I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Read online

  “Wow,” I say. I can tell he wants me to be impressed. He unlocks the door.

  “There is plenty of room for all of us, see?”

  I’d say. And those twelve people waiting for the shuttle, too.

  “You can sit right here in the car while I wait for their plane. Check it out! Listen to the radio, watch TV. I’ll be right back.”

  I never understand it when people think you wish to sit again after you have been sitting for hours. It’s like being in school. Sit forever. But I don’t want to insult him, since we’ve just met. And he isn’t really my driver. So I climb in. He turns the key of the giant car and leaves the limo running so I don’t suffocate inside. He goes back into the airport.

  I would rather open the windows, but they don’t seem to be working. I spin the dials on everything. The TV doesn’t work. The radio is static on every station. No drinks in the little limo-coolers. That is always a hope in a limousine. Icy drinks stashed in the built-in box. But this is a run-down limo, that’s for sure. All for show. I’m not fond of these gas guzzlers anyway. Who needs them? People going to proms. Politicians conducting high-dollar secret business deals. Sports stars. But me, in my rumpled flying clothes? Get me out of here.

  Then I remember. Isn’t Florida the state with so many carjackings?

  Not to be suspicious or anything, but might a running limousine with one tired person in the back be alluring to someone with carjacking on the brain?

  I get out very quickly, climb into the front seat, turn off the key. Lock the limo, put the key in my pocket. For pretty darn sure it is the only time in my life I will have a limo key in my pocket.

  I stare up at the twilight sky of West Palm Beach and sniff the soft air which smells like pineapple and Hawai’i and coconut milk and say, “Hello Florida. Hellooooooo West Palm Beach.” My destination is Boca Raton, Mouth of the Rat. I meditate for a while on the weird names of places and invent some. Stew Pot, West Virginia. Shoelace, Texas. Messed Up but Still Beloved, Louisiana.

  I get a call on my cell phone. My friend John in Knoxville says, “Hey. Hey, I just saw a church marquee you won’t believe. Here it is: WHAT IF JESUS SAID, I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE, YOU DON’T MAKE ME HAPPY, I’VE FOUND SOMEONE ELSE.”

  About forty-five minutes later the driver returns, dragging the giant suitcases of an older, travel-weary couple wearing expensive gray coats.

  I have started directing traffic by now. I have guided a black limousine carrying NBA stars into a space right next to me. I have bowed and waved to women picking up their husbands. I have made peace signs to little kids.

  The driver stares at me. Why am I standing outside of the car? I say, “I didn’t want to waste all your gas.” He smiles and I hand him back his key.

  I don’t say, Idling makes me feel like vomiting. I didn’t want to get carjacked.

  The couple stares at me with mild displeasure. They seem to dislike the idea of sharing their car, especially with someone so disheveled. I shrug and say, “Sorry I have to ride with you all. He is not my real driver. My driver is lost in action.”

  The wife looks to her husband for a response. He sighs and says nothing. Am I not the one who should be irritated? Thanks to my lost driver and this couple’s late plane, I have forfeited relaxation time in my beachside hotel. I sit as far away from them as I can in the huge interior. How will we turn this into fun?

  As we speed along, I begin interrogating them. It’s just too awkward to sit in gloomy silence. “How was your flight? What was the weather like in New York? Pretty big coats you have there!” They answer in muffled monosyllables for about ten miles. I gather they live half the time in Florida and half the time in New York. Grumble, grumble. The problems of so many keys…Their grandchildren live in Florida. They attend many parties and kiddie social activities down here. She’s wearing pearls and posh earrings. They’re glad to be back. Sigh. New York was feeling very tiresome recently. The man walks three miles daily when he’s in Florida. In New York he’s a surgeon with a high-pressure schedule, but down here he’s a walker with a jaunty cap. I ask them about “mouth of the rat.” Why such a name for any town? Something to do with the shape of a bay, they say. They put their heads together very closely when they talk. I imagine they are grumbling privately about my inquiries.

