High flier

Odysseus should've flown Southwest

Photo by Owen Lystrup on Unsplash

Whenever I fly Southwest I think about the time my sister, Allison, got sideways with that particular airline. Allison wanted to change her ticket, which the Southwest agent was happy to do, but only if Allison paid the change fee. At the time, Allison was a broke-ass college student, so paying a few hundred bucks to shave a lifetime off her trip back to school wasn’t going to happen. The prospect of her ludicrous journey—Los Angeles » Phoenix » Oakland » Salt Lake City » Nashville » St. Louis—probably put Allison in a mood. But it was the ticket agent’s adherence to Southwest corporate lingo that really set Allison off.

“You’ll need to purchase an upgrade if you want to change your ticket,” the Southwest agent said.

“Yeah, you already said that,” Allison replied. “But what I don’t understand is this: how is it an upgrade if I still have to fly Southwest?”

It was a sick burn, I’ll give my sister that. But Allison paid the price—in time, rather than money—for disrespecting the gods of air travel. Thankfully, the six months Allison spent trying to get back to school weren’t a total waste. She learned never to fly Southwest again, and I learned to purchase the most expensive ticket, which includes free itinerary changes.

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After a week visiting Christina and me in Los Angeles, it was time for my mom to go back home to Las Vegas. A week earlier, I had flown to Las Vegas to drive Mom to Los Angeles in her car. The return trip would go as follows: drive Mom to Las Vegas, help Mom unpack, then hop on the last flight back to Burbank airport. It was a simple plan. But the day before our departure, the news reported that yet another winter storm was barreling toward California.

“Maybe we should wait until Wednesday,” Mom said.

“It’s no problem to change the flight,” Christina said. “Michael specifically bought a Business Select ticket just in case.”

I cringed a little at Christina’s use of Southwest corporate lingo. My ticket may have been Business Select, but on Southwest the words Business and Select don’t mean what they mean on other airlines.

“If we wait, we’ll definitely run into snow on our route,” I said. “Also, Wednesday is the Ides of March.”

“So?” Mom asked.

“So? So beware the Ides of March, Mom! Misfortune. Betrayal. That kind of shit does not bode well for a mother-son trip across the Mojave desert.”

“What time does the storm get here?” Mom asked. “Check the weather.”

I checked the weather report, as if storms, like Southwest flights, always arrive on schedule. Man checks his plans against his iPhone weather app, and the weather gods laugh their butts off, or something like that.

“It looks like it won’t start raining in LA until around nine or ten in the morning on Tuesday,” I said.

“We’ll be in Vegas by then,” Mom said.

“You will? Christina asked. “What time are you planning to leave, Linda?”

“As early as possible,” Mom said. “Is five too early? What about four?”

“Mom rides with the dawn patrol,” I told Christina.

“Linda is the dawn patrol,” Christina said.

Early on Tuesday morning, one day before the Ides of March, Mom and I set out for Vegas at dawn. We beat the rush hour traffic leaving Los Angeles. We got ahead of the rain and the snow that would soon blanket the high desert. Around ten in the morning, as we rolled past the Vegas strip, we saw that we had missed Sin City’s morning rush hour too. We made the trip in four hours flat. Legend has it, Mom’s Subaru Impreza is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

“You should change your flight,” Mom said. “There’s no point in waiting around until tonight.”

I texted Christina and asked her to change my flight to something in the afternoon. Then I helped Mom unpack. After that, we refueled Mom’s car, went for lunch, and stopped at the grocery store for some staples. By the time we got back to Mom’s place, I had a new flight, one that left at 3:30pm.

“You should probably get to the airport,” Mom said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

I hugged Mom goodbye, then left for the airport.

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At the airport, I breezed through security because there weren’t a lot of people leaving Vegas on a Tuesday. Also, TSA PreCheck rules.

When I checked the departures board to confirm my gate, I saw that there was another flight back to Burbank that left an hour before the one Christina had booked for me. I checked my watch. I could make that flight, if I hurried.

