Lost Luggage
Every morning at 7:30 am, I see four men sitting at a small table in the lower level of the building where I work. They appear to be simple men who wear simple clothes: jeans and non-designer golf shirts. They drink coffee from mugs they have brought from home that have slogans on them like #1 Dad or I ♥ My Attitude Problem. When they meet with each other, between scheduled and unscheduled maintenance tasks, they talk about sports and items in the news they heard the night before with hopes their banter will escalate into a mini debate. They pay little attention to the men and women in designer suits that drink their coffee from Starbucks cups and talk about sales pending or the new car they just bought. They pay little attention to me. I am a product of the people around them. I pass them, wearing workout clothes, carrying my laundered shirt and pants. They are well into a hard day’s work and my day has barely begun as I take advantage of a company perk.
The men remind me of my father and the time he let me enter his world. I was 12 and it was Take Your Child to Work Day. While other kids were going with their parents to desk jobs to copy their faces on the Xerox machine, I went with my dad to the underbelly of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. My father was a Fleet Service Clerk for American Airlines. A fancy name for, as I would later describe the job, “the guy at the airport who lost your luggage.” My father took this job in the late 60’s with the intention of making it a temporary six-month stint while waiting for something bigger or better to come along—which never did. Before he knew it, it was 15 years later and it became the job he would keep until he retired a few years ago at 65.
What was ironic about the decision to take me to work with him was that my father never seemed like he wanted to be around me. He wasn’t the type to play baseball with me or teach me how to change the oil in the car. May father was short and stocky, exactly like me, and he never had any interest in sports. He liked to watch TV as soon as he got home from work and it typically stayed on longer than he could endure. Each night my father would fall asleep watching shows like Dynasty, The A Team, Cheers and The Cosby Show until my mother would yell at him from the foot of the steps, to come to bed. My father wasn’t a big fan of sports. He never encouraged any of his three boys to play on organized teams. I tried asking him to play football with me one time when he was fixing his car. He took the ball, threw it back to me and told me to go find my brothers. He was too busy.
My father also preferred conducting household tasks alone. If he did ask for my help, it was often to be his gopher. He would send me for another cup of coffee or ask me to get the Phillips head screwdriver that was on the third shelf down from the ratchet set, which I could never find.
When it came time to decide whether it would be my father or my mother that would take me to work, I just assumed I’d be going to the currency exchange with my mom. The currency exchange was where my brothers and I always went if there was a pre-planned school reprieve or if one of us were sick and my mother could not find a replacement. The currency exchange was where I went in the summers while my brothers lifted weights at the local Nautilus health club. It was where I figured out I could steal a roll of quarters without getting caught. It was where the old, heavy-set ladies came and cashed their monthly social security checks and the place where my mother introduced me to John Belushi’s sister, Miriam, who cashed her work checks there weekly and bought postage stamps.
My mother was always trying to encourage closer bonds between her sons and her husband. She was the one who suggested that I ask my father if I could come with him to work.
“Why would I ask him to take me?” I asked her. “We can’t even call him on the phone when he is working like we can with you,” I said. I had already filled out the permission slip with all of my mother’s work information and all it needed was her signature to be complete.
“He’ll take you,” she said. “I’ll bet you’d both enjoy the experience.” My mother lit a cigarette and took a deep breath. “Miiiike!” she shouted. My father was in the other room watching the news. “Can you take Cory to work with you next Monday? It’s for a school project.”
My father did not respond. I took it as a sign of rejection. He didn’t want me to be there with him. Work was his time away from home. He never took work home with him like I had heard many of my friend’s dads had. Why would he want to take home to work, I decided.
“Miiiike!” my mother repeated.
“Yes, goddamn it! I’m trying to watch the goddamn news! I’ll double check with my supervisor, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Okay!”
With that, it was decided that I would go to work with my dad to a place I knew very little about with a man I knew even less.
When he woke me up to “go to work,” it was 3 o’clock in the morning. It was dark and quiet outside, and to me it seemed as if we were the only people alive. Since this was a special occasion, my dad treated me to a stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for a glazed donut and chocolate milk. Normally, we were never allowed to eat in the car, but we did not have time to linger at the donut shop. I had to eat very slowly in the back seat of the car, surrounded by napkins. My father opened the white paper bag and put it on my lap like a towel and I had to keep the carton of milk on the floor between my legs. It was all very uncomfortable but also special because it was different. I knew I was breaking his strict routine, but my father didn’t let on that my presence was an intrusion.
