Radiomen (2 page)

I actually had listened a number of times to the program I’d tuned into last night. For a while, the big topic up for discussion on the show had been the increased sightings of UFOs that had coincided with 9/11, and the theory that the terrorist attacks had alarmed “the aliens”—people on the radio talked about aliens like it was a given that we were being visited by other-worldly beings on a regular basis—to the point where they might be considering some form of direct intervention in the affairs of our quarrelsome little planet. But many months had already passed, and since nothing like that had happened (that we knew of, anyway, as the occasional caller liked to point out), the discussion had turned to other looming dangers and esoteric mysteries, like a ghost hunter who had described his experiences with the angry dead and various self-described “out-world” archaeologists who discussed the Sphinx-like formation that formed the supposed “face” on Mars. But I had never actually called in when they opened the phone lines for questions. I still couldn’t figure out what had possessed me to phone in last night—boredom, maybe, or the effects of the wine. But whatever, I certainly hadn’t expected anything like what I got: a stranger’s voice describing a room I hadn’t been in for decades and a shadow that I had met in a dream. It was bizarre. Inexplicable. As was the fact that the shadow was pointing to the fire escape—as if I needed to be reminded about what had happened out there—that is, what had happened in my dream. I had never forgotten it but I also hadn’t thought about it in what seemed like eons, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in thinking about it now. And if there was anything I was really good at, it was finding ways to avoid what I didn’t want to think about. That’s what the radio was for, and my computer, and the TV. Besides, there were a couple of things I had to do before I left for work in the late afternoon, like go to the supermarket, which was a long hike from my building. So, I decided that buying groceries was more important than dwelling on my late-night encounters with weirdness in radio land. I got dressed, plopped a baseball cap on my head, and headed out the door.

By the time I got home, showered and pulled on clean clothes, it was time to get to work. I locked up my apartment and walked a few blocks past the body shops and garages to where the sidewalks ended at the road that fronts the marshland at the edge of Jamaica Bay. The bus I had to take to get out to Kennedy airport followed a route along the bay, winding along the back roads past more garages, junkyards and small factories until it turned onto the Grand Central Parkway where the driver could finally hit the gas pedal and join the traffic speeding toward the airport and then on to the city, beyond.

There was a chain-link fence near the bus stop where I waited that prevented access to the reedy wetlands beyond. The waters around here had once been an oily morass but were better now, after years of clean-up efforts. In the spring, there were often egrets standing along the shoreline, looking like white handkerchiefs blown in with the breeze, and even the occasional heron or cormorant. But it was winter now and the migrating birds had not yet returned. The appearance of the gray water lapping against the rocky shore was dulled by cold; the leafless trees planted along the street side of the fence looked skinless, barely alive.

When the bus arrived, I got on and took a seat among the other workers on their way to put in their hours on the night shift at various service jobs at JFK or the hotels around the airport that cater to the traveling public. We all knew each other—not by name, but recognized one another from this daily commute, though no one exchanged a greeting. At this time in the afternoon, we were generally the only people who used this bus route: maids, cleaners, cooks, clerks, mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and other low-rung personnel, with our identity cards hung around our necks. Except for the clatter of traffic and the airplane engines screaming overhead as we got closer to Kennedy, we rode together in silence, disembarking singly or in small groups as the bus finally entered the airport grounds and made the rounds of the terminals.

I worked in the oldest terminal, in a sports bar that’s part of a regional chain called The Endless Weekend. Our motto, printed on our napkins and on the black tee shirts we were required to wear with black jeans was,
We Party All the Time
. (I sometimes entertained the idea that I had been hired for this job less because of my bartending skills, though I did have those, than for the fact that I was dark haired and dark eyed, which fit in with the color scheme some corporate manager somewhere had picked out for the hired help.) We had five high-def TVs in the bar and they were all tuned to either a game of some sort or a sports-talk program; those were the rules and there were penalties for breaking them if any of the supervisors who did random spot checks of our operations found that we had tried to fiddle with the preset channels. In the bar, where there were no windows, it was always meant to be some version of a boozy, neon night where serious drinking was celebrated and team rankings were debated with unbridled fervor.

