Fair Warning: This post gets pretty foul-mouthed.
For the past month people have been asking me non-stop, "OH MY GOD SO HOW WAS IRELAND WAS IT SO AWESOME?"
And we gay out a little bit together while I tell them that yes, it was incredible, and so beautiful. I tell them how I cried when the plane landed in Dublin because it felt like coming home, like being reunited with a long-lost and much-beloved friend. I try to emphasize how great it is to show three of your favorite people around a country you love like it’s your own, to share with them little secrets that were shared with you way back in the day. I loved this trip.
But.
For some reason, I also bring up the flights. Those goddamn buggery bollocky flights, departing in Hell and arriving in Hell. I unleash a string of expletives so strong that it blows people’s hair back like a Memorex ad; to quote Jean Shepard, I "weave a tapestry of profanity." Because the flights? WERE A DISASTER.
That’s not entirely true; the international flights between JFK and Dublin were just fine. It was the rest of it, the stateside travel, that kept making me think that any second I would black out only to awake surrounded by dead bodies and holding an Uzi, standing there like River Tam, having just unconsciously slaughtered half an airport. The trip was incredible, life-changing and exactly what we all needed, but it was bookended by two days of absolute fail on the part of the airline industry.
Our itinerary was a little janky, because Brian was working in D.C., and we wanted to go for the Fourth, but I found a great deal on airfare out of JFK on Delta. I’ve been flying with Delta for well over a decade, have racked up several free tickets with them, and when I saw the chance to get an extra 6,500 SkyMiles by flying out of New York, I thought, "It’s so easy to get from D.C. to New York. We’ll just take the train; no problem."
So, I booked the following itinerary. Since Brian, Jayson and Laurie were already in D.C. when I got there, I booked the first leg to fly by myself from Oklahoma City to Atlanta, then on to Dulles, arriving about 10:30 p.m. Then, on the way back, Brian and I would arrive in JFK, then fly to Detroit, then on to Oklahoma City.
Then, a month after I booked the flights, Delta sent me an e-mail that our itinerary had been changed. Coming back, we would now be going from JFK to Detroit, then to Memphis, THEN to Oklahoma City. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I figured things like this happen – probably not enough people on that Detroit-OKC flight to justify actually having one, so they just moved everyone around. Only they gave us exactly 40 minutes in the Detroit airport to make the flight to Memphis.
I should have called them right then. I should have tried to eliminate that extra leg by having them send us through Atlanta, or Cincinnati, or hell, even Salt Lake City would have worked if they could get us home. But I didn’t; my unwavering faith that Things Will Always Work Out held fast and I thought, "We’re really going to have to run to make that plane, but what plane ever takes off on time? We’ll make it."
Ever the motherfucking optimist.
Also, let me just point out that if I had called Delta and REQUESTED this change, they’d have charged me $250. For each ticket. For a total of $500.
And so, the trip begins, sort of on a sour note. I had a crummy day at work, my housesitter never showed up (more on that in a sec), and by the time I got to the airport I was rubbed raw with stress. I walked up to the Delta kiosk to get my tickets.
YOUR ITINERARY WAS NOT FOUND.
Immediately the Neurosis Tabernacle Choir started singing in my head. In the two hours before I get on a plane and it is in the air, I am a total nervous wreck. I become obsessed with my driver’s license, my passport and my boarding pass, convinced either that I am going to lose one of these things, or that one of them will be somehow invalid and that I won’t be allowed on the plane. I have awful visions of myself handing my boarding pass to the gate agent and her saying, "Um, I’m sorry, but this is a McDonald’s receipt. You may not get on the plane." I become one hundred percent convinced that I am not going to be allowed to board. Then, once I am allowed on the plane, I become one hundred percent convinced that someone will be in my seat, someone big and angry, and I’ll be forced to get off, or that they’ll come down the aisle looking for me, saying, it turns out, we ran a background check. It seems your moral character is lacking; please get off the plane.
Once we are in the air, I can relax; no way they can kick me off now, right? WE’RE IN IT TOGETHER NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS.
And so of course when the machine won’t give me my ticket, Bad Mind kicks in. Bad Mind LIVES for this shit. You’re going to have to go home and miss Ireland altogether. It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars to get to D.C. now, and then you won’t have any money for the actual trip. You are fucked beyond all recognition.
The only thing I know to do to calm Bad Mind down is to pray, and so that’s what I did. I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Help."
When I opened my eyes, a surly Delta employee was walking up to me. "You on the Atlanta flight?" she asked with all the grace and sweetness of Lunchlady Doris.
I told her I was.
"You’re on a two-hour delay," she said, and began to walk away.
"Wait!" I called after her, frantically. She turned, begrudgingly, her eyes dull and impatient. "What do I do?" I asked.
