Ken Hada is a fourth generation Oklahoman, descendant of Danish and Hungarian immigrants: Gypsy poets, barn dance aficionados, art lovers, amateur philosophers, wheat farmers, preachers, teachers and common-sense craftsmen.

“These poems, acting as spare parts themselves, go into the making of one smooth-running, powerful engine.”

 - Diane Glancy

Author of Pushing the Bear

Desperate Shuttles | by J. Bonasia

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ARRIVING: Consolidated Airways, Flight 1638

12:44 AM, Terminal 4-C

Baggage Carousel 7, Ground Floor

 

This airport shuttle driver is clearly crazy, as are they all.

The obvious madness in his watery eyes reflects a pattern I’ve detected around the country lately. I travel a lot on business, and I see it everywhere. The steady increase in airport security appears to have induced a sinister paranoia among the nation’s airport shuttle drivers. It is that simple.

All these struggling, talkative old white men seem to gravitate to the shuttle industry after they retire, as a last best way to make ends meet. This job gives them some much needed income. Plus, it offers justification by demonstrating their ample skills for mapping out routes and driving vans safely. They also get to repeat countless riveting personal stories to captive audiences of shuttle passengers. It’s perfect. In some ways, this shuttle role serves as an outlet to counter their many failures and frustrations. In so doing it helps drain all the bitterness from their long lifetimes as a kind of late-stage self therapy. Not surprisingly, these drivers are often military veterans or former cops. Many are Bush voters or Reagan supporters. Some are even Nixon defenders. Pretty much all of them are strict social and fiscal conservative hawks. They see the world in black-and-white, and they see it as changing far too rapidly and convulsively for its own collective good.

Of course, for all I know, they may be right.

At least there seems to be some valid societal basis for their deep concerns. A generational shift is clearly underway based on the sudden dislocations of real-time communications and social media so cherished by younger people who cling to their glowing mobile devices and tap them so adoringly, almost like religious artifacts.

Older shuttle drivers secretly hate this smart-phone obsession among their younger passengers, their continuous flicking of fingers and thumbs on screens, their constant checking for and sending of text messages, their ongoing repetitive use of Google maps and iPhone apps to anxiously discover the shuttle’s destination and best path and then preemptively call it out even before the driver can map out his own chosen route. It’s all quite understandably maddening for the drivers of these desperate shuttles, and it goes a long way toward explaining their mounting sense of exasperation.

 This one particularly insane driver tonight waits for me by holding up a small white placard at chest level, bearing my family name, B—. My sensible neurotic sister must have called in for the shuttle dispatch. The driver stares blankly straight ahead at the airport crowd through aqueous eyes which scan side to side, his pupils darting like dull gray BBs across his face.

I have no idea that he’s standing right there behind me. I am made aware of his presence by an authoritative female airport intercom voice which invokes my name through the public address speakers:

“The Current Threat Level has been classified as Dark Orange Brown, or Burnt Sienna, to be exact… Please consult the 45-Degrees of Public Protection on the Airport Threat Level Color Palette Wheel in the Terminal Lobby… Do Not Accept Baggage From Anyone You Do Not Know… Please notify Airport Authorities of any Suspicious Behaviors... Please do not let your growing fears or latent anxieties paralyze your timely movements through the Airport Security System… Thanks for your compliance with these ongoing Safety Requirements and for your complete submission to Airport Rules, including full body-probe scanning penetration… Now from all of us at the Airport, have a great day.”  

 I am numb from the flight, numb from working a full day before flying cross-country all night, numb from arriving here on this broad expanse of perfect white linoleum under the obscenely bright fluorescent lights of this backwards southern airport at 1 o’clock in the morning. The clanking luggage carousel springs to life in a mechanical whirring of chains and gears that drive triangular plates of stainless steel and interlocking rubber mats in oval track patterns. My exhaustion is only exceeded by my hunger and the dull throb of my airline headache. This is when I hear the fateful words that echo from the disembodied female voicetone of the official Airport public address system:  

 “Mr. B—, please meet your party at Baggage Carousel 7.”

I look around to see this older guy, bearing the white sign with my name at chest level. He is standing directly behind me, uncomfortably so. He’s staring straight ahead toward the clanking oval conveyor belts, yet it’s as if he’s watching a tennis match with those blue eyes shifting side to side. How to describe their pure liquidity, the pale blue pooling emptiness? A shade of extreme light blue, closer to the absence of color, like clear water.

“I’m Mr. B— ,” I say softly.

“Welcome, Mr. B—. I’ll be your shuttle driver Johann, I’ve been sent for you by SSS-Shuttle Service,” he says, grinning big wooden teeth, hand outstretched, the unnaturally tanned skin of his arms glowing. His taut face is carved in angular features, a sharp pin-tipped nose and diamond-shaped cheeks. His hair is draped like strands of golden yarn around his creased bronze metallic head. The yarn twists into ropes that seem to grow out from the sides and back of his mostly bald head, swirling around the top of his flat yellow pate. His hair is a weird Caesar’s wreath of fluffy wheat stalks that protrude from the back of his crinkly skull. He wears an off-white knit polo shirt and dark blue slacks, with a brown belt and matching brown-tasseled loafers. Dark creases run into the corners of his eyes, just as deep horizontal lines ripple his forehead.