The travel gods were smiling on me, so I honored them by hauling ass to the last gate in the C concourse. I zig-zagged past hundreds of travelers, raced by a modern Siren that took the form of a cupcake vending machine, and hurdled a drug sniffing dog that was having a moment outside a barbecue restaurant.

I reached the gate just in time to hear the Southwest agent announce that the flight had been delayed by forty minutes. If I changed to that flight, I might still get to Burbank a little earlier than if I took the flight Christina booked. But there was also the possibility that the delayed flight might experience further delays. As travel writer and infrequent flier William Shakespeare once wrote, when delays come, they come not in single cock-ups, but in battalions of never-ending cock-ups.

I decided I didn’t want to tempt the patience of the travel gods by changing my flight again. After all, the flight Christina had booked for me was still way ahead of my original plan. So I turned around and walked back to my original gate.

As I walked to the other end the C concourse at a slower, civilized pace, I thought about how I’d kill two hours. I wasn’t hungry, so food was out, even though the drug dog was right about how good the barbecue smelled. I don’t drink, so day drinking was also out. I stopped to browse the newsstand, but it was short on news and long on souvenirs and over-priced candy.¹

As far as I could tell, my options for killing time at The Harry Reid International Airport were limited to people watching, paying ninety bucks for a chiropractic adjustment, and doing a deep dive on Harry Reid’s Wikipedia page. But then, above the din of grumpy travelers and garbled announcements, I heard the buffalo call my name.

Now, I’m not a gambler. Math and money stress me out, so I just don’t see the fun of betting your hard-earned moolah on a game where the odds are never in your favor. But when we took an Alaskan cruise last summer, Christina won big on a Buffalo slot machine.

What would Christina do, I wondered? The answer was obvious. She’d put some moolah on an electronic buffalo stampede. So I checked my wallet, the one that says bad mother fucker. I had two fifties and a ten. I knew Christina would bet one of the fifties, or maybe both. But I’m not a high roller like my wife, so I put a picture of Alexander Hamilton into the machine.

Exactly forty-seven seconds later, Hamilton was history. The buffalos told me to feed them my pictures of Ulysses S. Grant, but America’s most underrated general told me to tell the buffalos to get bent, which is exactly what I did.

With just under two hours to kill, I sat down at my gate. My plan was to listen to my audiobook, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. But I couldn’t find my earbuds in my backpack.

From my wallet, I heard one picture of Ulysses S. Grant tell the other picture of Ulysses S. Grant that I was planning to feed him to a vending machine that vomits earbuds, adapters, and power cords. Typical Grant, I thought, always willing to sacrifice fifty of anything for one of something.

But instead of buying new earbuds, I rummaged through my backpack again. I didn’t find my earbuds because I had left them at home. But I did find a small Tupperware container that held two cannabis gummies.

I didn’t remember packing the drugs. I didn’t intend to transport the drugs across the lines of two states that had legalized the drug in question. But there I was on federal property holding illegal drugs in my hand.

Right away, the lawyer in me was worried that I was in possession of a controlled substance. The client in me was worried about that too. But the stoner in me had a solution: destroy the evidence by consuming it.

I looked over my shoulder. The drug dog was nowhere in sight. I opened the container, removed the gummies, and ate the evidence.

At first, nothing happened because edibles are slow to activate. I sat there looking out the window at the rain, then at the people, then back at the rain. It looked rough outside, like the weather gods were about to fuck with the travel gods. But as it turned out, the travel gods were about to fuck with me.

Thankfully, if your privacy settings are right, the travel gods fuck with you via text. According to the message on my phone, my flight to Burbank was delayed by an additional two hours. But according to the gate agent on the PA, the weather gods weren’t responsible for this one. It was the scheduling gods who called in the hit and timed-out our flight crew.

“As soon as the new crew gets here, folks, we’ll be on our way to Burbank.”

Well, as soon as I heard that, I was on my way back to the other end of the concourse to see what the situation was with the earlier flight that had been delayed for no apparent reason.

Once again, I hauled ass through the C concourse of the Harry Reid International Airport. I zig-zagged through the crowds. I screamed at the cupcake Siren, “not today, Siren!” As I passed the drug sniffing dog, I gave it a knowing smile.

