The man I hoped was the pilot or involved in some official capacity with the aeroplane told us that we were going to land in two minutes. We suddenly flew into a cloudy haze that became the Burbank airport. The sun was not shining and everything was murky. It was a yellow murk whereas back in San Francisco it was a grey murk.
The aeroplane grew empty and then became full again. Vida got a lot of visual action while this was going on. One of the stewardesses lingered for a minute a few seats away and stared at Vida as if to make sure she were really there.
‘How do you feel?’ I said.
‘Fine,’ Vida said.
A small airliner about the size of a P-38 with rusty-looking propellers taxied by to take off. Its windows were filled with terrified passengers.
Some businessmen were now sitting in front of us.
They were talking about a girl. They all wanted to go to bed with her. She was a secretary in a branch office in Phoenix. They were talking about her, using business language. ‘I’d like to get her account! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! ha-ha!’
The ‘pilot’ welcomed the new people aboard and told us too much about the weather again. Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say.
‘We’ll be landing in San Diego in twenty-one minutes,’ he said, finishing his weather report.
As we took off from Burbank, a train was running parallel with us across from the airport. We left it behind as if it weren’t there and the same with Los Angeles.
We climbed through the heavy yellow haze and then suddenly the sun was shining calmly away on the wing and my coffee stain looked happy like a surfer, but it was only a passing thing.
Bing-Bonging to San Diego
Bing-bong!
The trip to San Diego was done mostly in the clouds. From time to time a bell tone was heard in the aeroplane. I didn’t know what it was about.
Bing-bong!
The stewardesses wanted more tickets and people to like them. The smiles never left their faces. They were smiling even when they weren’t smiling.
Bing-bong!
I thought about Foster and the library, then I very rapidly changed the subject in my mind. I didn’t want to think about Foster and the library: grimace.
Bing-bong!
Then we flew into heavy fog and the plane made funny noises. The noises were fairly solid. I almost thought that we had landed in San Diego and were moving along the runway when a stewardess told us that we were going to land shortly, so we were still in the air.
Hmmmmmmmm…
Bing-bong!
Hot Water
From San Francisco our speed had been amazing. We had gathered hundreds of miles effortlessly, as if guided by lyrical poetry. Suddenly we broke out into the clear to find that we had been over the ocean. I saw white waves below breaking against the shore and there was San Diego. I saw a thing that looked like a melting park and my ears were popping and we were going down.
The aeroplane stopped and there were many warships anchored across from the airport and they were in a low grey mist that was the colour of their bodies.
‘You can stop being green now,’ Vida said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m new at the tree game. Perhaps it’s not my calling.’
We got off the aeroplane with Vida causing her customary confusion among the male passengers and resentment among the female passengers.
Two sailors looked as if their eyes had been jammed with pinball machines and we went on into the terminal. It was small and old-fashioned.
And I had to go to the toilet.
The difference between the San Francisco International Airport and the San Diego International Airport is the men’s toilet.
In the San Francisco International Airport the hot water stays on by itself when you wash your hands, but in the San Diego International Airport, it doesn’t. You have to hold the spigot all the time you want hot water.
While I was making hot Water observations, Vida had five passes made at her. She brushed them off like flies.
I felt like having a drink, a very unusual thing for me, but the bar was small, dark and filled with sailors. I didn’t like the looks of the bartender. It didn’t look like a good bar.
There was more confusion and distraction among the men in the terminal. One man actually fell down. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it. He was lying there on the floor staring up at Vida just as I decided not to have a drink in the bar but a cup of coffee in the cafe instead.
‘I think you’ve affected his inner ear,’ I said.
‘Poor man,’ Vida said.
Flying Backwards
The basic theme of the San Diego airport cafe was small and casual with a great many young people and boxes full of wax flowers.
The cafe was also filled with a lot of aeroplane folks: stewardesses and pilots and people talking about planes and flight. Vida had her effects on them while I ordered two cups of coffee from a waitress in a white uniform. She was not young or pretty and she was not quite awake either.
The cafe windows were covered with heavy green curtains that held the light out and you couldn’t see anything outside, not even a wing.
‘Well, here we are,’ I said.
‘That’s for certain,’ Vida said.
‘How do you feel?’ I said.
‘I wish it were over,’ Vida said.
‘Yeah.’
There were two men sitting next to us talking about aeroplanes and the wind and the number eighty kept coming up again and again. They were talking about miles per hour.
‘Eighty,’ one of them said.
I lost track of what they were saying because I was thinking about the abortion in Tijuana and then I heard one of them say, ‘At eighty you’d actually be flying the plane backwards.’
Downtown
It was an overcast nothing day in San Diego. We took a Yellow Cab downtown. The driver was drinking coffee. We got in and he took a long good look at Vida while he finished with his coffee.
‘Where to?’ he said, more to Vida than to me.
‘The Green Hotel,’ I said. ‘It’s—’
‘I know where it’s at,’ he said to Vida.
He drove us on to a freeway.
‘Do you think the sun will come out?’ I said, not knowing what else to say. Of course I didn’t have to say anything, but he was really staring at Vida in his rear-view mirror.
‘It will pop out around twelve or so, but I like it this way,’ he said to Vida.
So I took a good look at his face in the mirror. He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle.
‘Here we are,’ he said to Vida, finally pulling up in front of the Green Hotel.
The fare was one dollar and ten cents, so I gave him a twenty-cent tip. This made him very unhappy. He was staring at the money in his hand as we walked away from the cab and into the Green Hotel.
He didn’t even say good-bye to Vida.
The Green Hotel
The Green Hotel was a four-storey red brick hotel across the street from a parking lot and next to a book-store. I couldn’t help but look at the books in the window. They were different from the books that we had in the library.
The desk clerk looked up as we came into the hotel. The hotel had a big green plant in the window with enormous leaves.