Unaccompanied Minor (5 page)

It was right after the divorce when Ash decided to transfer himself to LAX, thus commencing the necessity for me to fly there unaccompanied every other week in order to fulfill the custodial order. More than half the time Ash would forget to pick me up at the airport, and I’d have to catch a ride with one of the sympathetic gate agents. Eventually Ash took it for granted that I’d appear on my own. I got to know many of the gate agents who worked the ATL and LAX routes, because airline employees have their patterns, and I’m good at discerning patterns.

For example, Tyreese Washington is my favorite gate agent out of ATL, because he’s a short man with a big personality. When he makes announcements over the PA he sounds like a carnival barker. When it was time to issue my seat assignment, he’d wink at me and announce, “Step right up, beautiful little lady.” I started bringing him coffee from the employee cafeteria (“Three creams, no sugar—you’re all the sweetness I need”), and sometimes he let me sit by the dot matrix printer behind the gate so I could pull the departure report when it emerged, and twice he even let me deliver the departure report to the coordinator at the end of the jetway.

Out of LAX I liked Jalyce Johnson, because she’d often given me a ride to Ash’s place after noticing I’d been abandoned at the gate. If I were flying unaccompanied-minor as a revenue passenger, the airline would have dispatched an agent to be at my side until my parent or guardian arrived. But because I am the progeny of WorldAir’s own personnel—which, again, means I fly free (or “nonrevenue”)—the airline is absolved of that responsibility… or, more accurately, that responsibility gets transferred to the minor nonrevenue’s employee parents, and the airline stays out of it.

The first time Jalyce gave me a ride was when she saw me walking down Sepulveda Boulevard and pulled over. She had even remembered my name from the passenger manifest, and I remembered her because of her hair, which was ice-white and cut in a mod pixie style. She also wore oversized tortoiseshell eyeglasses. The look really worked for her. “Get in. This is no place for a young lady to be walking around alone,” she admonished me. “Right over there is where the Hillside Stranglers nabbed one of their victims.” She pointed to the bus stop where I had actually been headed. “Do you know who the Hillside Stranglers were?”

“Who doesn’t?” I said as I buckled my seatbelt. As a kid, watching true-crime television was considered mother-daughter bonding time. The Hillside Stranglers were an uncle and nephew team of exceptionally foul-hearted serial killers who prowled the Los Angeles area during the seventies, torturing their victims, sometimes for days at a time, and then brazenly dumping their desecrated bodies in open areas like hillsides and roadsides. Their method of operation was to descend on a girl, show her a fake police badge and demand she come with them to their car. Almost all their victims complied without question. “The Hillside Stranglers,” I went on, “are the reason why, if ever a man shows me a police badge and says I have to leave with him, I’m supposed to kick him in the crotch and run away.”

“Who told you that?”

“My mom.”

“Your mom is a smart lady.”

“We see that differently.”

Jalyce let that pass and asked me where I was headed. I told her and she whistled softly. “Manhattan Beach,” she said. “Your dad a pilot?”

“He’s not my real dad, and yes, he’s a pilot,” I explained, adding a run-down of my crazy custodial situation.

“You mean he’s not even related to you and he won legal custody?” she asked. “How does that happen? Did your mom show up with hypodermic needles hanging out of her arms or something?”

“No, that’s just it, she’s a great mom, if you subtract the fact that she married a controlling borderline sociopath,” I answered. I had yet to hack into my mother’s e-mail and read all the court documents, so like everyone else I assumed she must have done something terrible to deserve losing me. “Beats me what happened.”

“Was there a guardian ad litem assigned to your case?” she asked.

“I don’t know. What’s a guardian ad litem?”

And that is how I learned about GALs. Jalyce had a large layman’s knowledge about the intricacies of family law because her “baby daddy” routinely took her to court with crazy ploys to lessen his child support payments, and she lent a sympathetic ear to my situation. After that day I always tried to book myself on flights that left from her gate. She always let me board the plane while the ground crew was still cleaning the cabin. I liked to help by gathering the newspapers and other bulky trash and piling it all in one place for them, like in a forward seat next to the exit.

