If the windows separating the terminal from the tarmac suddenly shattered, and if the weakness I felt after the previous night’s debauchery suddenly dissipated, I could’ve hit the plane with a spitball. It was that close.
The time: 9:15 p.m. Scheduled take-off time out of Sao Paulo: 9:45 p.m. In 30 minutes the plane was scheduled to ascend into the troposphere and reduce Sao Paulo and its sea of skyscrapers shrouded in smog to bland playthings for the birds-eye mind.
Then the airline rep picked up her receiver. She said something in Portuguese in a steady but gravelly tone over the intercom, and half the people stuffed in the terminal sullenly gathered up their things and began filing out—a not-so-vague sign.
The rep switched to English and let the rest of us have it: Brazil’s air-traffic controllers had gone on strike. Every flight to and from the country was indefinitely canceled.
Most of the remaining would-be passengers were Americans, and they erupted like frightened geese. My mood swiftly blackened. I was no longer on my way home, but, rather, alone and stranded in one of the most populated cities in the world with enough cash to last a day, maybe two.
As I joined the gaggle of confused and angry Americans standing in line to talk with the airline’s rep, I cursed myself for spending the previous night on the Brazilian island of Florianopolis buying rounds of beers for the friends who’d assembled to see me off. Hope it was worth it, idiot.
Self-flagellation wouldn’t help me, of course, so I started searching the crowd for an ally. I noticed a bespectacled man about 15 to 20 years my senior with salt-and-pepper hair and goatee. Although the hard, frigid reality of the situation tugged at his eyes, he didn’t lend his voice to the American-made thunder. This was the first good sign I’d seen in a while.
In a muted British accent, David said that, yeah, he could use a little company. So we decided to stick together until we figured out what was going on.
I’d yet to explain my money problem, but I figured the passage of time wouldn’t make it any easier. How much better was I going to get to know him anyway? So I dove in and told him that, after spending two months in Florianopolis on a grad school scholarship, I had fewer than 0 left to my name. Could he lend me some cash? I’d been in Brazil long enough to pick up a usable chunk of Portuguese, so I could help him navigate, and I would definitely pay him back.
David said, in what I’d learn to be his reserved manner, not to worry.
We soon learned from the rep that the airline had arranged hotel rooms for us and we’d need to take one of the chartered buses assembled outside to get there. This sounded simple enough, but when we entered the steamy Brazilian night and confronted the calamity of the strike, we realized that just getting on a bus would be an ordeal in itself.
There had to be at least 1,000 people scurrying about. An armada of buses rumbled under the chiaroscuro lighting, filling the air—already thick with heat and the din of a mess of bewildered, pissed-off would-be passengers—with acrid fumes that stung the eyes and nose.
We filed into a line for the bus that stretched the length of two football fields, attempting to absorb the disaster we now found ourselves in. How long would it take to get on the bus? What would the hotel be like? How long would the strike last?
Although we’d been too preoccupied with externals to advance our conversation into the personal, I increasingly began to suspect that David would stick by me, if for no other reason than that he’d waited with me in that super-sized line.
Final proof came about an hour later, when, just before we boarded the bus, an airline worker asked if we’d be willing to room together. David and I didn’t hesitate in agreeing to the proposal: It was a natural outgrowth of the situation made acceptable by our mutual fear and hatred of it.
These circumstances added depth to our surface-level interactions: David and I were becoming friends.
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