When we arrived, we had to park in a remote lot that was for employees only. We boarded a bus filled with all different types of people who held a variety of jobs. You could tell which jobs people had by the uniform they donned. The pilots had on blue suits with crisp shirts, blue ties and fancy hats. The flight attendants were dressed as nice as the pilots, but since all of them on the bus were women, they had on skirts with panty hose and blazers. The mechanics wore long overalls and baseball caps. My father wore blue work slacks and a blue short sleeve button shirt. He had an American Airlines logo patch on one pocket and his name on a patch on the other. There were people from American, United, Delta, TWA and all of the other airline companies. They wore different company logos, but their work lives were basically the same. I was the youngest person on the bus and people looked at me with confusion. My father sensed my uneasiness and pulled me closer to him. I was surprised by his tenderness. Physical contact from my father usually came in the form of heavy-handed punishments. His subtle gesture made me feel safe.
When we got to the airport, we entered what appeared to be a holding cell for prisoners—the Ready Room—with long benches, tables and chairs and a hanging television set tuned to a local early morning news program. The volume on the TV was so loud that people had to shout to talk with one another. I thought that it would have been easier if someone would have just turned the volume down, but kept that to myself because I was afraid to criticize. Most people, I would later learn, had trouble with their ears from years of working with the planes. The volume on the television was a nuisance to the new guys, but a necessity for those with longer than five years on the job.
There were so many men and women around, mostly doing nothing but talking and waiting. They talked about a show they saw on television the night before, waited for a shift to end or begin, talked about dates they went on or were going to go on, waited for a flight to come in, talked about who would make the next pot of coffee and waited for that pot to finish brewing. Everyone was doing something, but nobody seemed to be working. It was these times, I would later learn, that were a welcome respite to a demanding job: manual labor.
As the sun began to slowly rise and people outside the airport began to take life, my father introduced me to the people with whom he shared his day. There was Mike Chin, whose third wife owned a Chinese restaurant in the suburbs, where years later we would visit during a summer break from college; Tommy Thompson, who didn’t believe it was his obligation to pay income taxes and would spend two years in a Federal penitentiary for tax evasion; Gail Gunderson, who worked harder than the rest of the crew because she never wanted the men to think she was any ‘less of a man.’ She had deep blue eyes and reminded me of my friend, Bobby Werner’s mother, who was our class lunch lady and worked harder than all of the other lunch mothers. She was always busy opening milk cartons or throwing away trash.
They were the people my father could talk about for hours because he spent so much time with them, often more time than he spent at home when the shifts were short staffed and overtime was a source of quality income. I knew they were people my father seemed to care an awful lot about. I was so curious to meet them because their lives sounded so amazing. They were bigger than life to me, yet when I met them, they were much older and much wider than I expected. I envisioned my father’s co-workers to be the exact opposite as him. We lived such ordinary lives. The way my father spoke about his team, they were everything but ordinary. They were also the same people that my father refused to embrace and invite over to the house for a Sunday afternoon barbeque or holiday get-together. My father respected these people because they worked together, but didn’t want anything more from them in the way of friendship.
Since early morning is one of the busiest times at the airport, we only had a little time for introductions and headed out to the planes to get to work. My father grabbed his bright orange earmuffs and searched a packed luggage bin for an extra pair for me. I couldn’t understand why we needed them until we walked outside and heard the screams emitted by the planes waiting to be loaded or unloaded. The loudness scared me, and my father laughed as he shouted (or mouthed because I couldn’t hear a word he said), “That’s what these are for!”
Shouting, I would later learn, was a way of life for Fleet Service Clerks. They shouted in the ready room, they shouted on the runways, they even shouted, to my horror, when they went to the bathroom. I discovered this in the most direct way—watching my father continue a conversation with his friend as he walked out of the ready room, into the bathroom stalls and for an additional five minutes.
