Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (21 page)

After the gay ol’ times of the live
SModcast
at the International Bear Rendezvous were over, I took a cab to the airport. I was booked on a seven-ish o’clock flight. I still had two seats for the flight back. Southwest flights from Oakland to Burbank run hourly, and I was very early for my flight. So I figured I’d try to get on the 5:20 flight back to Los Angeles and my wife. I’d been surrounded by big, hairy dudes who look like me all afternoon, and it was time to get home and fuck the tall, skinny, dickless Schwalbach.

I went up to the counter and asked, “Is it possible to go standby on an earlier flight?” The lady at the ticketing counter was beyond irritated that I’d asked her to perform a tortuous task that’s likely explained in detail in her job description: help the customers, especially when they ask for your assistance.

Very disinterested, she handed me a slip of paper. “Here’s a pass that’ll get you down to the gate. They have to do it there.”

Likely because of the weak economy, not every gate has its own dedicated check-in desk anymore. Instead of every gate having a desk and an attendant or two, Southwest in Oakland has a desk that serves three different gates. It makes little sense: two people behind the counter serving three flights full of a hundred and fifty to two hundred people apiece, each with tons of questions, some trying to get on standby.

“I’m trying to get on the five twenty, and they gave me
this card that just says, ‘Hand over for boarding pass,’” I said when I finally got up to the counter. “Do I do that now?”

Without even being offered a cursory glance, I was told, “No, you’re fine.”

“They told me I was on a list up front. I just want to make sure I’m on that list. Because if a standby seat opens up, I really wanna get home.”

After I was assured I was on the list, I grabbed a personal pie from a California Pizza Kitchen express. I ate less than half, rolling over in my head, “That person who dealt with me before barely looked at me. Maybe I’ll try the other one …”

So I approached the counter again, and admittedly, I was acting like I hadn’t had the first conversation at the desk when I said, “Hi—am I on a list or something like that?”

The Southwest employee at the check-in desk? Let’s call her Ms. Panic. Ms. Panic said, “You are on a list but it’s a very, very packed flight. If everyone checks in, there’s only gonna be one extra seat left.”

“Great, I’ll take it!” I said. “I’ve got tickets for two seats, but I’m happy to do a single seat if I can go home on an earlier flight.”

And Ms. Panic looked at me, trying to express something very foreign to a nonterrorist such as myself. “Well, there’s the other issue. The safety issue.”

We were at an airport and she introduced the term
safety.
So naturally, I asked, “Al-Qaeda?”

“No—your armrests have to be able to …” Ms. Panic struggled to find the term.

I was so confused, I asked, “Am I sitting next to a door?
You need me to open the door if the plane goes down? I can do that. I’m ready. If I’m alive after the crash, I’ll happily open the door for everybody.”

But that’s not what it was. As she looked at me, tongue tied by corporate-speak, I recognized the expression on her face as one I’d been at the receiving end of many times over the course of my blubbery existence: She was a thin person dealing with a fat person, marveling over how the chubby had let himself go so badly.

“Oh—you think I bought two tickets ’cause I’m fat,” I said. “Ma’am, I am fat. I’ll be the first to tell you I’m fat, but I ain’t
that
fat yet—where I gotta buy two seats to fly on Southwest. I don’t buy two tickets because of my weight; I just don’t like people. I don’t wanna have to sit next to strangers. So please: If there is one seat, don’t worry about my other one. I just wanna get home.”

Her mouth said, “Okay,” but her face and body language screamed, “Fat’s fat, you fat piece of shit.” See, to thin people, all of us fat people look alike: We’re pigs who pile on more calories than we burn. Within the world of the eternally hungry, we tend to be a bit more understanding of uncontrollable urges and weakness of willpower. We even have acceptable degrees of obesity, so we
know
when we’ve passed
our
comfort number on the scale—a line that ranges far wider than it does for the normies. Thin folks would see ten pounds in a month as unacceptable weight gain. Fat people go for larger, rounder numbers: Fifty, one hundred, or two hundred pounds of weight gain is where we start to accept we’ve failed at fitness. Meanwhile, the bony world can’t process how lazy and insatiable we chubsters must be, as we don’t seem to notice we’ve let ourselves go. Believe
me, Skinny Minnies: We
know.
It’s the bane of our existence. But in order to keep our sanity and dignity, we move the line for ourselves much more liberally than the First Lady and Richard Simmons would like us to. It’s a matter of survival.

