“The Roberts”

It’s hard to believe, folks, but summer is almost here. This winter was a tough one, wasn’t it? For months I went to work every morning clad in a heavy woolen coat, ski cap stretched over my skull like I was performing some sort of bizarre heist. The coat had been my constant companion since late October. Then 2 weeks ago I stood at the bus stop, and a stunning realization hit me. I was warm. I removed the coat. Since then I’ve only worn a light hoodie in the mornings, and soon even that will go in the closet.

It’s not just me—people everywhere are shedding their winter clothes in favor of more modest attire. And many are shocked to discover what they see. Fat. Lots of fat. Which can only mean one thing: time to go on a diet.

The Great American Diet has been around for over 200 years, ever since George Washington looked at the portrait of himself crossing the Delaware and thought, I need to get rid of that gut. There are many diets, called by many different names. Most of them don’t work because they are either flawed to begin with, or because people don’t follow them. It’s understandable if they are flawed, but why don’t people want to follow the ones that work? I think the answer is simple. Everyone wants to lose weight and get in shape, but nobody wants to work at it. In other words, the idea of being fit and thin is appealing, but the idea of eating a Krispy Kreme is even more appealing. So people try to do both at the same time. This doesn’t work. In fact, all this gives them is a cascade of guilt. Is there a way around the guilt? Yes. It is to fool yourself. And how do you fool yourself? By making yourself believe you are following the diet, when you actually are not.

A great way to do this is to not keep any records. Yes, you have an Aunt in Boca Raton who lost 80 pounds keeping a food journal every day, but who has time to write all that stuff down.

Another good way is to make sure every restaurant order you make is followed by, “and a small diet coke.” If you tack that on to any order you make, it will reduce the guilt by at least 25%. Try it now and say it with me, “I’d like a cheeseburger, fries, onion rings, and a small diet coke.”

See? Makes you feel better already. You ordered a small diet coke. This shows you are committed to your diet.

Perhaps the most common method is to re-organize your eating schedule. Don’t eat anything for breakfast, have a salad for lunch, and then go home and devour 5,000 calories at 9 pm, preferably in the form of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Papa John’s pizza, and chocolate Hagen Daz bars. That way you are following the diet because you “don’t eat breakfast, and only eat salad for lunch.”

These are all tried and true techniques. But the following technique has never (to my knowledge) been seen in print before. I call it, “The Roberts.”

The Roberts is named after the managing partner at my old law firm. At this firm we had many birthday and other social celebrations, all served with copious quantities of junk food and desserts. Roberts performed this technique at every one of these celebrations, and yet remained undetected by 95% of the participants. As such The Roberts is the ultimate undercover technique, fooling all.

It is performed like this: The subject (in this case, Roberts) sees a forbidden object that HE MUST ABSOLUTELY NOT EAT, sitting on a table surrounded by other sweets. This object could be a slice of cake, a chocolate covered donut, or a large slice of key lime pie. It doesn’t matter, the point is he is on a diet and the object is off limits.

Phase one of The Roberts is performed psychologically. Everyone is here to have a good time, he thinks, so it would be bad manners not to celebrate. No one likes to be around the stick in the mud who is on his diet.

This leads directly to phase two, where he picks up a knife, goes over to the forbidden object, and cuts off a very narrow piece. He eats it, and then walks directly to another part of the room. Leaving the scene is key to The Roberts. It doesn’t matter what he does on the far side of the room, only that he has moved away from the dessert table. Since it’s a party he will most likely socialize for a few minutes, and eat a few healthy items such as carrot sticks.

Then he comes back. This is the second and most important key to The Roberts— the re-entry. He circles the table a few times so as not to attract attention, then reaches for the knife. This is better than approaching the table obliquely, wherein both casual observers and his conscience might think he was there on purpose. Another small slice of the forbidden object is cut off and consumed. Then he leaves again. Waits a few minutes, then re-enters. It usually takes a half dozen exits and re-entries, but within 10 minutes the object is gone. Totally consumed. Slice, by slice, by slice. In this way he eats the whole damn thing, but with none of the guilt that eating it all at once would have produced.

Can you not see the brilliance in this technique? It’s really shocking in its simplicity, in the complete web of deception it drops not only over all observers, but also (and especially) the perpetrator. With the help of The Roberts, you can eat all the sweets you want at your next holiday party, with none of the guilt. After all, you only cut off a little piece. And it was purely to be sociable. Now hurry, go stand on the other side of the room.

The Airline Saga: Shuttle Bus Wars

Right after graduation from International Air Academy in Vancouver, Washington, my parents and I drove home to Corvallis. I only had 5 days before I had to report to work in Denver, Colorado, a place I had never been before in my life. I was in a daze as I packed my belongings and prepared for another unknown step in my life. Since I did not own my own car, the plan was for my parents to drive out with me to Denver, we would look for an affordable apartment, and then I’d ride the city transit system to and from work at Stapleton airport. As plans go it didn’t sound too great, but if you have no car or money the world is not your oyster.

It took us two days to drive the 1,300 miles from Corvallis to Denver. I don’t even remember where we stayed the first night, but probably somewhere in Wyoming. I have a vague recollection of driving the 2nd day along I-80 in Southern Wyoming, surely one of the most godforsaken roads in the entire universe. I-80 runs nearly the entire length of Southern Wyoming, and there is literally nothing out there. No trees, no people, no nothing but flat endless prairie. You can see for 15 or 20 miles in either direction because nothing is impeding your sight. Southern Wyoming makes the Dalles look like the garden of Eden. Fall asleep at the wheel in Southern Wyoming? Not to worry; you won’t hit anything. You’ll drive off the road for a while, and then sooner or later you’ll probably rejoin it. Veterans know the preferred way to drive through Southern Wyoming is at night— that way you don’t have to look at anything. Periodically there are large blank sign-like structures, square objects that appear to be left by aliens. “What is that?” we wondered as we saw the first one. Our labrador Belle was in the back, crammed between the suitcases, and whined softly as we passed. Later we would find out they were designed to block the snow, but at the time they merely looked ominous.

Rest areas were another Southern Wyoming treat. Not content to be right next to the road, their creators had for some reason stuck them 3 or 400 yards off the beaten path. When you finally got there all you saw was a stone structure, like a bomb shelter. No one was usually around, except for maybe an old trucker inside, standing frozen in front of a urinal and muttering at his pants.

Did I mention the wind? That was the worst part. It was evil cousin to the wind in Glacier National Park. But this Southern Wyoming wind was worse. It never, ever stopped. Just moaned and whined interminably, crushing your soul. And why should it ever let up? There was nothing out there to stop it. No, the best way to cross Wyoming on I-80 is at night, with your cruise control set to 80, your stereo blaring, and your windows shut tight. If you are a male, carrying a pee bottle is advisable. The more of those rest areas you avoid, the better.

At least we reached Colorado, and began seeing signs for Denver. The feeling of doom that had been growing over the past 2 days settled over me. We reached the outskirts of the northwest suburbs, reading signs to strange places called Northglenn and Thornton. My God, where were the trees? What was WRONG with these people?

We stopped at a Super 8 motel, and checked in. That night we walked across the parking lot and ate at a Perkins. You may never have eaten at a Perkins. In that case, I congratulate you. Although I have never eaten at a Jack in the Box nor a Long John Silver’s, and have no intention of ever doing so, either. Some restaurants you just want to avoid. However there was no avoiding this Perkins. In case you have not eaten at one, it is best described as a glorified Denny’s. Slightly higher class— only about 5% of the patrons are homeless, in comparison to a good solid 10-15% at Denny’s. Of course this depends on location, and is considerably lower in the suburbs. Perkins is one rung up the culinary ladder from Denny’s, about on par with its evil twin sister, Sherry’s. Or is it Shari’s? Mercifully, I do not remember. If the short order cook does not have a cigarette in his mouth, you are probably in a Perkins. Look for those key indicators, I always say.

The next morning we sat in the motel room and looked through the yellow pages of the local phone book for apartments. This was in 1992, an ancient time when cell phones and the internet did not exist outside of Michael Douglas movies, and NORAD. We spent at least an hour calling around to various apartment complexes, and finally settled on one in a southern suburb named Aurora, at a place called Fairways apartment. Note to self— anytime a business has the word “fair” in its title, be wary. They are probably trying to compensate for something. The fact that the complex name went beyond “Fair” and took it up a notch to “Fairways,” was an even bigger warning sign.

We drove over to Fairways apartments, and met the staff. They were all smiles in the complex clubhouse, and had me fill out the copious apartment application. “I’m sure you’ll get in,” they said, “but it takes 3 or 4 days to process your application. We’ll contact you when you are accepted and can move in.”

Beautiful. My parents had to drive back to Oregon the next morning so my Dad could get back to his job, so I would have to wait the 3 or 4 days by myself until I could get in. Then somehow I’d have to get a ride from someone, in order to move my meager belongings over to my new home. My parents and I went to a furniture store and we bought a futon, some pots and pans, and a few other essentials. I think we were able to store them at the complex while the paperwork was going through, but to be honest I don’t remember. What I do remember was my parents dropping me off at a nearby motel 6, where I would wait out the application process before I could move into Fairways.

“Well, goodbye,” my Dad said. “Make us proud and don’t forget to call if you need anything.” My Mom started to cry. I tried not to cry and succeeded. They walked away and I shut the door.

I don’t know if you have ever had a transitional point in your life where you’ve been all alone, with no car, in a strange city where you don’t know anyone. But if you have been, let me just say that a motel 6 is not a place that gives you an emotional boost. The padlock on the phone, the monster chain on the TV, the 3 channels of reception and the 12 of snow— it is all pure gold. Of course you could soothe the stress by going in the bathroom and taking a nice hot bath, except there is no bathtub. What you get is a stand up shower, with the same amount of water pressure they use to quell riots in 3rd world countries. I stayed there for 3 days, and the maids never changed the sheets once. Every morning I would see them walking past and say, “Can you change the sheets today, please?” And they’d smile and nod and say, “Yes! Yes! Si! Si!” and then it would never happen. Probably the lowpoint was the 2nd night, when I was lying on the bed and watching Charlston Heston in “Planet of the Apes.” There are worst definitions of depression than watching Planet of the Apes in a motel 6, but that is a pretty good one.

The one godsend was there was a La Quinta next door, and my fellow Air Academy grads and Mesa Airlines hirees Mike, Zack, and Annemarie were checked into it. I would go next door and sit in their hotel rooms, just to be in a motel that did not treat its patrons like convicts. Zack and Mike shared a room, and it was covered with empty beer cans. At night Mike and I would go on these long, stumbling walks out near the interstate, wondering how we had gotten here, and trying to grasp the significance of it all.

Before I got to move into Fairways, I had to go to work. My shift schedule at the airport was from 6:30 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon. I met Annemarie for breakfast at 5 AM, at the Denny’s that was next door. And yes, the short order cook was smoking a cigarette.

At this point my life had gone beyond being merely surreal, and had morphed into an alien life form. 4 months ago I had been living in a dorm room in Eugene and waking up at 9 AM. I had zero contact with girls due to my shyness, and had never even gone out on a real date. Now suddenly I was eating breakfast with a girl, it was 5 in the morning, and I was in Denver, Colorado. If the Easter bunny had walked up to the table I probably would not have batted an eye, and just told him to pull up a chair. I might have even offered him some of my French toast.

“So this is your first day, huh?” smirked Annemarie, as she poured maple syrup over her pancakes. Her orientation wasn’t starting until tomorrow.

“Yep,” I said morosely. “And it is pitch black outside. I don’t even know how to get to the airport. This is insane.”

“Do you even know how to take the bus there?” she said.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m calling a cab.”

After we ate I dialed the Denver yellow cab line, which was (I believe) 777-7777. It is strange how little details like that stick in your mind. After shivering out on the curb for 10 or 15 minutes, a ghostly vehicle emerged from the darkness, and screeched to a stop. A Jamaican man smiled at me as I got in. All I could see was the gleam of his white teeth.

“Where you goin’, mon?” he said.

“The airport,” I said.

