OK, I am so sorry that this post took so long, but I am seriously still recovering from that reunion last weekend. This is what happens when you get old—you think you can stay up all night every night with your friends, and then a few days later it becomes clear that oh, you cannot do this. This is also why I could never, ever take another red-eye flight. When I do that, I am destroyed for three or four days after. Yikes! That’s WITH my newfound white blood cells!
Needless to say, I am back on the east coast safe and sound, didn’t mean to worry you with that last post about the aborted takeoff. The plane did end up taking off after all, although it did arrive much later than expected, so I went to sleep at 3 or 4 am (as if I had taken a redeye), and have only now begun to feel like myself again.
Here is a brief summary of the journey:
I tried to get a flight back last Monday, but apparently the devil arrived in Los Angeles that day as well, bringing scorching heat and pestilence. And by scorching heat, I mean to say that it was hotter in Los Angeles than in my hometown of Palm Desert, where temperatures regularly exceed 115 degrees, people.
I had some things to take care of in L.A., so I left the desert in the morning on Monday with the full intention of catching a plane that afternoon and being back on the east coast late Monday night. Did that happen?
Oh no–no it did not.
When did I finally end up getting home, you ask?
That would be Tuesday night (or actually Wednesday) at like 3:00 in the morning. How did this happen?
Let’s start with the heat. Apparently Monday’s heat wave heated up the brains of already aggressive and cranky Angelenos to the point where there was even more traffic than usual, making it impossible to get around town, pushing termites out of buildings and into the air (I’m not kidding), and generally indicated to me that I should GET OUT OF TOWN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE while simultaneously making it impossible for me to do so, since everything was moving in slow motion and by 4:00 (the time of the last flight I could take), I was nowhere near the airport.
Yeah, so—a paradox. Los Angeles would like me to leave, and I agree. However, there is no way to actually get out of there, and now, every choice seems like the wrong choice, and I feel like crying. I have experienced this type of Los Angeles-related quicksand inertia before, and it literally makes me want to get in my car and drive until I get out of the state of California.
I managed to avoid this impulse simply because it was so hot and I was so swamped with work, so I went to a hotel to wait it out.
The next day I get up early (for me) to make a 1:30pm flight that gets in at 10:30pm. Miraculously I wake up on time, drive to the airport, return my rental car, and check in, all with plenty of time to spare and even though there are seventeen million traffic jams at 10:00 am for absolutely no reason other than the fact that it is Los Angeles and it's 100 degrees and why not?
So, I'm at the airport, at the terminal, at the gate, on the plane–this is all looking promising! Cell phones off, cabin door closed, first in line for takeoff, taxiing, speeding up, bracing yourself for that weird moment when you become airborne, and then….
Boom! The slamming on of the airplane's brakes. Not once, but TWICE. If you’ve never experienced this, it feels JUST like when you have to slam on the brakes at a stop sign you didn’t see, ONLY YOU’RE GOING 400 MILES AN HOUR.
Aborted take-off attempt– that's what they call it, followed by a situation called “hot brakes,” where the airplane’s brakes overheated from stopping a plane going that fast, so they have to wait for them to cool down before they can try another takeoff. There may have been a tiny bit of screaming (not by me, even though I know that’s what you’re thinking). Everyone is looking at each other all scared, and we're all waiting for an announcement as to what, exactly, just happened.
Then five minutes go by –nothing. No announcement. Nothing. Then someone yells “HELLO, WE’D LIKE AN UPDATE,” which makes me laugh, so the head flight attendant guy gets on to say he has no idea what is going on, so this is super and makes us all feel a lot better.
Then the plane, which has been dead stopped on the tarmac, slowly makes a left and lumbers like an injured elephant back to the gate. Everyone kind of collectively groans, because this really doesn’t seem like a good sign. Then five minutes go by, and then, the pilot, who literally sounds like the guy who does the voiceover for the Outback Steakhouse, gets on and tells us not to worry, mate, that there seems to have been a computer glitch, and that this glitch caused the automatic brakes to shut the flight down, and that it SEEMS like everything is ok.
Then the woman next to me takes a Xanax.
Then the woman behind me says “Hey, is that Xanax? That’s a good idea. I’m going to take one of mine.”
Now the whole plane is high.
Then like six engineers are outside the plane, checking it over, and it’s getting very warm, and we’re all looking at each other nervously, like “Is this a good idea? Was that a sign? How would we know if that was a sign? Should we get off?” and what’s funny is that the litmus test we’re all using is the flight crew—they don’t seem scared, and so we hope everything is fine.
Then another half an hour goes by, and by this time we’re all just up and walking around and talking to each other, because what are they going to do, call the FAA? WE’RE ALREADY GROUNDED BECAUSE OF A MYSTERIOUS GLITCH. We’re on edge, man! Also, and this is so Los Angeles, while I’m waiting in line for the bathroom a woman tells me that she has good news, she’s talked to her psychic about the flight, and her psychic has given the all-clear for takeoff. And literally, I am so desperate to leave Los Angeles city limits, I am like “ok then—good enough for me!”