Most Americans are always looking to lose a few pounds, but fat folks spend their
lives
on a never-ending diet. Right about then, I was wishing I could’ve told these sizes queens and their bullshit, fat-cist airline to kick fucking rocks while I leapt atop Fat-cor, the pudgy dog-dragon, and took off into friendlier skies. Instead, I was forced to deal with Southwest Airlines, hoping there might be less judgment and more customer service somewhere in that plastic heart of a logo they stand behind.

So as the flight was about to close, Ms. Panic practically whispered, “Kevin Smith,” over the loudspeaker. Since I’m listening closely, I hear it and race to the desk. I hand over my two tickets and they hand me back two pieces of paper: One is my boarding pass, the other is a drink ticket. Southwest boards in letter groups, so if you pay an additional few bucks, you get to board earlier and they give you a free drink on the plane.

Ms. Panic handed me two documents, but only one of them was a boarding pass. I gave her two boarding passes for my later flight; she gave me one boarding pass and a drink ticket for the standby flight.

“This is only one boarding pass,” I said. “I had two tickets.”

“There’s only one seat left on the plane,” she snapped.

“I understand—but what do I do about the other ticket that I had?”

“There’s only one seat,” she said, waving me toward the Jetway ten or twenty yards from the counter. “Just get on the plane. You’re gonna miss the plane. The door’s gonna close.”

So finally, I put my foot down in the most polite way I could. I am, after all, representing my parents out here in the world, and Mom and Dad always told me, “Everyone deserves to be heard.” Years later, I’d add to that sentiment, “… no matter how crazy or full of shit they are.”

I’m not a confrontational or rude guy: “Death before discourtesy” is on my family’s coat of arms. But while I was raised very well, my manners don’t come from a completely altruistic place either: I just never want to give anyone cause to mutter, “There’s that fuckin’
Clerks
-guy asshole …” Folks tend to resent you if you’re one of those people who desires more than you’re given in life, and they hate it even more when you’re willing to work to make it a reality.

So I looked Ms. Panic in her harried, stressed-out eyes and went human being on her: “Ma’am, I understand the plane is leaving. I’m just looking for a little information here: I gave you two tickets, now I have one ticket. Where’d that money go?”

“It’ll just be credited to your account! Just go!” she barked at me, not even making eye contact. I hadn’t asked her to illustrate the Pythagorean theorem, I merely inquired about my second ticket—and here she is, snapping at me. It was so deflating and irritating.

But rather than snap right back at her, I went all Spock calm, reminding Ms. Panic, “I’m only asking a question, ma’am—about tickets I paid for already.”

She offered a halfhearted apology for being so brusque
and sent me to the plane. Once I was in the Jetway, there was a Southwest employee heading toward me with a clipboard. His expression was not warm as he asked me, “Whoa, whoa—who are you?”

“I’m the standby guy. They said I could board.”

And he said, “Well, are you memmememue?”

I couldn’t understand the last word in his sentence, so I sputtered something about not being clear on what he said. He called out to the guy taking tickets at the top of the Jetway, “Is this guy memmememue?”

“What’s that word mean, man?” I asked, befuddled, then tagged it with a joke to keep everyone in this apparently very stressful situation calm. “Am I being reclassified as fuckin’ luggage?”

Suddenly, Mr. Jetway turned into Mr. Hyde.

“What’d you say?!” he snapped, reacting as if I’d asked instead, “Can I shit in your mouth and fuck your wife or loved one?”

I repeated the joke, which is never a good sign: “Am I being reclassified as luggage, dude?”

Mr. Jetway stared at me coldly for a beat, then muttered, “I said
revenue
.”

“What does
revenue
mean?” I knew the traditional definition of the term, of course—just not the bullshit, corporate double-speak definition as bastardized by Southwest Airlines.

“
Revenue
means it’s not an air miles pass,” he said, offering the information as if I’d slapped it out of his nuts with a cruise ship mooring rope. “It means you paid for your ticket.”

“Then I’m revenue,” I proclaimed proudly, trying to lighten the mood. “I paid for my ticket.”

“He’s revenue,” Mr. Jetway told the friendly young flight attendant waiting in the doorway of the plane, who lit up like Christmas upon recognizing me.

