, President and owner of Coldwater Security, as I sat next to Sasha and ordered Scotches for us both, recounting to her the very possibility I was a member of the press indeed (nicknamed the mag man because I was always popping tape cassettes into my camcorder, the way ammo magazines are into semi-automatic rifles dating back to the Desert Storm war era I was a hapless soldier in), luxuriating in the presence of her flesh, until she told me rather point-blankly to cease pointing my camera lens at her, like she were a true Hollywood royalty and I merely the most disgusting paparazzo.
    “She was, is, Bernie’s kept woman. There was no ultra-doubt about it. Yet somehow I had dared to foolishly hope for all these months, for all these endless, booze-riddled nights. And to hope, I suddenly knew, was more foolish than believing Silver Gabby the equivalent of Mickey Mouse in this retarded Disneyland of an airport.
    “ ‘You better lighten up on her, pal,’ Grammy the mustachioed bartender told me after Sasha McCoy had unofficially excused himself from my presence. ‘She lost a coupla close friends in that runway crash thing. This goddamn airport won’t be the same again -- for awhile ... And, oh, yeah, why don’t you lose that fuckin’ camera?’
    “Why are the biggest asshole bartenders always the ones with the ugliest mustaches?
    “That’s my ultimate rhetorical question, folks -- and be sure to join us next week, when our guests will be relatives of the deceased Quasar flight crash victims ...”
    *
    Like a dead soul her spirit leaped inside and inveigled me, and the camcorder through whose lens I was staring at the world suddenly stared back, its power of resolution far greater than mine. Clearly I saw myself looking through the peephole at the abyss I was, ladies&gentlemen, about to fall in.
    I panicked, shutting the camera down and trying to blink away the terrifying images. How could such a pseudo-technological sight come about? I felt this sight was something criminal, and now I was hardly its beholder but simply it.
    Quickly -- and with the thief’s stealth -- I put the camcorder back in my bag. Desperately feeling I was losing my grip on things, I knew suddenly I had to see Ms. Amber James: see her with all proverbial swiftness --
    Before I saw myself waving goodbye ...
    To myself.
    “Amber, I’ve made a boffo mistake it looks like ... But if you’re willing to love me again, I swear this time I’ll try my sober best. I swear it ...”
    Amber only shook her head in pity. To her I’d become a low-life extraordinaire. It was 9 P.M. and she and her two girls were just getting ready to make a pre-bedtime snack of pizza and orange juice in their cramped, two-bedroom apartment just off The Strip. If you looked out the window you’d see the monstrous emerald mountains of the MGM Grand hotel overshadowing all with its eerie glow.
    “No, Leo, save your breath -- you can’t stay the night,” Amber said off-handedly, while dicing pepperoni.
    “But it’s my night off,” I pleaded.
    There I was pacing around and waving my spirit-trap of a camcorder like a madman -- the only one not wearing a robe and slippers. And dear, petite Amber James was completely apathetic as she casually busied herself in the kitchen, oblivious to the ticking time bomb inside me that I’d become one with. I rushed into a bedroom and surprised one of Amber’s cute daughters -- who shall forever remain nameless -- sitting sleepy-eyed and yawning on the edge of her bed. Little Darlin’ had her robe open and I espied the pristine comeliness of her enticing figure in all its minor glory. I stood there trembling, dry mouth agape, realizing what an attraction her little body was: how much more it aroused the dead sexual embers within than frowzy Amber herself did that time we tried to make it when she had everything off except her hairy pin-curlers, bra, and exotically edible panties.
    Little Darlin’ almost winked with complicity at my bald-faced stare as I stood there, feeling sweat pop out on my unshaven clown’s mug.
    I was a pervert! On this typically beautiful evening in Southern Nevada, a day after the fatal Quasar crash at V.I.A., along with everything else “I-WAS-A-PERVERT!”
    That’s when I all but totally lost it for real. Somehow managing to pry myself loose from Little Darlin’ and bolt from Amber’s kiddy-cat home. I’d been waiting to freak out for a long time, I guess, and knew what to do next as if I’d been programmed by some invisible cyber-god.
    I had all the ingredients for making a pipe bomb stashed back at the small office I rented nearby The Strip. That office had become my refuge from the airport and my parents, who I was convinced were basically seeds of evil trying to plant my wanting garden of self with bad tomatoes. At the office I’d begun writing my Edict of Reformation against all of America’s sleaze-ball media pundits. (I won’t go into detail here, but to me my tract was as important as whatever Martin Luther drafted for the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century.) Before midnight I’d assembled one of my primitive devices: a pipe bomb consisting of a battery, clock face, stick of dynamite and blasting cap, most of which I’d purchased from a local hardware store. I put my baby in a blue tote bearing a United Airlines logo and headed for the airport.
    Once there I was able to saunter into the Main Terminal rotunda despite the increased presence of Metro police officers swarming about. Now all baggage was suspect -- except mine, of course. I was still in uniform, still wearing a blue blazer with an airport badge displayed in clear view. Most everyone working on the concourses would recognize me, of course, and there’d be no problem.
    And there wasn’t. After buying a muddy cup of coffe at The Auschwitz Cafe, I headed for the B-Concourse where I easily bypassed the security screening checkpoint by walking through the B-Gate -- unchecked by the night’s gate guard, a tired old Horney Huthkins, who could barely muster the energy to wave weakly from the podium he’d been sitting at for hours. He must be working beaucoup overtime for Tara, I figured, due to the Quasar tragedy. Despite all the hubbub caused by the tragic event, all looked pretty routine and normal as I strolled onwards and boarded the horizontal escalator (or “People Mover”) -- just like any other person on his way to work or one of the B-Gates to catch a redeye flight. As unmolested by a screener’s hand magnetometer as could be.
    I sat down at one of the airline gates -- I think it was Southwest’s -- and waited. The seats were all but unoccupied; the next flight, according to the posted info, wasn’t for another two hours. Slowly finishing my coffee, I debated whether or not to stash the tote inside one of the wall lockers and get the hell off the concourse. The device wasn’t set to explode until another sixty minutes -- but who knew the reliability of my bomb? I wasn’t skilled at making them, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. So I sat watching the bustling airport life carry on around me, and tried to forget anything connected with Sasha McCoy, Amber James, or her nymph-minor daughter ... Ironically, for the first time in who-knows-when, I realized I was stone sober.
    O bright shadow of consciousness! -- or something like that popped into my head then, I remember. How long it took I couldn’t say, because time tritely departs from our world like a disappearing 747 jet into another stratosphere. But I do remember going to the nearby white courtesy phone on the wall and dialing the Metro police substation inside the airport.
    “Vegas International Airport, Metropolitan Police Department,” a fuzzy female voice said, without any further questioning redundancies.
    “My name is Leopoldus Carello, my friend,” I announced slowly. Glancing at my digital Timex, the cracked face revealed the time as 11:15 P.M. “I have a pipe bomb set to explode soon in the B-Concourse ... Can we talk?”
    The date was September 10, 2001 -- a day before my birthday.



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...