  We pass lavish pink-frilled mansions with dramatic stucco arches, ornate wrought-iron balconies, and circular driveways. The woman says, “No one really lives there. Those houses are tax write-offs. Too big for their own good.”

  Sort of like this car.

  The driver never says a word. He’s up there in his own country, at the wheel.

  “So where are you staying?” the woman asks me reluctantly (we don’t really want to know more about this person but she won’t shut up) and I name a hotel. They know it. They say, “It’s a very nice hotel,” but it won’t be, at all. It will be truly mediocre—stinky elevators, saggy mattresses, a restaurant smelling of Clorox, and the same bad news of the world on the television screen.

  The couple chitchat comfortably about the dinner they will have once they unpack. Will they go out? Will they eat something frozen from their freezer? They mention phone calls they forgot to make before leaving. “Oh dear,” she frets, “that just slipped out of my mind!”

  “We’ll call them from here,” says the surgeon.

  I want to tell them to go out. Have fun. Wind down. Ever since I was a kid I have had to restrain myself from giving unsolicited advice. I think it says something bad about character that this is such a temptation. Who do I think I am? Telling other people how to live their lives. No wonder some of my own relatives won’t speak to me anymore.

  We pass a Bad to the Bone Barbeque restaurant. “Now that’s a good place!” the surgeon says.

  I say, “Especially if you’re a surgeon,” and he actually laughs.

  I say, “Do you keep a car down here?” and they say, “Oh, of course we do. How else would we get anywhere? It’s not like New York, where you just hail a taxi and go anywhere you want.”

  They are loosening up. I can feel their muscles lengthening. She says, “I am so impressed at the ways palm trees can bend,” and he says, “They don’t show the strain of the storms at all.” I say, “That’s just what I was thinking about as I waited for you!” They take deep breaths, and he pats her hand.

  When we reach their tall, glittering, silver condominium building, they gather their gloves and newspapers excitedly and climb out into their Florida lives. Their full southern pep has returned. The driver helps them haul their baggage inside and they call back to me, “Have a great time, sweetie!”

  The sun has set—I like the succulent blackness of Florida night seeping in through the open door. It feels like a tonic. When the driver closes the door and gets back in, I say to him, “They were nice.”

  He turns his head sharply and snaps, “Ha! Once you got them going. Don’t believe for a minute they’re normal, though. They were faking it. They tried to act normal, but really they’re spoiled millionaires. I know their kind; I see them all the time. They are not normal at all.”

  Sightseeing

  AT SEVEN A.M. IN SAN ANTONIO, A SHORT-HAIRED white cat sits straight up on the hood of a dusty green car in the parking lot of the Sanitary Tortilla Factory.

  A man stands near the car staring at the cat, smiling.

  In my bicycle basket a brown paper bag of thin corn tortillas lies steaming hot. It costs sixty cents. There’s nothing better than fresh corn tortillas with scrambled eggs and a few fried onions and peppers.

  I can’t resist circling in the parking lot to look more closely at the cat. He has an incredibly observant gaze. He is staring at sparrows hopping around on the pavement.

  “Good morning,” I call out to the man. “Say, what are you two doing?”

  Pointing at the cat, the man says, “He likes to ride around. Get a different view. He’s just looking.”

  The cat seems to be sniffing, too.

  “
Is he your cat?”

  “My wife’s cat. We ride around every day. I park, and he gets out and takes a look. He likes it.”

  There’s a green Dumpster with a wide mouth. A red hand-lettered HELP WANTED sign on the door of the factory. An old stone church ringing its bell across the street. This is the oldest tortilla factory still operating in the city.

  “How many places do you go every day?”

  “Oh, four or five each morning. I vary the routine. He likes some places more than others.”

  “How did you figure out that he wanted to do this?”

  “He always sat on the front porch step and stared very sadly at me and the car when I drove off without him. So one day I let him come with me and we started our tradition.”

  The man makes a little click with his tongue, and the cat gracefully steps over the car mirror and hops through the open window back onto the passenger seat.