“The airport?” he shook his head. “At this hour? You must be crazy, mon.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

I don’t remember what happened that day, or at least not much of it. I think we had to have our pictures taken for our airport I.D.’s, and then were shown around the various concourses. We stuck close together, like a flock of sheep scared of predators. It was also then that we learned that for a while we would not be boarding flights, checking people in—you know, the stuff we were actually TRAINED for; we would instead be driving shuttle buses.

The Denver airport in 2011 is state of the art, and is located well East of Denver, in a vast network of buildings called Denver International Airport, or D.I.A. for short. But that didn’t open until 1995. Back in the fall of 1992, everyone flew out of Stapleton International Airport, which was right in the center of the city, kind of run down, and feeling its age.

Mesa Airlines was a commuter airline. That meant we only flew small, propeller driven aircraft— 19 seater Beechcraft airplanes, and 30-seater Brasilia airplanes. Occasionally we would operate Dash-8s, which were ugly, noisome creatures that carried 50. But for the most part it was all 19 and 30 seaters. “Puddle jumpers” galore. We serviced the Western Slope, which translated to all the little towns along the Rockies, like Telluride, Grand Junction, Durango, etc. Because we weren’t “a real airline,” or at least did not fly any real airplanes like 737s or larger, the powers that be at Stapleton stuck us out in a satellite building, meaning we were separated from the other concourses, and from the main part of the airport. There was no way to walk to it from the rest of Stapleton, which is where we came in. We would pick up passengers from the main airport or the satellite terminal, and drive them to and fro across the tarmac, a distance of about 5 or 600 yards. This was our whole job. Some of us worked as drivers, some as “marshallers,” which helped back up the bus each time and send it on its way. And some to announce over a P.A. when the shuttle bus was boarding, when the next one would arrive (about every 5 minutes), and when it was full. Generally we had 2 buses going at all times, 1 marshaller, and at least 2 people on either end. Plus a person or two that was usually wandering aimlessly about the airport, doing nothing, dozing in empty boarding areas or buses, illegally eating danishes from the flight attendant’s commissary, and generally slacking off.

As newbies, it was our job to work the shuttle bus. The rest of our fellow Mesa employees worked “the gate,” or “the walkway,” and actually checked people in, boarded the flights, sent them on their way, etc. Not only were most of the other employees locals (Denver born and bred), but most of them had just walked in off the street and been given the job. They had not gone to 12 weeks of airline school as we had, not moved across the country, and not paid thousands of dollars for an education on the finer points of airline customer service. No, all of that was unnecessary. In addition, we were all being paid minimum wage, which at the time was only 5.25 an hour. But, the manager told me with a grin, since I was a college graduate, I would get a higher rate of pay! I would get 5.50 an hour, instead. Thanks.

The next day I got a call from Fairways apartments, and moved into a tiny studio with some help from Mike, my friend from the Air Academy, and fellow shuttle bus refugee. My futon set down with a whump right in the middle of the studio, and sucked up about half the space instantly. I had no TV but after a while did not miss it. I spent my evenings reading magazines or books, and Zack and Mike lived close by so we would often visit each other, largely bemoaning how alien it felt in Colorado, and wishing we could go back to the Northwest. I remember Zack saying, “The Northwest is so normal. Everyplace else is just so WEIRD.”

I learned to walk a half mile to Havana street, and take the 105 bus to Stapleton. This was shortly after 5AM, and riding the bus was like riding a zombie ship through outer space. Everyone was passed out or otherwise asleep, and the bus would lurch to a stop every 300 yards or so, to pick up another poor bastard who had to go to work. It took about 40 minutes to get to the airport, as I recall.

Upon arriving at work we’d have our “morning briefing” from Dan, a short little man of 5 foot 2 or so, who while being a great guy, believed in doing everything by the book. He had aspirations of being a station manager one day, and obsessively had us check the motor oil of every shuttle bus, each and every morning. When it is pitch dark and 28 degrees outside with a howling wind, this can get rather annoying after a while. I remember one day he told Steve, a 47 year old academy graduate, to go outside and check the oil. “It’s good,” Steve said. “How can you tell?” demanded Dan. “I have x-ray vision,” Steve said drily. Older people have a lower tolerance for bullshit.

My specialty was either driving, or marshaling. Of course, this is because both tasks did not require me to talk to anyone. If I was in a position where I had to talk to people, I did the minimum possible, making announcements while I hid behind a wall with the microphone cord stretched out to its full length, pretending to stare off into space so as not to talk to the customers waiting in line for the shuttle to arrive, etc. Folks, avoidance is not a good strategy in life. It is easier to fool yourself about that when you are 23. While other people chafed on the bus and wanted to know when we were going to be promoted to work on the gate and deal more directly with the public, I never complained. I was happy right were I was. I didn’t WANT to get promoted. That would mean talking to people.

I worked on the shuttle bus for 7 months. Mostly driving, where I perfected a one handed, slaloming technique where I’d zoom within inches of parked baggage tugs and support beams, on occasions making the more nervous customers scream in terror from the back, before fishtailing to a stop before one of the terminal doorways. We had to make an announcement when we got there, so I would shout out, “This is the final stop for all flights!” in a loud voice, which inevitably led most of the people to whisper, “what did he say?” When people got on or off the bus I would not say hello or goodbye, or smile; I would just stare straight ahead through the windshield, and act like they did not exist. Looking back on it I cannot believe I acted on that. If I were to work that job today I would say hello and goodbye and try to smile at each person who got on our off my bus. But back then I was incredibly shy and insecure so I would just cover it up by acting indifferent and ignoring everyone. Or, at least pretending to ignore everyone.

One of the main places we flew to was Aspen. Which, in the early to mid nineties, was the place for the Hollywood Elite to go. Consequently we saw a lot of famous people. Madonna, Duran Duran, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, Axl Rose, Paul Hogan (the Crocodile Dundee guy), Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, Bill Walsh (the 49ers coach), Michael Douglas (the nicest celebrity by far), Don Henley from the Eagles, random actors from Beverly Hills 90210, etc. One guy that I drove a lot in the shuttle bus, was David Brenner, the comedian from the 70’s. He would never say a word to me, just sit in the front seat with his sunglasses on, and stare straight ahead like he didn’t even acknowledge my existence. I thought he was a real jerk. Looking back on it, he does remind me very much of someone…..ME. Funny how I could not see that, at the time. But the one person who was acting exactly like I was toward people, I thought was a colossal jerk. There was a lesson in there.

Another thing I picked up from seeing celebrities, is they really weren’t any better than the rest of us. They just looked like ordinary people, and did not act any better or any worse. My friend Paul had Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn ask him if he could call ahead to the main airport and hold a flight for them, and they were kind of rude about it. He said he would call ahead, and told them to get on the shuttle. He never did call ahead and wouldn’t have known how to anyway, but he was tired of dealing with them and just wanted them to go away. Things happen.

Perhaps the strangest celebrity experience was with Michael Douglas. One night in 1994, he showed up to our boarding area, getting ready to fly to Aspen. He was there by himself and some friends. A very nice man, he smiled at us as he checked in, and made small talk. Later that evening I had to walk past his group, and they were all standing in a circle and talking. If you have watched any of his movies, he has a deep, distinctive voice. It was just SO WEIRD to hear that voice as you walked by, it creeped me out. Because I was used to hearing that voice in darkened movie theaters. And now I was hearing it just right next to me, as I walked past a group of people. Very strange. But cool.

We got bored on the shuttle, and started to “act out.” My friend Zack was the worst. He was eventually fired because of his bad attitude. He also did not have a driver’s license, something the crack staff at Stapleton neglected to check. So the entire 5 or 6 months he drove, he was illegal (he was 18 and just had a learner’s permit). During the winter the snow and ice came, and he developed this technique where he would get on the bus, put it in neutral, and rev the engine up to its maximum, then he would put his foot on the brake, set the parking brake, and then, right at the height of the RPMs, he would simultaneously drop it from neutral into drive, and disengage the parking brake, and mash the accelerator down.

The effect was nothing short of cataclysmic. If you’ve never seen a 40 seater shuttle bus peel out with all 4 wheels smoking, ice and snow kicking up in a huge wake as it fishtailed wildly, let me assure you it is hilarious.

Another fellow driver was Joe, a 23 year old like me and a recent graduate of West Virginia. In those days we all carried walkie talkies, to communicate to the other terminal when we were sending a bus their way, when a bus had arrived, etc. We waited until Joe had a full bus, and while he was in the bathroom we hung a walkie talkie about 4 feet behind his driver’s seat, where he couldn’t teach it, and turned the volume on high. We waited until he had driven off with a full load of 40 or so passengers, and then broadcast on the walkie talkie, “Attention passengers! You are being driven by a homicidal maniac! Please look to leap from the bus at the soonest opportunity! This man is unstable!” Joe told us later he kept trying to reach back and turn it off and drive at the same time, but it wasn’t working.

Mesa airlines taught me how to lie. Not only that, it taught me that lying was better than telling the truth. One day I made a careless turn, and drove the left fender into a metal pole. When I got back to the other side, the bus had a nasty chip on the paint. I told the manager, Jason, that I had made a mistake and it was my fault the accident happened. Result: 2 day suspension without pay.

Next time I wrecked the bus, I told him that I pressed down on the brakes, but they hadn’t responded. That is why the accident had happened. Result: no suspension, even a nod of sympathy. “These buses are pieces of shit,” he said. “I know they can be hell to drive. We’ll have maintenance overhaul it again.”

Had the brakes failed? Of course not. But I knew if I had told the truth and admitted it was my fault, I would have gotten a 2nd suspension, or been fired. So I lied, and was rewarded with no punishment, and even sympathy. That isn’t right, but it was what happened.

One night we were all tired, and my coworker Melissa and I were both driving buses. One of us tried to back up, the person marshaling made a bad decision, and we crashed into each other. Both buses were full of passengers, even standing up in the aisle of my bus. Everyone screamed and many people fell. I slammed my head off the front of the windshield and saw stars. There was a nasty gouge on the side of both of our buses. Our supervisor that night, Dwayne, a 25 year old guy from the Deep South, confronted us both at the end of the shift.

“What happened?” he demanded.

We both were almost shaking, knowing we would be fired. “We hit each other,” we said. “We don’t know what happened.”

“Well…” said Dwayne looking over both shoulders. “Just don’t say nothing to nobody. Let’s act like this never happened.”

So we never reported the accident, and no one ever asked where the nasty gouge came from. The buses were so old and beat up, it wasn’t like it stood out.

As in all jobs, gross miscarriages of justice began to occur, earmarked by blatant favoritism. 18 year old Mike, due to force of character and sheer bravado, became our daytime supervisor. His best friend at the airport was me, so many evenings he and I would take the spare shuttle bus out for lunch, drive it over to the main airport, and spend 90 minutes eating and hanging out. Mind you, we were only supposed to get a 30 minute lunch. Meanwhile, this guy Anthony was someone Mike hated. Due to the fact they both liked the same girl. So every time it was snowing, he would stick Anthony out on the tarmac for 8 hours, and shivering in the snow. It was quite mean, but we were all very immature. I still remember Anthony, a Cambodian guy with a thick accent, coming up to me one night and shouting in frustration about Mike, “That son of bitch stick my ass out to marshal all goddamn day!”

Dan, the anal retentive guy who made us check the oil every morning, eventually achieved his dream of becoming a station manager. I believe he took over a remote outpost in Kansas, like Dodge City or Garden City, where they got only about a half dozen flights a day. I am sure his wife was thrilled to live in the middle of nowhere, but in her defense she was proud of him. The last I heard he was in hot water for trying to de-ice a plane one winter, and accidentally dousing the entire airplane with jet fuel, which he mistook for de-icing fluid. Oops.

Soon it was Christmas, and one night Mike and I drove his pickup out to King Soopers. After deliberately running into 3 or 4 empty shopping carts (which was his custom), we parked and approached the deserted store. There were Christmas trees for sale piled up outside the doors, and we grabbed about 10 of them and threw them into his truck and peeled off. Luckily, no one caught us. We had done the same 2 months earlier, with Halloween pumpkins. We figured that all the stuff they put outside the store, they weren’t too concerned with people stealing anyway. Ah, the tortured rationalizations of youthful criminal minds. When you are making 5.50 an hour, they even begin to sound halfway plausible, too.