To be truthful, I wasn’t just being benevolent by helping them—people leave the most amazing things behind in their seats. Like last year I scored a portable DVD player along with all seven seasons of
MacGyver
. Lately it was almost all I had for entertainment, except for the books I pick up while helping the ground crew clean the cabin. But let me tell you, I have serious concerns about the state of today’s bestseller list. The last couple of books I read were epic period romances where the heroine gets raped a hundred times and then ends up all in love with the guy who totally treated her the crappiest. No, thank you.

So I’ve started being more picky about reading the books I find, which meant my amusement got restricted to
MacGyver
episodes and the WiFi signal outside the Flight Club lounges or on board the airplanes, because unaccompanied minors get free Internet if they ask for it. All the flight attendant has to do is give you her access code. But in-flight WiFi won’t let you stream video. So I’d use that time to complete my class assignments in order to keep my virtual high-school teachers from marking me truant, or whatever they do if you don’t complete your online assignments. I seriously have no idea what they do in that event.

All I know is that when Officer Ned Rockwell threatened to turn me in for truancy, I knew his threats were empty. I was current in my studies and had nothing to fear in that regard. I tried explaining it to him on our first flight together, but he got that glazed look older people get when you talk technology with them. I even had to show him how to download apps on his iPad so we could play
Neuroshima Hex!
together to pass the time.

In all, I’ve encountered Officer Rockwell three times. Law enforcement officers (or LEOs, as they are known on the departure reports) can board the plane before everybody else, the same as unaccompanied minors, and the gate agents like to sit them near each other. LEOs can also be part of the briefing process with the pilots and cabin crew if they choose, since often they are escorting prisoners and carrying firearms, like air marshals.

Air marshals, though, and I’m sure you know this, don’t alert anyone to their presence. I hear that rule got started because air marshals kept getting asked to intervene with petty disturbances, like when passengers bitch too loudly about not getting their meal choice—or, lately, any meal at all—and, you know, air marshals aren’t supposed to handle that; flight attendants are supposed to handle that.

But—and this is just my opinion—if air marshals don’t want to alert us to their presence, you should tell them to stop wearing Hawaiian shirts. Everyone knows that the universal “regular guy” uniform for air marshals is a Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, even for the
female
ones. And they always order a cocktail, but don’t drink it. That is seriously common knowledge, and they aren’t fooling anyone. Just my two cents, which should be of some value—don’t you think?—considering what happened to the air marshal on today’s flight. But I digress.

LEOs also have a somewhat common look, too. For example, they usually wear Dockers and a polo shirt under a sports jacket they never remove, no matter how hot it gets in the plane. This is because of the gun they’re packing. So LEOs are easy to spot, too, but they aren’t supposed to be traveling incognito, so I have no criticism regarding their attire.

Officer Rockwell and I have often encountered each other in the airport concourse, but he has only been on two of my flights. The first time was a few months ago when he was escorting a car thief who had been arrested in Georgia and then extradited to California. The prisoner was handcuffed, and sat in the window seat. He was skinny, with dirty blond dreadlocks pulled back in a thick ponytail, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that said Stop Staring at My Tits!, which I thought was pretty funny. (If I tried to wear that on the plane I’d be turned back at the gate, regardless of the fact that I hardly have anything to stare at.) Officer Rockwell took the seat next to him on the aisle, which put him right across the aisle from me. We were the only passengers on the plane so far, and Officer Rockwell must have noticed the eager expression on my face because he nodded hello. I took that as permission to incessantly grill him with questions throughout the rest of boarding and taxi:

“What happens if he escapes?”

“What happens if he has to go to the lavatory? Do you have to release his handcuffs?”

“What happens if there is an ‘unanticipated landing’? Do you have to release his handcuffs?”

“What happens if there is a rapid decompression and he can’t reach his mask? Are you gonna let him suffocate?”

“What happens if there’s an emergency landing and the cabin fills with smoke? How is he gonna feel his way out of the fuselage?”

