President Me (16 page)

2. NO MORE USING THE BACK OF MY SEAT AS A HANDLE TO HOIST YOURSELF UP.
I'm trying to take a nap and the jerk-off behind me is yanking my headrest backward to get out of his chair. That's the small piece of real estate I'm renting to sleep upon, not the handle Grandma uses to get off the toilet. Here's my solution: All planes will now have the dangling loop strap you used to see on subways for people to steady themselves. They'll hang from the top of the cabin so you can lift yourself with that instead of my hair.

3. ALL SEATS MUST RECLINE.
The closest I've ever come to being raped is sitting in that nonreclining last-row seat on the Southwest flight and having the seat in front of me lean back into my knees. I don't see why we can't just move every seat up a sixteenth of an inch so the back row can recline. Well, that nonreclining back-row seat is now illegal in my America. The problem is that the airlines are losing money and want to cram as much humanity into their vessels as possible, just like the slave ships of old. But unlike those Nubian warriors, we're getting fatter by the day. And ruder. This is a terrible combination, especially in a flying tin can.

4. RESPECT THE AREA AROUND YOUR SEAT.
Even when you're not literally spilling over into my seat, everyone has become so narcissistic and horrible that they have no awareness of the limited space on the plane. I was flying back from Phoenix not too long ago and I was in that weird row near the exit door that only has two seats—an aisle seat and a middle seat with space on the left for the door. I sat in the aisle seat. The guy next to me was sitting with his legs spread out like they were the Hatfields and McCoys. It was like his balls hated each other. The space you have is clearly delineated by the split on the seats in front of you. This dick had his knee way past the Mason-Dixon line. I'm six two, so there's not a lot of room to begin with and he had the whole open space to the left for his overage. It wasn't like he was asleep or had his earbuds in either; he was wide-awake and taking up residence in my space and could hear me steaming. I decided, “Fuck it, I'll open my legs too,” and pressed my knee against his as a signal. No response. I was thinking, “Are we seriously not going to have a conversation about this? Do you not feel the warm thing with a pulse mashed up against you?” I pressed more flesh with this guy than I did any of my high school girlfriends and he never budged. Remember when just clearing your throat was enough to shame someone? You have to hit people with an oar now. I feel like I'm in a staring contest with someone who has no eyelids.

It is nice when you can pit the fat guy against the rude guy. I was flying once with Dr. Drew and we hadn't booked seats next to each other. So when we got on the plane I asked the guy who was preventing me from being able to do a Bloody Mary–fueled complaint fest in Drew's ear the whole flight, “Excuse me, could you swap seats with me so that I could sit with my friend?” He just said, “No.” No explanation. Just a straight-up “no.” I then went to my seat one row back. As I buckled in I saw a fat guy come waddling down the aisle. And when I say fat I mean if John Goodman ate Adele fat. The plane was rocking back and forth with each step. As he walked toward the row containing the cock who wouldn't switch seats with me I thought, “Please, dear God, let him sit next to that asshole. Please.” It may be the one prayer that God ever answered because the guy plopped his ample carriage down next to the dick who now was regretting not moving. I shouted up to him, “Good. Enjoy.” I'm not sure if the larger gentleman knew what I was talking about but the other guy got the message.

5. IF YOU'RE IN COACH, STAY IN COACH.
I know a lot of you are thinking, “Fuck you, Richie Rich.” The truth is the vast majority of time I fly Southwest or JetBlue (of course, all of this is going to change once I am president!), neither of which has first class. But when I'm flying with an airline that does, I want the benefits that come with the extra cash I coughed up for the ticket. Having a lower passenger-to-toilet ratio is one of those benefits. I can't tell you how many flights I've been on where people from coach (or as us folks in the upper crust like to call it, steerage) push aside the mosquito net that passes for a curtain to come shit up the first-class head. I was on Virgin Atlantic recently and they had a magnet-tipped velvet rope separating the classes and someone came up, pulled the magnet from the wall, and waltzed right up to piss all over our seat. It's sad that we'll eventually get to the point where airlines have to hire a big black guy with a clipboard to work as a first-class bouncer.