I have nowhere to escape. I’m obviously the only shuttle passenger at this hour. The deepening monologue has already begun. Waiting for my luggage to appear, Johann immediately fires off several zingers about the slowness of the inept “darkies” running the baggage service. He also notes with a grin the various impatient “red-asses” waiting in line for their overdue luggage, people who are all grumpy and tired and hungry and worn out from the flight. Somehow he takes a wicked pleasure in their discomfort, conveniently forgetting that I am one of them.

Of course many others have been affected by the – he notes with a quick paranoid side-to-side scan of BBs here – affected by the… the airliner germ conspiracy.

“Have you heard of germ warfare?” he asks softly.

“Um, sure… World Wars I and II, Armageddon time… But instead of poison gas, you use lethal germs to wipe out the masses.”

“Wipe out?” he arches one golden eyebrow. “Or merely infect and brainwash them, very sloowwly, over time?”

“ … ”

Wiggle of both eyebrows. Johann stares straight ahead, tipping forward on his toes, hands in pockets, trying to appear innocent. “It’s worth a thought. Some say the more nefarious airlines might even be working with their governments on this. I never fly those Asian airlines, I can tell you that much. Too much chance for germ contagion from the germ conspiracy; same thing really… Needless to say, at the end of the day you won’t catch me flying alongside all those coughing Indians and Chinamen with that bird-droppings flu, no sir… No way, no sir, no how Bub.”

I was maybe hoping for some fast food, but would have settled for a tuna sandwich and chips from a vending machine. Any food would do before having to face my sensible, neurotic sister and her grouchy, bossy husband tonight. Instead, it’s me and my empty stomach embarking on an exclusive hour-long drive to their house all alone with this complete madman.

Our monologue really gets going with a few gracious questions while wheeling my luggage to the white van in the parking garage. Such as where are you coming from (Los Angeles), and what are you doing here down south (visiting my sensible, neurotic sister and her grouchy, bossy husband)? Then there are the mandatory lengthy local weather highlights touching on recent trends (cloudy with light rains), current trends (partly cloudy), the expected forecast (skies clearing by mid-morning tomorrow), and his opinion as to why that prediction is only partly correct (a light drizzle at dawn before clearing sunshine is more like it).

Quite quickly, it’s apparent there is not much need for me to speak beyond serving as Johann’s chorus, with lots of uh-huhs and you-don’t-says. He has more than enough important items to relate for the two of us. Explicit tales of certain disagreeable brown-noses and red-asses he has known through the years. His personal shit list, basically. When asked what he did in his prior career, he softens somewhat, dropping demure hints about an undercover profession… The implication being something related to guns.

“Like what? Like detective work? Police SWAT team? Army Ranger?”

“Special ops,” he says softly, glancing sideways toward me but not right at me, in order to gauge my reaction.

“Oh, wow,” I raise eyebrows and stroke chin in recognition of his stake-raising. “Like what do you mean?

 “ … ”

“DOD? NSA? CIA?”

“Something like that,” his face relaxes into the hint of a smile.

“Hmm, defense intelligence, that’s like some sort of James Bond-style spy work. You were a spook, Johann. You must have seen some pretty hairy stuff.”

“There were times,” he assures me. “There were times.”

Both of us listen now as the massive van motor rattles and hums beneath its blue plastic casing bolted to the floor between us in the front seat. The humid southern night drips past us on the windshield in glares of streetlights and stoplights.

Johann excuses himself to take several coded and garbled calls over the van radio system with the shuttle dispatcher. Their connection keeps cutting out. The actual point of their chat remains unclear, beyond fulfilling their duty to establish official communications in some sort of shuttle company policy kind of way.

 Finally Johann signs off, rolling his eyes. “She’s such a red-ass to me,” he says with a grin. I grin too.

Soon it becomes clear in the darkness of the cab that Johann has been unhappily married three times, but he is almost certainly no longer married to anyone now. He seems closest to his grown son, who must be around my middle-age. Johann was born in Munich, but came here as a young adult. I’m tempted to bring up the Olympic kidnapping fiasco from 1972 when the PLO murdered Israeli gymnasts on TV in perhaps the first modern act of mass media terrorism. But I avoid the reference for fear of igniting the tender topic of Middle Eastern relations. I assume Johann hates Jews, but despises Muslims still more, so I have no wish to pursue the matter.

He inquires about my marital status and I say single, although I did live with a woman once for eight years, but we never officially tied the knot. So I guess that makes it a common law marriage, I offer.

“Mr. B— can I tell you a story?” Johann says. “Nice fella meets a girl he really likes, falls in love. They live together for a long time, he proposes to her, she says no, and he lives alone happily ever after.”

“ … ”

“Don’t you think?” he asks, bouncing in his van driver’s chair.

“Quite right, bravo,” I laugh aloud. There’s no denying I felt huge relief mixed in with the debilitating regret from that particular breakup. How Johann was able to intuit this very personal detail from my life story seems both elusive and impressive, and not the least bit scary.