Five nights a week, on a rotating schedule, I was the bartender at The Endless Weekend, working with just one waitress. We used to have more staff but the company had downsized the workforce when the travel industry took a nosedive after September 11. I had worked at this same bar for a couple of years but the waitresses tended to come and go. In the past year or so, many of them were laid-off flight attendants whose lives had been upended by the problems that the airlines were experiencing. Bankrupt airlines—particularly a few notable regional carriers—had looted the employee pensions, sold their computers, their furniture and even their planes, and left their workers with little to fall back on. It was a sad story that I had now heard over and over from more than half a dozen women who had thought of themselves as professionals with good jobs that provided both decent benefits and serious responsibilities but had to face the fact that, in the end, once the world of work stripped their résumés down to the essence of what they did, potential employers thought of them as waitresses. A woman handing you a beer and a napkin, whether on a plane or in a dive bar on some lonely road, was a waitress. At The Endless Weekend, the main skill required for this job was that you could stand on your feet eight or more hours a day, smile even at idiots, and fit the jeans and tee shirt. It was supposed to be a big secret and, of course, completely illegal, but if you wore anything larger than a size ten, you’d never get the job.

I tried to be sympathetic every time I heard this tale of woe from a new waitress—and I was—but only to a point. It was hard for me to really empathize with the loss of something I had never had, like a real career. For me, bartending was just one more in a series of similar jobs I’d had after I graduated from high school. That was in 1972, an unsettled time of international crises, abundant Acapulco gold and disco music invading all the radio stations. I had no close family ties anymore and no idea of what to do with myself, so I joined the vestiges of the wandering tribes of kids in vans who had headed to California, then up to the Pacific Northwest, and then, finally, dispersed to rural communes to wait for the revolution that everybody already knew was never going to come. I had lived in Canada for a while, in Alberta, and then in rural upstate New York, but plains and mountains were not my thing; if I couldn’t see water and know the ocean was nearby, I felt trapped. The edges of the country, the coasts, were better for me; I liked the feeling of being able to sail away if I needed to. Not that I was going anywhere anymore or knew the first thing about sailing in any real sense; it was just an idea I had, something dating back to my traveling days. Given a few minutes notice, I thought I could still throw some shirts in a backpack and head out. Where didn’t matter as much as the fact that I could just
go
if I had to. If the need arose.

Eventually, I made my way back to New York—home was home, no matter how rough a start it had offered—and had found work in restaurants and shops. I worked cash registers, managed a kitchenware store, even fired pottery in an old warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan for a while and then delivered packages on a bike I navigated through the New York City streets, keeping myself just a level or two above an existence that involved real deprivation. It did occur to me now and then that I should go back to school, though for what I didn’t know. I paid attention to those ads that came on TV late at night, offering the chance to enroll in a school that taught sound engineering or how to be a medical assistant or a pastry chef, but I couldn’t picture myself doing any of these things. I just wasn’t a mainstream person; I knew how to manage at the margins of the system but I just couldn’t quite push myself up onto even the lower rungs of the middle class, where I suppose I should have been at this point in my life, at the tail end of my forties. It was the same with the relationships I’d had—boyfriends, girlfriends—things just seem to come apart without my really understanding why. I didn’t stick to things, I drifted away from people. At least, that had been my pattern for as long as I could remember.

