Originally posted: June 26, 2005
If you’re ever in the Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta, and you’re a smoker, man, you’ve got to check out Terminal A. Unlike L.A., in Atlanta the airport still provides us with Smoking Bubbles – those small dark depressing rooms where the smokers can huddle together and kill themselves in kind. I don’t know, maybe Atlanta put these in the aiports, reluctantly, for the 96′ Olymipics so the Europeans would show up. Good ole Euros and their liberal take on booze and smokes and general desire to enjoy life a little.
Mind you, Atlanta is becoming like all the other big cities in America and is quickly shedding its tolerance for those of us who enjoy a puff or two every now and then – We of the Ash, if you will. And you know, I really don’t care about that so much – I don’t smoke enough to be bothered by it. Shit I smoke a cig here and there to actually enjoy one. Not cause I need one. Course, I’ve heard a lot addicts say the same thing. As far as the rules go, though, it’s the whole lack of freedom thing that pisses me off. If you’re not giving me a paycheck, don’t fucking tell me what to do.
Great. Now I’m an angry high schooler. Algebra sucks, dad!
Anyway, Terminal T in Hartsfield has a pretty decent Bubble. Windows looking out onto the busy terminal and windows looking outside onto the other buildings. It’s a decent enough view if you can see through all the smoke.
But Terminal A? Holy moly, mother fuckers, this thing is the pits! My pal and I stopped in there for a quick fix on the way to our gate, and this room was so dark and rundown – so, well, depressing, that it got me stoked. And I had to write about it…
It’s windowless, of course…
The seats are old 70′s era blue leather airline gate chairs decorated with cigarette burns and coffee stains. The ashtrays are holdovers from the dawn of the metal age – strange silver cylinders topped with a gross metal mesh grill. The grill, of course, is designed to catch every filthy object a human hand could dispense – napkins, gray paper cigarette box liners, wet Camel Cash, lipstick-tipped Virginia Slim butts, and chewed, lung-tar-soaked Nicorette gum. Humans are gross. Hey smokers, stop throwing your trash in the ashtrays, it’s extremely irritating. And it’s a potential fire hazard for those of us graduates from the School of Paranoia. I don’t throw flaming cigarettes in your recycle bins. Please return the favor.
And the best part of the Bubble is the ceiling. The most accurate way to describe it would be:
…
Yep, no ceiling. Just a massive dark opening where the 80′s paneling should have been. And within this black void stretches a four foot long air vent that emerges from the darkness above, stretches horizontal towards the wall, and stops short about five feet from it. It’s as if the other half of the vent coughed it’s last breath of air and just crashed to the floor. A nice symbol of encouragement from the Smoker’s Bubble.
There are loose wires hanging up there in the darkness.
And the lights. Oh man, the lights are depressing. Old, flat, tiled lights barely spitting out their feeble illumination. And those lights are just hanging in the blackness, haphazard and lopsided. Each one looking as if it’s last remaining cable, the only thing keeping it from falling and breaking the neck of a wheezing old hag with a mouthful of blue Benson & Hedges exhaust, is mere stubbornness and unwillingness to die. A smoker’s light.
One light is resting atop, and appears to be only held by, a long-dead water pipe that hasn’t pumped a piss-drop of water in decades. Soon, that sad rusty copper snake is going to give up and snap, sending the light crashing to the dirty floor and bringing upon us the welcome darkness.
My pal and I weren’t seated by an ashtray so we ashed on the floor. It didn’t matter.
Someone rubbed their eyes. Another hollow soul coughed.
A fat dirty unshaven man in a tight green t-shirt and what appeared to be the final stages of a black eye seated himself by an ashtray and coughed. I looked over at this sorry fool and decided that the Hartsfield Aiport must be secretly hiring people like him to sit in the Smoking Bubble just to make the rest of us feel bad about ourselves and the company we keep. God Forbid a pretty Southern girl might step into this dank dungeoun. It might actually make We of the Ash feel a little less sad.
Anyway, as the local governments continue their duty of relinquishing the citizens of their freedoms and removing all the permitted places where smokers can kill themselves in peace, I’m finding myself mindful of any of these last remaining bastions of self-destruction and vice. And freedom.
And Terminal A is one of the best I’ve seen. A dismal example of the respect that smokers get these days. A dark, dank, forgotten cell for the ostracized prisoners we’ve made ourselves.