We handed out the Christmas trees to our friends, like evil Santa clauses. Then I got home with my tree, and brought it in through the sliding glass door of my patio. I set it up in the middle of my rug, and admired it. Half an hour later, I noticed all these needles were covering my rug. I picked it up and threw it out into the snow. That was the last Christmas tree I have ever “owned.”

One of my fellow air academy graduates named Robin, an 18 year old from Ashland, Oregon, with a great smile and sense of humor, got pregnant and returned to Ashland. Her son must be out of high school by now, which is hard for me to believe. He is older than she was when I last saw her. I remember that day, I was driving the shuttle bus and she was standing next to me, holding onto a pole and telling me she was moving back to Oregon. “I’ll miss you guys,” she said wistfully. “I wish I could stay.” I smiled at her and laughed, to cover up the fact that I would miss her even more. “What,” I said, sweeping my arm mocking at the tarmac as I drove, “and miss all this?” We both laughed.

Slowly the 7 air academy graduates I had come with, began to bite the dust. Brandi got pregnant like Robin did, but then had a miscarriage. She and Marie had a grungy apartment in Aurora, that was infested with ants and cockroaches. Brandi’s Mom came out, and drove her back to Eugene after 6 months. Marie moved back to Seattle. I saw her once about a year later, removing bags from my plane at the Sea-Tac airport. I waved at her through the plane window and she looked at me startled, then broke into a big grin. I miss all those people, and wonder what happened to them.

Mike got tired of abusing Anthony and crashing shuttle buses, and moved back to Phoenix, to work at Sky Harbor airport and live with his parents. I missed him a lot. He would always give me a ride to work at 5AM if I had missed the bus, with no complaints at all. He would take me to the grocery store when I didn’t have a car, and that winter when it snowed, he would do 360s in the parking lot in his pickup truck, laughing insanely while the truck spun around and around, and I clenched my eyes shut and grabbed tight to my groceries and yelled at him to stop.

Zack got homesick too. He was fired from Mesa after a couple months, and hung around another 3 or 4 months, working at Popeye’s chicken, and coming over to hang out with me most nights. We would argue about basketball teams (he was a Lakers fan and I a Blazers), and talk about the good old days back in Oregon. He missed his girlfriend terribly, and heard that she had started to go out with another guy. He went out to visit her once in Tucson, where she had gotten her job, but it didn’t work out. He fell into depression and would buy big 40 ounce bottles of Old English 800 malt liquor, and drink them at my studio and pass out on the floor. I felt really sorry for him. He needed to go home.

In the last few months they turned his heat off. The power bills were always addressed to the previous resident, and he told me that since it did not have his name on the bill, he did not have to pay them. So he refused. They turned off his heat, and pride would not let him admit his error and pay them to turn it back on. So he had icicles climbing up his walls. He would steal firewood from in front of King Soopers at 2 AM, and burn it in his fireplace to stay warm. In the middle of winter I finally took pity on him and just had him sleep on the floor of my studio.

Toward the end he hatched his master plan, and told me about it. He and I would steal one of the shuttle buses late at night, paint it a different color, and drive it back to Oregon. It was a completely hair brained plan, but at the time sounded halfway plausible. I am glad I said no. I am convinced if I had said okay, he would have done it.

I was good friends with this girl on the bus named Amy, who like Zack and Mike was 18 years old. She was from Carbondale, CO, and after work she and I would drive around town in her car, listen to music, and talk. We kind of liked each other but never really were going out, we were just kind of in that in between stage that you can sometimes be in when you are both really young and don’t know much about the world. We would eat at Denny’s late at night, and talked and laughed a lot. Like my other friends, she wasn’t very happy at that point in her life, and felt kind of lost. Eventually she moved to Kansas, to try to go to college at Kansas State, and we lost touch for a number of years. I really missed her.

Annemarie moved away, too. She transferred to work for Mesa at the Phoenix Airport. Last I heard, she was still there, 19 years later!

And why, you may ask, didn’t I follow suit and leave too? Was I any less lost, alienated, and lonely? Did I feel anymore out of place and disconnected? No. The reason I did not move, I think, is simply because I was 23 whereas they were 18, 19, and 20. They had never been to college, I had. I wanted to leave; I was very homesick and lonely. But when I thought about going back, I would think, “go back to what?” I had already been to college. I knew if I went back I would just have to take some lonely little apartment somewhere back in Corvallis or Eugene, and feel lost and alienated working there. It would be the exact same thing. That was why I stayed. No other reason.

So by spring of 1993, after only being in Denver 6 months, most of our original 7 from International Air Academy were gone. I felt very sad and isolated. I missed Rochit, the girl back at the academy who was my friend and who I thought I was in love with. She had stopped writing after I had “poured out my soul” in a letter telling her how much I loved her, and we no longer talked. My friends Mike, Zack, Annemarie, and Amy were gone. And I kind of thought I was in love with Amy, too, and now she was gone. This dating thing was turning out to be a drag. My friend Steve, the 47 year old guy who told Dan he had X-ray vision, also was leaving. I helped him load his furniture into a U-haul, as he drove off to Cedar Rapids to get a new job. I remember one day he asked me to drive to Georgetown with him, to see the big horn sheep. I said no. I really wish I hadn’t done that. He was a really great person and one of the most principled people I have ever met.

Just when I was convinced my life couldn’t get any worse or any more lonely, I got the word— I was leaving the shuttle bus, and had been promoted to the gate.

The Airline Saga: Vancouver (Part 2 of 2)

Once I decided to stick with the program, my life started to improve. I had always been painfully shy around girls, and my airline class was about 90% female. Most guys would have been ecstatic about this, but due to my shyness I just kept to myself. It looked like it was going to be a long 12 weeks, I remember thinking glumly. It was either wash dishes in a restaurant in Eugene for the next however many years, going home at night to a tiny studio near 13th Street, or stick this out for another few months. And once I graduated, I could be sent God knows where about the country! I felt utterly lost and hopeless.

Folks, this is what low self esteem does to you. You take a young man who is in excellent physical health, put him in a school that is 90% young women, promise him the adventure of living in a new part of America, with free flights anywhere he can go once he is there, and what does he do? Complain. And not just complain a little bit, complain deeply. When you have low self esteem / depression, everything seems extremely limited and negative. I should have been shouting hallelujah, but instead I moped around class and afterward went back to the apartment and shut myself in my room with a book. I could hear everyone laughing and having fun outside, but I was too shy to go out and join them. Deep down I wanted to, but when your self esteem sucks you just think you will never fit in. So you don’t risk that pain.

I kind of did this the summer I was in Glacier National Park, too. After their shifts everyone would be at the bar or the restaurant, and I’d be back in my dorm room with a magazine from the gift shop, listening to Van Halen’s “OU812.” My Singaporean friend Tou Yuen would call this being, “Anti-social!” Tou Yuen, you are dead on, my friend.

I gloomily trudged through life this way for about another week. I remember we had to take a self-esteem test in class. I scored 6 points. Then I looked at the answer key, and it said anything under 8 points is potentially suicidal. Great! That’s just what people with low self-esteem need, a test to tell them they should be suicidal. Idiots! It was probably designed by the same people that put those signs by the highway that read, “Illiterate?” and then give a 1-800 number.

The only time I felt halfway good was when I went on my run after class, no doubt because of all the endorphins I was slamming into my brain as I sweated through the local Vancouver neighborhoods. I also found this gym called “Excel Fitness,” which was about a 25 minute walk from the dorm. I would go there and lift weights about 3x a week, and that was nice. One day I saw one of the cutest girls in my class lifting weights there. To my shock, she said hi, came over, and offered to spot me as I did some bench press reps. This amazed me, but then I noticed she was lifting almost as much as I was, which kind of put the damper on that emotion. A positive person would have thought, “Wow, she came over and said hi to me, she must think I am pretty cool.” But a person with a negative self-image thinks, “She just felt sorry for me struggling under this pitiful weight,” etc.

One thing I enjoyed doing was shooting baskets. When I was at the University of Oregon my friends and I used to spend a lot of time playing basketball after class, and I missed it. I had my basketball with me (much like the character in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy carries his towel everywhere), and found a court in a nearby park. I soon found out that Vancouver’s disaffected and alienated youth played a lot of 4 on 4 and 5 on 5 there, and joined in a few times. One of the great things about pickup basketball is that you are accepted everywhere when you join a game; you interact with people you never would have otherwise, if not for the great game.

Still, in spite of these things, I was like a ghost in class and at the apartments. I didn’t talk to anyone, except maybe to ask Mike where he was going that night (No way would I be going out, also), and to listen to Greg ramble on about Ogden some more. I remember I got really depressed that Mike casually let it slip that one of our female classmates asked him if I was all right. Why did she say that? I asked. Because she said you looked suicidal, he said. And then laughed and walked out of the apartment. Yeah, that really cheered me up.

I decided that I would just do what I did the last year of high school— put my head down, not talk to other people, and get through the damn thing so I could move on with my life, whatever that turned out to be. It was the midst of this that the most amazing thing happened.

A girl in my class asked me if I wanted to study with her. Now, you may say, what is so amazing about that. And I agree, nothing. For 99% of the people on the planet. But for ME at that time in my life, it was nothing short of astonishing. You have to remember that at that time in 1992, I had never really had a female friend. All of my friends had been guys, because I was so damn shy around women I’d get paralyzed, almost. None of them had ever shown me the slightest interest, even as a friend. And I had stopped believing it would ever happen. I never considered that maybe because I walked around with my head down and never smiled or talked to them, PERHAPS I WAS SENDING OUT BAD VIBES. You don’t think about stuff like that when you have low self-esteem. You don’t realize that your internal state and thoughts create a lot of your reality. To a person with a low self image, everything is external.

The girl’s name was Rochit (Pronounced “Roquette”), and she was 18. Five years younger than me, and just graduated that spring from a high school in Seattle. She was Filipino-American, and I thought she was pretty darn cute. She told me she would come over to my apartment after class, and we’d study.

“She won’t show up,” I thought. “She’ll come to her senses.” But she did show up. We sat down with our books at the kitchen table, and in the best tradition of people everywhere that study together, got nothing much done. We talked for a couple of hours. All right, she did most of the talking and I listened, but still. Greg came in and shot us a second glance, surprised. Why isn’t Tim hiding in his room? he probably thought. He is down here talking to a real live woman, good grief. You could tell he was kind of shaken.

As I write this almost 19 years later, it seems ridiculous that it meant so much to me. Now if something like that happened, it would seem perfectly normal and no big deal. But you have to understand where I was at in my life.

This kept happening for the next couple of weeks. Every day I’d think, okay she is going to stop showing up now. Today is the day. And then she’d show up again and we’d study. My self-esteem was so bad then that I actually wondered why she was doing this. Did she lose a bet? Is someone paying her? I thought. I couldn’t fathom that she’d actually enjoy doing this.

Women usually have friends, and Rochit was no exception. After about the 2nd week, she brought over her two best friends in the school: Annemarie and Annadine. Annemarie was 20 and from Phoenix, and Annadine was also 18 like Rochit, and from Albuquerque. They were both quite a bit louder than Rochit. To my shock they both seemed to like me, too. Pretty soon every night after class, all 3 of them would come over and we’d watch TV and laugh while we studied.

Annemarie had a car (I remember it was a dark sedan that had a sign in the back that said, “No Fear”), and sometimes the 4 of us would get in her car and cruise around Vancouver with the stereo blaring. Unfortunately it was stuff like Boyz 2 Men or Keith Sweat (“chick music”) you might call it, but still I was just happy to have some friends. It kind of boggled my mind that they were all 3 girls, too.

We would often go to Denny’s to “study” because they were always open, and we’d pile into one of those booths, order food, put our textbooks and notepads out on the table, and then pretty much ignore them the rest of the evening. Annadine in particular was pretty loud, and we almost got thrown out of a couple of restaurants. She liked telling dirty jokes in a very loud voice, and sometimes one of the other diners would complain. I think they did it in part just to try and embarrass me (which wasn’t hard).

In a matter of 2 weeks I had gone from hating this school and hoping this time would end as quickly as possible, to being the happiest I’d ever been in my life, and hoping it would never end. My self image didn’t really know what to do with itself; foreign data was bombarding the mother ship so hard all systems were shutting down. Here I was a guy that barely talked to a single girl all through high school and college, and now my 3 best friends were all women, and we were inseparable. It was just downright bizarre.

