Tomorrow I will get on a plane and fly to Austin, TX for a week. I’ll be staying with some friends from high school and joining in the city-wide celebration of Spring Break for Geeks, aka SXSW Interactive. I did this last year and it was an extraordinary event… but one person made it extra special: the homicidal drunk rocker who sat next to me on the flight there.
I didn’t blog this story publicly when it happened because it was too close to the event. But now it’s “that time of year” again, and I’m starting to feel nostalgic for my angry seatmate. And I think enough time has passed that the story can be told.
So here’s what happened….
I had just boarded my flight to Austin and was quietly celebrating the fact that I had an empty seat beside me. The doors to the airplane were closing and we were getting ready for takeoff. That’s when I saw him — pushing his way onto the airplane at the last minute. He was wearing sunglasses and his dirty hair was pushed forward on his face. With his dirty tan coat, hard suitcase, and pinstripe pants, he looked like a 70’s rockstar. He was walking recklessly close to the person in front of him and whacked my shoulder hard with his suitcase as he passed by. All of the window and aisle seats were taken, and the flight attended asked him to choose a middle seat. He did a quick scan of the people around him, locked eyes with the bald girl in the black leather jacket, pointed to the seat beside me, and said, “I’m sitting there.”
I broke the ice by asking what time zone Texas was in, and he quickly became kind and friendly. Twitchy, though. A little nervous and angry about something. Depressed. He got to talking and some mentioned family issues, and then quickly added that he didn’t want to talk about them. But he wanted to talk, so I put on my best “attentive listener” face.
Within an hour, I learned that he was flying to Austin to kill his brother-in-law and then kill himself. But not in so many words. He tip-toed around it, giving references to the Godfather and shooting me knowing looks. His brother-in-law was his “best friend in the whole word,” but the dude was mistreating his sister and threatening to leave her, and my airplane buddy didn’t tolerate people messing with his family. He repeated Godfather allusions over and over, and told me he “might not be long for this world.” He was conflicted. He didn’t know what to do. “There’s no rulebook for these sorts of things,” he mumbled. I accepted this information the same way I would if he had just told me he was an accountant.
Posted in Adventures | 
23 Comments » | March 5th, 2008
