Vignette: The Plight Of The Journosaur

"What I don't understand," the fat man in the front seat huffed, "is why they don't give us an extra day to just, you know, enjoy being at the hotel." It was early in the morning, like before zero dark thirty early. I was catching a ride with the PR girl and this fellow. He wanted to make conversation; she just wanted to get to the airport. "I'm in, you know, maybe ten great hotels a month, but I never have any extra days to just relax."

"Uh, yeah," the girl said, looking straight ahead, "an extra day would be nice." Turning to face me in the back seat, the man volunteered that he worked for a niche-interest magazine with a circulation of 40,000. I'd never heard of it. He was wearing the T-shirt and the hat that had been given to us upon our arrival fifty-eight hours earlier. I'd seen him wearing both items on three separate occasions. The day before, he'd preened and posed for an interview with the media team of the manufacturer in question, making sure to turn his hat towards the camera and inquiring whether he was "in the right light." He was fifty years, five foot eight, and probably weighed about what I do. There is no right light for people like that, unless they are named "Marlon Brando."

When we came to a halt in front of his airline's sign at the Departures terminal, he stepped out and stood placidly at the curb, waiting for his luggage to be brought to him. The PR girl hit the trunk release. For a moment, he looked very sad at not being personally served by a twenty-eight-year-old. Then he opened the passenger door and leaned in, breathing deeply with the exertion.

"I'm hearing rumors of an international program coming up... need to be on that one!" A meaningful look at the girl, clearly intended to be a sort of iron-fist-in-velvet-glove intimidation. Then, like Batman, he was gone, with just the feeble thump of the closing trunk to announce his departure. I looked back to see where he'd gone, but if he was an individual component of the waddling crowd dragging their rollerbags behind them, I couldn't tell.