 Something gets him going now about the different gauges and brands of handguns and shotguns and rifles and automatic weapons and what they’re good for and best at, such as their accuracy, or the size and power of their blast holes, or the speed and magnitude of their bullet sprays. He has an extensive knowledge and many opinions about a wide range of differing firearms. His fascination clearly involves the concept of weapons as killing devices, as tools of actual death and dismemberment. During this dissertation it occurs to me that Johann almost certainly must carry a piece on his person at all times, or he at least must have one stashed under his driver’s seat, right there below the customer information clipboard which rests on the blue plastic armature between us.

I’m processing this information just as he begins to expound on a natural-born Cold War assassin he once knew from the Florida Everglades. This was a very special redneck kid named Cleary who could pick off targets from 1,000 feet, in Vietnam, Nicaragua and El Salvador, apparently.

“When you shoot from that far away, they don’t even know where the bullets are coming from when the bodies start dropping,” Johann explains. “But this kid Cleary was especially nuts. He had no problem wading into a swamp or burrowing into the jungle muck for long hours, or even a full day at a time, silently waiting for his prey. He would cover himself with all these palm fronds and leaves and mud and sticks, until he became part of the swampy earth. Then, he waited, just like a true cold-blooded killer, just like a gator would.”

The headlights of the van smite the misty darkness like two flames from the nostrils of a dragon in the night... Silence, save for the thrum of motor noises at my left knee… Thoughts of loaded weapons going off; visions of blue smoke of gunpowder and the blue flicker of police lights flashing by the side of the highway… His paranoia has induced my own dark thoughts in this deepest purple night.

All such worries turn out to be needless, of course. Johann soon realizes we are fast approaching the house of my sensible sister and her bossy husband, so his precious time is limited for ghastly late-night storytelling. He hurries up the pace of his narrative to get to what seems to be his greatest interest, namely the pressing question of atmospheric chemtrails.

“You know chemtrails, those lines behind jets in the sky, Mr. B—, right?”

“Sure, but my understanding is that most of those jet trails involve hot water vapor that’s condensed by the icy cold sky, not chemicals. That’s why the clouds are pure white, because they’re water vapor.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha – ha!” he slaps his thigh, probably one demonstrative ‘ha’ too many. “That’s just what they want you to think. Yet rigorous analysis reveals that these chemtrails are made up of ferrous oxide, ammonia dioxide, sulphur fluoride and all sorts of other complex chemical molecules directly related to brain functions.”

“ … ”

“Listen, can I tell you something? I think I can trust you. Because when I told some other passengers about this, they got pretty scared. They went back and told my boss that I scared them, and then he went all red-ass on me. That red-ass threatened to suspend me if I kept warning my passengers about all these true chemtrail stories, so now I’ve got to keep my mouth shut.”

“ ... ”

“Listen, I apologize for bringing it up,” Johann says glumly.

 “Aw c’mon,” I say. “Let’s hear it. I want to know the truth. I don’t trust anybody, most especially not your self, Johann. You should know that by now. So let’s hear it anyway.”

His enormous smile is evident, those sturdy German teeth gleaming like blocks of wood in the bleak shadows of the van cab. “Well, there’s growing evidence about chemical vapor trails in the skies over Europe, over America, over the whole goddamned developed world.”

“Government work?” I sympathize, not totally disbelieving him.

“Worse,” Johann says, his BB eyes starting to ricochet wildly. “Possibly far worse.”

He clutches the steering wheel harder, knuckles whitening as he cranes his head sideways to face me with real torment through the shadowed space between us. “Aliens seeding the SKIES of the earth, for who knows what godforsaken ends? U-F-Os, I tell ya… There’s plenty of evidence, Mr. B—. Real data… Here, I want you to have this article as proof.”

He reaches down and shuffles around for the papers on the floorboard beneath his feet. For one agonizing instant, I’m quite sure he’s reaching for a vintage slender .38-caliber Luger pistol with a silencer, preparing to cap me directly between the eyeballs at close range before dumping my bloody corpse in the black swamps just beyond this interstate highway’s cloverleaf Exit 238, which he slows down to take just now toward my sister’s town.

My apprehension quickly passes when Johann pulls out not a pistol but a well worn four-page printout downloaded from a British UFO cultist Website. He anxiously hands it to me.

“Check this out when you get a chance,” he says, briefly looking me in the eyes with those aqueous BBs, his golden eyebrows wriggling. “I trust you.”

I tuck the article into the carry-on bag at my feet. He rushes to explain that some British researchers have documented extensive flyovers of Europe and the UK by some unidentified aircraft at enormous altitudes, some 55,000 to 65,000 feet above earth, far above the 35,000 feet of most commercial aircraft and even beyond 45,000 feet reserved for private executive jets. He grows more animated and then agitated as he furiously unwinds the assorted conclusive evidence he has assembled to confirm this irrefutable contrail conspiracy story.

“Maybe they’re some kind of government reconnaissance aircraft,” I offer meekly.

