Crazy Planes!

I have arrived in Köln, where I quickly found a place to live, a cheap little room in the hip and multi-culti Ehrenfeld neighborhood, sharing a street with Köln's biggest Biergarten, and an arty cinema. My roomates seem laid back and interesting, but I haven't actually moved in yet, so I can't say much about them. They are both German, she from Koeln, he from Gelsenkirchen. I'm having a lease-signing dinner with them this evening, and moving in Oct. 1.

Life with my two Stony Brook friends Adam and Cynthia has been enjoyable, a highlight being our viewing of the excellent "Tokyo Drifter," a 60s Japanese Mafia film by Seijun Suzuki--not to be missed. I thought, however, I would tell the story of the strange man I sat next to on the plane from Newark Int'l.

He had the window, I had the aisle, and an empty seat lay between us. He was quite large, barely fitting in his seat, and had mangy hair and a thin yet unkempt beard. He also smelled strange, right at the threshold between questionable and nasty. The overall impression was of someone I might choose not to sit next to on a subway, or else sit next to as an intentionally humane gesture. It was strange to find such a person on a plane.

Things got stranger after he started to speak. His first question was normal enough-- "Are they gonna give us a meal?"--although his tone was bit too forceful and his eyes seemed to be focused on some point behind me, as if I might have strapped his meal to the back of my head. I told him they surely would, but he wasn't convinced and so asked the first attendant who walked by--told her, rather--that his "brochure" said we would get "a snack and a... a food." We would get to that, she told him. We weren't off the ground yet.

I was reading, deciding whether to try to avoid conversation with the guy or figure out his deal. He stared at me for a while, then asked if I was German. (No.) "What are you, then?" He also asked me if the airport in Koeln would be "hard to get around." He looked out his window for a while, then produced my favorite of his sentences: "That must be wunna them crazy planes!!" I tried to see what the hell he was talking about, but he started to turn around, so I went back to my book.

We got to drinks before we got to "food," which was fine by him. "You got beer?" Yes, five dollars. He asked for a "Kronerfeld," or something like that. The attendant told him "how it was going to be": Bud, Miller Lite, or Heineken. Heineken, ma'am, he said, in his slow southern drawl, practically a drool.

After some more strange questions ("Is the Arbeitsamt"--the employment office--"still there?" "Why you like sparkling water so much?") I decided to put on my headphones to avoid conversation. I was interested in why this guy was headed to Koeln and how he was going to stay alive there, but I also wanted eventually to be able to sleep. He didn't take the hint, though, continuing to ask me questions through my (rather large and conspicuous) headphones, and tapping my arm when I pretended not to hear. "Do you know it's after 10? I wasn't sure if you knew." And: "Ask the lady for beer nuts."

At one point he decided he had to go to the bathroom. I told him they had just made an announcement that everyone should go back to their seats. "What's that gotta do with me?" I said they would probably just tell him to sit back down. (I knew getting up was going to require a big effort.) He looked at me like I had just asked him to jump out of the plane with no parachute. "But if I don't go now I'll go to the bathroom in my seat!" I got up and watched him as he put his beer cup and can down on the middle seat with his huge hands, and as his huge ass drifted dangerously close to them while he pawed his way out. He was good at this, however, and didn't spill a drop, neither this time or the next two.

We landed after a sleepless night for me (not entirely his fault--I just had to watch The Dukes of Hazzard), at which point he told me to "Get his bag down." His bag was a big clear plastic sack. He asked again if I was German, and if I knew where the "[unintelligible]-abteilung" was. He repeated "[unintelligible]-abteilung" 5 times ("Abteilung is German for 'department!'," which is true, but that wasn't the problem) until I just told him I didn't know where it was. He then went through the same routine with the attendant who by this point had moved from patronizing to tight-lipped with respect to him

I last saw him at the luggage carousel, staring at the ceiling.