There was a period of time when working domestic flights again felt good if only for the fact that I wasn’t crossing eight time zones in a day. The truth was, however, that I felt cramped inside of a plane that wasn’t a wide body, and the multiple flights daily – four, five, or six sometimes, was more exhausting than the time zone changes.
As well, I had been away from Salt Lake City so much and so often that I’d fallen out of whatever social circle had existed before I started flying out of New York. This is not uncommon with an airline job. Regular people have regular schedules and see people regularly. Looking back, my ‘regular’ schedule had taken place in Helsinki for nearly two years – so at least I had that for while.
With having purchased a computer and then exploring all the options to be connected to people in other places, I found an on-line community where I’d chat with a variety of men whenever I logged in. This filled the gap, so to speak, of not having a lot going on at home.
I found myself talking regularly with a couple of guys that lived in Columbus, Ohio, a man who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and another in Dallas, Texas. With the advent of web cams we were able to see one another and talk face to face and these guys became the mainstay of my social circle for the next year.
Another man would pop into chat from time to time. Riaan was from South Africa and was attempting to get a work visa for the U.S. The time difference between the two places meant we spoke with him less than with one another, but when he was on he and I would talk privately as he had questions about where he might live in the U.S. and having spent fourteen years flying, he was keen to hear my take on different cities.
As it happened Riaan found work in Orlando with a company that sponsored his visa and as it happened one month, I had Orlando layovers, so we made plans to meet on one of them. For whatever reason, likely weather problems in Atlanta, our flight was delayed, I arrived late in Orlando, and Riaan was texting whether or not he should wait in the hotel lobby any longer.
The text I received upon landing in Orlando said that he was going to head home and that we’d reschedule for next week. I texted back that I was on my way to the hotel. He made the decision to wait for me. It was late but we went out for a couple drinks and he spent the night with me at the hotel.
With weekly layovers in Orlando I started hanging out with Riaan and helping him navigate life in the U.S.. He had left behind a large home, a large income, his friends and family to start over again. I’d recently come out of a fairly similar situation – minus the largesse, and was empathic to what this meant to someone and I was happy to help him just as my friends in Finland had helped me.
One thing led to another as they say and Riaan and I started dating and when I didn’t have Orlando layovers I’d fly out on my days off. Riaan already knew that he didn’t want to stay in Florida but his visa was tied to work – so that’s where he was stuck for the time being.
At the time, late 1998, the real estate market was starting to heat up and Florida had lots of affordable housing. Also at this time, Salt Lake City housing prices were soaring because of the upcoming 2000 Winter Olympics. Utah’s population was also soaring due to the birth rate and the housing situation could not keep up.
Despite all the negatives associated with Florida, I made a decision to move to Orlando with the idea that I’d buy a house, gain some equity and use that equity to enter the housing market in a better city. Delta had a crew base in Orlando, the schedules out of Orlando were actually quite good with mostly long-haul wide-body service in and out, and Riaan was there. We’d find a place to live outside of Florida when it was time.
The movers packed up my place in Salt Lake. I had the car transported separately and on my last day in Salt Lake I stood on the curb with one suitcase and waited for a taxi to the airport. I had arrived in Utah fourteen years earlier in exactly the same manner. Now, however, it felt very different. I felt empty and depleted. Everything I owned was in the hands of someone else.
I’d spent fourteen years trying to make a go of it in a place that I never liked. It had been inexpensive up until this point but I never liked it enough to feel as though I wanted to live my life there – even though it is where I had spent the majority of my adult life. I was happy to be leaving and at the same time feeling sad for what felt like a lot of wasted energy. I looked out the back window of the taxi one last time to see downtown fading away.
Four hours later I was in Orlando where Riaan met me at the airport.
He and I had talked about getting a place together, but at his urging, I instead rented my own place in the same complex where he lived. It was a beautiful newly built complex with a large central pool and club house and each apartment had it’s own balcony. My balcony overlooked the golf course and being on the second floor there were tall vaulted ceilings which made the one bedroom apartment feel far more spacious than it was. The drive to work on the tollway was quick and easy and the flying, mostly long-haul service that brought tourists in to Orlando, was a lot better than the up and down of the usual domestic schedules.