6. YOUR BAGS GO IN YOUR BIN, NOT MINE.
There is complete and utter lawlessness when it comes to the overhead compartments. I've had to gate-check luggage because someone put their stuff in my bin. Shouldn't this just be a given? The space above YOUR seat is YOUR space. The bin above MY seat is MY space. Why should I have to walk down fourteen aisles swimming against the current like a salmon, fighting with the drink cart to get my neck pillow? This is a tightly controlled environment, they tell you when you can sit, when you can stand, when you can piss, and when you can drink. Yet enforcing this rule seems to be a nonstarter. When you rent a car you rent the trunk as well, correct? What if you got the car at Hertz and it was just full of someone else's shit? What if the dealer was just like “Yeah, I'm not sure whose hockey equipment that is. Sorry.”

This is the micro version of the macro “narcissism is ruining us” argument I laid down at the beginning of this book. These are the same people who are asking the politicians what they are going to do for them personally, not the country at large. Nowhere is this scourge more evident in air travel than in the rise of dogs and bare feet on planes.

7. KEEP YOUR FUCKING SHOES ON.
I shouldn't have to say this, but on my last three flights I've had bare feet come poking through between the seats. When did we get so simultaneously casual and disgusting? I blame this on the taking off of the shoes at airport security. We're so used to being barefoot now on the airport floor we just keep the shoes off on the plane too. So after mashing your bare feet into the used gum, sweat, and dirt on the security-screening-area carpet (ironically the world's most disgusting surface is the one we're forced to tread on barefoot), you then wipe them all over the seat I'll be occupying? No. And every now and again I'll see some special aeronautical assholery where the guy has somehow pulled off a yoga move and gotten his bare feet on the wall or ceiling of the cabin. Since I've been complaining about this, people have been tweeting me pictures of these atrocities. One was a guy turning the overhead light switch on with his toe, which is worse plane behavior than anything the nineteen hijackers did on 9/11. That guy should be raped with a rolled-up
SkyMall
catalog. One of the best pictures a fan sent was the guy at a major airport—you could see the moving sidewalk in front of him and a 777 in the background—in the full downward-facing-dog yoga position, which in this case should have been called the Downward Facing Douche. His shoes were off and he was . . . ​wait for it . . . ​shirtless. He was in a major metropolitan airport, not the shitty detached garage he converted into a yoga “studio.” If you count socks and shoes, he was wearing less than a third of his clothes. Someone should have taken a running start from behind him and kicked him in the nuts like they were going for a fifty-five-yard field goal.

This is not just an annoyance. This is a safety risk. The point of the “laptop case must be safely stowed safely” bullshit is because that case can get in the way if there's an emergency. What about the bitch in 28F who's taken off her UGGs and placed them in the aisle and has her bare feet on my seat. Is this not an impediment to me getting to the emergency exit? And is there a worse plan for you than to be barefoot when the plane catches fire or if we need to make an emergency landing in the winter? You'll be standing on the frozen tarmac of O'Hare in your bare feet. You'll be shoeless like John McClane in
Die Hard 1
but in the setting of
Die Hard 2
.

If you tried to go barefoot on a ride at Disneyland, they wouldn't let you. Why on a plane post-9/11? There are no laws on this because we could have never imagined this world. If you went back a century and tried to convince lawmakers at the time that this is something their successors would have to consider, they would throw down their top hats, shout “Poppycock!,” and swing their pocket watch at your head.

Do you remember back when bare feet were disgusting? Back when we had something called a civilization? This barefootedness has crept up on us. We didn't make Dr. Scholl the surgeon general. This is just us becoming more narcissistic. Every time you go to the Starbucks or the smoothie place, you'll see the ass clown with his bare feet on the table. I'm putting my bagel there in twenty minutes, man. What's your plan? You gonna put your tootsies up on the table, lean back, and grab a little shut-eye? The world is not your living room. I'd like to pick my nose wherever I want and on a hot day I'd like to just be in my Jockeys, but we have a society. So slide your feet back into your Crocs and stow them safely under the seat in front of you or I'm going to stow a size-twelve steel-toed work boot up your ass.

