I get to the Des Moines airport at seven in the morning for a nine o’clock flight that’s supposed to take me to Denver and from Denver to Winnipeg. It’s Thursday. I’m playing a show on Friday. At the ticket counter they look at the itinerary a little funny but don’t say much to me about it, and they hand me my boarding pass and I’m on my way. In the Denver airport, where I’m supposed to have about two hours to kill, I find the Air Canada check-in to get my boarding pass for Winnipeg. Oops -- that flight’s cancelled. Permanently. No flight from Denver to Winnipeg at eleven in the morning. No flight from Denver to Winnipeg until eight at night, actually. It’s ten a.m. Damn. Wish I’d have known. Wish they’d looked a little more closely at the itinerary back in Des Moines. There are, as I see it, two options now: hang around the airport for twelve hours, or go into the city and hang out until it’s time to come back to the airport. Lucky for me that I’ve got a lazy streak or I probably would have caught a cab into the city so that I could fling fecal matter at Mile High Stadium, for which I probably would have been arrested and charged, although I am certain that my fellow Raiders fans would have busted me out of jail and carried me through the streets of Denver on their shoulders. But my lazy streak and my high tolerance for boredom dictated that I stay in the airport. For twelve hours. Read magazines? Check. Read books? Check. New York Times? Even the classifieds? Check. Rent a DVD player and watch some movie in which the big-business model of rock journalism is presented as the realization of the form’s potential, resisting the urge to mutter and wag my finger at the tiny screen? Check. Buckets of coffee? You got it, Cap’n. Walk from one end of the enormous terminal to the other? Check. Again? Check. Again? Check. Again? Check. Sit staring at hands? Check. Food? Yes. More? Check. By now it’s about six-thirty and it’s time to find the gate, so I do, and I meet up with a guy named Ted who’s playing on the same bill with me up in Winnipeg, and we shoot the breeze for a while as flight delays are announced. No big deal, I guess -- what’s another hour when I’ve been here for nine hours already? -- but the delays keep coming, and word begins to spread among the would-be passengers in the waiting area that there’s a tear in one of the wings, and Ted and I are talking about this and that and the other thing and he says, “You don’t think I’ll need a passport to get into Canada, do you?” and I say that I think that actually he will, and in my heart I’m thinking if I didn’t have my passport with me I wouldn’t even bother trying to get through, because Canadian customs people are pretty notorious about not wanting to let people in, especially if they’re carrying a guitar, which Ted is. About this time they announce that the flight’s been cancelled and there won’t be another one until tomorrow, so they’re flying us all to Chicago at eleven o’clock, and then they’ll put us up in a Raddison until daybreak, at which point they’ll fly us to Winnipeg. We all herd ourselves down to the next gate, fly to the City With Big Shoulders, sleep two or three hours in a room much nicer than most of us would ever have paid for, and wake up with the sun to get down to the terminal. All’s well that ends well, right? Except that coming through customs, both Ted and myself are pointed in the direction of the we’d-like-to-have-a-word-with-you line. I don’t travel with my own guitar, so I’m unarmed, so to speak, and I wait in line about forty-five minutes before telling the customs agent that I work in psychiatric health care, which is true, and that I’m attending a music festival, which is also true. And he lets me through. Ted, though, was yanked from the line and taken off to a room with a couple of customs agents. Both Ted and I are being picked up by a guy named Blair, who’s waiting for me when I get through, and we wait around for another hour waiting to see if Ted’s going to make it or not, and Blair tries to ask the customs people about it but they give him the distinct impression that it’s a grave mistake to bug them about this kind of thing, so we leave and go to his place. On the way I learn that I’m scheduled to do an instore at a record & video place that afternoon. I am completely exhausted and don’t remember agreeing to play any instores, but what am I going to do, say “No, I’m too tired?” I am a team player and I came to play. Blair calls the airport on his cell phone every so often to check up and finally gets a phone call from Ted saying that the customs people have discovered that he’s a musician, and that he’s scheduled to play that night but hasn’t got a work visa, so if he’s going to be allowed to pass through he has to buy one, which costs hundreds of dollars. Ted hasn’t got that kind of money on him. Blair bails him out and they show up at the instore just as the fifteen hours I’d spent in airports and the total time I’d spent in transit over the previous thirty-six hours and the are catching up with me and I’m just about to faint in the middle of the second chorus to “Nine Black Poppies” played unamplified to a wonderful audience of fifteen or twenty attentive Canadian folks who are probably making bets on whether or not I’m actually going to make it to the end of the song. At the end of the set, there’s Ted, looking a little worse for wear but happy to be here, and he’s got a story about spending three hours in a room getting asked the same questions over and over -- “Why do you have a guitar? Are you playing somewhere in town?” -- until one of the customs agents, thumbing through a newspaper, found the advertisement for the show, and since Ted plays under his own name, the advertisement means he’s doomed, as he’s been saying for the last few hours: “No, I’m not playing anywhere in town, I’m just up here to see friends.” Blair shows up at the airport and has to pay cash money to get Ted through or else they’ll send him back to Chicago, and his passport gets flagged so that he probably won’t be able to go back to Canada, like, ever. All of which, in the end, just lends more support to Last Plane to Jakarta’s central thesis, to wit: advertising is a major social evil whose unforeseen consequences can bode no good. |
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