  The man smiles at me and shrugs. “Now we’ll go somewhere else.”

  Tips

  WELL, I WALKED DOWN TO THE PIKE PLACE Market in Seattle and the yellow flowers were still fat, the fishmongers were still pitching and slapping the fish. I stayed in a cool hotel called Hotel Max that had giant black-and-white Seattle photographs on all the doors of the rooms. Every photograph was different. My room had a dog, peering around a corner. There was a note on the table by my bed that said I could order cold buckwheat noodles in a bowl any hour of the day or night, and they were pretty cheap, too.

  My visit to the international teachers’ conference went well, but the taxi back to the airport, which we had booked three hours in advance, didn’t show up. Someone called it again for me as I stood by the curb and waited for forty minutes. I was waiting by a blue bench and a crossing light, just where they told me to wait. I was starting to get worried. No other empty taxis passed, so I couldn’t hail one. Salmon trucks passed, and dairy trucks, and buses filled with interesting-looking people I would never meet, and young moms with babies in car seats. Then I overheard a woman who had just shown up half a block down the curb saying, “Airport” to a taxi driver as he swooped up to her, so I hustled over there and said, “Maybe you’re here for Nye?” and he said, “No, I’m here for Martin.” I asked if I could join them and pay half. They nodded. “Now I’ll get a really good tip,” the driver said.

  Very quickly I could bet the Martin woman was glad I rode with her because the driver rambled nonstop from downtown to the airport and it’s easier to have two people in the backseat saying “Uhhuh” and “Mmmmm” instead of just one. We could take turns.

  He started by pointing at the jail and then just went on from there, like someone had flipped a switch.

  You ladies don’t want to check into that hotel I’ll bet, heh heh heh! Not even a good spot to have lunch, I’d say, though Seattle has a million kinda restaurants if you’re hungry and every cuisine you could dream of even weird stuff from weird countries you didn’t know existed like Zanzibania and I was wondering, have you ladies ever tasted one of our great northwestern specialties, the Rainier cherry, the one that is yellow more than red and very tart and delicious? (Uh-huh.)

  You have? Oh well I was going to go to a fruit stand on the way to the airport and get you a bunch of them in a paper sack if you’d never tasted them, do you by any chance remember what you paid per pound? (Mmmmm, maybe $3.99? Or $4.99? Pretty expensive…)

  Oh wow they’re much cheaper here of course near the source of the trees I guess that’s how it always goes, things cheaper near their sources, or is it? (Mmmmm) I heard something about how the clothes made in China aren’t cheap in China if you could even buy them there but they’re for export only so usually you can’t. (He points at a building.) Do you ladies realize that that building of forty stories was, for many years, the tallest building west of the Mississippi? (We did not.) Do you know who owned it? (Huh-uh.) Mr. Smith. And can you guess which Mr. Smith he was? (Mmmmm. No telling.) Can you ladies guess which product it was that made him rich? I’ll bet you can, you got some years on you heh heh heh. It’s an office tool. That’s my only hint. (He taps his wedding ring on the steering wheel.) Think of it ladies, it’s a sound that teenagers of today will never know, I feel a little sorry for them…. (Smith Corona! I shout.) You got it! Right-o! (He honks madly. Two cars swerve out of his lane.) I think you should get a prize for that, okay I’ll tell you something else, we have a Concorde and we have Lyndon Johnson’s airplane and we have a DC-3 hanging from the ceiling and guess where they are? Have you ever been there? Our Museum of Flight! It’s a must for your next trip. Lots of people miss it. They always go to the dad-gum Pike Place Market and the first Starbucks like big deal who cares about a coffee shop even if it did start here. (Mmmmm you could say that again.) I could take you a place where a cuppa coffee’s still fifty cents and it’s a good one too in a big mug. Anyway back to the flight museum, I guess if you fly a lot yourselves you might not be that excited to go to a Museum of Flight right off but trust me those of us that stay on the ground really get into it. The pilot of the Concorde did not make any friends in this town when he delivered the plane though, he was supposed to land around three-thirty but he arrived early at two-fifteen because he took a shortcut over Canada from wherever he was coming from and all the little kids that had permission to get out of school to see it land and were on their way over here in big yellow schoolbuses missed it. When they got here it was just sitting on the runway like no big deal and the engine was already turned off. And the kids didn’t even want to deliver those welcome cards they had made, the newspaper wrote about them, welcome cards to an airplane, they could hardly stick them on the nose of the plane….

