I arrive at LaGuardia at 6am and I haul my luggage onto the scales.
A middle-aged airport lady raises an eyebrow and looks at me through her painted face.
“You’re over. Excess baggage is $90.”
“Let me re-pack.” I sigh.
The airport lady looks me and the pack horse look I am sporting up and down.
“Where you going to put it honey?”
I don’t think five pounds is that overweight, even when that five pounds turns out to be more like ten. And I’ve never understood why airport ladies are like this. What’s in this policing for them?
I re-pack. On the airport floor, with a line of people building up behind me, I repack my bags after three months of travel. Shit is everywhere.
I haul my bags on the scales again.
“Still needs to lose another couple of pounds.”
I haul my bag off again.
Philadelphia airport. Boarding a plane to LA, from where I will catch a train to San Diego, to visit Anna, a close friend, who has relocated there temporarily while she works on a reality T.V show about car hoarding. Everyone on the full flight has boarded and is strapped in. We get greeted by the stewardess over the PA. Then the flight gets cancelled and we are told to go to the customer service desk, which is manned by one person, for rescheduling. The line extends across the length of the concourse.
I’m rerouted through Charlotte.
I don’t even know where that is.
I arrive to discover that my onwards flight is delayed, which, at this stage does not make me happy, but my need for the bathroom is overpowering my want to yell. I enter the toilets and the first thing I notice is that the withered old bathroom attendant is singing. She is singing loudly and proudly. Her song goes like this:
My beautiful ladies, god bless god bless, my beautiful ladies enjoy your flights.
She interrupts herself whenever anyone comes in and says:
Welcome, welcome, come on in to my bathroom, I love you.
Some people may find this appealing. I don’t. Furthermore, I was in need of doing a number two. The old woman makes her way up through her cubicles, cleaning them, loving them, singing to them, singing to us, to me, so I choose a cubicle far away, although inevitably, I know that she will be cleaning, loving, blessing and singing to the toilet bowl and the universe next to me as I try to snap one off. It’s a little disconcerting, but need triumphs over personal boundaries and for the first and hopefully last time, I have a strange woman singing a song for me, blessing me – one of her many beautiful women – while taking a dump.
Eventually, I come out of the cubicle and she wants to ask me about my travel plans, as she has already asked all of the other beautiful women who have washed their hands before me. Inevitably, upon hearing my Australian accent she quizzes me about Kangaroos – Have I ever seen one? Do they attack? How strong are they exactly? Would they chase her down the street? I start to talk about roadkill. I don’t know why I like to do this but I do it often with foreigners. I like to de-romanticise the Kangaroo and describe them in their natural habitat which is often dead on the side of the road, tyre marks through head. I know it makes me a bit of a wang, but why deny a simple pleasure? I tell her about how we hit them with our cars at dusk and dawn, how guys are employed to shoot them, how we eat them, and once how a friend’s particularly derro boyfriend drilled a hole through the head of a dead one at the age of seventeen. And then I tip her a dollar. That’s the going rate for an awkward bowel movement experience.
When I arrive at San Diego airport twenty two hours have passed since I first hauled my luggage to West 4th Subway, only to learn that Oceanview, where my friend Anna is staying is not a suburb of San Diego, but the suburbs near San Diego and another hour or so on a shuttle. As I lug my luggage onto yet another mode of public transportation I stew. Oceanview better be fucking amazing, although based on Anna’s description (My hotel is on a freeway next to a Hooters!), I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not.