From her reaction I thought she might have misheard me; she answered like you might answer a grown adult who asks, "What’s two plus two?"
"Go stand in the line," she said, her voice dripping with impatient derision.
My blood pressure now somewhere in the realm of a heart-diseased gorilla, I went to stand in line. When I got to the front I explained my predicament for the ticket agent. I may have led her to believe that my getting to Washington that evening was a life-or-death situation; without directly saying so, I may also have made it sound like I had urgent business there first thing in the morning. Maybe.
And so she pokes at her computer for awhile, trying to get me there. She finds a flight and then looks sideways at her computer, like a dog cocking its head upon seeing something unfamiliar. Then she looks at the gate agent at the computer next to her.
"I don’t know how to book this," she tells him.
"I don’t either," he says without taking his eyes off his own screen. "Ask Bill."
"Bill," my gate agent says to a man several feet away, at a volume guaranteed not to get his attention; she was using her inside voice in a crowded airport terminal. So of course Bill doesn’t move; he didn’t hear her. She waits. I wait. Another passenger comes around me to ask the gate agent a question, which she answers. Bill is talking to another Delta employee and doesn’t realize someone needs him, because the someone who needs him didn’t really bother with trying to get his attention.
The other passenger’s question is asinine, like, "Do I really have to check this GIGANTIC BAG? Can’t I just carry it on? Can’t you make an exception for cute little me?"
I’m standing there about to just lose my shit all over the place. Finally the other passenger goes and gets in line like the rest of us plebians, and the girl stands back up and looks at me like, "What? Are you still here?"
"D.C.," I tell her again. "And I don’t care where I lay over or which airport I fly into. Dulles, Reagan, Baltimore, it’s all fine, just get me there."
She seems to rouse, as if from a nap, and pokes at the computer. "Oh yeah," she says. "Bill?"
BIll still doesn’t hear her.
"Hey Bill!" I say loudly. He turns to look at me. I point at my gate agent; Bill looks at me the way I look at people who go through the checkout lines at Target speaking loudly on their cell phones, and then drags himself, with great effort, over to my gate agent.
"I don’t know how to book it," the agent tells Bill.
"What is he wanting to do?"
I take umbrage at the use of the word wanting, as if I’ve made some outrageous request beyond the one I made when I purchased the ticket, which is GET ME WHERE THE FUCK I WANT TO GO. I take another deep breath, say another little prayerlet, and explain the situation to Bill with some urgency.
Bill roughly pushes the gate agent aside, hacks at the keyboard for awhile, and then steps away. By now the other gate agent is watching what the two of them are doing, saying, "Oh, yeah, I don’t know how to do this either." So I’m just holding up the whole line at this point; I can feel my fellow passengers staring daggers at me from the line.
Then someone else jumps around the line to ask Bill a question, can she take her cat on the plane? Bill steps away, leaving now two gate agents awaiting his expertise on the computer, and I hear the ENTIRE LINE behind me heave a huge Post Office sigh, an embattled groan.
Meanwhile, I’m standing there just staring at the lady who felt like she could just go around us all with her sob story, whatever the fuck it was, and make us all wait even longer BECAUSE SHE’S JUST THAT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN WE ARE. I know, right? I’m looking at her with my meanest look, the one I used to give students when I would catch them surfing MySpace in the middle of lectures, like, "Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit right now?" She sees me looking at her and goes red; nobody knows how to throw shame like I do.
She goes to stand in line to check her cat. Bill looks around like, "What was I doing?" I stand up as tall as I can to get his attention. He looks at me like, "Oh God, are you still here?" and then comes back to the computer to finish fulfilling my outlandish request.
A few keystrokes and some words of training later, he has shown both gate agents how to book a flight, and I am handed a boarding pass for an American Airlines flight to Washington Dulles via Dallas. The other passengers on my ill-fated Atlanta flight watch me leave with great relief; I want to get on the airport P.A. and announce that if Delta wanted to take care of everyone faster, they could have Bill open up another line, as well as the Delta employee with whom he was talking before I flagged him down, and that they shouldn’t blame me. But I’ve got places to be; I go to board my American flight.
The flight goes as smoothly as an American Airlines flight can go, considering their chairs are so uncomfortable that it feels like their slogan should be "Fixing America’s posture, one traveler at a time." I get to Dallas and have to take their stupid Disney World Monorail all around the airport to my gate, the whole time standing next to a creepy-looking dude in a Promise Keepers ballcap who is staring intently at me the whole time. I’ve had such a bad day at this point that I’m thinking, "Just ask me if I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Just start that conversation with me and see how many of your teeth are still in your head at the end of it."