One night it was just Rochit and I hanging out, and she began to cry. Her boyfriend in Seattle had just broken up with her. She was beyond devastated. When you are any age and someone dumps you, it feels like sledgehammer to the chest, but when you are only 18 it has to feel especially terrible. For the rest of the time we were in Vancouver I tried to comfort her, as did Annadine and Annemarie. But she was always depressed and struggling.

Inevitably, I suppose, I fell in love with her. Or at least I thought I did. When I say inevitably, it’s because if you look at my life up until that point, there was almost no avoiding it. No woman had ever given me the time of day, literally, and she was the first one who ever seemed to care and want to hang out with me and be my friend. And, she was pretty. I really had no chance.

Of course, she did not feel the same way. She was still very depressed over her ex, and would be for a long time afterward. You can’t move on to someone else before your heart heals. But I was too naïve to realize this, at the time. Luckily, my shyness saved me. I didn’t tell her how I felt, but hid it. I was afraid of ruining what we had. But as the weeks went on and graduation got closer and closer, I started to despair. I didn’t know what was going to happen. We would all get jobs that would take us away from each other, and that would be that. And I was in love with her.

Then the worst thing (for me) happened: Rochit flunked out. She had been so depressed about her ex, she had stopped studying. One day they pulled her into the admin office, and gave her the bad news. And we were only a few weeks from graduation. She was so depressed about life, she didn’t care. She was going to miss Annadine and Annemarie and myself a lot, but beyond that she was ready to get out of there. She just wanted to go home to Seattle. So she left.

I was distraught. And I still hadn’t told her how I felt. But even I was smart enough to realize that she was mourning her ex, not looking for somebody new. I just missed my friend.

Interview week arrived—- for every class at International Air Academy, there was a one week period where representatives for various airlines would come in and interview prospective candidates. I was pretty down about Rochit, and didn’t really care about the future. The gloominess was back. I was about to be cast out to some foreign place, some distant city where I knew no one. I had known this couldn’t last.

American Airlines, United Express, Delta— they all came around the school. After Mrs. Marks did one last check with Mike, Greg and I to make sure that WE WERE STILL WEARING SOCKS, we all lined up for an interview with a representative for a little commuter airline called Mesa. I had never heard of it. It was flew prop-driven 19 and 30 seaters all along the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains, and were based out of New Mexico. But anyone they hired would work in Denver, at Stapleton airport.

I dutifully trudged in for my interview. The woman was nice, and we started the interview. Normally when I am nervous I stutter, and I can’t talk hardly at all. But for some reason this interview just slowed. I didn’t block or stutter once, just sailed through all of my answers with a smile. When I walked out, I knew I had gotten it. Maybe I just didn’t care very much because I was so down about Rochit leaving. Maybe my self imaged was still so gob-smacked it didn’t have time to fall back into familiar patterns. But for whatever reason, I talked like Bill Clinton in there. For five minutes, I was Bubba.

7 of us from our class were hired by Mesa. For the last 2 weeks of school, we would go into our own separate class, and learn Mesa procedures. Then we would graduate on September 15th, and have to report to work in Denver on about September 18th. We all planned to drive out with our friends our family members. Driving to Denver took 2 days from Vancouver (1,300 miles), so we would have to leave in a hurry.

The class, like most of the Air Academy, was pretty mindless and easy. Everyone else was ecstatic about moving to and living in Denver; when they told us 6 of us burst into applause and started hugging each other. One person did not applaud and sat there with a gloomy frown on his face. I don’t have to tell you who that person was. Yours truly.

(And just to show life has a sick sense of humor, which of the 7 ended up staying in Denver the longest? That’s right, yours truly).

Graduation day finally arrived, and we walked up one by one and got our diplomas. Rochit had driven down from Seattle from the ceremony, and gave me a big hug. I felt both wonderful and terrible about this. Wonderful to see her again, terrible to know I would be moving 1,300 miles away starting that morning.

I said goodbye to Mrs. Marks, to our Mesa airlines class teacher (who cried even though she’d only known us 2 weeks), and to Annadine, who was moving back to Albuquerque, with no airline job secured. Annemarie, at least, was going to Denver with me. So was Mike, my roommate. And one of my best friends at the school, Zack. So that was some comfort. I remember thinking as I walked out of the school for the last time, a lot of momentous things in my life had occurred on September 15th. On 9/15/84, I rode my bicycle in the century I had trained so hard for. On 9/15/88, I left Glacier Park after working there all summer. And now on 9/15/92, I was leaving everything I’d ever known, the Pacific Northwest, and moving to this strange city called Denver. Every 4 years something big seems to happen on that date, I thought dejectedly, as I followed my parents to their car to drive home to Corvallis and pack.

The Airline Saga, Part 2: Vancouver (part 1 of 2)

I still remember the exact day I was going to leave behind everything I’d known, and start airline school in Vancouver, Washington. It was June 29, 1992. I had been so nervous to leave the University of Oregon, and head out into “the real world,” that I subconsciously didn’t take enough credits my fourth year, so I’d be forced to take 5 years to graduate. As you may remember in my previous blog entry, this didn’t seem to help much. I got sick of being in college, but was terrified to leave. College and I were in a dysfunctional relationship.

I had no car, so on June 29th my parents helped me load my possessions into their car, and we made the 2 hour drive north on I-5. I still remember sitting in the back seat, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into, feeling a gathering sense of doom as the familiar landmarks slipped by and into the rear-view mirror.

School was not to start until Monday morning, but I had to get to student housing on Sunday afternoon to get settled in. “Student housing” consisted of 2 apartment complexes, each about 2 miles from the school, which was an unassuming single level white building off Mill Plain boulevard, with “International Air Academy” written on it in huge blue letters. Half the students were assigned to an apartment complex called Robinwood, and the other half, including myself, to a 2 level off-white complex called Greenwood. It was on a dead-end street, surrounded by lower income housing and with grassy strip of grass in the middle.

When I got out of the car I checked into the office, signed a few papers, and was given my room assignment. Each unit consisted of an upstairs and downstairs, with 2 bedrooms upstairs with 2 beds in each. In my unit, 4 guys shared the apartment. The first guy I met was named Mike Kunesh, an 18 year old just out of high school, from Glendale, Arizona. Mike had a flat top haircut and thick black rimmed glasses— he was an absolute dead ringer for Drew Carey. His personality was much the same. Kind of hyper, but give him a break, he was 18. Next I met Greg, a 28 year old from Ogden, Utah, who had a hearing aid and was just as friendly as Mike. As long as I knew Greg it was always nonstop, “Ogden, Ogden, Ogden!” as if it was some Shangri-La. “Let’s go to Ogden over the long weekend, I can make it in 18 hours,” that sort of thing. He drove a late 80’s dark blue sedan which inexplicably had police lights mounted on the back seat. Greg was neither in law enforcement, nor a Mormon. Let’s just say I never did figure out what was up with Greg. But like Mike, he seemed pretty cool.

Like myself, Greg and Mike were starting the first day of school the next morning. By contrast, my roommate Jason, a 26-year old surfer dude, was already 4 weeks in. Back in 1992, the length of International Air Academy was 12 weeks. After that, the fliers seemed to indicate, everyone would have a job. The classes were named after the start date: year first, then month. Mike, Greg, and myself were to be in class 9207; Jason was in 9206.

Jason was just a little bit off. Not in a bad way. But he saw life a little differently. If you have ever seen Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that would describe Jason pretty accurately. A former drug addict, he had come to International Air Academy to turn his life around. Swearing off all booze and drugs, he had developed a regimen of rising every morning at 6 AM, and going on a run. In the afternoon after class let out, he would meditate on the grass outside the apartment for half an hour. As such things tend to do, in the time we were roommates I got a front row seat to the schedule’s demise. The first thing to go was the 6 AM run. But it didn’t go without a fight. For a while there he just kept hitting snooze on his alarm clock every 10 minutes, for about an hour. As his roommate I found this particularly lovely. Music, groan, hand slap, silence. Ten minutes of bliss, then music, groan, hand slap, silence. After about a week of this he finally embraced the horror of slacker-tude, his natural birthright, and slept in like the rest of us.

Mike and Greg informed me that there were tons of girls at the school and they would be having a great time hitting on all of them. When they were done telling me their theories of female domination, Jason would start in on the vibrations of the earth, and how it is all connected, man, and how meditation is so much better than speed or pot. Then Greg would chime in with Ogden! Ogden! Ogden! and by the end of the evening I was feeling pretty well adrift.

In the morning after Jason’s six alarms, I got up and got ready for the first day of school. At International Air Academy, or I.A.A. as we called it, you were expected to dress to a certain standard. The men had to wear suits and ties, or at the very least sport coat and tie, and the women had to wear skirts that went below the knees. I’m not sure why this was enforced, seeing as real airline workers often look like they’ve slept in their uniform for four days, but I guess it was all about the presentation. I had just learned to tie a tie a week or two before, sitting in a Eugene parking lot with my Dad giving me instructions, both of us trying to figure out how we had gotten there, and if the rabbit comes out of the damn hole or around the tree. Fortunately, the first morning at I.A.A. I got it right. Shaving was also an unpleasant experience, as in college I would shave about once a week, and in high school I lacked the sufficient amount of testosterone to bother (with shaving or much of anything else).

The four of us piled into Mike’s behemoth Buick with Arizona plates, and set out on the 2 mile drive to school. We entered the school and were immediately forced to stand in line filling out paperwork for the next several hours, which if you think about it is pretty much training for the next 40 years, no matter what career you are in. Half of 9207 was assigned to a crotchety old man whose name I forgot, and my half was assigned to a 30 year old blond teacher named Mrs. Marks.

About 20 of us got into our classroom, and Mike, Greg and I sat down together. Everyone else in the class was girls. This is one of the nice things about the airlines, come to find out. It is mostly female, and a large percentage of the men are gay, so if you are a heterosexual male working in airline customer service, you have a nice ratio going for you. This is balanced out nicely by substandard wages and constant threat of layoffs.

At age 28, Greg was the grand old man of 9207, or at least our half of it. At age 23 I was the elder statesman. Most of the women were right out of high school, with a few aged 20 or 21.

The first thing Mrs. Marks did was announce, “Okay, people! We are going to have a dress code inspection! Come on up here 2 at a time and show your classmates your clothes!” Since there were only 3 of us guys in the classroom, Mrs. Marks had Greg, Mike and I parade up there all at once. After sheepishly confirming that yes, we were all wearing suits, Mrs. Marks said, “Show us your socks, guys!” We pulled up our pants legs to confirm that yes, we were wearing socks.

One of the annoying things about I.A.A. is that for the entire 12 week course, they assume you have the mental capacity of a poached egg. Every single morning, 5 times a week, we would all have to get up in front of the class and confirm we had on the proper attire. And each morning for 12 weeks, when Greg, Mike and I got up, Mrs. Marks yelled, “Show us your socks, guys!” By week 11 I expected one of us to say, “Oh, shoot, you know what, I forgot to put on my socks this morning. Because, you know, it’s easy to forget. WHEN YOU’VE BEEN UP MY ASS ABOUT IT FOR THE LAST 2 AND A HALF MONTHS!” But instead we’d just smile, and lift our pants legs like submissive dogs.

I remember one morning the hottest girl in class (guys notice these things), Cheryl, stood up for dress inspection, and her skirt was deemed to be a little too short. It didn’t quite cover the tops of her knees. Mike, Greg and I didn’t think this was a problem, and in fact were in favor of it being even higher, but Mrs. Marks was in no mood for tomfoolery. She ordered Cheryl home to change, and “come back wearing something acceptable.” Cheryl immediately burst into tears and sat sobbing at her desk, as one of her roommates went to get her car. I always thought that was a really mean thing to do to someone. Great, you made an 18 year old girl cry. Congratulations.

So what kind of classes did we take at I.A.A.? All kinds. Most of them followed the scholastic formula of every school— learn reams of things that you will never, ever use. And, also like other schools, the most valuable class was typing. My Dad once told me that higher education is mostly about jumping through hoops until you can get the diploma, and while I wouldn’t call I.A.A. higher education, and the hoops you had to jump through wouldn’t have taxed a mid-sized show dog, they were at least challenging enough for a Maltese terrier to work up a good sweat.