Because I was flying on the weekends, I had the pool to myself on most weekdays and I lavished at the fact that I had all of this to enjoy without the usual disturbances. The other reason I had all of this to myself was that the apartment complex was pricey and most of the locals who lived here had to have two jobs to afford the place. Many of the employees worked for Disney which to my surprise paid exceptionally low wages and exploited their labor with the lure of having Disney on their resume.
Riaan did not work for Disney but he was in fact being exploited by the company in South Africa that had found him the job. Fifty percent of his income was taken by them. He was essentially an indentured servant. Fortunately his wages were such that the fifty percent he kept provided him with an okay life.
Riaan and I traveled a bit thanks to my benefits at Delta. We visited San Francisco – a place he’d always wanted to see and met up there with my friend Rupert from London who had relocated. We traveled to The Netherlands to visit is brother who lived there and to meet his mother who was visiting. At age 79 it was her first time away from South Africa and her first airplane ride. She was a spry woman filled with tremendous love and curiosity. We lost her briefly one afternoon in Amsterdam when she’d found herself intrigued by a sex museum. She insisted that we take her picture standing in front of a large dildo.
We spent a few days in Eindhoven with Riaan’s brother, a weekend in Brugge, took the train to Germany to visit a friend of mine that I knew from the on-line chat room, then took the train to Brussels to catch a flight back to the the U.S.
Despite the gains Riaan was making in acclimating to life in the U.S. it was a far cry from what he left behind where he had maids, cooks, gardeners, and drove a Mercedes – the only make of car he’d ever driven. He struggled to get credit – even a gas card from Chevron was out of reach at the time. Some of his frustration was taken out on me and looking back on that now, it wasn’t so much that he was taking it out on me its just that I was the only one there to listen. Anger, frustration, resentment, all of it coming my way.
Things between Riaan and I were on thin ice at the time, and in addition to the venting he had a libido with which I could not keep pace. There was one particular event that I couldn’t over come. Riaan had invited a friend over for dinner, a friend of his that I’d since met. Whatever Riaan had made for dinner was still in the oven and not wanting to have to check on the status of it, from across the room Riaan said to me, “Boy, get up and see if dinner is ready.”
I knew he had Black servants at the house in South Africa – everyone he employed was Black, that’s the way it was there for most whites. It wasn’t so much that he asked me to check on dinner. It was that with that statement, the life that he’d left behind and the person he had once been returned to the forefront. It was ugly. It was humiliating. And I felt terrible for having heard how it must have been for the people he had employed at his home. In that moment Riaan had transitioned to someone I had admired to someone that was uncaring and grotesque.
The statement he made that evening ultimately put an end to me and Riaan. Worse yet – and now just a few months in to having moved to Orlando, I found nothing there worth staying for or investing in. Orlando was suburban sprawl and although I lived in a place that was walking distance to daily essentials, there were no sidewalks and no tax base for which to include such amenities – as if sidewalks were an amenity. The summer heat was excruciating and suffocating and at one point that summer a wild fire had me scrambling to determine what I should pull out of the apartment in the event that the wind changed direction.
I had a year’s lease to ride out.
Delta had decided to start a low-cost airline of it’s own in Orlando to compete with the number of low-cost airlines that served the city. Delta was also dealing with growing pains at this time. Their purchase of Pan Am created financial and political problems that they were unequipped to handle. Their new flights to Asia out of the west coast were failing and new lower cost airlines were scooping up traffic that Delta had thought would always be theirs. There was a level of arrogance at Delta that was also rather ugly at the time – a group that felt they could do no wrong and with an approach to employees that was not too far off from what I’d seen in Riaan.
Knowing that I’d leave Orlando just as soon as my lease was up, I took a part time job waiting tables on the weekends and moved to Delta Express where my seniority meant I could fly during the week and have weekends off for the other job. With no state income tax and the second job, I was raking in money – all of which would be needed to move out.
