The things you can learn — about yourself, about others, about America — on an airport shuttle bus
The hotel shuttle shot past me and the trans woman waiting, so we looked at each other incredulously, sure we’d just been abandoned. Sometimes I can see the future, and as she walked closer, I knew we were about to bond in that American occurrence we call outrage.
“Did he just drive right past us?” the trans woman, whose name I’ll say was Sarah, asked.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong spot,” I started to say, but Sarah was already shaking her head. She had a nose ring and dyed black hair cut in straight bangs across her small forehead. “I checked,” she said, like a person who’s spent her whole life checking to be sure she isn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I said maybe he didn’t see us, but the worry had already set in: Were we in the wrong spot? Was this the right time? Would he come back, or were we forever stuck in limbo at the Las Vegas airport?
We decided we’d wait 10 minutes then call the hotel, but soon the shuttle circled back. The driver, Oscar, a Hispanic man, north of my middle-age but not yet old, said he had seen us standing there but had been cut off on the busy street. He had to circle around the airport because the streets were one-way, and came back to get us as soon as he could. Sarah, no longer outraged now that our salvation was in sight, laughed at something Oscar said about Vegas traffic. I was worrying about sleep. I’d woken up at 3 a.m. in Kansas, in the heart of the heart of the country, and now, not long past dawn, had arrived at the Las Vegas airport weary and unsure why I was there. I’d been invited to a book-festival panel to speak on the relevance of the personal essay in a world where everyone knows everything about us already, and wasn’t sure I had anything to say on the subject that hadn’t already been said. I knew Facebook mined our data and sold it to conservative think tanks, and that our phones were spying on us, and even though both those things are true, they sound like conspiracy theories when you say them out loud. I knew the confessional essay was making a comeback due to a sudden need to hear about lessons learned on the value of other’s lives, but I didn’t have anything to confess besides the fact I sometimes want to say “not all men” when I know I should be listening to women’s stories, so I wasn’t sure what to contribute, except maybe some vague, professorial mention of W.H. Auden’s poem “The Unknown Citizen,” after which I would lean back and strike a pensive pose and hope everyone found me acceptably erudite.
But the panel was paying me, and I’d never been to Vegas before, and now, not even 8 o’clock in the morning, I’d already formed a bond with a trans woman wearing a nose ring and forgiven a Hispanic man for making me wait an extra 10 minutes, so maybe I could come up with a few words on the relevance of reflection in such dark times. I was already considering a confessional essay of the kind that gets published in WaPo or HuffPo, one of those Po places, in which I’d tell about the trans woman and Hispanic man and how quickly I was, in my white maleness, able to forgive them for being different from me. The comments section would stretch to 10 miles, most of them telling me to shut the front door on my privilege, but any press is good press, as we all know.
But that sort of navel-gazing foolishness isn’t acceptable to the professional I profess to be, no matter what Po it’s published in. It’s an easy answer, and not a particularly good one, to state that one is aware of one’s own privilege. It’s too close to claiming how “woke” one is, a sort of virtue signaling I think we can all do without. It’s better than being unaware, certainly, but awareness is only the first step, and not a particularly hard one. To get to the heart of the matter, I’d have to actually listen to others, not as easy, especially considering my fatigue and what I was calling world-weariness, even though my flight had been barely three hours.
While we loaded our bags in the back of the shuttle, a few more people showed up. Joe was in his 70s, retired from some line of work that was too banal to even bring up — his words as he waved the question away. He wore cargo shorts and those half-shoe/sandal things I don’t even know what they’re called, but they seem to have been embraced by older men especially, so I assume they’re comfortable. He had on a polo shirt and a wristwatch he wore face down.
Besides Joe there was a Latina, Becca, who spoke with Oscar in Spanish. Maybe it’s my prejudice against my own people, but I expected Joe to say something about language and leaving the country. Instead he asked, in Spanish, where Becca was from. My high school Spanish was too rusty for me to make out her answer, but Joe said something back and as Becca replied, Oscar said “Amigo” like he meant it and took Joe’s bags.
Behind Becca were two interracial couples: one a middle-aged white man whose name I thought was maybe Milquetoast, and a 20-something biracial woman who never spoke above a whisper. I thought maybe Milquetoast had kidnapped her, most likely because I’d seen a sign about sex trafficking at the airport, but I only skimmed it like most of us do news articles we later quote on social media as if we’ve actually read it all. But Milquetoast was too milquetoast for kidnapping, I assured myself, harmless as far as committing major crimes went. And I don’t mean to make fun of sex trafficking, which is a real fear for many women, or of middle-aged white men, which is another real fear many women rightly hold, and of which I happen to be one. I only mean to say that I carry some preconceived notions with me sometimes, and other times jump to conclusions, which is where the importance of reflection comes in. I know where this is going. But I’m also trying to see how I got there, how we arrive at where we end up, with all our prejudices and ill-formed opinions, which means exploring all the petty ways we look at one another without understanding what we’re looking at, whether it’s weird shoes or shade of skin.