“No WAY, Jose!” Johann exclaims with added harshness in his already hoarse voice, as if to emphasize how dare I insinuate that I might know more about spy planes than he? “Recon planes only fly at middle altitudes, and satellites only hover outside the earth’s atmosphere. No sir, we’re definitely talking UN-identified flying OB-jects, at ex-TREME altitudes of earth’s atmosphere. No other POSS-ible explanation.”

Silence. Suburban streets slick with night dew, the quiet darkened homes filled with families sleeping and dreaming as we pass by, black tires on black asphalt in the black night.

“My sister’s place is just past these banks of lights, then right, then left,” I say.

“I know, Mr. B—,” he says glumly, as if now in second-guessing his navigational prowess I’ve rejoined that rabble of cocky, thumb-swishing text-messengers, just like all the rest of the red-asses out there.

“No, of course, Johann, of course you know the route. Pardon me. You’re a true pro shuttle driver, after all. Anyone can see that. Please accept my apologies… Now you were saying about those chemtrails?” (Still vaguely lingering concerns about the slender Luger with silencer underneath the seat, after all.)

Smiles, bounces up in his seat, rubs the steering wheel with new enthusiasm. “There’s this highly respected group of skywatchers, some former Royal Air Force, some USAF, some skilled amateurs. They have sophisticated equipment, and they collaborate over the Web from different sites around the Northern Hemisphere. They have documented a most disturbing pattern in recent years. It seems these aircraft fly high overhead with no detectable bases or air-refueling needs. They have no detectable manufacturers or government insignias. There’s not even any good evidence that they ever land or take off. Yet their routes appear to crisscross the sky from every point on the compass, often forming lattice-like fractal patterns with their extensively intricate chemtrails.”

“ … ”

 “Since they are supersonic, these aircraft are far beyond the visible horizon in terms of seconds… How these strangely silent jumbo aircraft break into Mach 1 without disturbing a sparrow is another complete mystery.”

“ … ”

“As these aircraft seem to behave like UFOs, their effects may be large or small, immense or mediocre, it makes no difference. We as modern people cannot see the candlewick for the sun before us, because we are constantly being diverted by something else. No one has enough personal hard drive open these days to process all the available information. This is why the American community is distanced from UFO-ology. That, plus the vastness of the Internet and the cluelessness of the media.”

 “Thanks, thank you Johann… I think this is my sister’s place. Just up this driveway here, next to that sensible hybrid sedan. Thanks so much.”

He parks, both of us get out of the shuttle van from opposite sides, meet at the back door, which he opens with a creak.

“Thank you, Mr. B—,” Johann shakes my hand vigorously as he accepts his generous cash tip, with those eyes floating like empty reflecting pools of water. I collect my luggage. “All cultures generate anomalies, such as UFOs and chemtrails,” he says. “That is just the way things are, and the way they always have been.”

I can’t disagree, so I say nothing.

“Goodbye,” he says.

“Bye.”

As he pulls away, dragon flames of headlights burn through the tangles of black branches and leaves that line the driveway. I wheel my luggage to the dark wooden front door, where I find a note tacked at eye level: “C’mon in, Bro.”

Once inside the dim silent house, it’s clear my sister and her husband have already gone to bed, as it’s now well past 2 AM. I spot another note under a light on the kitchen table:

“Sorry we got too sleepy to stay up. Here’s a late bite if you’re hungry. Sweet dreams! Love, Sis.”

Beside a folded white paper napkin on a clear vinyl placemat, she has neatly arranged a perfect tuna sandwich and chips on a perfect blue plate, covered in a protective layer of clear plastic wrap.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One Week Later:

DEPARTING: Consolidated Airways, Flight 1789

6:35 AM, Terminal 7-C

Shuttle pickup time: 4:05 AM

 

 

 

First off, for starters, there’s the matter of my devastating hangover on two hours sleep.

Then there is this deceptively mild-mannered shuttle driver at the dark wooden door in his beige, short-sleeved shirt and pale blue baseball cap with the SSS-Shuttle logo, softly whistling a happy showtune. He’s a remarkably bland guy with no distinguishing features or traits whatsoever. Short grayish-brown hair, pinkish face. Neither handsome nor ugly, just plain.

In my bleary condition, it takes me nearly the entire drive to the airport to grasp his underlying shuttle pathology. Turns out it involves some serious reservations about life and death, and regrets about having lived a bland, unfulfilled life that’s quickly approaching its terminus. This truth becomes abundantly clear by the end of our trip, when he hands me a slim purple book titled Ride the Tide, which he had written himself a few years prior. It’s about his wild adventurer brother who had died under mysterious circumstances in the Caribbean tropics.

“I want to share something with you,” he says. “I think I can trust you. How do you spell your name again?”

As I slowly recite the spelling, he actually signs and dates his autograph on the title page of Ride the Tide, in the scraggly but proud penmanship of his quaking old hand: “Mr. B— Hope you enjoy this. – Sam Wentner” Then he hands me the book.