When I arrived at the gate, the situation looked good. That flight to Burbank was still on time, which is to say it was still running late. Even more promising, there were people getting off the inbound flight. That meant there was a plane at the gate, with a crew! The only question: would they have me?

“I’m supposed to be on a later flight to Burbank,” I said to the gate agent. “But I bought a Business Select ticket.”

A piece of me died inside saying Business Select, but I pressed on, determined to get home.

“Is it possible to get on this flight?”

I slide my driver’s license across the counter. The gate agent printed me a new boarding pass.

“We board in ten minutes,” she said, then playing the man, perhaps, she added, “just enough time for a Jamba Juice, dude.”

Now that she mentioned it, my mouth was dry. Really dry. So I walked over to the Jamba Juice and purchased a small strawberry smoothie, which is actually a strawberry milkshake, minus the guilt. Then I went back to the gate. My flight was boarding. I checked the number on my boarding pass: B31.

“B-thirty-one through sixty please line up,” the gate agent said.

I headed to the front of the line to find my place.

“Are you B-thirty one?” a man in a grey suit asked.

“Yes, that’s me!”

“I think we’re the only ones in this group,” said a woman with purple glasses.

“Still counts,” I said. “I’ve never been at the front of the Southwest boarding line before. Well, technically, I’m first for the fourth line, but still! I feel like a celebrity.”

“This is a big moment for you,” Grey Suit joked.

“I’m telling Twitter that Francis Ford Coppola was on my flight,” Purple Glasses teased.

More jokes were cracked. Good times were had. Eventually, we got around to some travel small talk. Grey Suit was in Vegas for business. Something about wholesale medical supplies. Or crypto. I couldn’t say for sure. The conversation was beginning to get fuzzy.

“I came here to get wild with some college friends,” Purple Glasses said.

If I recall correctly—and I’m not saying I do—Purple Glasses either went to a Pac-12 school, or West Point. From what she said, her idea of a wild time was Keno, Moscow Mules, and Udon noodles.

“What about you? What brought you to Vegas?”

“The buffalos called me,” I said without thinking.

“What buffalos?” Grey Suit asked.

“I thought buffalos were extinct,” Purple Glasses said. “Didn’t we do that? I heard about how we, like, killed all the buffalo. This podcast I listened to… well, actually, this friend of mine told me about it. He’s super into podcasts, but I don’t really do podcasts… Anyway…”

“I don’t know what some podcast says, but buffalos are still around,” Grey Suit said. “I eat buffalo burgers all the time.”

Purple Glasses looked at Grey Suit like he was part of the problem. That is, she seemed to blame him for what happened to the buffalos. But he looked at her like she was part of a different problem. That is, he seemed to blame her for the widespread ignorance that plagues everyday life in America.

Or, maybe that was all in my mind.

But then they both looked at me because I was the one who brought up buffalos in the first place. They didn’t ask for an explanation, but I could see in their faces they expected one just the same. I could also see in their faces that a bullshit story about a buffalo eating Alexander Hamilton, but sparing Ulysses S. Grant and his clone, wasn’t going to fly. I had come here, to B31 through 60, to make jokes and fly, but I was all out of jokes, ones that made sense anyway.

“Here’s a pro tip,” I said. “Burbank exits from both the front and the rear of the plane. Head for the last row, and you’ll get off first.”

“All right you three,” the Southwest agent said. “It’s time to go to Burbank.”

I scanned my boarding pass.

“See you in Burbank, I will.”

Then I headed down the jetway for my short trip home.

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Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions. You’ve got answers.

1. Is Allison right? Are upgrades incompatible with flying Southwest?

2. What do you do to kill time before your flight?

3. Between the airport bars and the beverage service, drinking is a big part of flying. Meanwhile, flying with cannabis is illegal. But wouldn’t the friendly skies be a lot friendlier if society let stoners do their thing?

4. Are buffalo burgers tasty, or are they really just beef burgers because the buffalo are extinct?

5. I’m still working my way through Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Are you reading anything good?

1. Charging $9 plus tax for a “fun size” of M&Ms takes the fun out of those M&Ms.