My current job, which I had more or less lied my way into (though I had worked at enough restaurants to have picked up some bartending skills and learned more as I went along), was actually one of the longest I’d had. A lot of that had to do with changing times. There just weren’t that many jobs available anymore for someone with the kind of post-hippie-jack-of-all-service-trades résumé I had, so for once, I was playing it safe and not even looking around for another job. Having already survived a round of staff reductions at The Endless Weekend, I was just more or less keeping my head down, my mouth shut, and serving drinks with an ever-present smile, as instructed by the supervisors who also dictated our all-sports-all-the-time TV fare. They were in charge; I just did what I was told to do. At work, they—the supervisors, the corporate bosses I never saw—more or less owned me, and I understood that. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I needed to pay rent, I needed to buy groceries, and so I needed to work.

Tonight, at The Endless Weekend, ice hockey season was underway, so while watching the money on the bar, keeping my charge receipts in order, and generally trying to pretend that yes, indeed, this was the place where a perpetual party was going on, where every guy was a hunk, every gal a babe, and every conversation sparkled with wit, I worked on through the hours of a game that was interrupted by a bench-clearing fight and then went into overtime. I knew that because part of my training for this job had involved being instructed that it was my responsibility to keep track of the action displayed on the TV screens. People wandering in at the middle of some game would often ask about the score and we were supposed to be able to tell them. I guess it made the bar seem like more than it really was: a destination instead of just a stopping-off point in a journey elsewhere. So, I kept an eye on the hockey game as well as an international soccer match playing on one of the screens. The see-sawing score in the soccer game paid off with a nice tip when a South African fellow (I didn’t even have to ask; I had become an expert at accents) stopped in for a couple of shots and wondered if I knew what was going on. Sure, I said. And I did.

The night manager, who was responsible for this bar along with several others around the airport with different names but owned by the same parent company, came by just after midnight to start checking the receipts and bundling the cash into the safe for collection by an armored car service. Around one
A.M.
, when he was finished and we had helped to clean up, I was free to head back home. I was looking forward to doing nothing much at all until I had to come back to the airport tomorrow night.

The terminal was a sleepy place at this hour of the night. The TSA people were around, of course, drinking thermos coffee and eating sandwiches they had packed at home because the restaurants were all closed—and they couldn’t really afford to buy the overpriced, overpackaged stuff they sell in those places, anyway—and there were always a few cops strolling around with their big dogs that you weren’t supposed to pet. The cops were friendly and I knew most of them by name, just as I knew their dogs, but even as I said hi, I could see the German shepherds watching me as I passed by, sniffing the air.

As I was walking through the terminal, I was stopped by someone else I knew to say hello to, the driver of one of those electric carts that the airlines use to transport disabled passengers. He offered me a lift so I took a slow ride with him, sitting in the seat beside him as the car beeped its way down the long airport corridors lined with lighted panels advertising great places to visit and things you’d want to take with you on your dream journey: fabulously expensive luggage, extravagant jewelry, and sunglasses that cost more than the moon.

I left the airport through a service exit that let me out near the cargo bays used by the food-service companies. There were a couple of refrigerated trucks parked in the bays, but I didn’t see many people around except for a pair of security guards. I showed them my ID badge and they let me continue on my way.

The cargo area led me to a parking lot for the food-service employees; it was almost empty at this time of night, but because it had electric fencing all around, I had to pass through the entry gate, which meant showing my badge to another guard. After that, I was back on a municipal street, though you could hardly call it that: there was a narrow grass verge along the edge of the parking lot and on the other side of the two-lane road that ran past this back end of the airport, a long stretch of tangled marshland. Beyond, there were briny estuaries that freshened with the tides and fed into the deep-water bay. The landscape presented much the same vista as the bus stop where I waited on the first leg of my journey back and forth to work.

The night had turned out to be colder than I expected and I had on the wrong kind of jacket. Shivering, I tried to distract myself by picking out the constellations overhead—the stars Castor and Pollux were easy to spot in Gemini, as was Orion, with the three sisters in his belt, a nebula wielded as a sword and his hunting dogs chasing him through the black sky. From the many nights I had waited here for the bus, I knew how to follow the progress of these starry markers across the seasons as fall turned to winter and then to spring when they disappeared below the horizon until the year changed over again.