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| As mentioned else where in this site, my move to El Segundo in 1978 opened a whole new urban world to me. The central satellite to all the 'space age' I was bumping into at the time was the Los Angeles International Airport. With my curiosity and its behemoth shadow covering the area, it didn't take long after my arrival that I made my first detailed visit to LAXland. All that jet setting I saw on TV, ads, movies and the rest of the media at the time was finally all in front of me in this land and was soaking it all up. The real problem with this soaking business was that I was too young and arrived far too late for the party. Actually, too young AND too geekish to participate. You don't see anybody wearing thick glasses in, say, one of those bachelor lifestyle spreads in Playboy (outside of Woody Allen). But then pretty much everything in that floating castle is all an airbrushed fantasy anyway, but I digress... It goes without saying that if you're one of those addicted people-watchers, you'll have an o. d. from the circus parade called humanity. I did my fair share of ease dropping, but I didn't go far as doing the George Carlin thing and play "spy at the airport". I was just digging in the scene. |
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| ...and the ye old air of the port was buzzing with airlines, a ton of them: Hughes AirWest ("the big banana"), Piedmont, PSA (a goofy funky little airline that painted smiles on their plans and employees would wear costumes during holiday flights), Air California, TWA, LTU, World Airways, Pan Am, Transamerica, Western, American, National, SAS, United and so on. With almost each airline, they had their own "sky lounge", magazines, catalogs (with their own logos plastered on everything) and, with the bigger names, their own individual terminals. Yup, it was an age of living large with extra leg room. Connecting between the terminals without the bother of security ment you had to go down that looooong brightly lit thin underground tunnel that felt like eternity, or an echo chamber, whichever surreal moment you wanted to act out. I created one of my own with my old Sears portable "boom box" and a cassette copy of Brian Eno's 'Music For Airports'. It could have been worse if I had 'O Superman'. Another 'tunnel' that offered cheap entertainment was the colored tile walls at the United terminal that connected the main lower lobby to the escalators up to the terminal. I've tripped over the end of the moving sidewalk too many times from staring at the changing colors with idiotic fascination. For a little guy like me, this was as close one will ever get to a "experience" without drugs. You can actually see the mural and its effect in the opening credits of 'Jackie Brown'. |
| A section of a window from a Westchester travel angency! Can you spot the rare airline or two? |
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| After awhile, I began to notice that I wasn't the only airportrat (similar to mallrats, only less welcomed) running around, thanks largely to a baggage cart retrieval system that rewarded you for returning the carts to a rightful station by automatically paying you 25 cents. I did this for a while and got up to an average of $5 per visit, but it was becoming time consuming and I was beginning to feel like the rest of the desperate and broke idiots whom were also fighting over a quarter. So I gave it up and watched those rats increasingly get in serious trouble with airport security. |
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| ABOVE: a strip of my LAX days of yore for my forth comming book BELOW: a hint of things to come in page two of this story |