“What happens if the escape chutes are deployed? How is he gonna slide down them all handcuffed like he is?”

Officer Rockwell tried to ignore me, but good luck with that on a five-hour flight. “Kid,” he finally hissed. “Shut the hell up. You’re freaking us all out.”

I looked around and saw that he was right. It turned out people are not enthusiastic about listening to all the ways a flight can go wrong while you’re sitting on the tarmac about to take off. Already three of the people surrounding us had broken federal regulation and put their earphones back on. Personally, I think it’s relaxing to go through all possible disaster scenarios in my head as we taxi out. I have a list, of course. It helps calm me down. My friend Malcolm is the same way. I really don’t get why it doesn’t work for everyone.

“Don’t use profanity,” I told him. “I’m impressionable.”

“‘Hell’ is not a profane word,” he corrected me. “And if you’re so impressionable, where the hell are your parents?”

“I’m flying unaccompanied. I do it all the time.”

“Why?”

“Because my parents are divorced and they live across the country from each other. They both work for the airline so I fly free. My custody schedule is week on/week off.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, furrowing his brow. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn he was a little nervous about flying. It probably did not help that he was about a hundred feet tall (“six-five,” he later corrected me), and his knees were practically bundled under his chin in order for him to fit in the economy seats. It’s a good thing he got to wear regular clothes and not his uniform.

“This is an MD-88,” I said, evading his question.

“I know that.” He took the safety card out of the seat pocket in front of him and waved it at me curtly. This prompted his prisoner to take out his own safety card and study it like it was a total treasure map.

“I’m just saying, because the economy-class seats are only seventeen inches wide,” I yammered. “Do you wanna know what’s bigger than seventeen inches?’

“I’m sure there are a lot of things bigger than seventeen inches,” he drolled.

“The average seat of a baby stroller is nineteen inches wide. Can you believe that? These seats are two inches narrower than the seat of a baby stroller.”

Officer Ned closed his eyes slowly and kept his head facing forward. He was a light-skinned African American with freckles and eyes the color of caramel. He wore his hair close-cropped and was probably in his early forties, which made his goatee kind of unfortunate. He had a space between his two front teeth that made him look more approachable that he probably liked. Plus he looked kind of weary, so maybe he could have been younger. I don’t know why I wanted to talk to him so much. Like I said, I have major trust issues. But I read in one of my mother’s books that it’s important to have a “support system” in place when you go through a crisis. And if you ask me I was going through a crisis right then. Suffice it to say that of the few friends I had, almost all of them were airline personnel. Malcolm was my only friend my age, but Malcolm wasn’t there that day. So I thought it would serve my purpose to create a new ally to “strengthen my support system,” like the book said to do.

And maybe it was the weariness of his face that drew me to Officer Ned, because I related to that. Also, I knew I’d probably see him again. You don’t fly as much as I do without recognizing the potential for repeat run-ins. Patterns, remember? And since he was a LEO, I figured it would be best to get on his good side.

The cuffed criminal next to him kept trying to order tequila from the beverage cart, and it was becoming an old joke. Officer Ned had a lot less tolerance for him than he did for me.

“So what does week on/week off mean? You never told me,” he said to me after a while. The MD-88 had no onboard entertainment system, not even any music in the armrest; it was just a matter of time before he became desperate enough for distraction to talk to me.

I turned to him eagerly, happy to begin cracking his hardened defenses, although I was
not
so eager to talk about my ridiculous parental situation. He struck me as someone who would require very little input to surmise that I was on the run. But it looked like he wasn’t really listening, anyway, so I decided to open up a little—give and take.

“It means that I spend one week with one parent and the next week with the other, and so on and so on,” I answered.

“All year long?” he asked incredulously. So he was listening after all.

“Yeah, it’s not the best of situations,” I said.

“And your parents live across the country from each other?” He was still incredulous. I was used to it. Non-airline people always get their cockles in a bundle about our lifestyles. Like my mother once flew me to Rome because we were out of Parmesan cheese. People act like this is child abuse or something. It’s not. It’s awesome.