Snapshot Strangeness Story #2: The Hand Jive Lady on the Plane

Things are Not What They Seem, Or So It Seems (Redux)

Two big ol’ hands for the little lady.

“You may whisper sweet things to me / But I hear your gentle words, they make me scream / You tell me I'm so happy, you tell me the place is clean / Come on, this place is falling apart / What in God's name do you mean?” — Andrew Cash, “What Am I Gonna Do With These Hands?”

“Well, the doctor and the lawyer and Indian chief / They all dig that crazy beat /
Way Out Willie gave 'em all a treat / Doin' that hand jive on the TV…” — Johnny Otis, “Willie & the Hand Jive”

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Of all the memorable encounters among individuals who evidenced strange and noteworthy behaviors in the past few years, or at least one of the most Substack-able, was the paradoxically beautiful, timelessly facial-featured yet bizarrely and unsettlingly ancient-handed woman who sat next to me for a brief stint on a short flight from Myrtle Beach to Newark in August of 2019.

She hated me. On sight. Maybe before sight.

Let me go backwards. First I gotta talk about the guy I eyeballed on my tail, who had been on the periphery of my traveling life for months. Dude looked like a combo of a young Matt Damon and Rami Malek. Handsome but bug-eyed, his eyes large and full of white, pools of…not sure what. 

He was….maybe 28 y.o.? 30? I first met him at Anarchapulco in February 2019 when I joined him for breakfast. We were both up very early, the restaurant in the hotel where the event was being held was empty. He was the only one at his table for four. I like meeting new people, especially people probably counted among the Conspiracy Crowd. Maybe meeting somebody new at Anarchapulco would teach me something, so I joined him.

He probably told me his name and shook my hand but I don’t remember either. I tried to strike up conversation but he looked totally uninterested in me or anything I was saying. He emitted lofty elitist airs of dignified disinterest. 

I never pegged him for a spook, even though Anarchapulco 2019 was the peak of that event and it was crawling with spooks and kooks. He wore a shirt I don’t remember the color of, with some cryptocurrency or crypto-related company logo on the left breast identifying who he likewise told me he worked for (I don’t remember). I judged that book by his cover: a dull crypto bro. 

It meant less than nothing to me when Crypto Bro was on my flight back to Tijuana. But then I saw Crypto Bro on my flight to New York City a couple months after. Whoa. Coincidence. I guess. Then he turned up on another flight to Newark in July. Co…incidence? Then a few days after that, getting off the plane last from a last-minute flight I booked from Newark to Myrtle Beach to see my mom, I was knocked for a loop to find Crypto Bro waiting in the gateway (for luggage he was forced to check at the last minute?) as I deplaned. He even nodded at me, eyes wide and kinda guilty, like “You got me.” I LOL’d as I walked past, it was all so crazy. Never saw him again.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it thrice: I’ve learned a lot from the classic British author and defender of the realm, Ian Fleming. Naval Intelligence Officer, propagandist, creator of James Bond and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In the excellent pulp espionage novel “Goldfinger,” the titular villain tells Bond after running into him again and again: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Rule of Three, and then some.

I didn’t consider Matt Malek (Rami Damon?) “enemy action” by a long shot, but whatever was going on was either sloppy as shit spycraft or intentional. I’ve found when things look ambiguous, my best bet has always been to barrel ahead heedlessly with the Truth. So I told a former gal pal of mine about it via text, because if somebody is tailing me then that’s no doubt an indicator that they’re collecting and harvesting all my shit (not that great a stretch—EVERYTHING is being “collected”), though maybe not in real time. 

There’s your setup. I ended up spending ten days in South Carolina—did some traveling, ate out a bunch, often in public, never in doubt, never saw or felt I was being “tailed”—then bought a cheap, sudden, last minute ticket back to Newark on Sunday for a Tuesday flight on Frontier. 

No Matt Malek this trip. But that’s when the beautiful crone-handed woman turned up, as I finally “circle back” to the beginning of this entry, sitting next to me in the next-to-last row of the plane. She did not want to be there, and she most definitely and blatantly did not want to be sitting next to me. 

