Thomas Trip Report - Part Two - Still in MoBay - but not for long

[Thomas]

It was funny how things worked out, Thomas thought – funny in the odd sense.

Eighteen months earlier, he was fat, dumb, and happy working as an air traffic control supervisor at the Vancouver Area Control Center. Over the years he’d earned a reputation as a solid controller. He was well-respected among his peers.

The job was great. He’d ride his bike to work, sign in, sit down at a radar display, plug his headset into the console and start moving airplanes. As a supervisor he’d also do a little paperwork and maybe go to a meeting once in a while. After his shift he’d bike home. Five minutes into the ride, the air traffic control business was the furthest thing from his mind. His job never came home with him; he left it on the road. Best of all, he was well paid – very well paid.

His home life was great too. He truly believed that he’d met his soul-mate when he met Eugenia.

Thomas was an avid mountain biker. He owned a condo in Whistler. Every summer he would spend a week there riding the cross country trails in the valley and another week ripping the lift-serviced runs on the mountain. One afternoon he was making his way up the slopes to get in the last run of the day. He’d taken the Fitzs chair to the halfway point and was in the queue for the Garbonzo lift which would take him the rest of the way to the top. He was solo, and as he got on the chair he was paired with another solo. It was Eugenia. They hit it off right from the get-go. They rode down the mountain together, taking ‘Freight Train’ and ‘No Joke’ then threading the lower trails. It was all Thomas could do to keep up with Eugenia – she shredded the trails and literally left him eating her dust. By the time she hit the GLC drop at the bottom of the hill he was trailing her by a good twenty yards.

They racked their bikes in front of the Longhorn Saloon and sat on the patio where, in the interest of rehydration, they downed a pitcher of the local Weissbier brew. Thomas invited Eugenia to his condo for dinner. She accepted. To replenish the carbs that they’d burned on the trails (and to fuel the effort that they were about to expend in the bedroom) Thomas prepared his special dish of fettuccine carbonara, adding extra cream and butter to the recipe.

After dinner he opened a bottle of Bin 707 Cab. Eugenia spent the night. Two months later they were living together in Vancouver.

Eugenia was tall and slender. She wore her blonde hair cropped and spiked. At the age of thirty she was five years Thomas’s junior. She worked as a freelance professional photographer. Her mountain biking shots, she called them ‘nuggets’, blew Thomas away. Eugenia’s parents had immigrated to Canada from Russian when she was four years old. She spoke with a slight accent. When she wanted something from Thomas she would cuddle with him and lay the accent on a little thicker – invariably this would get her anything she desired.

All things considered, life couldn’t have been any better for Thomas. He had a job that he loved, and he had Eugenia – the love of his life. Perfect.

But after ten years of controlling airplanes Thomas had begun to yearn for a change. While he was clicking through the Company’s intranet one afternoon he noticed that a middle-management position at the Head Office in Ottawa had been posted. On a whim, not really thinking it all the way through, he’d fired in his application. Two weeks later he was called into the Shift Manger’s office. His application had been accepted, and he was going to Ottawa.

But there was a problem; he’d neglected to inform Eugenia that he’d even applied for the job in the first place. She was, to put it mildly, shocked when he broke the news. It took a while, but she eventually warmed to the idea of leaving her family, and her beloved Vancouver, to follow Thomas to Ottawa. He offered her an engagement ring and, to his great relief, she’d accepted it.

So, Thomas and Eugenia packed up their things and moved east to Ottawa. Thomas left his operational position in Vancouver filled with high expectations. He truly believed that he could make a difference working as a manager at the Head Office.

His hopes were soon dashed on the rocky shores of corporate priorities and office politics. When he’d taken the job he hadn’t realized that what he’d actually signed up for was indentured slavery. His work week jumped from an enviable thirty-seven and a half hours to a gruelling sixty. His leisure time evaporated like the morning mists lifting from one of his favourite biking trails. His mountain bike languished on its rack in the garage; its tires went soft and cracked. Metaphorically speaking, the same thing was happening to Thomas.

He soon learned that his years of operational experience meant nothing in the boardroom. When he expressed his often unasked-for opinions, they would be greeted by silence and blank stares. The Company had its objectives and there were schedules to meet. Nothing else mattered. Thomas had become an odd-job lackey on a short leash, and that leash was his company-provided Blackberry.

To make a not-so-long story even shorter, there was a change in the VP of his division. Unfortunately for Thomas, years past, he’d crossed paths with the VP on union business and since that incident the two had developed a long-standing and intense dislike for one another. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Thomas was the subject of a division-wide email informing all and sundry that he’d decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities.

[Thomas]

They gave him a pat on the back and a pink slip with two years severance. Thomas was shocked, upset and extremely pissed-off. He felt that he’d been released without cause. So he hired a feisty labour lawyer (“Hi, I’m Cheryl, but just call me Cheri.”) and in short time she had negotiated another year of pay and a full three years of benefits. Sweet – bittersweet.