The cover portrait portrays his younger brother by a few years, Danny Wentner, as a grizzled sea captain and free diver with a salty beard who gazes off into the distance toward the ocean horizon, apparently in deep meditative thoughts.

Ah me, what to say of this illustrious self-published author, this retired cost accountant, this desperate shuttle driver, this Sam D. Wentner?

Predawn darkness, a gentle knock on my sister’s front door. Sam Wentner has arrived, right on time. Try to be quiet, I tell him softly, as my sister and her husband are still sleeping. I gulp down the last dregs of sour black coffee as we fumble with the luggage. When we get outside, the first thing I notice is that Sam is positively far too awake and cheerful and talkative for my own pained state. I sense his uncontrollable compulsion for conversation already. It’s quarter after 4 in the morning, we’ve only just met, my ears are ringing and the whites of my eyes are clearly oozing blood, yet this guy will not shut up, not for one second.

Of course Sam opens by graciously asking where I’m headed (Los Angeles) and how was my visit here (nice but very, very tiring, actually). His casual demeanor belies a psychological powder keg. The wick to his burning obsession seems to involve a need to radiate his entire life story, to throw it all out there at once like a live grenade, as if all of it really matters a lot.

Our drive starts out normal enough, except for my profound thirst and fatigue, and the blunt wedge of pain that cleaves itself into my forehead like a vertical axe blade. This is when Sam launches into his preordained monologue. He disguises his many manias by speaking slowly and clearly in calm voicetones, just like a retired accountant should.

Mandatory local weather highlights start our show, of course, including a forecast of light showers before mostly clearing by midday… But suddenly, with the formalities aside, he starts spooling out his personal biography in a big way, without the slightest prodding from me. I even subtly try to discourage him by saying very little to nothing at all, not even the uh-huhs and you-don’t-says, without much success.

“I actually got my start in Texas, the Lone Star State… Plano, Texas, to be exact,” Sam D. Wentner says, as if launching into a well rehearsed Broadway soliloquy. “But as the son of an Army man, we moved around a lot. As kids, my brother Danny and I – Daniel and Samuel – we lived in Texas, Arizona, New Hampshire, Utah, Alabama and Georgia before attending high school in New Orleans, where I played varsity football. Running back, actually. They called me ‘Battering Ram’ Wentner,” he says with smirking self-regard.

“ … ”

“From there, I spent four years in the United States Navy, seeing duty on both destroyers and diesel subs. Then I returned to New Orleans, where I attended city junior college before graduating from Tulane with my finance accounting degree. We had two kids and we moved to buy a two-story, three-bedroom place at a very attractive price-point in a highly desirable suburb of Atlanta. But then I put my career on hold to live out my dream by cruising on a sailboat with my first, ex-wife in the Caribbean tropics.”

“ … ”

“Then unfortunately I contracted a lengthy, painful bout with colon cancer that caused me to reevaluate my priorities. It was a difficult time, as you can imagine, but with the help of my second, current wife, I pulled through. And that’s when, after 20 years as a senior cost accountant for the Rebel Confederate Army Reenactment Society, I decided to do what’s most important by realizing my larger dream to become a dirt farmer in the Georgia red clay country. Always wanted to be a dirt farmer, after being a cost accountant, and a boat captain like my brother. And a shuttle driver now, of course.”

Smiles broadly with earnest unwavering eyes that gaze straight ahead at the flat snake of road before us. Apparently, he has no recognition of his own intensely multilayered orbits of denial, or his searing self-hatred. It’s uncanny. How do you live this long and not see the underlying duplicity, the personal loathing and self-defeating patchwork of lies that make up your own life narrative? The decades crash into each other like train cars piling up in a blocked tunnel.

Now Sam gets going with a mad cascade of stories about his beloved brother who grew up to become quite the iconoclast. Seems Danny worked as an independent boat captain who skippered fishing tours and pleasure crafts off the coasts of Florida and the Bahamas. He also made money as a free diver for tuna and lobsters. Somewhere along the way, his boat started transporting illicit herbal cargoes, shall we say, along with some sniffing substances as well…

Sam actually pauses the monologue here, for the first time all trip, to make sure I picked up on his hip description of his brother Danny’s edgy lifestyle.

“He was a drug runner,” I say. “He was a dope and coke bootlegger in the long tradition of Caribbean pirates and rum scoundrels.”

Sam beams at this, as if I had just said his brother was a real saint and savior for all humankind.

“Well, that’s dead on, Mr. B—. But he referred to it as ‘the import business,’ to be more discreet. He was a real character, I tell you, a rebel in every way. He tried to live off the grid as much as possible, as he put it. Mostly he lived on houseboats or other people’s yachts. Never maintained a bank account, never had a credit card, never paid taxes. He chose to only pay in cash. Always kept sealed coffee cans filled with wads of cash buried in our mother’s backyard. Said he opposed the system in that way. Overall, he took an underground approach to life in general.”