Mrs. Marks’ teaching style was a tried and true one used by substandard teachers everywhere: she pulled out the textbook, and read to us from it. Our class soon shifted into predictable zones: the butt kissers sat in the first row, the confused sat in the middle, and the truly cynical and disgusted sat at the far back, as if the teacher had a contactable disease. I sat about 3/4 of the way back, so as to have a foot planted firmly in both camps. I have always prided myself as something of a passive-aggressive fence-rider, and I think it is one of my better qualities.

Every morning we would have a motivational speaker, except ours was always the same guy, and he was on videotape. Mrs. Marks would wheel in a big Panasonic, and for 45 minutes every day we were subject to a man named Bob who held forth on the beauty of hard work, achieving in life, and being a “go-getter.” It was not apparent what being a go-getter turned you into, except someone like Bob. The people in the back row inched back even further, noses wrinkled and backs pressing up against the windows.

After “Video Bob” (as we called him) was finished, we were subjected to a god-awful class called Tariffs. It was never exactly clear to me what Tariffs was about, and thankfully it only lasted for four weeks. Even Mrs. Marks said, “You probably won’t ever use this stuff—“ Which when spoken by a teacher means no one will ever use it in the history of mankind. “This is all done by machine now,” said Mrs. Marks. “But you should know how to do it anyway, in case the airport has a cataclysmic power outage and the machines don’t work.”

I wanted to point out that in a cataclysmic power outage people would be less concerned about tariffs and more concerned about picking up blunt instruments to beat each other with, but one thing I’d learned in my 23 years was that authority figures don’t like smart asses, so I just kept my mouth shut.

Another great class was Phone Reservations. Half of us would get in one class room, half in another, and we were connected by phones. We had scripts that we would each read from, where one person played the customer, and the other played the reservations agent answering questions. “I’d like to go from Los Angeles to New York,” you’d say. The role player in the other room would say, “At what time?” and then enter the data into the computer. Etc. When Mrs. Marks was out of earshot, the back row gang would start to make up their own questions and answers, each one more ludicrous than the last. “I’d like to blow up the Empire State building,” one would say, “Can you loan me some dynamite?” “Of course, sir. What kind?” That sort of thing.

The easiest class (for me, anyway) was typing. Even though most airline agents are hunt and peck gods, I.A.A. was bound and determined to turn us into Toscaninis of the typewriter. On the first day they ushered us in, had us do some basic keyboard familiarization, and then said, “Every day at the end of class you will be given a timed test. When you reach the ability to type 50 words a minute with less than 3 errors, you no longer have to attend class.” I typed 50 words per minute on the first day, and never had to go back. A fellow escapee named Mariah also made it out, and we spent the next 12 weeks in study hall, relaxing in the break room while a cacophony of typewriters hammered away on the other side of the wall, punctuated by shrieks of, “FIFTEEN WORDS? IS THAT ALL? AND WITH 8 ERRORS???”

You have to remember this was 1992, and those type writers all weighed as much as an Olympic plate in a Venice Beach weight room. If you’ve ever typed on one of those typewriters, and have also seen the movie “Misery,” you will have no doubt that the typewriter James Caan used to kill Kathy Bates with was UP TO THE TASK. It probably would have killed Mike Tyson. Caan showed impressive upper body strength just to raise it off the floor, much less into a full military press.

The typewriters came equipped with correction tape, the key of which was usually marked with a large white “X” resembling the logo for poison on household cleaning products. When depressed, it sounded like a machine gun. Pow-pow-pow! Pow-pow-pow! It felt like Mariah and I were sitting next door to a fire fight.

Class usually took place from 9AM to 3. During lunch we would cross the street in our absurd suits get a slice of pizza from the local Italian place, or Mike and I would roar off in his car to the local Arby’s. I always ordered the same thing, and remember it with crystal clear accuracy 18.5 years later: Cheeseburger, lemonade, and cherry pie. Mike always ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Pepsi, easy ice. I’d never heard anyone use the term “easy ice” until I met Mike, but apparently it’s a term used in lesser Phoenix dining establishments, and as of 1992 had yet to make its way to the west coast. The way he emphasized it, I got the feeling bad things would happen if the ice was not easy.

After 3 the first thing people did was race back to the dorms/apartments, and rip off their horrific clothes. Off would go my suit and tie, and I felt like a human being again. About this time I started going on a run after school. You have to remember this was July, about 4 pm, and it was hot as Hades outside. I’d put on my running clothes and head out down Mill Plain boulevard. I found this really cool route which went through a park with power lines above it, along a bike path, up a steep hill, and then finished in a 4 mile loop back at the apartments. I really enjoyed running it every afternoon. The hill was so steep the first few days I had to stop and walk up it. I was very pleased with myself when by the 3rd week I could run straight up it without hardly even slowing down. The human body is amazing.

What is not amazing about the human body is the joints. My right hip started to hurt like crazy. I eventually had to stop my afternoon runs, and my hip problems continue to this day. I have never been able to run for any extended period of time since. I have always thought running is the best exercise ever created for the heart and lungs, and one of the worst for everything from the waist down. As far as the neck up, it’s a wash.

One thing running is unparalleled at is giving you a high like a moving meditation, and I would get in a Zen-like state while running past all those houses in Vancouver. When I got back to the apartment I would be sopping wet with sweat, but felt like I’d really accomplished something. In those first few weeks when I felt very lost and alienated, running was a great thing to hold on to.

It also was the source of one of the funnier things that happened to me— One day I returned home from my run, and walked into the apartment. I immediately noticed 3 of my classmates and next door neighbors were sitting at our kitchen table. No problem, people drop in and out all the time to visit. Then I noticed the tile on the kitchen floor looked a little different. Huh. I guess I just never noticed it before. Then I reached in the fridge for my drink, and it wasn’t there. “Who took my damn Gatorade!” I yelled. My three classmates regarded me coolly. “You’re in the wrong apartment, Tim.” I beat a hasty retreat.

What else would we do after class? Well, earlier I mentioned that big strip of grass in the midst of our complex. Someone had set up a volleyball net, and every afternoon there was usually a big volleyball game happening. Those were fun, even though none of us could play worth a damn. The guys took off their shirts to show off for the girls, which in many cases was probably unwise and rather horrifying. I wisely kept mine on. The girls knew they were in control, heck they always are, let’s face it. The rap song, “Baby Got Back” was a big hit that summer, and it was constantly playing at high volume, over and over, and over….I really started to hate that record.

At night most people partied, or tried to party as well as 18, 19, and 20 year olds can. Much throwing up, passing out in peoples’ apartments, etc. I have never been a drinker, so was just a bemused onlooker. It was always kind of strange on Saturday and Sunday mornings, though. I would be up by 8 or 9, and walking around the complex. It was like I was the survivor of a nuclear war. No one else would stir until about 11, at the very earliest. Then they would groan and tiptoe around like shelling victims.

After about 3 weeks, I had had it. I was lonely, depressed, and besides Mike, Greg and Jason, did not have any friends. And they were only my friends because we lived in the same apartment and were forced to bump into each other. Somewhere during one of my runs, I decided I’d had enough. I called my Mom on the pay phone outside the complex (no cell phones in 1992), and told her I was thinking of quitting. My Mom then told me my godmother had died. A sudden stroke, while on vacation at the coast. Now I felt even more horrible. She had used to babysit me. My Mom started to cry and I did too.

Why do you want to quit? My Mom asked. I told her how lonely I was, and depressed. I’d always hid a stuttering problem, and the damn phone reservations class wasn’t doing me any favors in that department. I wanted out.

A little voice in my head started up, the same one that talked to me in my last term in college. “What will you do if you quit?” it said. I tried to ignore it. I had this mental image of me going back to Eugene, getting a menial job washing dishes in some restaurant or hotel, and renting a squalid studio apartment near campus. It sounded awful, but this airline school wasn’t for me.

Jason, my surfer-dude roommate, tried to help. “Dude,” he said that evening, sitting lotus style on the edge of his bed, “It’s okay to let go.”

“But I’m not sure if I want to go,” I said. “I’m not sure if leaving is the right thing!”

Jason smiled and nodded his head. “Then stay, dude,” he said, “stay.”

In the depths of despair you’d think being around an inveterate optimist would cheer you up, but it only irritates you and seems kind of maddening.

I remember I had my book of “best short stories of the century” with me, and took a break from talking with Jason to read “A good man is hard to find,” by Flannery O’Connor, a story about a serial killer who escorts an entire family into the woods one by one and shoots them in the back of the head. At the end of the story he disposes of grandma, and comments that she would have been an okay person if someone would have had a gun trained on her her entire life, because she was so much more agreeable and kinder then. Then he said, “Life is nothing but pure meanness.” The story seemed to suit my general mood. I even had Jason read it. “Far out, man!” he said after reading it, eyes shining, “that was like…epic!”

We stopped talking about it and turned on the radio. Eric Clapton’s song, “Tears in Heaven” was popular that summer, and when I explained the meaning to Jason, he thought that was even further out. Then the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” came on, and Jason thought this was even deeper, as he used to do drugs. Like, you know, under a bridge. Downtown. All in all none of this was really cheering me up too much.

“Just let me think about, Jason,” I said. “It’s late. I have to go to sleep.”

“Okay, dude,” he said, flicking off the light. “But remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN? I thought, and drifted off into uneasy sleep.

The next day I walked into the admissions office. A young woman behind the desk asked if she could help me. “Yes,” I said. “I want to drop out.” I expected her to say, “Okay, I understand. Here is the paperwork.” Or maybe argue. But instead she just smiled, turned her head slightly, and said, “Hmmm. That’s too bad. Can you tell me why you feel that way? Please sit.” She motioned to a chair.

There are some people that can talk you into anything by just listening. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that was certainly the case with her. Instead of trying to talk me out of it, or saying fine, here ya go, she just let me talk, nodded sympathetically, and used phrases like, “Well maybe if you gave it another week, things would turn around. After all, you never know what will happen.” After half an hour of talking to her, she had me completely turned around, and I agreed to stick with the program and give it another chance. I don’t know what her name was, but I wish I knew. She changed the course of my life. Another person would not have taken the time, would have merely said oh that’s too bad and here’s the drop form, and my life would have been totally different from thereon out. I never would have finished airline school, gotten a job, or gone to Colorado. I would have just gone back to Eugene or Corvallis, lived with my parents, gotten a bad job, and lived a sheltered life. We often don’t recognize pivotal moments in our lives, but that was certainly one in mine. It changed everything for the next 8 years, and many things forever. Just because I talked to that one person.

I think I will pause here and call this part one, and continue with part two of my airline school experience in a few days. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Thanksgiving: the perfect holiday for men

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. However this was not always so. When I was a little kid, Christmas topped the list. The reason was simple: every kid loves to get presents. There was something magical about sitting beneath the lights on the tree and staring at the brightly colored packages beneath the branches, wondering what was inside them. Thanksgiving was not nearly as exciting to my 8-year old mind, because there were no gifts involved. It was simply about sharing a good meal together. The older you get, the more you grow to appreciate that sharing a good meal with loved ones is better than any present, and usually those brightly colored packages were full of wool sweaters or polyster pajamas that itched like crazy.

Another reason I like Thanksgiving is it is short. When you are a kid you love the anticipation of Christmas: the counting down of days, the advent calendar you open bit by bit, the Charlie Brown specials on TV. But seeing it with an adult’s eyes, you realize it is mostly about money. Commercial after commercial bombards you with cynical attempts to separate you from your cash, and it all starts a good 5 or 6 weeks before the actual day. Or even sooner: last weekend I was driving around my neighborhood, and saw Christmas lights hanging in a commercial lot. I almost drove into the ditch.

By contrast, Thanksgiving is mercifully short. Two or three hours, five or six tops. Get in, and get out. Aside from some 4.99 turkey special commercials, there are almost no advertisements. No presents are exchanged– just good food.