The job my father did was very demanding. We drove from one docking station to the next, retrieving the precious cargo of the hundreds of passengers on each flight. My father would drive up to one cart housed inside of the hangar, leave the engine running and quickly toss suitcase after suitcase onto his once empty rack and then drive the cart to the belly of the airplane and quickly toss the bags onto a conveyor belt where another Clerk would pull the bags off the belt and onto the plane. There was no method to this madness and everything had to get done so fast that there was no time for questions.
I wanted to ask, “Why don’t you just have the people who work inside put the bags on a cart, you then can drive up to it and attach it to your truck?” Or, “Couldn’t they just build a longer conveyor belt that would take the bags from the hangar to the plane?” My queries seemed logical to me, but I was 12, simple in my own right with nothing to add.
Although my father had what was to him a very ordinary job, he took the time to make it extraordinary for me. Aside from meeting unusual people and hauling people’s luggage from one area to the next, I got to walk up and down the aisle of an empty 747, then not only saw the cockpit, but got to sit in the pilot’s seat. When I was sitting in the Captain’s seat, my father had to walk away to get something off his truck. He told me not to touch anything so as soon as he was out of sight, I grabbed hold of the steering wheel. I flew that plane high into the sky. I pretended to fly off to Italy—the place my father always dreamed about going. My father and I were the only passengers on this flight. We flew to Italy, ate pizza in the leaning tower (because that’s where I heard they had the best food), and I flew us right back to O’Hare in time for bed.
I heard my father coming down the breezeway, so I took my hands off the steering wheel and smiled. I was a pilot. My father had gone out, I realized, to his truck to get his camera. He snapped my picture in black and white. I was a 12 year-old boy, forever frozen in time.
After the time on the plane, my father took me to a special hangar, a warehouse for the promotional items flight attendants handed out to special passengers. I got to take decks of cards, coloring books, plastic wings, color-form sticker books, balloons and travel magazines. My father also gave me a navy blue T-Shirt that had FITA written on the sleeve, which stood for First-In-The-Air. I was ecstatic.
Our day came to an abrupt end, though, soon after we looted the warehouse. We were summoned back to the Ready Room where my father instructed me to sit on a bench, drink a can of lemonade that he bought from the vending machine and watch TV. He went to the corner of the room to talk with his supervisor. Someone had complained that my father had taken me to work, even though he had received verbal approval from the same supervisor. My father was a man of principle, a man who followed the rules, a man who would show up to a job he utterly despised thirty minutes early each day so he wouldn’t be late. When he asked his supervisor for permission to take his kid to work, he was told, he should have gotten it in writing because the supervisor was a busy man and how could he be expected to remember every request from all of his employees if they didn’t take the time to write them down. My father was both mad and embarrassed when he told me our day was over.
“You’re gonna have to stay in here for the rest of the day,” he told me. “Some pain in the ass supervisor from another area saw you out here and complained. He was pissed off that I had you on that plane.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I know how important it is for you to get a good grade in class for this,” he said, looking at his watch to make sure he didn’t miss his next pick-up. “I hope you got enough here to talk about with the class. I wanted you to meet one of the pilots and see some of the other areas where I work.”
“It’s okay, dad, really,” I said, pointing to the bags of goodies I had. “Look at all of this I get to bring back to everyone in class. I’ll bet no one else will have stuff like this.”
My father looked over at the other workers, his friends, who could hear what he was saying. Tommy Thompson smiled and winked at me. For a moment, I felt like one of them. I was a real worker—a Fleet Service Clerk, just like my father.
Even at such a young age, I was touched by everyone’s disappointment.
I never saw my father’s tenderness after that day. Years later, the day after I graduated college, my father would accuse me of thinking that I was better than him. We got into an argument about my wanting to move to Arizona and be a full-time volunteer at a senior center. My father couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just go out and find a good company to hook up with; find a solid, high-paying job. I wanted to save the world and he mistook my passion as a sign of rejection, me refusing to want to follow in his footsteps and be more like him, which wasn’t true. But, as he was pointing his finger at me, I was thinking, “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Shouldn’t you want your son to be different?”
My father doesn’t know that the day I spent with him at the airport is the tenderness I chose to remember about my childhood. It was a time when an imaginary baseball was tossed between father and son; an invisible car got an oil change; a time when a father let down his guard. Time no one can take away from us and time we will never get back.
Alien Buddha Press 