Welcome to Michael Silliman!

I want to take this moment to welcome Michael Silliman as the newest member of the Free World Radio Network team!

To mark such an auspicious occasion I'm pleased to offer Michael's latest:

My Strange Day... by Michael Silliman From the pages of "Tales from the Limo..." I usually get my assignments the night before so I can print them out and properly research any addresses that I am unfamiliar with. Late Monday night I'm issued four jobs spread over a 16 hour period. The last one is a supposedly simple transfer at 10:00pm from Long Beach Airport to an address in Huntington Beach for one Shannon Funk. In comparison with LAX, Long Beach is a hick airport where passengers still board and disembark on creaky old stair trucks that drive up to the plane. Old school. Real Flintstones stuff. So I'm standing there for over 20 minutes in a practically deserted baggage claim area listening to the old Donna Summer music blaring out of the rusted speaker with the blown cone, ensconced no more than ten feet from the gate waiting with my sign, when the passengers from Jet Blue #217 from JFK finally start filing through the security gate. What first catches my eye among all the other disembarking passengers is a group of three young women, the center one wearing a goofy hat and sunglasses and being carried along briskly by her friends and I get the immediate impression that she's "somebody." But my focus is on the other female passengers, trying to make eye contact with every woman who gets off the place to see some recognition of their name being held aloft on the clip board, and I pay absolutely no attention to the three girls once they're out of my peripheral vision. Not more than 20 seconds later, a mob of paparazzi about 30 or so thick comes storming around the corner, rudely jostling themselves and the passengers waiting for their luggage trying to get shots of the now fleeing trio, and they, in turn, were followed by a small gaggle of grumpy airport Barneys pissed off that somebody had the temerity to interrupt their precious donut time. Me? I'm standing there with my eyes still glued on the door waiting for my passenger, one Ms. Shannon Funk. Fuck celebrities. This is Elay, man, and I'm celebrity fucking immune. All I care about is getting my passenger in my car and to the address listed on my trip ticket so I can get home, pour a couple of fingers of whiskey and get ready for the next day of playing Chauncey the Chauffeur. One by one, the passengers collect their bags, and bag by bag, the terminal becomes as silent and empty as I first found it. No Shannon Funk. My dispatcher tells me to wait at the location until they can clear me through the booker. As I'm standing there, a young woman approaches me and inquires if I know when Jet Blue #217 from JFK is arriving. I inform her that it arrived over 40 minutes previously which seems to cause her a bit of consternation. When she sees my sign, she tells me that she's looking for Ms. Funk as well, so I inquire if she's a friend and perhaps has a phone number I can reach her with. The young lady then informs me that she works for People Magazine and she's there to report on Ms. Funk. After my brief Scooby-Do moment, I’m informed that my passenger was/is the newly fired/quit personal assistant to Britany Spears that was there at the infamous OK Magazine interview meltdown, and had flown into Long Beach instead of LAX in order to (unsuccessfully) duck being served a subpoena by the trampy pop star’s ex-husband who’s trying to build a case for sole custody of the mutant offspring of their ill-fated union. The reporter seemed incredulous that I had no idea who I was waiting for. She asked me the usually questions about if I saw Ms. Funk being served, or if she spoke to anybody, etc. After a while she realized that I don’t have anything of any real value to add to her story and she puts the notebook down and asked if it would be alright if she waited with me, as she heard my dispatcher’s instructions for me to stay on station, perhaps thinking that the fleeing trio might return to at least collect their luggage, if nothing else. We are joined after a while by a swarthy, beady-eyed gent with a big pro video camera rig that I can tell instantly that she is not real happy to see. Once he discovers who my passenger was supposed to be, he starts hammering me with questions. My inability to answer any of them to his satisfaction just infuriated him no end. The tipping point came when he offered me an obscenely escalating amount of money to give him the address of the drop. There was no moment of hesitation, no visions of what material desires the windfall would garner me. He talked to me like I had a price. Fuck him. I told him that divulging that information would be a violation of a proprietary company procedure, and that he would have to learn that information from someone else. He reacted like Dracula to sunlight…Fuck! An honest man! And then he turned and disappeared into the night muttering to himself. The People reporter seemed slightly bemused, but said nothing. So about 11:30pm, two hours after the plane landed, the booker cleared me from the job and I drove home wrestling with a slight case of “what if” remorse thinking of the shiny black 60gig Playstation 3 and a case of uber-yummy port-casked Balvenie whiskey a moment of lapsed morals might have brought me for simply selling off a person’s privacy. Relax, Ms. Shannon. If they found your home address, they didn’t get it from me. Like the movie quote goes: “Relax, Jake…It’s Chinatown.”

Michael's original music can be found here:

www.HansMeyer.net/Silliman

Welcome, Michael!

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