Dare I say it, but Thanksgiving is especially good if you are a man. Generally you aren’t expected to do anything other than consume, burp, and unbutton your pants. For a man, anything that involves these three requirements is beyond great. Oh sure, if you are an adult male you may be required to carve the turkey, but what guy doesn’t like waving around a large knife? After you get done eating, burping, unbuttoning your pants, and waving around the large knife, you get to go into the next room and watch football. Then you fall to sleep. Really, it’s the perfect holiday.

Unfortunately, Thanksgiving is a bit more work for a woman. Your job is to buy the turkey, cook it, make the pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, peas, salad, and other assorted “fixings.” After the meal is over, you and your friends get to clean everything up. Oh of course you could ask us to do it, while you come into the living room and watch football. But you hate football. And you know we would break all your dishes. So it is never brought up. Thanksgiving, indeed.

In this case, man’s greatest weakness turns out to be his greatest strength. It is assumed by the women that all men are idiots. We do not know how to shop, cook, prepare a table, or clean up. In truth we might know how to do all those things, but it is best not to let you think so. Because then we would have to do something.

On occasion, women will try an end run and attempt to short circuit this glorious process. A bloody coup will be attempted, as the women storm into the living room and attempt to turn the TV from Lions vs. Broncos, to “Found at Last: A Holiday Hallmark Special.” This kind of rebellion is serious, and must be treated as such. It is best to squash it immediately and quickly, before things get out of hand. The best counter-tactic is to pretend to go along with it. Go into the kitchen and start the clean up. Make sure to break things. Loudly. It is a little known fact that the average glass, when dropped from a height of 3 meters, makes as much noise upon impact as a taxiing 737. You and your fellow males may wish to employ a chair, so as to drop it from a further height. After 2 or 3 good impacts, the Hallmark Special will be abandoned amid a cacophony of frenzied “get outs!” And you can go back to your football game. A good female Thanksgiving host thrives on order and cleanliness, and by threatening this delicate balance, victory is won.

Until next year, I hope you all have wonderful Thanksgivings. And if anyone has a really big knife I can wave around, let me know.

The Airline Saga, Part 1: Road to Vancouver

In the spring of 1992 I was living in a dorm room on the University of Oregon campus. My days carried on just like they always had in the preceeding 4 years: I’d wake up at the crack of 9, take a shower, eat at the school cafeteria, come back to my dorm room and read the newspaper, and around 1 pm stroll off to one of my challenging classes, usually something with an exotic name like Racquetball 2, or Beginning Billiards. Things were going quite smoothly, but around March a faint warning bell began to go off in my head. In the next 6 to 8 weeks, I was going to graduate. Dear God, what was I going to do then? I had had this same feeling one year before, after my fourth year, and solved it by going back to school for a fifth year. I had a few more credits to take anyway, so it was easy enough to put off reality for another 12 months. But I couldn’t do that anymore. And if I admitted it to myself, I was secretly sick of college. For the last few months I’d begun to hate the campus, the same old buildings and classrooms and bland tasting food. But just because I was ready to leave, didn’t mean I wasn’t scared to enter the real world. The truth is, I was terrified.

My old roommate Paul had graduated the year before, and was living up in Portland as he tried to apply to medical school. He had failed to get into one the first year of trying, and was working some nebulous job while he filled out more applications. From time to time he would call me, and I remember squatting on the floor of my dorm room, phone pressed to my ear, trying to listen to his voice as music blared up and down the hall.

“I’m doing all right up here,” he would say. His voice always sounded far away. He sounded more serious, as if life in the real world had sucked the joy right out of him. “Maybe I’ll get into med school next year, but until then I have this job…” It sounded awful.

Most English majors become schoolteachers, or went to law school. I had neither aspiration. In fact, I had no aspirations. A card carrying member of Generation X, I stood paralyzed on the doorstep of adulthood.

I used to talk to my next door neighbor Jamie about it. He lived right across the hall, had long hair, and listened to Soundgarden. Like me, Jamie was an English major. Niether of us had the slightest clue about what we were going to do after we graduated. Unlike me Jaimie was a sophomore, so he still had a couple more years to stretch things out, maybe even 3 years if he took his time. But already it was weighing heavy on his shoulders. Sometimes he’d walk across the hall, sit down on my bed, and comment on it. “What the hell are we going to do?” he’d shout.

In the room next to me was a gay guy named David. He got along with everyone, even though he had the odd habit of singing Barbara Streisand numbers in the shower. He would do so in full voice, but he had a good voice and was a nice guy, so nobody minded. David was born with severe nerve damage in his face, and the lower portion of it was permanently frozen. He had never smiled in his life, and never would be able to. When he laughed the sound was disembodied and strange, because his facial muscles could not move. Whenever Jamie and I began to feel particularly desperate about life after graduation, we’d talk to David. He helped put things in perspective. Both by his condition, and also by the things he said.

“The way you have to think about it,” he said one day, “Is that life is meant to be embraced. Don’t be scared about what will happen. Live life! Enjoy it! Heck, look at me!” I looked at his frozen face and think yes, you are right. Of course he was right! What was I complaining about? He looked at a copy of Parade Magazine I was holding. Patrick Stewart, the actor that played Jean Luc Picard on Star Trek, was on the cover. “Isn’t Patrick Stewart a good looking man?” David said with a sigh. I didn’t know what to say to this, and we both realized the talk was over. He went back to his room, and soon Barbara Streisand was blaring. God bless the guy. I often wonder what happened to him. He once told me his father hated him because he was gay. I admired the way he kept so positive in life. It couldn’t have been easy.

Our resident assistant was a guy named Stewart. He was another person who didn’t know where he was going in life, and who had a disability. Like David he had a birth defect– there was something wrong with his wrists and hands, and they couldn’t grip properly. When he ate in the cafeteria, he had to use a special fork with a thick handle, to eat his food. And just like David, he had a sunny, optimistic outlook. Jamie and I began to wonder what was wrong with us, that we were so angry and brooding, and they weren’t even though they had more problems. Or at least I wondered about it. Jamie would just mutter and go back to his room. A few seconds later I’d hear Metallica crunching away. One day he came into my room without knocking.

“Well, I went over to the stupid advisors office,” he said. “They gave me a book called, ’101 things to do with an English major.’ And do you know what it taught me?”

“What?” I asked.

“Jack shit!” he yelled, and stormed out.

So, this was the mood I was in as I began to count down the weeks to graduation. 8 weeks, 7 weeks, 6 weeks, 5 weeks. I had no idea what I was going to do. Every day I would come home from class, set down my racquet, and turn on the radio, where I’d listen to Anita Hill testify against Clarence Thomas. While I listened I’d stare out at campus, watching the students walk by and the flowers bloom in the bush outside my window.

What the heck was I going to do????

It was at this point I heard something that changed my life. It was a radio advertisement. I probably heard it during a break in the Clarence Thomas hearings. The advertisement said, “Come to International Air Academy, located in beautiful Vancouver, Washington, and get an airline job after 12 short weeks of training!”

I sat bolt upright in my bed, heart pounding. Okay, that is an exaggeration. I probably didn’t even pay attention the first few times I heard it. But dear reader, it planted a seed. As I heard it more and more, and my panic at graduation grew larger, I began to think, why not? That doesn’t sound half bad. Don’t airline workers get free travel? That sounds like fun.

I made a few phone calls, and found that International Air Academy, or I.A.A. as it was abbreviated, was holding interviews in a Eugene hotel the next week. I decided to go.

The morning of the interview I grabbed my 10-speed bike and pedalled off campus, across Franklin Boulevard, and onto the bike paths paralleling the Willamette river. Being a poor college student I had no car, and had gotten used to going anywhere on my bike. I had figured out the hotel was near the bike path, so I was there in about 20 minutes. I changed in the bathroom, and nervously waited in the lobby with other prospective students.

I don’t remember much about the interview. They didn’t ask me much, just had me fill out a questionnaire, I think. At the time I didn’t know that as long as I had a pulse, could maintain an upright position, and could give them money, I was pretty much in. They told me how to apply, and that school started on June 29th, in about 8 weeks. I rode back to campus on air, thinking: finally, I have a plan!

I told Jaime what happened, and he gazed off into the distance and whistled. “Wow, man, that’s a good idea. Airlines, huh? Where you can fly for free and shit, right?”

“Right.”

“Cool. Hey, did you know that Chris Cornell is making a solo album?”

David approved of my decision also. “Good job, Tim!” he said. “See, I knew things would work out.” Of course he couldn’t smile, but his eyes were twinkling.

Our floor was all male, but a girl from the 2nd (all girls) floor came down frequently, to visit her boyfriend on the first floor. I wish I could remember her name, but I can’t. I later heard she had a child with her boyfriend, and that they were having trouble. I don’t know what happened to her, but she was always kind to me. I was terrifically shy around girls in college, and hardly talked to any of them. She was one of the few. On one of my last days before graduation, she came down to say goodbye to me. Sadly, I was not there. She slid a copy of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” under my door. On the inside cover she wrote:

“Tim: have a good life, and don’t kill anyone.”

I never got a chance to thank her. And I always thought this was a very enigmatic message. A few short days later I packed up my room, drove home with my parents, and prepared for June 29th, when I would go north to begin my new life in Vancouver.

(to be continued)

The Great Columbia Bridge Crossing

On October 3rd, I participated in the 29th annual Columbia Bridge Crossing. This is a 10k run / walk that begins on the Washington side of the river, and then crosses over the bridge to Astoria. I had been invited to participate by my friends Dave and Sami, who live in Tillamook. As any of you know this is quite a ways south of Astoria, and although the race started at 9AM, we had to be there by 7:30 in order to pick up our race packets and take a shuttle bus to the start line.

I drove over to Dave and Sami’s house in Tillamook the night before, as we had to be up at 4AM the next morning. Our friend Lela met us at 4:30, and we started carpooling north on 101 toward Astoria. We immediately noticed that the car was almost out of gas. No problem, we said, we’ll just stop at the next gas station. The only problem with this theory is nothing is open at 5AM on the Oregon coast. We drove past a succession of darkened gas stations while the dash board flashed, “LOW FUEL” over and over. I was about to suggest we just pull over and embrace the horror, when we saw an open gas station in Seaside, and were saved.

Upon arriving in Astoria, we discovered that once we picked up our race packets, there was not much to do. It was 7:30, and the race didn’t start until 9. We also discovered that we were now all starving. We had failed to plan for this, and no one had any food. As the shuttle bus took us across the bridge to the start line, we hoped the benevolent organizers of the race would have some pre-race carbs set out. Alas, there were none. Instead they gave us a marimba player. I want to state up front that there is nothing wrong with marimba players, although there may be something wrong with them above the 35th parallel. And there is something decidedly wrong with them when it is freezing cold outside, and you are hungry. However, although they had provided us with a marimba player but no food, the race organizers made up for it with water. Jugs upon jugs of water. In a cruel twist, they counteracted this by setting out only a dozen or so porta-potties. You can play all the marimba music you want, folks, but when 3,000 people have to pee like Seabiscuit, 15 porta-potties and a Don Ho cover song ain’t gonna do it. I took one look at the gigantic line, shot the Marimba player a baleful glance, and headed for nearest stand of trees. Apparently others had this same idea, as I passed men and women in droves coming out of the foilage.

When I finally returned, the four of us sat on a nearby curb and shivered. It was quite cold, we were all starving, and everywhere we looked people seemed to be eating bananas and granola bars. We sat their watching them, mouths watering and stomachs growling. My mind idly began pointing out the weaker and smaller looking ones, and asking (just as an interesting hypothesis), I wonder how much of a fight that one would put up? He couldn’t want that clif bar that bad, could he?

It was at this point I saw the clown. I had heard rumors of this— every year a man in a clownsuit enters the race, and does it on a gigantic pair of stilts. I am no big fan of clowns; they give me the creeps, actually. So when I saw him in all his stilted glory: bouncing up and down, flexing his knees, bending over to reveal his enormous padding stuffed butt, I felt sick. I saw I was not the only one unnerved by this bozo: the crowd was giving him a wide berth, as fish do when a shark swims too close. For his part the clown seemed oddly focused– keeping his head down, stretching, and inexplicably puffing on a cigarette. Maybe it was a good way to warm up his lungs.