She got into her seat after I did, one of the last passengers to board. I didn’t see her get on with anyone but she may have. She didn’t look at me as she arrived but I looked at her and she was very easy to look at. At least at first: 

This woman was beautiful. Maybe 35. Her skin looked flawless, not a freckle, not a mark, either lightly tan or a darker complexion, with more makeup than I would customarily like, but applied with skilled craft to an exquisite and a classically featured female countenance: High cheekbones, thin pointed nose, strong smooth forehead highlighted by pulled-back brunette locks behind clean delicate ears. Casual but pricy clothes along with name brand handbag. Sleek black yoga pants for sure, a shirt I don’t recall and a dark jacket. Though she was flying out of the Confederacy, she looked Yankee to the core, and when she spoke her voice carried not a trace of y’all. 

“How soon can I move?” she asked with precise clipped well-raised diction, to the flight attendant almost immediately after sitting down. “My husband is right up there,” she said, pointing generically forward.  

“After we take off, you may be able to move your seat during flight,” the flight attendant said, or something like that.

“I really don’t want to sit here,” she complained. 

I turned to take a good look at my seat companion and…was caught off-guard by the look of open contempt she shot me. Like “I fucking hate you.” It was kind of hot, actually.

Leave the World Behind. I’ve got a whole Substack sequel to my interview with the White Lotus of Light podcast about this damned thing, but is it really worth deconstructing any further? We all know it’s Evil AF, let’s move on.

But it caught me off-guard. I’m not used to people glaring at me with such unbridled loathing, at least not from people I don’t know at all. I looked away. I looked down and away, and for the first time, I noticed her hands. They were old. Like wizened and wrinkled and spotted and gnarly. Thin fingers but slightly crooked from the knuckles and at the joints. I looked back up at her, WTF in my eyes maybe, and she glared back, hating on me, not saying anything, then turned away while making a low noise of dismissive disgust. 

Not much I could do about it without pulling a Bill Shatner Twilight Zone kind of thing, so I rolled with the oddity and clamped on my Skullcandies through A Period of Transition, which I was listening to constantly at the time. Tried to keep a surreptitious eye on her while she typed furiously away on her smartphone, until she had to go plane mode, whereupon she fidgeted and glared at me from time to time while I hoped this wasn’t going to climax with her elbowing me in the face with terminal velocity like some kind of Charlize Theron + Betty White Terminatrix at 35000 feet. 

That of course didn’t happen, but as soon as we got aloft to a point where the pilot said we could move about the cabin, move about she did, immediately, into the last row aisle seat directly behind where she’d been sitting, and making a fairly big demonstrable production out of it, like the guy she’d been sitting next to had been sprayed by a skunk or was a disgusting inappropriate pig or who knows what. If this woman had a husband up a bunch of rows, she never went to see him, not even to check if anybody would swap out seats. 

Since I was sitting in the middle row, I moved to the aisle seat, now directly in front of her.

It was a short flight, only an hour plus a couple minutes. I often wait to get off last from planes, especially if I’ve got luggage to pick up; it’s fun and maybe informative to wait and see who else hangs around. I let the beautiful wizened hands lady from the last row get off before me. She ignored me, but I couldn’t resist not ignoring her, and not just because she looked splendid from behind in those expensive black yoga pants.

“See Eye Aye you later!” I said flatly, not robot-like but like the nail in a deflated Aston Martin tire. She didn’t turn back, but it sure looked to me like she flinched in her fine strut, slightly, a shade that slid into her stride. I’m not so detached from reality that I can’t see myself sideways, so maybe I saw what I wanted to see. These are ambiguous times. 

Yet I also saw those hands. If it hadn’t been for those hands, I never would’ve given her another thought, she’d be long forgotten and I never would’ve written this, which has been sitting on my computer for four-plus years.

But they were an old woman’s hands. My arthritic late grandmother Dot’s hands, near the end, after a lifetime of two-pack-a-days. The beautiful woman’s hands were very strange and she was very strange. Or maybe I’m strange. Maybe we’re all strange. “Paging Dr. Strange, emergency behind Gate 9.” These are strange times, I think we can all agree, and maybe those who can’t/won’t/don’t see that are in the strangest place of all.  

There are worse airline experiences, of course...