//sacramento

The Flight Out (It will probably take you as long to read this as it took me to travel it.)

by cari | May, 2008

The Friday before last, I flew out to California for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. It went a little something like this:

Had to leave my apartment at 4 AM to make an 8:10 AM flight in Long Island, so didn’t go to sleep at all. Waited for subway for 15 minutes before panicking and going downstairs to get a car. Asked the driver if he could get me to Penn Station in half an hour or less, to which he replied, “Probably.” He got me there in 29 minutes. I paid him $27 and ran into the station with five minutes to spare.

At the Long Island Railroad ticket kiosk, found out my debit card was declined due to unavailable funds. Two minutes before the train leaves, counted all my cash on hand including the change and found I was a dollar short. Asked this young guy sitting on the ground if he could please, please give me a dollar because I didn’t quite have the full fare and my train was about to leave. He paused and then reached into his pocket and pulled out all his change and handed it to me. (I thought he was going to say no.) I ran back to the kiosk and bought my ticket then ran to the platform and boarded the train to Ronkonkoma. A minute later the train left the station.

An hour and a half later, we pulled up to the Ronkonkoma Station and I either needed to ask someone for $0.75 cents so I could take the bus or hopefully my funds had been made available and I could take a cab to the Islip Airport. After walking around for ten minutes, I finally found a Capital One bank branch with ATMS, none of which worked. Then I followed these two girls into a lotto place because they said there was an ATM in there, but it was a weird one where you swiped your card and then it printed out a receipt that you brought to the cashier and he gave you the cash. Apparently my bank funds had been released.

I took a cab to the airport with this crazy driver who had his window rolled down (it was 50 degrees outside) and was listening to Opie & Anthony on the radio. He kind of reminded me of David Johansen as the Cab Driver/Ghost of Christmas past in that movie Scrooged. He kept spitting out the window. I got to the airport 45 minutes before my flight left, so that was good. I get this paranoia about missing my flight so usually I get there way too early, but in this case I barely squeaked in.

I don’t normally get cold but it was cold when I left Brooklyn and it was cold on the train and then it was cold on the plane. I thought it was a direct flight from Islip to Sacto because those were the only two cities listed on my itinerary, but it turns out that wasn’t the case. First of all, for some reason, people flying on Southwest Airlines out of Islip have apparently never flown before. The passengers were a lot older and less urbane than the JetBlue crowd, and inexplicably there were four times as many men as there were women. An example of the general mindset was that some older woman wandered up to a flight attendant who was taking drink orders to give her a cup half full of liquid to throw away. The flight attendant told her that she couldn’t take that from her right now. No shit, lady, what the hell?

The best part was the bachelor party seated near me that was headed to Vegas. One of our flight attendants was named “Jenny” and several of these guys thought it was fucking hilarious to yell “JENNY” repeatedly FOR FIVE HOURS. They drank a lot of beer (at 9 AM) and demanded more Cheese Nips and yelled “Jenny” and made faggot jokes the entire flight. Many people, including me and the flight crew, had been awake since 4 AM or earlier, and even if we might have found this amusing under other circumstances, which we seriously fucking wouldn’t, nerves were ready to snap.

Due to weather problems in the Midwest, the captain did not turn off the seatbelt sign until 3 HOURS INTO THE FLIGHT. The flight attendant kept telling people to stay in their seats with their seat belts fastened. Of course, people who needed to relieve themselves kept getting up and running into the bathroom. And the flight attendant, who was bitchy from the get-go, announced that it was against Federal law for people to be walking around the cabin when the sign was on and they couldn’t serve drinks if people were blocking the aisles. And I’m thinking, Bitch, nobody wants drinks if they aren’t allowed to pee!

Then the weather mellowed out a little, but the captain came out of the cockpit which meant the front bathroom was now off-limits. With 60 people who are being given drinks on a five hour flight, chances are good that at any given moment someone has to pee. There are only two bathrooms on the plane, so even under ideal conditions, passengers are going to get irate. Oh, did I mention my seat didn’t recline? It didn’t because we were in front of the emergency exit. But the seats in front of us could recline, and did. I tried to sleep with my head on my jacket against the back of the seat in front of me but the dickhead kept bouncing in his seat.

Finally, thank Jeebus for small mercies, we landed in Vegas. Everyone got off the plane except for me, because I’m flying through. Then new passengers got on board and we headed to Burbank, CA. There, everyone files off the plane again (except for me) and I asked a flight attendant if I could use the lavatory while everyone is deboarding and she said yes. So then I came out and found that they had taken my bag out of the overhead and brought it to the gate inside the lovely Burbank airport because they didn’t know I was on the plane. So I had to go with the flight attendant who’d said it was okay for me to use the bathroom into the airport to get my bag. Then I asked her if I could just walk out onto the tarmac in front of these other people waiting at the gate because I no longer had a boarding pass due to me being a fly-through passenger, to which she responded, Oh yes, and then she escorted me back onto the plane.

When the other flight attendant chastised me for not waiting for the headcount, I almost lost it. I told her, Look, lady, I told that other flight attendant where I was going to be and she obviously forgot…in the span of five minutes. So then she apologized and I sat in the front row aisle seat so when we landed in Sacto I could get the fuck off of this plane upon which I’d been for the past 9 hours.

The leg from Burbank to Sacto was fairly uneventful. I sat next to this older woman who looked like her name was Gladys and she probably owned at least 20 cats and thought Celine Dion could be a little racy. She was talking to this man from L.A. who used to be a stock broker and then a realtor and some other jobs which meant he had a lot of self-important opinions about a lot of boring things. When she first got on board she had tried to talk to me about my crossword puzzle but I just looked apologetic and baffled like I didn’t speak any English.

By the time I got off that plane I was ready to murder someone. Fortunately, my mom took me shopping while we waited for my brother’s flight to land (had we known I was going to stop in Burbank, I could have just flown up with him) and she bought me some sunglasses and new running shoes. Then when we got to her house, we all had vodka martinis.

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Just A Thought

by cari | February, 2008

You know what I’d like to see more of in my neighborhood? Asian people with British accents. That would be so awesome!

In high school we had a German exchange student who was Chinese! It was so crazy to hear her accent. Talk about confounding people’s expectations. I bet it was shitty for her in Sacramento because people used to ask me if I spoke English. Imagine if they asked her and she answered “Yes” sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger. How confused would those people be?

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