“This is so cool!” she said in a respectful whisper as the happy camper headed back up the Jetway (at a suspiciously brisk pace).

I walked onto the plane and it was packed. Everybody else was already aboard, and there was only one open seat remaining: up front in the first row on the right-hand side. There were two very slight women already sitting in the three-seat row, with one empty seat between them, and one was an adorable, squishy old grandma, just a big, smiley prune, happy to still be aboveground. Older than fuck but adorable. The other woman seemed indifferent to my presence and maybe just a little disappointed that her empty seat buffer was disappearing. “
Hello!
” cooed the squishy old lady in such a way that I realized the entire hour-long flight was going to be spent listening to my aged seatmate reminisce about her first flight years prior with her college pals Orville and Wilbur.

I offered her a return greeting as I got ready to buckle my seat belt. It took a degree of sucking in the gut, but nothing troubling or noticeable to anyone but me, and no extender was required. Once the metal fastener caught and closed, I would not only be able to exhale, I could eat the free peanuts they’d be whipping around the cabin later, too.

That was when I saw Ms. Panic heading down the Jetway toward the door of our plane, eyes locked on me. She was so intense and full of purpose, for some strange reason, I assumed she was coming to inform me that my mother had died.

“Mr. Smith. Hi.” Ms. Panic smiled as she crouched in front of me in the bulkhead, once she was on the plane. “Um … we have kind of a problem …”

“My mother died?” I said, finishing her thought. Her eyes flashed momentary confusion at my assumption, until she remembered why she was really there.

“No,” Ms. Panic said in a quiet voice. “The captain says that you can’t sit here.”

“Why?” I asked. And I was
really
asking, because I had no clue. It never occurred to me this was a weight-related issue because I’m not the size normally deemed problematic in matters of public transportation.

And as delicately as she could put it in front of the two women sitting on either side of me who were now under the assumption they were sitting beside a terrorist, Ms. Panic said, “Well, no. It’s just, it’s a safety issue. It’s a security measure.”

“Wait—safety? Security?” I asked, suddenly flipping the script and wondering if Ms. Panic was actually some kind of female Jack Bauer, trying to save
me
from the mother/daughter tag-team terrorists sitting on either side of me. And as I mentally prepared to go all Sam Jackson on these would-be, distaff troublemakers in travelers’ clothing flanking me and get these motherfuckin’
mothers
off that motherfuckin’ plane … Ms. Panic lowered the boom. Or the armrests, as it were.

“Mr. Smith, if you can’t lower the armrests, then we’re not … We can’t let you …”

And after a second, I understood what she was getting at; this was, after all, the woman who had already profiled me earlier. What she
wanted
to say but couldn’t was, “We
think you’re too fat to fly, so you have to buy two seats. But this flight’s already oversold and you can’t buy an additional seat right now, so you’re gonna have to get off the plane. In front of all these people.”

That was when the terror crashed over me like a wave: the sinking feeling that everyone was seeing this and everyone was guessing what the flight attendant was talking to me about. And as if I was coping with the death of my dignity at the hands of this uniformed quarter-pounder working for a corporation that can barely mask its utter contempt for the overweight, I went through most of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief—the first being denial.

“This can’t be happening,” I said to Ms. Panic. “Look—the armrest can go down, ma’am!” And I lowered and lifted the armrests to support my claim.

“I’m sorry,” she offered. “Captain’s orders.”

The next stage for me was bargaining, as I turned to the women on either side of me for support against the mongrel horde.

“Ask these ladies!” I said, turning to the middle-aged woman sitting on my left. “Ma’am, am I squishing you?”

“It’s only an hour flight,” was her response. Not exactly the ringing endorsement I was looking for, but hey, at this point, I’d have taken any assist I could get.

With that in mind, I turned to the little old lady next to me who couldn’t hear shit and asked loudly, “Ma’am, am I squishing you?”

And she asked, “
Whaaaat?
” in such a cartoonishly old-lady fashion, I thought she was gonna reach into her granny bag and pull out one of those ancient hearing aids that looks
like those equally ancient phonograph speakers. So I repeated, “
Squiiiishhhh …,
” while making the lemon face and pulling my arms in tightly. Only some half-assed American sign language was gonna get us through this quagmire.