All at once, the hand of fate dropped three things upon me.
The clock struck midnight, marking the fifth hour of sitting at my gate in the Seattle-Tacoma airport.
The gate official tapped on the microphone, and announced my flight was delayed until noon the next day.
I received a text from John, the lad I’d met at a bar the night before.
Get home safe? His text read.
Flight delayed, looks like I’m sleeping at the airport 😦 I responded.
I could pick you up. I read his text with raised eyebrows.
The night before, I’d first noticed John in my peripheral vision as a gigantic-gray-sweatshirted blur. Upon closer glance, I realized he was human; a whirling dervish on the dance floor. I watched him give new meaning to the word “boogie” in wonder.
It wasn’t so much his technique or grace that reeled me in, as both left something to be desired. It was the reckless abandon with which he threw his body around. Here was a man liberated from the societal expectation of masculinity that confines most guys his age at clubs to the frat boy shuffle– whose only moves are tucking a Zyn behind their drooling bottom lip and staring at the dance floor from their pool table-side view.
I’ll be the first to admit, strange things attract me. Let’s refer to the time I was at a pregame when a guy asked the room if anyone had ever shit their pants. He then proceeded to take a hit of coke off of a teeny, tiny spoon and recount his own wretched tale. I was the only one in the Uber full of girls on the way to the bar who thought he was so cute.
Needless to say, the unruly combination of fist pumps and head bobs of the dancing Tasmanian Devil in Seattle entranced me. As the kids say, I was locked in.
I couldn’t help myself; I bumped into him.
My friends ended up getting along with his friends, and we all ended up going to one of their places. The night didn’t last long once one of John’s friends ended up throwing up red wine all over the bathroom floor, but John managed to get my number.
And here he was offering to sweep my sorry ass off the floor of Gate 39F, likely looking for more action than some fist bumps and head bobs.
I took stock of my situation. All of my friends from our girl’s trip left hours before on planes that arrived in one piece. I’d lost my debit card at the beginning of the trip, and only $8 in cash remained in my pocket. There was no one else left in Seattle that I knew. Except for John.
If you’re reading this, I’m sorry Mom, Father Johnson, my gynecologist, and the distant memory of my pure childhood.
As the other 200 fools who’d also chosen to fly on Frontier Airlines filed into a devastatingly long customer service line, I took a deep breath and gave John a call.
Yes, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. As I sat by baggage claim waiting for John to arrive, I mused over the position I’d put myself in.
You don’t have to fuck him if you end up not wanting to, you can always fake a kidney stone or a ruptured spleen, I wrote in my journal as the flight attendants called Ubers beside me. Am a bit nervous, but he’s less likely to kill me than that nice comedian fella who muttered what sounded like witchcraft in his sleep.
I dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. And I waited.
John rolled up to the arrivals terminal a few minutes past one in the morning. He drove a small red car dwarfed by the huge dent in its passenger side door.
The car ride wasn’t awkward. We tossed banter back and forth in an topsy turvy game of catch. He played good music; Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, and Anderson Paak. The ride was also uneventful; save for a few exits he took so fast I hung onto the window handle to keep my face from smushing into the glass.
John was visiting Seattle for the weekend, and staying at a friend’s who lived in a woodsy neighborhood above Lake Washington. As we turned off the main highway, we drove up a steep street that winded deeper and deeper into darkness.
“This is where I kill you and hide the body,” he said as turned down a road suspiciously reminiscent of the flying monkey scene in The Wizard of Oz.
“Still beats sleeping at the airport,” I replied.
A few minutes later John started to drive slower and squint out the window. He admitted he didn’t know his friend’s address.
“I’ll know it when I see the driveway,” he said as we turned around not one, but three times to scan the houses once more.
Eventually, John identified our destination from a red mailbox stuck lazily into the ground next to a narrow path leading up to a log cabin.
The house was old and rustic and filled with the air of a time that once was. High ceilings and polished oak walls loomed above a quaint dining room full of tea cups and fine china dinner plates. The west side of the house had huge windows and a wooden porch that overlooked the lake in all of its Pacific Northwest-esque glory. Sturdy evergreens towered above the delicate cherry blossoms that scattered about the landscape like sprinkles.
It was obviously a parent or grandparent’s house. Only the empty beer cans scattered across the kitchen counter, and the faint whiff of Axe Body spray lingering in the air gave away the presence of a couple of guys in their early twenties.
We took a few minutes to admire the view of Lake Washington below the porch. From here, the night sped up by zero to a hundred thousand miles per hour.
A glass of wine later, and he was frantically ripping my clothes off. His advances were like his driving; jarring.
Here’s the long story short, because the entire story was actually short.
Despite his frenzied approach, things couldn’t quite take flight for the second time that night.
“This isn’t gonna work,” I said, pushing him off of me after trying every trick in the book to help him out.
“Argh!” he furrowed his sweaty brow. “I must’ve done way too much blow today.”
“Huh?” I sat up. “You did cocaine, today? On a Sunday?”
“Yeah, I’m on vacation,” he looked at me like a little kid who was caught with his green beans from his dinner plate shoved in his socks. “Not a lot, just lines throughout the day.”
I thought of the skid marks his driving left on the highway exit roads. “How recently?”
“Yesterday,” he replied.
It was now 2 in the morning, and yesterday was as recent as 11:59pm.
“Riiiiighhhhht,” I said.
“I’m embarrassed,” he said.
“It’s okay, dude,” I said, hammering the final stake through the vibe. I was more than ready to go to sleep. “Can I use your shower? I feel gross from the airport.”
His shoulders deflated as he saw the window of opportunity pass his powdered nose by.
In the shower, I scrubbed him off of me. An image of him crazily dancing the night before cast a shadow over my mind.
This guy wasn’t a liberated spirit who’d found the self security to relish in his god-given right to boogie. This guy was high on cocaine.
Back in bed, I crawled underneath the covers. As I closed my eyes, John began to talk and talk and talk and talk.
He talked about a man in Florida who’d given him cocaine for the first time. He talked about how when they ran out of coke, John went back to the man’s house with him to get more. John still seemed surprised when he told me the man turned out to be a bit of a wacko. He talked about how the guy started jabbering about conspiracy theories and his own tendency to come out of a drug-induced stupor and find himself making kombucha late into the hours of the night. He talked in circles about his night in Florida with the guy who sipped kombucha as he cut tidy, long lines.
I fell asleep to John’s voice. His voice had a nice timber to it, even if there seemed to be no “off” button.
In the morning I insisted on taking the train back to the airport, but John assured me he could drive. After a good night’s sleep, he took the exits much slower.
“Let’s keep in touch,” he said as we pulled up to the departure terminal.
“Sounds good,” I said, and actually meant it. Despite John’s quirks, I enjoyed listening to his stories.
But we know how these things go; we never texted again. Shit blows.
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