The race started promptly at 9, and off we went. We four were just walking, due to injuries of various magnitudes. We discovered that half the fun of these walks is just observing the people around you. During the first mile we walked behind a woman in high heels, as if on her way to a formal dinner. She seemed to be doing fine, but I would have loved to see her at the finish line. As we got on the bridge we noticed the Columbia river near the sea is REALLY WIDE. At least 4 miles wide. We also saw seals and pelicans in the water, which was especially fun. A less fun discovery was that we all had to pee again. All that water we drank in an attempt to quell our hunger was taking its toll. But there was nothing to do but suck it up (or pinch it off, as the case may be).

As we got closer to Astoria, the bridge rose sharply upward. We had reached the part of the bridge where ships pass beneath. I am nearly as scared of heights as I am of clowns, so I stayed firmly in the center of the bridge. Luckily bozo was nowhere to be seen. I think that 1-2 punch might have sent me over the edge, literally.

Once we got to the Astoria side, the race route went on for about another mile, in order to get to the requisite 10k mark. With sore feet and aching knees, we finished at 2 hours on the dot. There were free bananas and drinks at the finish, and we devoured them hungrily. Then we realized we had to walk back to the car, and complained because quite frankly, we were DONE with walking. Nothing felt so good as finally getting to the car and sinking into the backseat. Then since we were in Astoria, we decided to climb to the top of “The Column,” which is an old lighthouse in the hills overlooking the cities. This was a great experience which I would recommend to anyone. We also spent some time at the Astoria farmers market, which was also fun. Finally we headed back down the coast for Tillamook, after a great day. We are already looking forward to next year’s race. If anyone is interested in participating, sign up early via the internet, as by law the bridge can only hold 3,000 people at a time. Apparently if the 3,001st person steps on it, the entire structure will spontaneously collapse, and all racers will drown / be eaten by sea lions.

The lies we tell our children

A few weeks ago I was on a flight from Chicago O’Hare to Portland, and sat beside a woman and her 4 year old daughter. For those of you who have made this flight, you know it takes close to four hours. That is a long time for a 4 year old to sit still, and the mother had her hands full. For a while the coloring books worked, and then Dr. Seuss, but by mid-flight the 4 year old had had enough. She started standing up on her seat, trying to press the flight attendant call button, and doing gymnastics on both armrests.

“Mackenzie!” said her mother. “Stop! Leave that nice man alone!” Apparently I was the “nice man” in question, but rather than being irritated by Mackenzie accidentally kicking me or leaning way over my seat to look out the window, I was amused by the whole production. I found it increasingly hard to keep a straight face.

When Mackenzie began twirling her headphones in circles, her mother leaned forward and grabbed her arm.

“If you don’t stop misbehaving, I am going to call the pilot and he is going to come back here,” she said.

Instantly Mackenzie was on guard. The headphone twirling stopped. “The pilot is going to come back here?” she said.

“Yes,” said her Mom.

This stilled Mackenzie for a good five minutes. Then she pulled up her seat cushion, braced it against the armrest, and started reinforcing it with in flight magazines and The Cat and The Hat.

“What are you doing?” said her mother.

“Making it so the pilot can’t come in here,” said Mackenzie. I realized suddenly that thanks to mom, the pilot was no longer a nice man who flew the airplane. He was some mythical ogre summoned to punish little children. Mackenzie was no longer having fun. She was instead turning row 14, seats D,E and F, into a foxhole.

Later on, her fear somewhat subsided, Mackenzie began acting up again. Her mother was trying to comb her hair, and Mackenzie squirmed and whined and said it hurt.

“It does not hurt, Mackenzie!” said her mom. “I’m barely touching your hair. You are faking! If you don’t stop faking, the pilot won’t take a picture with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t like fakers.”

Mackenzie stopped complaining. She did, however, stare into her mother’s eyes. You could see her thinking. Her mother stared right back, as any good liar will do. In another year or two, I thought, those lies won’t work. Mackenzie’s mother will tell another whopper, and hear the two words parents fear most: “Yeah, right.”

Since when did it become okay to lie to our children? Does the end (getting them to behave) justify the means (telling an outrageous lie)? What’s next, I wondered:

“Mackenzie, if you don’t buckle your seatbelt, all the unicorns in the world will die.” She didn’t say that, thankfully, but I wouldn’t have put it past her.

Soon we landed, MacKenzie and her mother went hurrying past the pilot (no picture, of course), and I went on with my day.

Road Trips

I just got back from a road trip to Canada, and that got me thinking about road trips in general. Ever since the Model T was invented, people have gone on road trips in the summer. And even before that. They weren’t road trips in cars, of course. Many of these road trips substituted a body of water for the road (Mississippi River sternwheelers). Two of the greatest American novels of all time, Huck Finn, and The Grapes of Wrath, are essentially just big road trips. So is Moby Dick, and The Odyssey. Of course, the ultimate American road trip was carried out by countless settlers in covered wagons. We even have a minor classic dedicated soley to the road trip, Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” What is certain is that road trips are an integral part of the human experience. Although my own road trips pale in comparison to those mentioned above, I still remember them fondly. As a child road trips are often a hateful thing, particularly if you grew up like I did in the 70′s, and the car had no air conditioning. Squeezed into a backseat surrounded by suitcases, your body dripping with sweat and drool from a 100 pound german shepherd looming over your shoulder, is not the ideal way to travel. Now people take to the road in air conditioned comfort. I can’t help but think the kids in the backseat with their miniature TVs are missing something. Adversity toughens the soul, and watching The Lion King in the back of a Dodge Caravan can hardly be called adversity. In any case, there are 3 golden rules you must absolutely follow if you want your next road trip to be a success. Many have violated them, and many have paid the price.

1) Do not sleep in rest areas. I know it’s tempting to do this and save money on a motel, but if you do it, at least roll the windows all the way up. I know it can be hot in the summer, and that cool night breeze feels good, but being stabbed in the neck is not a good way to wake up. If you must sleep in rest areas, at least bring along a large hunting dog, preferrably two. If you have at least 2 large rottweilers in the car with you, go ahead and roll the windows down as far as you want.

2) Do not eat in gas stations. Like the previous tip, this one can be hard to follow. With gas so expensive, it is tempting to try and cut corners in other areas. Sure that beef jerky by the cash register looks good, but picture yourself doubled over in agony 100 miles from now. Because that’s what’s going to happen if you eat it for lunch. If you are under age 30 you may be able to eat it and still be okay. The digestive powers of a teenager and young adult are amazing. However if you are older like me, do not consume at all costs. You aren’t the man (or woman) you used to be. That jerky will go off in your gut like a bomb. If you are over 40 do not get back on the highway, just drive yourself straight to the nearest ER.

3) Never stay in a bad motel. You always want to go “one rung up” from the least expensive place in town. There are solid reasons for this, all of which involve your physical and mental health. Is that extra 10 dollars you’ll save really worth it? I think not. Here are some clues you are in a bad motel. Move along if any of the following pertain to your room: 1) television chained to the wall, 2) padlock attached to rotary phone dial, 3) “magic fingers” coin-operated bed massager, 4) bathroom painted red or black, 5) shag carpet of any color, 6) strong odor of tobacco smoke, 7) Bloodstains. If you must stay in a bad motel, at least avoid the pool. It can be tempting if you have little ones, but you must fight this. These pools are cleaned like clockwork every 6 months, and contain nuclear quantities of chlorine to compensate. If you fancy the thought of being covered in a gigantic rash, fungus, or flesh-eating disease, by all means go in. I know a game of Marco Polo can be fun, but scabies is not nearly as entertaining. Also, do not patronize the vending machines.

Those 3 tips are the backbone of good road trip strategy, and if you follow them you are well on your way to a successful trip. When you think about it they aren’t too hard to follow, and are probably much easier than a comparable list 150 years ago, which might have read: 1) Boil everything for five minutes, 2) Don’t eat anything once it turns black, and 3) If I die, bury me in at least 6 inches of soil. It will take the critters longer to dig me up. So by comparison I don’t think this trinity is too hard to follow. Some people make road trips into a fine art– they streamline it as much as possible, eliminating even rest stops from their agenda. The actor Matthew McConaughey, for instance, once bragged that he had a special hole cut in the bottom of his van, so he could pee without having to pull over. This would certainly save time, but we think it goes against the whole spirit of being on the road in the first place. Your road trip should not be a rally car race to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. It should be way to see America and share it with the ones you love. As long as you remember not to do this camping out on I-5, eating jerky in a Shell station, or swimming in the Motel 6 “sub-Olympic-sized pool,” I’m sure you’ll have a good time.

The Art of Temping

It takes real skill to be a temp. Or at least a long term one. You see, anyone can be a temp for a few hours or a week (both of which I have done at various times in my temping career), but to hang in there for month after month, sometimes even over a YEAR, with no vacation time, no health insurance, and no future with the company, takes real talent. Granted, it is similar to the talent of a person that can take a beanbag round from a police riot gun and not fall over, but it is still a talent. Hey, we’ve all got to be good at something.

Almost all of my temping took place in Colorado. After I graduated from the University of Oregon, I attended a shadowy, fly by night organization called International Air Academy, who took my money for 12 weeks and then sent me to work in the Denver airport, driving shuttle buses around the tarmac for 5.50 an hour. The regular wage was 5.25 an hour (Colorado minimum wage), but my employers very generously gave me an extra quarter because I was a “college graduate.” I did this for 7 months, only wrecked two buses, and never hit an airplane, although there were numerous close calls. Someday I will write a blog about that. Maybe I will title it, “What happens to English majors after they graduate from college.” But none of that has to do with temping.

No, my temping days were still a few years away. After 4 years of working airline customer service (another future blog), I finally quit the airline business, and went to school at another shadowy fly by night organization, this one called Denver Paralegal Institute. It was 1997, and DPI, as it was known by its attendees, sat in the shadow of Coors Field. It lasted 5 months. During the morning I took classes named things like Real Property, Legal Research, and Corporate Organizations. I learned a lot of things that I would never apply in real life (high school algebra, anyone?). In this way the school was very similar to International Air Academy, where I also didn’t learn much that I would apply in real life (I never took a course entitled, “How to dodge a 757 while driving a 27 seat passenger bus,” unfortunately.).

During the lunch hour at DPI, I would often wander down the street to look at Coors Field, and all the people streaming toward the game. There were always vendors on the sidewalk, selling peanuts for 16 dollars a bag, or whatever the price was, and old men playing clarinets and saxophones in the hope of making a few bucks.

After paralegal school was over, most of us went to one of several large legal temp agencies in town. We were in luck— it was 1997, so the economy was booming and there was no shortage of positions. They were all temp, but at least they were 40 hours a week. I went to one popular temp agency, Gibson Arnold & Associates, had about a 5 minute interview during which they determined I had a pulse and was therefore fit for employment, and had a job by the following Monday.

Or rather, a temp job. You see, as a temp, everyone treats you differently. At least at first. If you are there long enough (read: months), some of the people might forget you are just a temp, and come to see you as a real human being. But for at least the first couple of weeks, you have the strange sensation of being invisible.

Temps come and temps go, so no one really bothers getting too attached or even asking what your name is for a while. After a few weeks they might look up in mild surprise, eyebrows lifted in an unspoken, “What are you still doing here?” but by and large the temp is ignored. He or she can only find solace in their fellow temps. You see, temps are invariably all stored in the same place. Usually this is some abandoned room in the law firm, half filled with old boxes stuffed with legal briefs from 1985, and scattered mouse droppings. Perhaps there will be a door nearby that says, “Boiler Room.” If you see a maze of pipes running back and forth across the ceiling, you know you are in a good location to set up a nest of temps. Basically look for the most run down room in the firm, and chances are, this is where the temps are.

If this isn’t enough to give the location away, generally just look for a xerox machine. This is prime temp real estate. Or search for a place of elevated temperature. Again— temp territory. As if temps don’t already feel abandoned and on an island, permanent employees (“Made Men” in temp parlance) will have thrown them a few swivel chairs and old cubicles, usually into a room that is too big for them. The temps will compensate by sucking inward, and grouping the cubicles in a protective circle, like mountain men protecting themselves at night from wolves. This classic defensive posture is one observed in temp populations for decades. It is also remarkably similar to the “bait balls” that fish assume in nature, when large predators are close by. The fish school together in a tight roiling ball, which confuses the predators and makes it hard for them to hone in on a single target. I found this same posture again and again during my temp days in Colorado, even though Denver is some 1300 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Fascinating.