There are only two bright spots to all of this. First, if you're one of the many millions of males out there with a foot fetish, it's game on. This is the Golden Age. You must be walking around with a constant erection. Every flight and every Starbucks has turned into your Playboy Mansion. Second, this gives me an excuse to include my Crocs joke. Wearing Crocs is like getting blown by a guy. It feels great until you look down and realize that you're gay.

It occurs to me to that this non-shoe-wearing is the domain of rich white people. Blue-collar people don't do this. They might end up on a flight wearing a mustard-stained wife-beater, but they still have the dignity to keep their shoes on. This is the hipster dude working on the MacBook Pro while sipping a double-skim, light-foam, extra-hot soy latte or his performance-artist wife who boards the plane with her “service” dog because she has irritable bowel syndrome.

8. JUST LEAVE YOUR PETS AT HOME.
That's my biggest plane pet peeve, and it's a literally a
pet
peeve. I was on a flight from Dallas to Tucson in first class and the woman next to me had a little mutt with her. If there's anything that says “first class,” it's inhaling dander and dog farts for six hours. I put on an Academy Award–worthy performance, asking this woman about her dog, saying that I was interested because my wife and I were thinking about getting another dog, but really I just wanted to make fun of her onstage that night in Tucson. I asked her what her “service dog” was for, and she said anxiety. Bitch, that's what the airport Chili's is for. Have a couple of “service beers” before the flight like me and other normal people. We all have a little anxiety before getting on a plane. I paid a bunch of extra money and I can't even get a Bloody Mary before the flight takes off, but this cunt can bring Benji on with her because she has a note from her doctor stating that she's a fucking nut job? It's a great society we've crafted. We've decided to bend over backward for these bat-shit bitches. That's what this is, a personality disorder. We should create a separate airline for these people—Narcissistic Personality Disorder Airlines. “NPD Air. Come fly the crazy skies.” And how about that note from the doctor? Here's my rule—you should have to get a note from
my
doctor to bring your damn dog on board.

Ten minutes later, as the flight from Dallas was still boarding, the anxiety dog was standing in the aisle when another service dog came on board, heading to coach. This one was a seizure-alert dog. By the way, I asked Dr. Drew how a seizure-alert dog works, and he had no idea. When I wouldn't let it go, he thought for a while and said, “The dog, it can't predict a seizure, but maybe it would alert someone if the owner were having a seizure?” I'm not sure how that would go. The little shit would run up to first class start tugging at my pant leg, and I'd say, “What's that boy? The woman in 26B is having a seizure?” No, I'd kick the thing back into coach. But sure enough the seizure-alert dog and the anxiety dog started going at it. They were scrapping in the aisle of first class. I was about to ask the stewardess to break a hundred so I could throw down some money like Michael Vick.

Here's why this makes me want to rush the cockpit and bring the plane down. Fifteen minutes after we took off, I looked over at the lady with the anxiety disorder and she was fast asleep with her canine companion sitting atop her ample gut. Meanwhile, I was getting yelled at by the stewardess for having my backpack on my lap. My backpack. This was a threat
so
great it had to be stowed under the seat, but two feet away her furry fart machine—which was the exact same size as my backpack—was happily breaking wind and spreading Lyme disease.

And now I'm seeing “Service Animal Relief Area” signs in airports all over the country. No smoking and no shampoo over 3.5 ounces, but there's a place for your pooch to take a shit after a long flight. Our founding fathers would never stop vomiting if they saw this. Like all problems in our society, I have come up with a solution: I'm going to have Dr. Drew write me a note that says I have a disorder and I can only fly when accompanied by my service pelican, Gilligan. Then, he'll just roam up and down the plane gulping down these little service dogs.

Other animals must be pissed when they see how we treat dogs. Possums must be like “All we do is get chased around with brooms. We're furry, we don't bother anyone. WTF?” My dog has a better life than 99 percent of the people on this planet. That's why coyotes eat little dogs: envy. They're scavenging out of Dumpsters, while Paris Hilton's dog gets carried around in a purse and onto a first-class flight.