Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

the runway, listening as the guy behind us crabbed at his wife. Actually, crabbed is too gentle a word.
He screamed at her: “For God’s sake, will you just shut up!”
He was an American in his seventies, tall and bearded, who’d topped his greasy hair with a black
beret. “I’m sick of hearing about it, so just shut up. Can you do that? Shut. Up.” Boarding the plane
had put him in a foul mood, and his mood worsened when they sent out a bus and returned us to the
airport.
Like most of our fellow passengers, the American couple had a connecting flight in Paris. At ten
a.m. they still had a chance of making it, but by noon all hope was gone. While Hugh and I talked with
a Canadian schoolteacher, the bearded man roamed the waiting room, loudly complaining to whoever
would listen. His wife sat alone, huddled in her mink, and after a while I stopped feeling sorry for
her. You don’t just suddenly become an award-winning asshole. It takes years of practice, years she’d
doubtlessly spent mortified in other, larger waiting rooms with pay phones and magazine racks. They
had us reboard at around one, and again her husband started yelling. He screamed when a man with
glasses accidentally took the window seat, “You’d think he’d never been on a goddamn plane.” He
screamed when his wife tried wedging her purse beneath the seat, and he screamed when a fat man
arranged his coat in the overhead compartment. “Hey,” he said, “you want to back off?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re invading our space, goddamn it.”
“I was just trying to—”
“Bullshit, you’re knocking against my wife. Back off.”
The fat man was also from the United States, clean-shaven with gold-rimmed glasses. “You, sir,”
he said, “are being an ugly American.”
“Piss off,” the bearded man said.
“An ugly, ugly American.”
The fat man laid his self-help book on his seat and called for the flight attendant. “Excuse me,
miss,” he said, “but you might want to keep an eye on this gentleman.”
“Oh, kiss my ass,” the bearded man spat.
He was quiet for a few minutes but started up again when the pilot announced a baggageidentification
check. A few of our fellow passengers had gone missing and we couldn’t proceed until
their luggage had been removed from the plane. This involved unloading the cargo hold and spreading
its contents out on the runway. In groups of twenty we were instructed to disembark, identify our
suitcases, and reboard. The process took over an hour, and we didn’t take off until two fifteen, by
which point the whole thing had become a terrible comedy. The bearded man brightened with his
third glass of champagne and fell asleep shortly afterward. Her crossword puzzle finished, his wife
put her head on his shoulder and quietly, so as not to wake him, chewed the end of her pencil.
February 8, 2002
Paris
Yosef called yesterday afternoon, asking if I’d found the time to read his screenplay. I told him I
hadn’t and he said, “Well, I read your book and hated it.” He translated my laugh as “Tell me more,
please,” and went on to offer a detailed critique of Barrel Fever.