In Transit — One Angry Waitress

I love to travel, but, save for the handful of night trains I’ve taken, I’ve never cared much for the actual experience of getting to my destination. I’ve long had a theory that airports are the actual various circles of hell that Dante’s Inferno described.

Say you were only moderately evil—no murder for you, just a bit of petty thievery and lying on your taxes—and so you end up in the Montreal airport, always missing your flight and having to try to determine where you are supposed to go by the Frenglish that is being broadcast over a fuzzy intercom. When you do finally make it onto the plane, you’re seated next to the love of your life (this is the only time the two of you see each other on this side of life), which would be great news if the two of you didn’t always fight on planes and he wasn’t six foot three and shameless about taking up all of your legroom.

Or, say you’d made some bad life choices and either had to go to Toronto, where it seems like every woman pees on the toilet seats (seriously, if you don’t have the thigh strength to hover, then at least clean up after yourself), or Tokyo where the toilets are a wonder of modern technology and flushing them is its own small mystery—one that leads you to try switching on the stall music and the bidet, which then refuses to be shut off again, and you must therefore either sit there for an eternity because you’ve missed your flight, or have to fly all the way to Sydney soaked to the skin.

Or perhaps you end up at LAX with your parents, only to find out that your airline has disbanded, that the airline has lost your luggage in Miami, and that you will be spending the night in the sort of hotel where cockroaches rain from the ceiling each time you flip on the light, and when you go out to try and buy a toothbrush with your father, pimps will continually approach him. Thus, there in an all-night 7-eleven, with its jaundiced looking sushi, he will decide that now is the time to have a conversation about the right times to have sex (never for profit and always within the bounds of marriage), as you hunt in vain for deodorant in hopes that when you do find it, the conversation will end.

Throw in an endless security line up, a thousand so-called random pat-downs, a Chilis and Adolf Hitler standing behind you asking if you’d mind hanging onto his backpack until the two of you get on the plane (because if you ever make it on, you know you’re going to be sitting together, and he’s going to take up your arm rest and the entire luggage cabin above your heads), and then dashes off to use the washroom, where no doubt, none of the hand dryers will work for him either.