The other couple comprised a black man from New York and a white woman from Tennessee who had a deep Southern accent worthy of an early Cormac McCarthy novel: Child of God, maybe. The man, whom I’ll call Darryl, had a deep, loud voice that he used often. Two minutes inside the shuttle he knew all our names. His big hand engulfed mine when he offered it. I sat in the way back, too tired to think of much other than a nap, vaguely listening, and hoping some idea for the panel presented itself, but Darryl was ready to get down, he said. He wanted to gamble. He wanted to eat at In-N-Out Burgers because he’d once gone to one in California and it was the best burger he’d ever had so he wanted to get one here. He wanted to smoke weed. He wanted to get one of those “big-ass bloody Marys.” He wanted to go to the top of that big building — you know the one, he said.
This was all before Oscar started the van. When he climbed in and the radio came on — Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” — Darryl started dancing in his seat, singing along with Snoop: “But I, somehow, some way, keep comin up with funky ass shit like every single day.”
Halfway through the song Darryl told Grandpa Joe to get down. Sarah smiled. Oscar, looking in his rearview mirror, swayed side to side as he drove. I expected Grandpa Joe to tell us he didn’t “get down,” but when Darryl said, “I bet you listen to country and western,” Joe shook his head.
“What then?” Darryl asked. “Classical? Beet-hoven, or some shit?”
Let me interject to say that Darryl wasn’t being rude. He was a big guy with a loud voice, and normally, at such times — too early in the morning, tired, worried about what I’m going to say in front of people who will expect me to say something intelligent — I would have disliked Darryl. I would have wanted him to shut the fuck up so I could close my eyes for a few minutes. I would have told him no one cared about In-N-Out Burgers in a city that had some of the greatest chefs in the world. Or that the weed here is watered down because the casinos don’t want to people too stoned to play a slot machine. Or that those “big-ass bloody Marys” will cost $23 and taste like tomato juice and tailpipe.
But Darryl’s laugh was infectious, and it’s hard to hate a guy who clearly loves living so much that he wants everyone around to live with him. A man who gets excited about a fast-food hamburger is a man who will laugh alongside you, even at 8 in the morning on an airport shuttle.
Grandpa Joe seemed to understand this as well. And Grandpa Joe, despite his conformist shoes and cargo pants in weather that was already turning toward winter, even in the Vegas desert, was not a country music fan.
“Rock,” Joe said, and, unbelievably, pulled out his air guitar and pantomimed an arpeggio worthy of Yngwie Malmsteen. “Does anyone play rock and roll anymore?”
“You stole rock and roll from us,” Darryl said, light-punching Joe on the arm, “So we had to create rap.” Joe said something I couldn’t hear over the sound of Dr. Dre starting up “Nuthin But a G Thang.” It could have been a tense moment had Joe tried to deny that his kind had ever stolen anything from anyone, or fallen back on that old mantra that music can’t be owned, but Darryl had leaned in, and so I assumed Joe was assuring Darryl he did indeed know that the white community had stolen rock from black musicians, or at least borrowed it without their consent.
By this time we had left the airport and pulled out onto the highway, where we could see the Vegas Strip: Bellagio and the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay. The Luxor pyramid, named after the city in ancient Thebes. The New York-New York. The Strip seemed like a whole new history set before us, rebuilt here in the desert with the low brown mountains ringing us all around, and we fell quiet looking at the splendor. We went past the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, where I’d often watched on pay-per-view Ultimate Fighting Championships in which men beat the living hell out of each other just to see who was stronger. Past the casinos where high-stakes poker championships were held on TV, as if we all wanted to see who could keep the straightest face. Past Treasure Island, with its not-so-subtle reference to getting rich, a nod to that innermost desire of so many of us struggling. Past the Eiffel Tower and the Stratosphere, a replica of Seattle’s Space Needle, as if even in Vegas people want to be reminded of somewhere they’d rather be.
When we went past a sign for In-N-Out Burgers, Darryl got excited again. He tried to get Oscar to pull in. He would buy us all a burger, he said, but Oscar kept on, toward Downtown, what someone said was Old Vegas, delivered with a sort of reverence, as if the old ways were still the best. Oscar drove like a madman, which seemed part of the scene. I suspected he had been told to get people where they’re going quickly, so they can get down to the business of why they’re here, which is forgetting why they’re here. Forgetting for a few days about work and mortgages and college tuition for their children, enveloping themselves in the lights and the noise and the liquor and the hopes of making enough money to pay off all the things that need paying off. In this way I’d say Vegas is the great American distraction, but we can find the same thought processes anywhere in the world, from pro football games to pro futbol games and every arena in between, not only of the sports variety, but music or monster trucks or backpacking through the mountains, anything we can do to distance ourselves from our everyday lives.
