“Are you at the
good Denny’s?”
Three motels, one
with its hourly rate proudly posted, and the adult bookstore directly across the
street made it clear I was not.
I had been expelled
from a closing airport and sent to spend Christmas Eve at the "bad
Denny's" to be hit on by an aging gangster named Foot while sitting
adjacent to Chardonnay, a stripper with a stack of singles and feather roach-clip
earrings, wearing a black Santa hat emblazoned with the word
"Naughty!"
“I don’t think so…but
I need to reserve a cab pickup…”
“Ma’am, we don’t
make reservations for pickups from Denny’s. Especially that Denny’s.”
Click!
All eyes turned to
me, the pariah from the police car, who had just been plopped in the parking
lot. I stood there, Delta Dawn incarnate, wearing an ill-fitting 17 year-old
wool winter coat and ripped yoga pants, clutching a small suitcase.
Just hours
earlier, I had been racing through an underground tunnel at LAX because the
first leg of my flight had been switched and was suddenly being serviced by a
completely different airline…in a totally different terminal…on the opposite
side of the airport.
I made it, just in
time to reprint tickets and tags and rush to the gate…where the flight was
delayed. I had just set my carryon down and was readying to settle in when --
“Here, watch him!”
A complete
stranger, not even bothering to make eye contact, shoved her son at me and
disappeared…for half of an hour. She blew back in the same whirlwind in which
she went, phone squeezed tightly between her shoulder and cheek, whisking him
up as she hurried past and on off down the hallway hollering back to me without
even glancing up, “Hurry up Helen! I can’t do this all myself!” No, she
couldn’t. She definitely couldn’t. And poor Helen, wherever she was.
But now, I sat, plates
piling high on the pressed wood table, ordering course after course from the menu
to bide my time until the airport reopened in a few hours. I preferred paying
rent on this sticky tabled booth rather than at the hourly motor lodge across
the way where there was a good chance that the surfaces were just as sticky. I
ordered $16 worth of food. $16 is an immense amount of food for a single person
at Denny’s.
I swirled my straw
through three dollars worth of strawberry shake.
“What you doin’?
What you doin’ with that bad ass?”
I looked up to see
a bandit-bandanaed-blonde-bombshell airbrushed across a black t-shirt just
below some numbers and the letters “O.G.” sliding into the booth across from
me.
“Foot” slurred a
thick tongued introduction fragrant with fermentation as he extended his
tattooed fingertips; a tinted motif that flowed up his forearm, then slipped
under his sleeve unseen to later resurface, slithering up his neck and
culminating around his eye in teardrops, dots and digits. He continued by
unleashing an uninvited ode to my ass. That same, travel tired tush that was
now respectfully tucked away in torn yoga pants under a large tunic.
The rip in the
rear was the result of a snag from some stable doors set up in the sanctuary
for Christmas Eve service. I was cleaning up the frankincense and myrrh when my
derriere was detained by the doors just minutes before boarding an airport
shuttle to make it to my original flight in the nick of time…before it was
changed in every way possible.
A flight that I
was taking to catch up to my husband who had already headed to the Midwest a
few days earlier. A flight I had to take solo because I worked at a church and
Christmas Eve is, well, a workday. A flight that was supposedly a “connecting
flight” that had just landed at a tiny airport that “doesn’t do connecting
flights.”
“Ma’am, you’ll
have to leave. The airport is closing. It’s Christmas Eve and everyone wants to
go home.”
“But I’m supposed
to get on a connecting flight in a few hours.”
“Ma’am there are
no connections. This is the end of the road.”
I stood there
wagging my tickets for the remainder of my trip. Tickets printed by an airline
that doesn’t service that airport. Tickets that no one would even look at when
I asked them to because it wasn’t their airline. Tickets that cost hundreds of
dollars, but were getting me nowhere except kicked out of the airport because
it was closing.
“Ma’am. How did
you even get here? Who dropped you off?”
“I flew. I just
got off of a plane a little over an hour ago.”
And then the
walkie-talkie was whipped out and I was described as a confused lady in a red
wool coat. A really old red wool coat. A red wool coat that I was wearing even
though it was at least 70 degrees outside.
Two Novembers into
our marriage, I had no winter coat nor the budget for a winter coat. But was
surrounded by Iowa weather that required said winter coat. This was back before
you could order things online, so we went shopping.
There was a
beautiful red wool coat, at Yonkers department store, that I loved. Then, there
wound up being one functional coat at another place that was the only one that
fit me and the budget. The store closed before I could go back and get it. I
resolved to return the next day.