Then there’s an announcement that one of the passengers has asked to get off the plane, and so we are going back to the gate to he can get off, and we all have to sit down so they can move the plane twenty feet, and no one is very excited about this, and we all want free stuff to compensate us for waiting.
Then the plane pulls up to the gate and they open the doors.
Then, no lie, THIRTY OR FORTY PEOPLE GET UP AND RUN OFF THE PLANE. People are dropping like flies, man. Clearly some sort of group mentality has set in, but amazingly, I am not part of it. For some reason, even though I hate flying, the thought of getting off the plane, getting another rental car, getting another hotel, and waiting for another flight was much more odious to me than just waiting it out and seeing if they were going to fix the glitch so we could take off. Believe it or not, even though I am generally a nervous flier, I have been involved in some hairy situations (one of them involving a one-engine emergency landing through some killer turbulence in the Rockies, in which I took so many tranquilizers I think I actually had an out of body Courtney Love experience), so I am not all that scared.
On a side note, I totally don’t mind that those people got off the plane. I actually got off a plane once because I had a bad gut feeling. Nothing happened to that plane, but if I’d been on it, who knows? So, I’m just saying, I respect people’s choices, but I do wish they had just gotten off the plane rather than asking the flight attendant if they could get refunds and rebook their tickets while they’re standing there, still on our flight. ON OR OFF, PEOPLE. SOME OF US WANT TO GO.
For me, though, it’s true, the pain of staying in Los Angeles for another day was actually great enough to compel me to r
emain on a possibly broken plane, even though a bunch of other people got off. Oh yes, about this time I turn my phone back on and start playing with it, and realize that internet celebrity Justine Ezarik (iJustine), who I actually know from a couple of years ago, is on the same plane, and she is live-Tweeting the madness. If you don’t know Justine, she is a lovely person and a great designer, and you can learn all about her right here. Hi Justine! I think if you look back a week in her Twitter stream, you can find the play-by-play. Around this time I also learn (from another passenger) that Law & Order actor Richard Belzer (the Belz!) is on the plane with his little dog, and the first thing that goes through my mind is “Wow, I bet that dog is going to pee all over him.”
Shortly after the mass plane exodus, the plane is deemed "perfectly fine, maybe even better than a regular plane because it’s been checked over so many times,” and we are assured that we are taking off as soon as the “hot brakes” cool off, only then it becomes clear that we are not taking off soon, and why?
Because now there is paperwork to be filled out, for the stoppage, and the “hot brakes” situation, and (this will make you laugh) for the 40 people who left the plane, for now it is too late to remove their luggage, and there is apparently a whole bunch of paperwork for EACH PERSON who is not actually on the plane but whose checked bag is going with us to New York.
I wish I was kidding, but I am not. Eventually we took off, and I’m not going to lie, the moment before we were airborne was probably the most tense (tensest?) moment of all of our lives, and we all had our butts clenched, but we made it into the air and the flight was actually really good, and we were only about 90 minutes late, despite all the drama at takeoff. Of course, this means we’re landing at midnight, which means it’s going to be the crack of dawn before I get my stuff, get home, open all my mail, and settle down enough to go to sleep, but for now we’re all thanking our respective deities that we even made it.
Until we got there, and then there was MORE PAPERWORK FOR THAT BAGGAGE THAT WAS STILL ON THE PLANE, so they had to find all those bags before they gave us ours back. This take another hour or so, during which a clearly drunk girl who I later start to suspect might be a prostitute but who says she has a dog-grooming business starts engaging me in a David Lynchian conversation about how long the flight took, and where is our luggage, and did I see Richard Belzer, and how she is so drunk, and then she goes back to her group of friends, one of whom is absolutely a pimp wearing a set of medical scrubs, and one of whom is a girl with a pirate’s eye patch.
Meanwhile, Stephan has circled the airport in the car no less than twenty times waiting for me, listening to a repeat of the Leonard Lopate show recorded earlier in the day about all of the intense dangers of cellphones, which is ironic, because I called him so many times on the cellphone to complain how much it sucked that I couldn’t leave the baggage area because my luggage was being held hostage by the airline that my main phone went dead so I had to start calling him on my backup cellphone (don’t hate, I own an internet company, I have two phones, ok?)
I did end up getting home at 3am. It has been six (count them) SIX days since then and I am still a little bit jetlagged, mostly because before that epic journey I had been out all night for three days. Overall, though, I had a wonderful time, and the whole journey was worth it—not only to see some long lost friends, a pimp, a girl wearing an eyepatch, Richard Belzer, and a woman who relies on a psychic for travel advice, but also to get out of the flaming inferno that is Los Angeles.