Two weeks after Thomas was punted from the Company he was sitting at home feeling sorry for himself when he heard the phone. To his surprise and great relief, it was a job offer. At the time he hadn’t yet started to look for work, he didn’t even have a resume. But word had gotten out on the industry grapevine that he was available and the reputation that he’d built had paid off. A company that sells turn-key radar display systems had just procured a contract for the job in MoBay. It was a fit for Thomas’s background and experience – so he accepted the job offer.

The contract couldn’t have come in at a better time. Thomas was ecstatic. This would show those pricks back at the Company. Even better, the first storm of the winter had just encased Ottawa in two feet of snow and the job was in sunny Jamaica. He was ecstatic.

It was only after he’d hung up the phone that he thought of Eugenia. ****, I’ve done it again, he thought.

He broke the news to her that afternoon when she got home from a photo shoot. She was cool to the idea, very cool. The MoBay job meant that he’d be away from home for six weeks. Thomas thought that perhaps Eugenia would come down and visit him while he was on the job. He thought that she would be happy for him that he’d landed a job so soon after having been dumped. He was wrong on both counts.

After he got to Jamaica he called Eugenia almost every day. She was lonely. She missed him and she missed her friends and family back on the coast. Thomas thought that she was just going through a rough patch; he figured she would eventually adapt. She’d snagged a few freelance jobs and had made a couple of new friends. Things would get better.

But with each successive phone call he could feel her slipping away.

It was bitterly cold in Ottawa. It didn’t help that when they Skyped Thomas would be sitting outside on his deck in the shade of waving palm fronds with the sounds of birds chirping in the background. The fact that he was either bare chested or wearing a tank top just added insult to injury.

In the end, Eugenia became his ex-fiancée after he’d been in Jamaica for a month. Late one night she phoned him. She was crying. They talked. She cried some more and they talked some more. Thomas said he would quit the job and return home immediately. Eugenia said no, she’d made up her mind; she was going back to Vancouver. By the end of the call both of them were crying. They said their final goodbyes.

Thomas missed Eugenia dearly – but it was over.

In the cold, hard light of the next morning Thomas added yet another entry to his growing mental list of ‘Really Big ****-Ups That I’ve Made’.

Tanisha sat at Thomas’s table, barely visible in the dim pulses of light given off by the stage strobes. The chiffon slid off her thigh, as if trained to do so, revealing a set of lithe muscular legs that appeared as if they could power her down a hundred meter track in less than ten seconds.

Tanisha was twenty-four years old. She had two children, both boys. The first was born when she was sixteen and the other just after she turned eighteen. Each boy had a different father. Tanisha often spoke fondly of her ‘babies’; their pictures displayed on the tiny screen of her Digicel whenever she checked it, which was often. Thomas was under the impression that Tanisha’s boys stayed with her mother, but she was evasive on that subject. Tanisha had fine facial features, which was somewhat unusual for a native Jamaican. She had a high, proud forehead and sported a natty crop of short dreads. Once, when Thomas had asked her how long she was going to keep growing her dreads, she’d replied, “Until me old, old, old.”

Tanisha draped her arms around Thomas’s shoulders and pressed her chest against his. She nuzzled his ear again and said, “Me can make you ‘appy baby.”

The fragrance of night jasmine laced with Tanisha’s pheromones wafted into his nostrils. His head swam, he felt his grip loosening. Night jasmine, Cestrum nocternum, whose tiny blossoms open to reveal its delicate petals and release its heady aromas only after the heat of the day has given way to night breezes. Tanisha was Thomas’s own personal night blossom.

“No, no, not tonight Tash – it’s not that kind of boredom – I need to get the hell out of MoBay,” he said.

She leaned back and looked at him. She saw something there and, before his eyes, Tanisha the exotic night blossom morphed from a jasmine scented siren into Tash, the pretty Jamaican girl who had shown him around the Orange Street Market the previous Saturday afternoon.

“Yah mon, me bored too,” she said, crinkling her nose and eyes, “Me need a cheeange.”

Without thinking it through entirely, Thomas blurted, “So why don’t we take off someplace? Maybe take a little road trip together?”

Tanisha sat bolt upright and replied, “You teake me to New York?”

“No baby, I’m thinking somewhere in Jamaica.”

She regarded him for a long moment. From the big bank of speakers a fragment of Gangsta ricocheted off the wall, “. . Bullet! – Bullet! – Bullet! . .”

“Meaybe,” Tash replied. “Me bin ‘tinkin’ ‘bout goin’ to Negril to see mi bruddah.”

Negril. The fabled, laid-back beach community located on the western tip of the island. During his stay in MoBay Thomas had heard much about Negril; the long stretch of spectacular beach, its crystalline waters, the anything-goes culture.

Of course, Negril!

[northcoast]

PULEEZE do not leave us hanging like this......continue on man!

[marley9808]

I am just wondering if Thomas knows Danika
lol

[irieworld]

yeah, I made The Thomas/Danika connection too

[Seveen]

awesome writing - very novel like

[marley9808]

I was also wondering if there was any connection from the Thomas in "Walk Good"....wasn't he an air traffic controller from Canada as well........