  Lending Library

  I’M FASCINATED BY THE TRAIN OF THOUGHT. How many cars does it have?

  In San Jose, California, a driver waited for my late plane for three hours. I wished no one had been called in advance and I could just have found someone on the spot. He hauled my suitcase grumpily, trying to be professionally gracious, but it was clear he was bummed out in the pouring rain. I apologized profusely. “I thought you would have left me by now.” He had driven in something like seventy miles from Monterey. I explained that all million passengers at DFW airport had been evacuated from the entire place, every terminal and gate, after some nutty college student ran through a security checkpoint without stopping. It took quite a while to get us all checked back in.

  The driver didn’t want to hear about it. He wanted to know what I was reading. He had a book in his own pocket. “Reading saved me tonight,” he said.

  “Reading always saves me,” I said.

  “Right on!” he said. Things seemed to be improving.

  It was raining so hard I asked if it was a monsoon and he said no. He said, “I’ll read a TV Guide if I have nothing else. And I don’t watch TV.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  I told him I was reading Peter Matthiessen’s Lost Man’s River on the plane, while I was feeling somewhat lost, and he got very happy.

  “Matthiessen is the best!!!” he said. “Far Tortuga is my favorite novel of all time! And The Snow Leopard is my best nonfiction book—so what are the odds of the same person writing your favorite book in both genres?”

  “Pretty cool.”

  And then, because he was so excited, I couldn’t help myself.

  “Have you met him?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I wish!”

  “Well, I have. In fact, I know him. I know his wonderful wife and I have stayed at their home.”

  “Are you joking?” Now he was happy he’d waited for me.

  Sometimes name-dropping comes in handy in this world. The trick is knowing when.

  “Where is his house?”

  I told him in general terms. I told him Peter’s wife had a huge, gorgeous garden and a cozy kitchen filled with beautiful pans and kettles, and they had a fireplace and a million books.

  He asked me when I had first read The Snow Leopard. “In college,” I said
. “It marked me.”

  He said, “YO! My whole life shifted into a different gear when I read that book.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I got more honest,” he said. “I wanted to live my life in a more meaningful way. So this is what I decided to do and it became my regular pattern—work for a year and explore for a year. I wouldn’t get married or have kids and I wouldn’t build up any material empire or anything—I would just save my money by living very simply for a whole year, then spend it on the road for the next year. So here are the places I have seen—Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, Siberia, China, Bhutan, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Chile, Samoa, New Zealand. Next year I’ll be hiking in France for the whole year. I really haven’t spent much time in Europe yet. It’s more expensive. But I can truly say The Snow Leopard sent me to all these places. Would you tell Peter that for me?”

  “You bet,” I said. “He’ll like it.”

  “Oh—and I’m hoping for Antarctica, too. But I have to find an affordable way to do that.”

  “I like your life.”

  He said, “I’m never lonely. And I’ve only taken a friend along twice. But I always take books and find more books…. Say, have you read another one of my truly favorite books, Cold Oceans by Jon Turk?”

  “No.”

  “Well, give me your address and I’ll send it to you. I have three copies that I loan out. But you have to send it back to me in three months. Promise?”

  “Maybe I can find it on my own so you don’t have to bother.”

  “No! I’d rather send it. It will change your life. It’s about Jon Turk’s adventures in a kayak, a rowboat, and on a dogsled.”

  “I’ll stick with the rowboat,” I say. “We rode on a dogsled once in the Alaskan tundra and I thought I was going to launch to outer space. Very bumpy and a little too thrilling for me. Also, my son kept thinking the dogs were going to bite us.”