The woman with Darryl seemed asleep. Or maybe she was used to letting Darryl do the talking. I still don’t know if they were married, lovers, friends of the sort who might fly together to Vegas for the weekend and sleep in different beds. I don’t know. He was a large black man from the Northeast, and she was a medium-sized white woman from the mid-South, but I’ve seen odder couples, including Milquetoast and his perhaps-kidnapped date, so thought nothing of it until we came to Trump Tower, standing just off the Strip in its gold-plated garishness, at which point Darryl coughed into his hand and said “Asshole” quite audibly.
The woman with Darryl sat up. “He’s not an asshole,” she said in her Southern accent, suddenly angry, or at least sounding so. “Best president we’ve ever had.”
Grandpa Joe, who had been half-turned to talk to Darryl behind him, suddenly looked straight ahead. Sarah was suddenly staring at her phone, and Oscar was suddenly concentrating hard on the road before us, only none of it was sudden, for I’ve seen the same reaction a hundred times: the looking at something else to avoid looking at the thing coming. “I voted for him once,” Tennessee-woman said, “and I’ll vote for him again,” followed by an announcement that she was certainly wasn’t going to vote for “Killary,” as if HRC was running again in 2020.
Suddenly it was sitting in the shuttle with us, the thing we all wanted to escape: the late-night arguments on social media with uncles we’ve mostly lost track of, the news articles that send us to despair over our avocado toast or Count Chocula. The TVs turned to Fox or CNN in every waiting room in the country, the constant bombardment of ideas we don’t agree with from the other side. The demeaning of each other in our desire to see our country put on the right track, the constant disagreement of what that right track is, and how to get on it.
Darryl, however, was not deterred from his good mood. Perhaps he’d had practice deflecting her before, or perhaps he was only saying asshole to rile her up, knowing that here they held no common ground but could always agree to disagree. I don’t know their relationship. I don’t know how two people with wildly different views can spend time together, but maybe that’s a failing on my part. I still shake my head when I learn that one half of a couple likes Duke and the other half Carolina, wondering what keeps them still in love amid such high stakes as college basketball.
Whatever the reason, Darryl held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right,” he said, “We ain’t going to talk about all that.”
Tennessee woman seemed to relax, but I could see in the set of her shoulders the conviction that Trump was indeed the best president we’ve ever had. She wanted to go on, to tell us how she had been wronged. “He’s the only president who cares about white people,” she said, but Darryl held up his hands again and she broke off.
I wanted her to continue, even though I was afraid of what she was going to say. It’s been my experience that people who use “Killary” are the ones who believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton, lawyer, former First Lady, former senator and Secretary of State, personally oversaw a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza place in D.C. that doesn’t have a basement. It’s been my experience that people who believe white people need extra attention from the president have their own problems in understanding the racism and bigotry others face every day, but perhaps I am stereotyping, so I wanted to hear what she had to say.
Then I wanted her, for all of us, to listen to Darryl, who wore a different color skin than hers, and who had, I’m sure, been wronged far worse in his past than she had. I wanted to ask trans-Sarah if she’d ever been assaulted, physically or verbally or simply by a pointed stare, for the way she carried herself. If Oscar had been told to speak English or to go back to where he came from. Maybe Milquetoast and his biracial girlfriend were quiet because too many times they’d been forced to answer for the universe drawing them together, all of which made me wonder how Tennessee-woman felt about the divisiveness in this country, that conviction that everyone different from us politically is an enemy.
I wanted to know why Darryl thought Joe listened to country music, what idea of others we form from social media or those TVs tuned to one extreme or the other. I want to know what the news we hear every day does to us: white cops shooting black men and white women calling the cops on black families barbecuing and immigrant children caged and rallies of white supremacists who look a lot like my college students screaming in the smoke from their torches. I had suspected Joe might tell Becca to speak English because he was old and white, because the rhetoric coming from men who look too much like me has led me to expect such behavior, even though it unnerves me endlessly to hear such generalizations about myself.
But we had no time for all that. We were on a shuttle from the airport to the hotel, where we would spend the next few days gambling or drinking or trying to understand why stories are important. I was too tired to answer. Darryl wanted a drink and Joe only wanted to enjoy his retirement, so he turned back around and said, “We came here to forget all that,” and the moment passed.
