Dopp Juice Archive

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.

He was a musician (hence the rockstar look), so we started talking about music. I asked lots of questions about what he was passionate about, what his sister was passionate about, what his brother-in-law was passionate about, and what his family was like. He talked and talked and talked. He loved them all dearly and started getting sentimental. He told that he found salvation in Jesus Christ but that he hated organized religion. “Jesus was the original punk rocker,” he told me. (Again: the same face I’d give an accountant.)

Eventually he paused and started thanking me for listening. Most of his friends were dead, he said. I was being so nice. He was surprised.

He referred to the flight attendants as “waitresses” and mentioned he’d “been sitting here with an empty glass for over an hour.” They were curt with him when he asked them for things, and I felt bad for the guy. When I went to the lavatory, they stopped me and ask how I was “holding up.” From the looks on their faces, I could tell they’d been laughing at him from the back of the plane. I mentioned he’d been drinking, but that he was being good, and that I’d let them know if he did anything uncool. I appreciated that I was being watched out for.

Rocker and I got personal. I talked about some of the harder experiences I’d had in my life, including some points where I was suicidal. I talked about my family, my spirituality, and some of the tools I’ve used to work through things. He told me he liked me and politely asked if I was straight. Conveniently, I could tell him I wasn’t.

I could tell he was starting to trust me, so I dealt out some direct questions in my best non-judgemental voice. “So, when are you planning on killing yourself?” “When are you going to confront your brother-in-law?” “What’s your plan for killing him?”

He looked conflicted. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” He told me he liked himself, that his family likes him, and that I seemed to like him. That was six people who liked him, he said. That was a lot.

He asked if he could email me some of his music, and I gave him my business card card. This included my email and phone number. I chose to do this for the same reason that I chose not to call the police as soon as I stepped off the plane: I believed he was changing his mind.

At the end of the flight, we said our goodbyes, and he kissed my hand and thanked me. As I walked toward the door of the plane, I turned around with a sudden afterthought: “Hey, don’t kill yourself while I’m in Austin, okay?”

He paused and looked like he was taking the request seriously. “Okay,” he said with a nod. “I’ll wait.”

“Thanks!” I smiled at him. “See ya later!”

I spent the week checking the local Austin news for murders and suicides and saw nothing.

A month later, I called the number he gave me and asked his voicemail how he was doing. He returned the call a few days later and left this message (which I transcribed on the spot):

“Hey Sarah. Uh, yeah, it was good to hear from you. Thank you for calling me, and thank you for listening to me and talking to me on that, on that flight. As screwed up as it was, it was just really cool to have someone there to listen to me and talk to me and stuff. You’re a really cool person. I made it. I made it out. I made it through. Didn’t hurt anybody, that I know of, and, uh didn’t hurt myself, that I know of, significantly. I’m back home and feel more alive. Death brings forth new life, you know, and that’s kinda how it is. I hope it went well for you, out there, for your event and everything. Yeah, you can give me a call back anytime you want. Thanks again for being so cool. And, uh, talk to you later.”

So that’s the story of my flight to SXSW07. No flight since then has lived up to it, and I still think of him every time I board a plane.

And it just occurred to me… throughout that flight, he kept raising a skeptical eyebrow at me and saying, “You’re going to write this story, aren’t you?”

All I said to him was, “Maybe. But probably not anytime soon.”