My friend Jen flew into town today for a nice 4-day weekend visit. She booked the first United flight of the day into San Francisco. When she first told me she was coming, she mentioned that fact and apologized earnestly if it was going to be an inconvenience. I told her it wouldn't be. She asked if I was sure, thinking, I assume, that I was just being polite. I told her it would be my pleasure. I wasn't lying. It would be.

SFO is a locus of crossing paths and chance meetings. It's a way-station for a vast contingent of businesspeople from around the Pacific Rim as well as across the globe. It plays temporary host to a whole assortment of travelers--with plans as varied as their life stories--who, with little make-up, not unconvincingly resemble more than one or two of the alien characters from the cantina scene in the first Star Wars. In fact, that may be the best way to picture San Francisco International Airport without the use of a video camera and 15,000 words: it's a living, breathing, ever-changing version of the Star Wars cantina. You think I'm kidding, but a couple years ago during Thanksgiving weekend I'm almost 100% sure that I saw the blue keyboard-playing aardvark-looking dude eating chowder out of a breadbowl at the CrabPot just inside Terminal 3.

So naturally, who--or rather, what--is the first person I see as I come off the escalator that connects the walkway from the parking garage to the baggage claim area? Well, I don't know exactly. I'm not a biologist. I'm pretty sure it/he is a Man, but there is a good chance that he is representative of a distinct, recently-classified sub-species of the genus Homo named Homo reallyerectus fireislandia.

A gawkish, heroin-thin kid (maybe 20, 21), his beady brown eyes were set a little close together and deep into his head like a cross between Ted Danson and a corpse. His face was covered with freckles--not your normal red-headed Annie freckles though. He looked like he stood behind a screen door during a diarrhea fight. His eyes were partially obscured by foppish, blazing red curls that spilled out from underneath an ill-fitting Zebra-patterned Brett Michaels Every Rose Has Its Thorn cowboy hat.

He wore a tight-fitting white Filipino wedding shirt unbuttoned 3/4 of the way down. Exposing his diarrhea-freckled chest in a shallow 'V,' the shirt was open to just below the concave area between his solar plexus and the top of his shockingly defined abs that is formed by an eating disorder during 4 torturous, misunderstood years in high school and a subsequent and dedicated cocaine addiction during his abortive stint at art school.

I spotted him from a pretty considerable distance--as he was coming off the escalator that fed arriving passengers from the terminal down to baggage claim and then on to either the taxi stand or the parking garage. I had just hopped off the escalator from the parking garage and was making my way to the United arrivals board. What caught my eye first--besides that ridiculous fucking cowboy hat--was the long, lucid strides he was taking as he made his way toward me. He walked with a loping, almost non-jointed ease that seemed impossible without the assistance of a cocktail of banned narcotics. Moreover, he spilled toward me in a pair of skin-tight, low-rise, bell-bottom jeans that--but for the filthy mustard yellow pumas he had on his feet--made it look like his lower body was being swallowed and digested by a bifurcated denim boa constrictor.

He came off the escalator, I noticed, with no luggage. Nothing. No hand luggage. Not a backpack, not a messenger bag, not any sort of recycled and/or hemp-derived protest literature receptacle. Well, obviously, he didn't look like he was employed by any entity at SFO--unless Ringling Brothers bought the Dirty Hippy Circus between now and the last time I was there and leased performance space in Terminal 3 between the See's Candies stand and that piss-ass bar/cafe with the $14 double bloodies specials--so I was somewhat at a loss to explain his presence in baggage claim.

Then we crossed paths. I came upon him just as I turned the corner from the United arrivals board. As he oozed past me, it came together. I caught the distinct aroma of Bacardi and his cologne:

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The scent of urinal cakes and glory holes was unmistakable.

I was truly at a loss for words. Seeing one of these specimen immediately post-anonymous-coitus is akin to stumbling upon a family of snow leopards in the wild. I didn't know what to do...until he tripped. Over a baggage claim carousel. That's when I laughed, pointed, and pulled out my notebook.

Posted by nils at 9:32 PM

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