As it happened, Delta Express had twenty-four hour layovers in Columbus, Ohio and I set out to meet the guys from the chat room that I had met while I was living in Utah. They’d said for years that I should come and visit – but I’d never heard of Columbus, Ohio even though it was the state capital. They said I’d like it. I asked them why. They said I’d just have to see the place.
On the layover I headed out that evening to find Mike and Harvey. I knew where they hung out and when I arrived I asked a random guy if they knew them. He did – Mike and Harvey were names that when put together meant only one thing, this specific couple. The random guy told me that something had come up and Mike and Harvey would not be around today. Curious though to who I was and why I was asking, he and I talked and hung out at the bar that was hosting it’s usual Sunday afternoon BBQ.
The next morning I went for a walk in the neighborhood just south of downtown and became instantly enamored with what I discovered. Tidy homes on tidy blocks. Gridded streets in a walkable city, and friendly people who said hello when passing them or while waiting to cross the street.
There was a history present here. A midwestern city with a history of German settlers, where things had been built to last, where there appeared to be an effort to maintain the sense of place, and a place where people seemed to trust others because there was no reason not to.
I stopped for lunch at a little neighborhood bar – an old brick building that hd been there for over a century – sat at the bar and had a beer while I waited for my burger. Others at the bar engaged with me as if I like anyone else who was there. It felt like the set of a TV show but with no scripted dialogue, bright lights or cameras. Nothing odd or precocious about the interactions. People were just people and I felt like I was right at home here – a most uncanny thing after feeling out of place in Utah for so many years.
It was one of those things – love at first sight really and I made the decision that day that I’d start looking for a house in Columbus.
Things at Delta were getting worse and it felt like the writing was on the wall that major changes were on the horizon. Schedules were being rebuilt that maximized every available legal hour of flying. Layover hotels had changed from downtown hotels to suburban locations far removed from things to do. Strange policies were put into place where we had to be physically inspected by a manger before going to work to ensure that our uniforms were being worn precisely as stated in the manuals, as if somehow the fold of my pocket scarf was the cause of Delta’s financial failures.
Columbus became even more attractive because of this. It was driving distance to Cincinnati where Delta had a crew base. The distance, still far enough away, meant that if something were to happen and layoffs became necessary, I’d be in a city and not competing with hundreds of others in the job market. I wanted to start distancing myself from whatever might be coming so that I would have more options than those who were tied to living in hub cities.
On subsequent layovers I’d walk the streets with a folded map and highlight the streets where I thought I’d like to live walking miles upon miles week after week. One afternoon after feeling a bit lost as to where I was, I found a park and sat in the shade orientating myself with the map. It was a tiny half-block square park with a church across on one side, and craftsman style bungalows across on the other sides. On on of the three sides sat four houses in a row – all exactly the same, and all in a slight state of disrepair. It wasn’t necessarily neglect but rather a ‘stuck in time’ sense – as if nothing had changed with them in decades.
A group of boys arrived at the park pushing a old broken down law mower. There were four or five of them – seven, eight, maybe nine years of age, all a bit dirty from having been outside all day. One of them approached me at the bench, “Hey Mister,” he said, “Can we cut your grass?” They were looking to drum up some money.
“I don’t have any grass,” I told them. “I don’t have a house here.”
“Oh man,” the boy said, then asking, “Are you homeless?”
“I have a home,” I told him. “It’s just not here.”
“Okay Mister,” he said and the pack of boys continued on their pursuit.
I found this all so endearing. One – I used to make a lot of money as a kid mowing grass and raking leaves. Two – this was a place where kids were not afraid to talk to adults. And three – it all seemed like a part of American life that had somehow vanished elsewhere and yet was somehow alive and well here.
I found a realtor in Columbus, got approved for my loan from my credit union in Los Angeles, and continued the search. Six months later and at the end of my lease in Orlando, I moved into one of those four identical houses across the street from the park where I sat one day.
Riaan asked to and offered to help pay for the move – which wasn’t necessary and felt somewhat vindictive. He stood adjacent to the U-Haul as I pulled out of the complex and in the mirror I watched him wave good bye.
I had spent 365 days in Orlando which was roughly 360 too many.
The 36 Broadway 
Leave a comment