And perhaps that’s the beauty and sadness of Vegas, which is, of course, simply a reflection of ourselves: we often need to forget. The purple mountains majesty are too often brown and dull, and the buildings are too often gold-plated. The rest is just light and noise and alcohol, a big-ass bloody Mary to help us with our hangover, a hamburger to ease the hunger we feel about all the things in the world we know we never will have.
That wanting too often leads to insecurity. Insecurity leads to the belief that someone else has more than we have, and that conviction too often leads to anger, too often aimed at those we see as different than we are, when really it’s the gold-plated towers pointing at the sky causing all our concerns.
Tennessee woman said nothing else, except to ask, once, if it was okay to say “Black,” or if she had to say “African-American,” as if the extra syllables were a burden she had to bear. There are a lot of things I could say about all this — about odd couples, the dream of getting rich in Vegas, the work black people still have to do to educate white people, about getting along despite political differences. About listening to the stories of others.
And I don’t want these people on the shuttle to become characters in a story I’m writing about myself. I’m not writing about myself. I’m writing about the country outside this room where I write. I’m writing about that shuttle, that trans woman whose name wasn’t Sarah. Grandpa Joe with his weird shoes and air guitar. That couple, the black and white one, with their political differences so vast it seems they could swallow Trump Tower whole. I’m writing about the decisions that drive our small shuttles from one place to the other, wondering how we ever live with ourselves.
But it is a story. It’s only ever going to be a story, one that starts with me. If I’ve done it correctly it will end with you, but it starts with me. It is a simple story, about the people I met on one single airport shuttle, but it can be magnified and multiplied a million-million times, from a microcosm of America into the whole real shining image. The decision we have to make together is if it’s our story. Is this the story we want to read? And what is the story anyway? Is it a story about a middle-aged white man watching everything around him without acting? Is it a story of two people from opposite poles finding each other even amid the crumbling rhetoric of our country, allowing themselves space to exist together without tearing each other apart? Is America a story of diversity or difference? I feel a better person would know the answer to this, but I’m not sure where to find one or how to become one, so I keep stringing sentences together against the darkness I sometimes feel overwhelming me, like directions to some place we’ve never been before.
When we got off at the hotel Darryl shook hands with everyone. He said he hoped we all won a million dollars. The next morning I saw him walking through the hotel and we nodded at each other. He said “Hey, hey,” and I said “Hey, man,” and we went on our separate ways. Tennessee-woman was with him, and she gave me a little half-wave and I gave one back. We were no longer on the shuttle but I think we have always been on the shuttle, looking out the windows at some place that isn’t what we expected, hoping it holds everything we dream of. I think we are always talking with people unlike us with the understanding that we’ll soon go on our merry ways and we won’t have to deal with them any longer, until the realization sets in that we will. And we should. Because every story is just as valuable as the one we’ve already written, the one in which we’re the heroes and everyone else is somewhere off to the side, unimportant. My biggest problem with politics is gold-plating. My anger at America is aimed toward people who tend to forget they once came here looking for freedom or fortune while others were displaced or dragged in chains.
In two days I would get back on the same shuttle driven by the same Hispanic man, only now there would be a stoned black girl and a woman from Australia and a quiet Mexican 20-something, and we would all be too tired to contemplate politics or culture or why we so often disagree. We would speed past the Strip with hardly a second glance, then, in the airport traffic, would find ourselves going down a one-way street, unable to circle back around. When we finally reached where we were going we would rush inside the airport, where in the shops the gifts were garish and cheap, shirts proudly proclaiming a location but nothing else, as if we didn’t learn anything by being there. We would go back to our small homes and tell our loved ones all the sights and sounds of Sin City, leaving out the difficult parts: the homeless, dirty and hungry in the alleys and byways, the stoned teenagers and street performers, the middle-age men puking into garbage cans from too many big-ass bloody Marys.
But before the ride home and the flight and the reflection, someone in the crowd at the literary festival asked how I knew when I had material for an essay. How do you know when it’s an important enough event to write about? they asked, and I told them this story: about the shuttle and the interracial couples, about Grandpa Joe and Trump Tower and a divided America. I didn’t know where I was going, but I kept talking, hoping it would make sense at some point. I told them about the trans woman and the Hispanic man, about rap music and racism. About Darryl and Tennessee-woman, with their differing views but ability to spend time together. About the Vegas Strip, which signifies some of our highest achievements and lowliest entertainment. The long low mountains ringing us around like bruises or barricades, the gilded towers and unimaginable greed, the prejudices we carry around without realizing it and the understanding we can come to if we try. And here’s the thing: They listened, like you did just now. As if I knew what I was saying. As if they had once heard how beautiful this place could be, and only needed to be reminded.