Sixteen Hours in the Geneva Airport (Part II)

Now crazed with fear, I raced to where the informational signs indicated I could find a fork and knife. There were eight different types of sandwiches listed on the board, but instead of the ubiquitous tomato mozzarella vegetarian option I had requested, I received a ham and cheese. It was all they had left at this time of night.

I also bought two different pouches of nuts and some paprika flavored chips, mentally remarking on the diversity of international chip flavors and their consumers. (I’d be very curious to know what demographic buys Consommé Pringles.) I also bought a bottle of water, a bottle of Diet Coke, and this is where the night starts to really get interesting, a draft beer.

I sat down at a table just outside of the smoking section and drank half the cup of lukewarm in one gulp. I removed the ham from the sandwich and ate a small portion. I saved the rest for the morning. It was then that my ears perked up to someone speaking English, the utter dearth of my native tongue in Moscow being responsible for my finely tuned ears. Turning my head, I found the source of this haughty lilt. It belonged to a man. No, even better. It belonged to a guy, a cute guy with a British accent. The clouds began to part.

I sat pondering how next to proceed. He certainly didn’t look like a serial killer. He was talking to one of his mates about when they were going to pick him up at the London airport. A backwards baseball cap sat on his head and a music festival logo adorned his chest. And like me, he was drinking alone. Feeling plucky, I right then and there I decided to pull out of my back pocket the all-time, guaranteed best conversation starter ever invented. It has worked in every country and in every language, outside every house party and at every bar. With the cool aplomb of an old pro, I solicited a cigarette.

It felt gutsy to put on my backpack and cross into his section, but then I realized he only had loose tobacco – I am terrible at rolling cigarettes. But I set to my task and got to know Todd, who gentlemanly introduced himself and offered his hand the moment I sat down.

He was an itinerant contract butcher living in a rural French village, but he was from the white cliffs of Dover, UK. He had been butchering for fourteen years, since he was nineteen, but he looked younger than that. I learned that England employs a different technique of removing bone from meat than France and he was doing an apprenticeship in the French style.

I told him I didn’t eat meat and I asked to use his lighter again because my cigarette had gone out, again. He said he just eats fish and chicken, “Because I like me chicken.” I asked him if he ever gets squeamish. He said only when he gets sprayed in the face by blood. I empathized.

Apparently, Todd’s day involved smoking pot, sawing away to rock music, and breaking for lunch, when he’d eat chicken and smoke pot again. He said that he definitely does not “eat piggsies, because,” now pausing to exhale for dramatic effect, “pork is the meat that most resembles the taste and texture of human flesh.” Which of course begs the question that given the situation I thought best to avoid: “How do you know what human flesh tastes like, Todd?”

Throughout our drunken getting-to-know-you session he dropped this adorably droll vocabulary, using words like “right diamond” and “murder” as adjectives. Eventually when I confessed to why I was hanging out in an airport, we invented an ill-advised scheme to break into duty free and drink Hennessey until morning.

At this point we were about five beers deep each, all of the rounds he paid for. He had also given me all the Swiss currency he had and his Virginia Gold and rolling papers. When I asked him why he was being so nice to me, Todd responded, “Because I feel sorry for you.” And when an itinerant pothead butcher feels sorry for you, you tend to agree with the sentiment.

Our restaurant started shutting down so we kept moving over in sections until we were just drinking in the terminal. I knew that his plane was taking off soon and began dreading the night in earnest. In a fit of desperate hope, I asked him if there was anyway at all he could stay with me and leave the following morning. His company bought his ticket; he couldn’t.

He told me I was going to be alright, kissed both my cheeks, and was gone. I watched the bill of his backwards cap blur in the distance, only then realizing I had learned much more about Todd in our three-and-a-half hour exchange than I have with people that I’ve known for much, much longer than that. He was the best friend a stranger could ever hope to have and now I was alone.