“ … ”  

“And by underground, I also mean underwater. He was a free diver, meaning he dove for fish and lobsters without scuba tanks, usually just a mask and spear-gun. He was a free man too. Couldn’t help it if he liked his drinks and his guns and his women. He did enjoy the pretty ladies, that’s for sure. OK, so he had a long history of beating his many girlfriends when he got too drunk, but he felt very badly about that whenever he sobered up. He often made his remorse abundantly clear in great swelling waves of depression, during which he started taking too many painkillers to, to… to kill the pain.”

“ … ”

“Needless to say, I was completely distraught at his passing away. I obviously had some issues that I needed to work through. So I wrote this book about him to capture his amazing life, and his still unsolved death. He disappeared at sea under some very strange circumstances, and his body was never found. There are very good reasons to think there may have been some foul play involved. After all, Dan was forced to deal with many fairly shady characters, people of ill-repute, as you can imagine. There are even some suspicions that he may have entered a witness protection program, which would explain his disappearance. The case remains open. Details are sketchy… ”

 “Sounds like a suicide to me,” I say.

“That…,” he says, pausing for only the second time yet, “… That is one very plausible working hypothesis.”

When we arrive at the airport terminal curb, Sam is still talking nonstop…

“Gee Sam, thanks for the ride and conversation,” I cut in. “Those are so many amazing stories about the many incredible things that you’ve seen and done.”

“I always tell my airport passengers who prefer to sleep on the drive that they’ve got the wrong shuttle driver,” he smiles defiantly.

We exchange my luggage for his cash before shaking hands. When he finally waves goodbye and drives off forever, I have not even begun to fathom the depths of his personal longing and despair. Only then on the flight afterward do I read his twisted book in one quick pass, marveling the whole time.

To really understand Sam D. Wentner, one must first know the curious life of his broken younger brother Dan, as the hero/antihero of this staggeringly ill-conceived book, which even includes some truly sappy rhyming poems by the author. By serving as Dan’s biographer, mild-mannered Sam gets to partake in all the craziness, winking to the reader as the stable narrative voice of reason amid the biography’s constantly exploding interpersonal fireworks.

For 162 rollicking pages, Sam openly glorifies his brother for his devil-may-care ways, yet he somehow completely overlooks or downplays Dan’s many deeply serious social defects and personal flaws. Such blindness is clearly the result of real familial love, in that love-is-blind kind of way.

The author chooses Thoreau’s telling quote to open the very first chapter, apparently without irony: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

The early chapters detail both boys growing up as best friends, based on moving around so much. Their abusive ex-Army dad took the two young boys along on Friday afternoons when he made his drinking rounds to the illustrious gin joints of New Orleans after he got paid.

By the 22nd page, Dan has already moved to California, waved a gun at his neighbor for not properly settling a debt, fathered a baby girl, and agreed to marry the poor mom. Their marriage quickly dissolves when she finds out he’s having an affair with a co-worker. Soon Dan retreats back to the southeast coast, leaving the single mom and fatherless daughter to fend for themselves out west.

Sam clearly takes deep pride in documenting and promoting Dan’s antisocial worldviews. Sam brags that he even sold several copies of the book at a school reunion last year, to some people who knew Dan as a teen. After reading the book on the flight home, the thought of that reunion scene alone makes me cringe, apart from the book itself.

I do read the thing, of course, cover to purple cover, flying westward across the scarred craggy American continent… Staring dazed out the window at the landscape below, ragged pale yellow clouds are tossed above the rutted browngray land, where dry canyons pour down into windswept plains… Somewhere midway across the country, I fall into a deep comatose sleep, but reawaken over the snowy Rockies to finish reading.

As exhausted as I am, and granting the tremendous writing, editing and grammatical problems posed by this self-published work, I cannot deny that this slender tome is some kind of bawdy page-turning masterpiece, not least for its winking narrative tone. Each chapter reveals stunning new revelations about Danny’s promiscuous, perverted, drug-soiled and booze-soaked existence, accompanied by his disagreeable ways and blunt meanness, between his many clichéd anti-intellectual oversimplifications about complex human relations and social dynamics. In short, Dan Wentner is a complete and total moron. Yet Sam Wentner totally idolizes him.

Where to begin piecing together the crooked interwoven path of these two doomed brothers? I’m already reading this thin purple book in the airport terminal as I wait to board my flight to L.A. shortly after dawn. I am hooked by the second page, after early discouragement due to some blatant typos on the acknowledgements page. Actually, I’m hooked before I even open it up, while scanning the book’s outline on the back purple cover. It features a shot of the author in a tan cabled preppy sweater beside Danny in a retro clingy striped navy blue knit ski sweater, with a thick beard and gold wire glasses. The two brothers appear to be outside some rugged mountain ski lodge.

“Ride the Tide is the tale of my brother and friend, Dan Wentner, a really special individual whose life was shaped by the deepest currents and forces of nature, most notably the tidal power of the Atlantic Ocean,” reads the back cover. “This blue planet supports over three billion unique people, but Dan was truly one of a kind. He was not just the product of his genetic makeup, or his nature. He nurtured himself, which is to say he was a product of self-nurture. He toiled to impose his individual will on the world. He had a powerful disdain for the work ethic that elevates so many unworthy people to riches or glory. He shunned such affluence and/or notoriety, which society has dictated as the only real measures of success.