After work, I
swung by home to change out of my bank teller’s uniform before heading out to
make my practical purchase and there, lying on the bed, was the red wool coat. That
red wool coat took extra hours. That red wool coat took giving things up. That
red wool coat made me cry. And even though it has gone out of fashion and I
live in the heat of Southern California, I still wear that red wool coat every
year when I travel home for Christmas. It is the only winter coat I own. It may
have been seventeen years old, but the intent and love behind it are still the
same.
“Well, all of the
cabs are gone now, and by the time one gets here, we’ll all be gone and it’s
not safe to leave you standing outside alone. Is there someplace I can drop you
until the airport opens again in the morning?” The airport cop had been
summoned to deal with the confused lady in the red wool coat.
“Maybe a 24-hour
restaurant like an IHOP?” I offered.
“I don’t know. A
lot of things are closed.”
I checked my phone
to see what I could find. I found a Denny’s. He said that was doable.
I climbed into his
squad car with my carryon luggage in my lap, closed the door, and as the car pulled
away from the curb, the questions began. Familiar questions. Questions we used
to have on a list for a nonprofit I had worked for. Questions that were asked
of mentally unstable people off in an alternate reality.
And according to
my phone, we were not headed towards the Denny’s. Not by a long shot. I was
headed to spend the early morning hours of my Christmas where those deemed
“confused” who show up in old red coats at dead end airports with tickets for
airlines that aren’t there wind up. So rather than starting at the beginning
again. Out of desperation, I chose to start at the end. The destination. Rural
Iowa. My mother and father-in-law’s house and how they would be waiting to pick
me up, along with my husband.
And as fate would
have it, this cop, way out on the west coast…had family…in the tiny town just
one county over. And knew all of the places and even some of the people from my
husband’s hometown. And at least for a moment, long enough to turn the car around,
decided maybe I wasn’t completely deranged and dropped me at that Denny’s.
That Denny’s where
I now sat across from a very large man, with very identifiable associations on
his skin, as he wound up his ballad to my butt.
“I’d really like to
kiss you.”
“Dad, leave her
alone!”
And there he was,
the son. Foot had a son! A son! A son with miraculous timing. A son whose face
burned with embarrassment as he dragged his elder from my booth toward the
door, apologizing profusely. A son who said he hoped his father hadn’t ruined
my Christmas as Foot staggered back toward me offering, in his own way, to…keep
in touch.
“For the love of
God, Dad! Get in the car! Now!” And one kick to Foot’s own “bad ass” and they
were out the door and into the waiting car.
I spent the next
few hours in the booth next to Chardonnay and across from an autistic tree
surgeon named, I kid you not, Gabriel. Who, from what I gathered, came in every
night to sit on the same stool and eat the same thing. He would sit at the
counter and talk about trees, to anyone and everyone, as loudly as he could.
He knew everything
there was to know about trees! Their insides, their outsides, their bark and
their bite. And how at this time of year, everyone loved trees. He got to
string them with lights all throughout gardens and hedges. And shape them and
tie them and make them look lovely. So of course Christmas was his favorite! And
what better way to spend Christmas than with his favorite strangers and at his favorite place, Denny’s.
And he wished each
and every one of us a merry Christmas and us him in return. And in those wee
early hours while we were still in the night, all of us waiting for…something; the
strays and the castoffs, the unwanted and wandering, the fringe and forgotten
were gathered together and wished well and welcomed and given glad tidings of
great joy from Gabriel, about his evergreens.
It was going to be
okay. I had a place to be. I was warm and I had $16 worth of cold spaghetti and
sides splayed out before me. I was pretty blessed and soon I would be with
people who loved me...with or without underwear.
Yep. When I
finally arrived at my destination, my luggage was lost…for five days.
Despite
everything, I made it back to the airport, onto an outbound flight and to my
mother and father-in-law’s house. Where I finally replaced my ripped open pants
with a pair of pajama bottoms I opened for Christmas because I had nothing else
to wear.
And being Rural
Iowa, everything was closed for the holidays. I eventually had to give in and
buy some underwear from a Mennonite supply store just to get by. These behemoth
britches came way up past my belly button and my husband and I called these
sizeable, sexy specimens my “Amish underpants.”
But I had made it
to my destination. To people who love me, Amish underpants and all. And I know
that I’ll never have another Christmas Eve like that one…
Because next time,
I’m going to the “good Denny’s.”