When you are first brought on as a temp, you are quickly ushered into the office of a senior (or not so senior) paralegal. This person will be your supervisor. You will learn they want nothing to do with you. In fact, they are probably the lowest paralegal in the firm, because no one else wants to deal with the temps. Neither, usually, does this person. Usually they have you sit in a chair, and again like the temp agency that sent you there, they will confirm that you have a pulse and are not drooling in an untoward manner (a little drooling would probably be passable). Then you are quickly walked over to the temp nest, aka temp tank, aka room filled with boxes from 1985. There you are introduced to some of your fellow sufferers, I mean temps. It is always fascinating to note the expressions on their faces. Some angry, some depressed, some desperate with pleading eyes. These people will not make it very long. If you are lucky, you will see one face that stands out from the crowd, however. The happy, smiling one. This is the face of a Natural Temp, one whom you might almost say, was born to be a temp. Maybe in the old days when he used to have dreams, he was one of the angry or depressed ones. There is a middle state, too: resigned. But past resigned there is enlightenment, a true Embracing of the Horror. In which the temp stops worrying and starts enjoying. Ten dollars an hour and no health insurance? No problem! Could get let go at any time with no recompense? Who cares! Just pass me that stapler, Jimbo, and let’s make some worthless documents!

You see, the Natural Temp, not unlike the Samurai of feudal Japan, has discovered a secret: Only when you have resigned yourself to die, do you truly begin to live.

For the first 6 months or so, the Natural Temp was probably like the rest of the masses. Sad because he had no health insurance. Angry because he was not invited to the company Christmas party (only official members allowed). Distressed because there were mouse droppings under his desk. Annoyed because he had to shout over the xerox machine. But then, over time, a strange sort of calm settled over him. Acceptance. And then, after that, something even greater: appreciation. Yes, I said it. Appreciation.

When you reach Natural Temp status, you realize that the same things that make you hate the job: abandonment, nobody caring about you, being ignored and undervalued— are actually wonderfully freeing. After all, if no one ever expects anything of the stupid temp by the boiler room, he can pretty much do what he want. Come and go as he pleases. He is a temp, after all. No one knows what “they do over there anyway.” And why should they care? They are not going to be here long, anyway. Except that is where they are often wrong. Because corporate bean counters love temps. From a temp they get all the bang, with none of the buck. If they hire temps, they don’t have to pay for their health insurance. Or give them paid vacation. Or sick days. Or performance raises. The temp is a free ride. Why not keep them on indefinitely?

And that is exactly what they do. The bosses use the temps to get cheap work, and the temps use the bosses to sit around and do whatever they want all day. It is a symbiotic relationship similar to the clown fish that travel with the great white sharks (I never had realized how similar temping was to Sea Life, actually).

I have watched fellow temps go out for coffee for 2 hours, and come back with no one even noticing. I’ve seen them play Tetris at their desk for 3 hours straight. I’ve been taught how to play poker by them, using sugar packets as chips. I have taught a whole room of temps how to play hearts, and had massive tournaments with intricate scoring systems and brackets. All because? When you are a temp no one gives a damn about you. The greatest curse turns into the greatest freedom.

So while the temps feed on the bosses, the bosses feed on the temps. At one law firm I temped for, we were moving our law office from one location to another. The lead partner decided to do it on a Saturday. Half the staff were official employees of the firm, with full benefits, and the other half were temps. So the lead partner ordered us temps to work on Saturday, and had the official employees stay home. Why? He didn’t want the official firm employees there on a Saturday, because he’d have to pay them overtime. But with us temps, no such worries. We were cheap labor. You might say this has parallels to illegal immigration workers in the US, doing work for less than minimum wage. I admit it does have some parallels.

So he worked us temps to the bone all day, loading and unloading U-Hauls, carrying boxes in and out of freight elevators on dolleys, etc. I think we worked about 12 hours. He had to feed us, of course, so he took us to a Wendy’s and told us in line, “Don’t anybody order any drinks, we have some back in the fridge at the firm.” I was so mad I ordered the largest Pepsi they had. He didn’t say anything. The next morning we all had huge purple bruises on our forearms, from carrying boxes all day. Nobody said the life of a temp was always great.

They finally let me go after 2.5 years, when work was slowing down. But they kept me around as long as they could. Cheap labor is hard to find, after all. Maybe I was dumb enough to stay there, but the freedom was pretty nice. I never had a yearly review, where I was raked over the coals like at other jobs, over my performance. Why bother reviewing temps? They’re temps! You see, there’s a silver lining in everything.

Not all temp jobs are long term. The one immediately after that was at a firm called Holland & Hart, in downtown Denver. The female paralegal who was my boss was so low on the food chain, they only gave her a closet, and somehow managed to ram a desk in there. Needless to say, there wasn’t a window for her. When I came in, she was eating a sub sandwich big enough for a show dog to jump over, as the saying goes. “You’re in with Patrick and Henry,” she said, her mouth full of cucumbers (incidentally, I find it a little disturbing that I still remember their names after all these years, and only being there a month).

When I saw there were only 3 of us, I know this was going to be a short gig. Long term temping entails a bigger tank. If you find yourself with more than 5 temps stuck in a room, you know you could be here for a while. But with only 3…too many predators. The two that were there hadn’t even bothered to pull their cubicles into a protective bait ball— they were just sitting there out in the open. It was like they’d already given up. But they were definitely temps. The hang dog expressions, the pasty skin, the proximity to the night data entry women– all the signs were there. I introduced myself and got down to work.

“Work” being: sitting beside a printer and removing printouts with one hand, while in the other hand I read a book entitled, “Best of Outside Magazine in the 20th Century.” Literally. That is all I did. Between this I went to the bathroom, went down to the local Borders and read magazines, and talked to Henry about his bow hunting adventures. Of course no one bothered us. People leave the condemned alone. That was fine with us. More time to read. But those night data entry women were annoying. The one woman, I remember, talked nonstop about two things: 1) Here evil daughter-in-law, and 2) Her carpal tunnel syndrome. I also recall one time they accused us of stealing water from their water cooler. I didn’t know you could steal water from a water cooler. Apparently I was wrong.

After that I took on my last, and greatest, temp job. Actually, I can say without a doubt this would be not only the best temp job I ever had, but the finest job of my entire life. Gibson Arnold, after a brief 2 week hiccup in which I sat around my apartment in my underwear, called me up and sent me to a downtown high rise building to work for Holme Roberts and Owen. Again I was introduced to a paralegal, but this time she was actually quite cheery. Not only did she check to see if I had a pulse, she also asked me how I was doing! I had to fight the urge to look over my shoulder, to see if she was talking to anyone else. But she wasn’t. She actually cared.

She brought myself and a fellow temp named Jill, to the Holme Roberts temp tank. It was located on the 46th floor, which otherwise was almost 100% abandoned. The main part of Holme Roberts was on floors 44 and 45. There was nothing but the temps on the 46th floor, and a few octogenarian lawyers that would totter about once in a great while from unseen doors, presumably at the office so they could get away from their wives. But they never bothered us.

Paula ushered us into the tank, which had 2 long tables spread out, with 3 computers on each table. A quick round of introductions, and I was shown what to do. Like most temp assignments it was horribly complex and took all of 90 seconds to learn. We were there to code. Which means we would look at an endless series of documents whose images had been scanned into the computer, identify what type of document it was, and then code it accordingly. For instance, if it referred to a business, we would type “F3,” which mean business, and this would be coded into the system. And so on. I still remember that whenever I saw something referring to “La-Z-Boy Furniture,” I had to code in F3. Don’t ask me why; that’s all I remember.

As exciting and stimulating as this work was, we did need a little levity to break up the excitement. Luckily, there was a vast assortment of games built into each computer. On my computer I remember there was Tetris, Free Cell, Hearts, Bejewled, and Pac-Man, just for starters. In retrospect, installing these games on our computers was probably a mistake. I single-handedly witnessed, over the course of 6 months, a 30 year old temp named Nicole advance from an intermediate skill level at Pac-Man, to a god-like state where she was routinely ripping off scores of 50,000 points at a crack. It was truly stunning. To add to the ambiance, the local Peregrine Falcon population that patrols the downtown Denver skies, had adopted the ledge outside our window as their very own lunch counter. The 46th floor is pretty darn high, and they would swoop up onto the ledge carrying a dead pigeon almost as big as themselves. Temporarily we would all put our games and coding aside, and literally watch the feathers fly. I don’t know if you have ever watched a peregrine falcon eviscerate and consume an adult pigeon from 36 inches away, but let me assure you it is a sight to behold. They get right down to business. And those talons can clench right up like a fist. Amazing.

Paula was working away down on the 44th or 45th floor, so she never came up to the 46th much. On the occasions she did, often 5 out of the 6 of us would be playing games on our computers. We felt kind of bad, but she was a flower child from the 60′s and would just laugh and then go back downstairs. She was so nice however that she installed that rarest quality among temps: guilt.

The only other people on that floor, besides the octogenarian lawyers, were the IT guys in the room down the hall. If you’ve ever know IT guys, you know they enjoy the same freedom as temps. No one ever knows or understands what they are doing, and they are usually the smartest people in the building anyway, so they pretty much do what they want. What they wanted to do was usually play a game called “Sniper,” in which they engaged in full on special ops battles against each other on their computers. Sometimes they would invite me down to play, and I would usually last about 30 seconds before my avatar exploded in a fine red mist of blood and spinal fluids.

While in the temp tank, we also listened to music. Lots of music. We had a radio in there, and the female temps liked to listen to the local Oldies Station. Jammin 95.5, I think it was called. I learned all these oldies from the 50s and 60s, and whenever I hear them now I just think of us all in that room.

Some of you may know that I like to play poker. Well, I learned right there in that room, in the summer of 1999. My friends Diane, Jill, and Nicole taught me, using sugar packets as chips. We had a lot of sugar packets laying around that we’d taken from the break room, and I still remember Diane looking at her cards and tossing a bag of NutraSweet on the table, saying, “I call.” This is the best way to learn poker, in my opinion. Being taught by good looking young women, high in an abandoned office building, with Peregrine falcons dining 6 feet away, oldies playing on the radio, and using sugar packets. Can’t beat it.

We began to organize big tournaments: 7 card stud, Texas hold ‘em (back then no one but me had heard of it and said, “this kind of poker is stupid!”), and wild card poker of all different varieties. We played one called “Chicago,” which was 7 card stud, where the high spade in the hole won half the pot. My friend Janet, a law school drop out and fellow temp-in-arms, was a particular fan of that one. Janet, where have you gone? My buddy Alberto, an ex-HS Spanish teacher and fellow temp, liked to deal and when he dealt out 2 queens would always say, “…And a couple of ladies,” and on the 7th stud card, “Down and dirty!” Alberto, where are you now?

You see, I really miss all those people. There is a certain bond and camaraderie you share when you are a temp. When no one else cares about you, and you are all at the bottom of the ladder. It was like a funeral whenever one of us would get hired for a real job, and leave. We were happy for them, but sad to see them go. You’d always leave on a Friday, that was always everybody’s last day, and when the others would come back in on Monday, they’d see the empty desk, and almost cry.

Maybe when you are in a situation that everyone knows isn’t going to last very long, it makes you treasure it more. Its very impermanence gives it more meaning. If you knew you would all be there for the next 10 plus years, you probably wouldn’t care very much.

I remember my last day. I had decided to move back to Oregon, and had given my notice. It was April of 2000, ten long years ago. I still remember how the other temps took me out for lunch that day. They refused to let me pay, even though none of them were making more than ten dollars an hour, as was I. When we were done we left the restaurant, and all stood around awkwardly on the sidewalk outside, as they prepared to go back to the 46th floor, and I prepared to walk out of their lives. “Well, see you later!” I said. We all knew we’d never see each other again. We shook hands and hugged, and as I turned the corner I saw them all standing their waving and smiling at me, permanently frozen in my mind as 30 year old versions of themselves, forever.

As you can tell, I still really miss them.