“Dan’s claim to fame…” (This line especially commands my attention, as Sam seems oblivious that Dan still possesses zero claims to fame, not even after his book’s publication. None, zilch, nada. Except maybe for ill-gotten fame among a handful of aging high school acquaintances who bought the book at a lame reunion and read it, horrified, and those many drug dealers, lenders and loved ones who simply recall Dan for not paying them what they were owed. Nevertheless… ) “Dan’s claim to fame was that he forged a lifestyle which most hardworking family people could never fathom. He would do anything to remain free and unattached to the baggage that keeps most people at the station.

“Did Dan succeed in his life quest?

“Only you the reader can judge.

“This story is true, although the author has used some poetic license to change certain names and identities for protection.

“Dan, if you’re out there, get in touch, would you?”

Wow. Based on an intro like that, how could one possibly not devour this book on the flight? It becomes a kind of extreme guilty reading pleasure that blots out the hung-over cross-country hours. I’m really too tired to sleep at first, as it turns out, what with the axe blade firmly lodged into my skull.

One of the endearing aspects of this book, Ride the Tide, involves a series of small grainy amateur photos inserted into the corners of certain pages of text, to candidly reveal Dan in his element, usually in cool Ray-Ban shades and a striped Speedo swimsuit onboard some boat or dock, holding up some huge fish he had speared, or a dried shark jaw. One random racy shot pictures four smoking hot naked babes, kneeling on a deserted coconut island beach. They’re shot from behind, looking out at the placid bay, glistening. How they are connected to the narrative remains unclear. Many other shots portray Dan posing in his “trademark” tiny Speedo meatsuits. Seems he enjoyed parading around semi-nude or fully naked on his boats, and he encouraged his passengers to do the same.

One particularly disturbing passage of the book involves Dan guiding his boat through a dangerous stretch of the Gulf Stream one summer day with Sam’s young family onboard. Despite Dan navigating some imminent danger of jagged rocks at low tide in unfamiliar waters, the author goes into extensive detail about one Minnie Mae, Dan’s well-endowed stripper girlfriend at the time who just happens to come along for the trip.

“Her stage name was Minnie Mae, and the stages she performed on were runways, yet she was not a model. She made her living by having dollar bills stuffed into her garters. Her patrons had no pretensions about her ambitions for showbiz. They just wanted to see close-ups of her tits and ass,” explains the author. “The more skin she showed, the more money she made. Danny, ever the benefactor, had rescued her from a growing drug problem in the strip clubs. And so he made her a member of his nude boating crew – First Mate, in fact. Minnie Mae might not have been able to stimulate the intellect, but she certainly could arouse certain other interests.”

During this particularly dangerous crossing of the Gulf Stream, Minnie Mae dazzles the author’s two young boys as she repeatedly stretches and bends her stunning body at the waist, stretching this way and bending that way over miles of pounding waves in her outrageously small bikini, her glossy hair flowing over the boys’ skin in the wildly blowing winds, her golden tan glistening with creamy jets and warm blobs of squishy white suntan lotion that she repeatedly squirts from the big brown tube and rubs deeply into her smooth skin, with her feet firmly planted on the rock hard boat deck, drenched as she is in her own slick sweat beneath the liquid pulsing of the intensely hot tropical sun.

It’s difficult to know what seems more perverse, the obvious personal arousal and masturbation fodder the author takes away from his many references to and descriptions of Minnie Mae’s amazing “rack and legs and tush” in such extensive detail, over and over again throughout this rather short book; or his feigned amusement at how horny she obviously made his young sons in front of their poor mother, who was after all his own wife.

Come to think of it, Sam’s ex-wife – who put up with Sam and her insufferable brother-in-law Dan’s antics for 20 years – gets far fewer mentions in the book than Minnie Mae, who only dated Dan for a couple months in the 1970s. That’s a pretty sick scene to fixate on for anonymous readers, when you get right down to it. The whole story reads like a bad sea sickness, really. It’s like a happily woozy sailor family that appears to skip merrily over the frothy waves of life while actually crashing on the unseen shoals of frustration and discontent.    

This intensely purple book’s dramatic opening scene portrays a dark fishing vessel moving up Florida’s coastline into a backwater harbor just before daybreak. Dan is making a daring solo predawn drug cargo drop-off, directly under the noses of numerous federal authorities who are staked out in armed speedboats. Of course a glamorous boat chase scene ensues, with Dan ducking the feds by making an impossibly bold passage across a choppy, craggy inlet. Somehow the government’s vast arrays of radars and search vessels and sirens are no match for the amazing boating skills and cool charm exuded by the superhuman force that is Dan Wentner. In the end, he escapes detection and has a big payday, which funds a weeklong binge of booze, coke, gambling and hookers, not necessarily in that order.

As our story progresses, we come to totally abhor Dan. In short, he’s a complete shit.

