Kudzu Queen
I am not a high-maintenance broad. I am perfectly content to go to the airport. I don’t even need to get on a plane – the airport terminal experience is enough for me. Going to the Mobile airport is one of my very favorite things to do. Since my daughter flies up to Ohio and back several times a year, I get to go to the airport semi-regularly. I live for these excursions. I get more excited than Veronica, and she’s actually getting on a plane and going somewhere.
I suspect I have a kind face. This must be why paranoid schizophrenics, religious zealots, rabid conspiracy theorists and just garden-variety kooks invariably attach themselves to me. I’m a good listener. This is a euphemistic way of saying that I am the nosiest person in the whole history of humankind. I’m not pretending interest when the ancient Steel Magnolia totters over to me and conspiratorially whispers her plan to poison her daughter-in-law, up in Wisconsin (Where the Grande Dame of Dementedness is heading). I am truly fascinated.
“What are you going to use?” I whisper back. “Lots of stuff can be traced. Better be careful.”
“I will, honey. I watch ‘CSI’ all the time.”
And I actually liked it when the weeping mother, who’d just watched her out-of-control delinquent son board his plane for a therapeutic sojourn with Hardass Dad, wanted to tell me the whole sordid story. I listened with rapt attention.
“Yeah? And then after you found the drugs and the weapons and the porno in his room, what happened next?” I asked avidly.
I was honestly captivated by the young Wiccan’s burbling excitement over the occult convention she was traveling to in New York City.
Last time I took Veronica to the airport, I arose way early and skipped about the house.
“Yippee!” I exulted. “We’re going to the airport! I’m going to make a new friend!”
“How do you know?” my daughter asked.
“Don’t I always, every time we go to the airport?”
“You have a point, Mom.”
It’s undeniably fun to hear about strangers’ plans for vice, romance and basic mayhem. But my greatest airport desire has so far been thwarted. I have never managed to have a conversation with any of those folks who travel carrying live human tissue in a lunchbox-sized cooler.
My ambition-thwarter, as usual, is my daughter.
I remember the first time I spotted a traveler carrying a white box with “LIVE HUMAN TISSUE” printed on it in red. I was transfixed.
“Veronica, look!” I gasped. “LIVE HUMAN TISSUE! Omigod, what can it be? Corneas? A liver? A BRAIN?!!”
“Mom, you are SO not going to go over there to talk to that person. No way. Just cross it off your list.”
“This might be our only chance to see a live, human brain, unless we happen upon a horrific auto accident,” I said. “I absolutely must talk to that woman.”
“If you take even one baby step in that direction, I’m running away from home and I’m never coming back,” Veronica hissed. “Besides, it’s not like she’s going to open the box for you, or let you fondle the brain. She’ll probably have you arrested.”
“For what?”
“Being so weird.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You win.”
On subsequent trips to the airport, whenever I spotted one of those LIVE HUMAN TISSUE boxes, Veronica stepped-up her security operations. I couldn’t get the kid to leave me alone for one minute.
“V., here’s an outrageous amount of money. Go on a spree in the gift shop. You deserve a pile of gifts, just because you’re you.”
“Nice try, Mom,” Veronica said. “I saw the body parts box and I’m not leaving you alone for 10 seconds. You are NOT going to talk to that person.”
“I thought I saw Nickelback down in the lobby,” I said. “Or maybe it was Good Charlotte. Hadn’t you ought to go check?”
“Cross it off your list, Mom. I’m sticking to you like glue until I get on my plane.”
I was frustrated, but I felt confident that the serendipitous day would come when I would spot a LIVE HUMAN TISSUE box in the boarding area, and my daughter would need to go pee. To try to more efficiently bring this serendipitous event to fruition, I have begun spiking Veronica’s breakfast with diuretics, on airport days.
What if the whole thing is a hoax? The bearers of LIVE HUMAN TISSUE boxes always get to board first. How do we know there’s REALLY a brain in there? Maybe it’s the perfect crime – get a white Styrofoam box and stencil LIVE HUMAN TISSUE on the side, and then you ALWAYS get to board your flight first.
Come to think of it, what if you made yourself one of those ersatz body part boxes, and walked around out in the world with it? Would people treat you differently? Would you get to automatically go to the front of the line at the bank, the post office, the ticket counter?
“Excuse me, do you mind if I skip to the front of the line? Otherwise, this brain is going to get wilty. Thank you.”
I’m onto something big, here. I may never stand in a line again. Now, if I could only remember where I left my red paint.
Contact Tamara Ducote at TDDucote6@aol.com.
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