In the Dallas airport I call Brian and tell him that they shouldn’t plan to meet me at the airport, as I am now scheduled to arrive just a few minutes before midnight. I pay $7.99 for wi-fi and book a blue van to take me to my hotel.
The flight out of Dallas sits on the tarmac for quite awhile, and I don’t actually end up in D.C. until almost 1 a.m. When I start up my phone I have a text message from my mom:
I just went over to get Sam — he is doing great. I made him a bed in the kitchen and I think he’s asleep. Have fun! Luv mom.
A shock to me, since I was supposed to have a housesitter coming to stay with Sam all week. I feel a part of my brain collapse, like a Moon Bounce that’s been stabbed with a butcher knife, and I call Brian.
"Why does mom have Sam?"
"Oh, you heard about that, huh?" he says, his voice fearful.
It turns out that our poor housesitter, Jayson’s brother Casey, totaled his car that afternoon on the way over to my house, and won’t be able to watch the place after all. He’s fine, no major injuries, but his car is lost to the ages. Mom went and got Sam and he stayed with her all week, because my mom? You guys, she’s awesome; she kept Sam all week, and at the end of it he didn’t want to come home. I sent Facebook messages to the neighbors telling them that anyone entering the house is now doing so illegally.
At this point I am entirely convinced that the day can’t get any worse. So I go to meet my blue van, wanting just to be driven to my hotel and to climb into bed.
Only when I go to meet my blue van, there are seven people climbing into it. I walk up to the door and say, "Um, I reserved a seat on this."
The last dude climbing into it, some preppy jagweed about my age, says, "It’s full," and slams the door in my face. The van takes off, without me. Had I not been weary with frustration at that point I may have dragged him out and kicked his face, but as it was I just walked back inside to the blue van counter, print my ticket at the kiosk and take it to the desk.
"My van filled up and left without me," I tell the guy at the desk.
"That was the last one for the night."
"I have a reservation," I say through clenched teeth.
He just shrugs, like, "and?"
"So get me a van," I say.
Once again it’s as if I’ve asked him for a lock of hair, or a kidney.
"Well I’ll have to call someone," he says irritably.
"So call ‘em."
He rolls his eyes at me, and I tap loudly on the counter. He picks up the phone, points to a row of seats and says, "Thirty minutes. Wait there."
I glare at him suspiciously, pretty sure he’s just calling for a pizza, and sit down. Two minutes later he comes over and looks at me impatiently. "Your van is outside."
So, I go and load up my stuff. A few more people come and get in, also needing rides into D.C. The driver gets everyone’s destinations and creates a route; out of five people in the van, I will be dropped off fourth.
The guy sitting next to me gets on his cell phone and calls his girlfriend. I can hear both sides of the conversation; she is yelling at him, telling him that she’d woken up in their apartment all alone and was afraid.
"I’m sorry," he pleads, "my flight was delayed two hours."
I can tell she is crying by this time. "You have to do better about getting home. You know I’m scared to be here alone at night. That’s why I’m glad to be getting married, because then I don’t have to, like, grow up and do stuff like be alone at night or pay bills. I woke up and you weren’t here and I was so scared."
She broke down in sobs while he apologized, over and over, for his delayed flight, as if he was personally responsible for that. If he hadn’t been such a pussy I would have thought it was nice that at least someone, somewhere in the world was apologizing for flight delays. I whiled away the drive listening to him apologize for the airplanes, for the ocean, for the air, for the fact that about half of every day it gets dark, and that she was scared of the dark and he wasn’t there to keep her from ever having to grow up, and like a really fucked-up Peter Pan and Wendy, they went on and on.
So the blue van winds through GWU and Georgetown and Capitol Heights before finally dropping me off. I’m exhausted and frustrated and at my absolute wits’ end. Brian meets me at the front door of the hotel and walks me up to the room; I’m so happy to see him that I give a moment’s thought to actually taking a physical bite out of his shoulder.
Jayson and Laurie have already been there a day, and so the room is fully stocked. The hotel is next door to a liquor store and there’s a bottle of Bacardi on the dresser next to some plastic cups. I take the bottle and fill a cup to the brim with rum, then down it one gulp.
"Babe, don’t," Brian says.
"You shut up," I snap. Jayson and Laurie have awoken by now and heard my story, and so I instruct the room: "We are not setting an alarm tomorrow. Must sleep."
Everyone’s in agreement with that, and so we all go to bed. I sleep like the dead, clinging to Brian like a life raft, having vague nightmares of horrible airline seats like something out of A Clockwork Orange, and blue vans that come to life and speed away with me holding the door handle, and Bill, an army of Bill, Bill legion stepping away to answer the questions of passengers who want to know if they can bring their cats on the plane, and me, in the middle of it all, pulling out huge chunks of hair that turn to snakes in my hand.
Part 2, NYC-OKC, coming soon.