“Dan had a dark demon with beating wings and sharp fangs,” our author confides. “It seems that whenever he was able to bring a woman into his life, he soon felt a strong compulsion to abuse her verbally, and then physically. This resentment would bubble just beneath the surface until it finally exploded, whenever he perceived any challenge to his authority or masculinity, which were two tightly interwoven aspects of his personality. He took an almost prehistoric, Neanderthal view of women. He was usually very kind and generous before the abuse boiled up. Then, after he had vented the anger, he became nice again. Alcohol was inevitably the catalyst. One minute he was the life of the party, the next minute he was flying into a complete rage, throwing punches and breaking things. He never planned to hit a woman. It just seemed to happen.”

Dan drops out of proper society and spends all day and all night drunk on screwdrivers and Cuba libras, chain smoking cigarettes and vast quantities of dope and complaining to his barroom friends about the constraining boundaries and oppressive rules of modern society. Yet he makes no effort to contribute to or improve society in any constructive way, beyond diving for fish and selling them to fish traders for cash to fund his lifestyle. Well, to be fair, he gives volleyball lessons and starts a volleyball league for some poor Caribbean youths. But apart from that, he pretty much spends his whole life escaping from society, escaping from all responsibilities and commitments, slipping further and further downward and outward from the mainstream as he makes his way southward along Florida’s coast, past Miami and into the Keys and then further downward into the Bahamas. It is there he finally disappears into the deepest aquamarine waters and white sands of rum- and vodka-drenched delusions. He spends long months watching daytime television on his houseboat in a pill-induced trance as ripe coconuts fall from palm trees that rim the marina beyond the rotted wooden pilings of his boat slip.

“Perhaps he was influenced by the great quantities of cocaine and his prolific consumption of alcohol? Perhaps he was affected by a personality defect?” our author ponders. “Danny was no dummy. He had been a consistent top scorer in school. And he was world-wise and street-smart. Yet he was quickly presenting the image of a burnout, no longer the image of an operator who had the system by the balls. We know he was a complex, smart and insightful person, yet one who also hid himself within a mask of macho bravado and profound substance abuse.”

Dan’s big thing becomes nudism on his houseboat, and playing nude volleyball. He brags about the sweaty lunging of nude volleyball leagues, down there in the dirt and gritty sand, as being far more real and athletic than any elite golfers at snooty country clubs. He even travels to distant cities to participate in nude volleyball tournaments, but he quickly becomes disappointed to find out most of the participants are older, flabby and/or wrinkled nudists, not the shiny young darlings he seeks to seduce with all his stuff tightly packed down into those skintight banana-hammocks, those meatsuit Speedos of his, the many dozens of them that he keeps at the ready in his dresser, his drawers exploding with fountains of colorful Speedos.

The author repeats this disturbing and increasingly irksome Speedo motif throughout his ever spiraling tale. For instance, one afternoon Dan meets a cute gal named Carol at the beach volleyball courts. “One day after a hot and sweaty match, Carol felt an immediate attraction to this tanned sculpted guy with the graying beard. His hairline was receding, but he offset that with a long lion’s mane in back. And he was obviously very popular with the beach locals. Dan wasn’t exactly dressed in formal eveningwear, either. The only thing draped on his body was a fading Speedo, and Carol had already noticed what it seemed to be draped on.”

At another point just five pages later, Dan is described as wearing his best “dress” Speedo to some formal occasion, or at least formal for the Keys, whatever that might mean – maybe just a black Speedo with bowtie, like a male stripper? One can only guess… At another point, our author relates that although Dan was rather short of stature in his Speedo and sandals, he wasn’t short in other endowments… Etc., etc.

By book’s end, Dan has become completely unhinged due to his profligate drugs and booze and women. He has a large and growing skin cancer from long years on the water. He refuses to see a doctor, because much like his late ex-Army dad he has always distrusted the medical profession. Dan’s liver has been weakened from hepatitis, and his kidneys are inflamed from heavy drinking. He’s also hypoglycemic. Not so pretty.

When he has slapped his last loyal girlfriend out of his life, and finally run out of money, in addition to food, gas and any other good options; when his brutal father is long buried and his loyal supportive mother is dead too; and finally when his loving brother is simply unable to help due to personal financial hardships and a debilitating case of colon cancer, we are almost relieved to discover on page 162 that Danny Wentner leaves several vaguely unsettling messages with friends and relatives before setting out on a surprise fishing trip from which he never returns.

A small crew aboard a Cuban fishing vessel finally discovers the boat floating freely at daybreak three mornings later, with no one aboard, about 100 miles off the choppy southern coast of Florida.

Dan’s wallet and ID and some other telling personal items including his cigarettes and favorite lighter are found stored carefully in a pouch below the boat’s steering wheel and navigation console. There’s also a half-full (half-empty?) cup of chocolate milk and vodka in the cup-holder, which the cops later mistake for coffee.

I finish reading all this just as my flight touches down in southern California, at the complete opposite flank of the continent. While deplaning, I tuck the purple book into my carry-on bag.

After picking up my luggage, I decide to spend a little extra on a cab ride home, rather than taking the shuttle. The pleasant dark-skinned Muslim cabbie in a pure white head-wrap does not speak one word the entire trip, only occasionally smiling blissfully at me in his rearview mirror.