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October 15, 2005

A Busy Week

It has been an extremely long, exhausting but exhilarating week. It started from last Thursday when it was time to travel to the Bay Area, California for my friends Steve and Amy's wedding.

Weddings are interesting moments. They are filled with periods of intense, ostentatious relaxation as well as emotionally charged points of terror and anxiety. Luckily, this wedding was primarily filled with the former variety: we toured the Sharffen Berger Chocolate Factory in Berkeley, roamed around wine country, played cards, and stayed in a nice inn.

Just about all of the negativity that weekend was either the result of my own doings or the doings on the part of the airlines. I had managed to drink a mammoth amount of beer at the bachelor's party and ended up having to take a drunken stroll around Sonoma around three in the morning in order to walk it off. The next morning, I awoke with a truly profound hangover. I guess I am just not professional when it comes to drinking. Likewise about the airlines it could be said that they are not very professional when it comes to flying.

Sparing the details of that particular Monday, it was important to be back on Tuesday in order to shoot our episode of Decorating Cents with Joan Steffend in order to have the kitchen made-over. However, our Frontier Airlines flight out of San Francisco had not even arrived yet. It had not even arrived yet from Denver and was delayed at least five hours. The airline could not decide if the flight would be continuing on to Minneapolis or not.

If it did and not barring any additional complications when it came time to reach snowed-in Denver, the new arrival time was set sometime after 3:00am. The HGTV camera crew was set to arrive at 8:30am. This drove me to try and be creative in getting home.

Having tried to reach the crew and notify them of the delay and failing I left the terminal for the ticketing agent to petition for alternatives. Using some magic I learned from my father I negotiated my way into a flight coupon that would be valid on other partner airlines.

The first airline I tried on my ticketing trick-or-treat was NWA who left me standing at the counter for 20 minutes before emerging from the back office only to inform me that they no longer honored "type 120" coupons from Frontier and that I would need to return to them in order to get the coupon re-issued in a more generic form called a "FIM". She assured me the work was mearly clerical and their part and would be no trouble at all.

An hour of waiting in lines and haggling yielded no FIM, and no further advice. I had the poor misfortune of getting the woman who hated her job and hated everybody else by extension and she even threatened to void the coupon I had because the last man was mearly, "doing me a favor I did not deserve." All the while the flight had been delayed even further. It was looking bad. The thought of an angry television crew standing outside the door of my empty house made me nervous.

I returned to my ticket trick-or-treating and finally found an airline that would be willing to take the coupons from Frontier. America West finally took me in and re-issued tickets to fly through Las Vegas. The final arrival time into Minneapolis was now set at 4:10am, but at least I would be getting there.

The good news is, I ended up winning cab fare home on the nickel slot machines in the airport in Vegas. The bad news is, I have positively no recollection of the filming of the episode. After landing in Minneapolis, there was just enough time for an hour and a half nap and a shower before the crew arrived. At least most of the house was clean. My only regret was not having cleaned the stove before leaving to California. Joan told us that a little dirt makes for better T.V.

It was rather surreal at times to have eight or nine people in this tiny house, poking around filming and recording things and trying to define, stereotype, and make you sound interesting to the at-home audience. It is going to be weird to see what a lanky dork I look like on camera. The magic of television.

The kitchen however did turn out beautifully. New paint, new shelving and storage, less clutter and more space. "All this for under $500!" Also, the magic of television.

While driving back from a victory dinner at Safari Restaurant, a place filled with warmth, good friends, and excellent food, we were waived down by a couple of large looming figures standing cold and angry in the rain.

I rolled down the window and inquired what was going on and this man told me that his car quit, he thought it was the alternator, and that he wanted a jump.

There is an ever fine line between street smarts and compassion. I returned with my car, a pair of jumper cables, and a Maglite and hoped my compassion would be met with open arms.

The man introduced himself as Darren. He was over 6'5" and pushing 250 pounds, with short dark-brown hair, thin mustache, and sharp eyes. The woman he was with was short, squat, with rough features and a soft rounded accent I immediately recognized as from a Native American reservation.

I pulled up my car nose-to-nose with his, flipped on the Maglite, and took out the cables. He told me the car wouldn't start and it was making an odd noise. I asked from where and as his finger met the beam of my flashlight I saw that the nail had been torn from the finger. I asked him how it happened and he said that he had mistakenly slammed the hood of the car down upon it a half an hour ago. It was still bleeding.

I asked them to turn on their headlights so I could judge how strong their battery was. They were dim. I hooked up the jumper cables to my car, started it, and connected the cables to his vehicle which made the lights brighten. He barked at his wife to try and turn the engine over. Nothing emerged but a sad little noise from the component that he had pointed at with that bloody finger.

Everything I have learned about cars I have learned from Tom Waits and and The Ghosts of Saturday Night, "You know it could be your distributor and it could be your coil." In this very Tom Waits vintage 70's Mercury, I guessed the round cylindrical object with one gozintah and many gozouttas that sounded like a coffee grinder was the culprit; it was probably the distributor and not the coil.

I softly informed them that I did not think the car would be going anywhere that night and offered them a ride home. The man then barked at this wife, "bring 'em the backpack!" She brought over the backpack and opened it for me and saw that it was filled with cutlets of meat from the local supermarket chain, "we'll give you some meat for a ride home!"

I told him that wasn't necessary and asked him where he lived. He lamented to me that the car was not even his, but his 500 pound friend who would break his neck when he found out that he had left his car so far from home. He said he lived on the northeast side of town, just past the University. The three of us climbed into my Mini Cooper.

He pointed at the center dash speedometer, silhouetting the crooked tip of his finger, "what can you get on that? The world-wide high-speed Internet?" he chuckled to himself.

I inquired what happened to his finger, and he said that it was broken and that he dropped a drill on it a few days ago. Under the street lamps I could see that it was still freshly swollen. I wondered how many more mangled digits he possessed.

When we hit the highway his mind began to run about how to tell his friend that his car was broken, "he's going to kill me, goddammit...he's going to kill me." And he pleaded that we stop at his friend's house, then his mother's house so that he could plead for money, "my per-cap from the casino doesn't come in 'till this weekend and he is going to kill me!"

His trick-or-treating from family and friends for money proved not to be as successful as my trick-or-treating for tickets from the airlines. As we neared the driveway to his house, he pleading to me with an ever faint whiff of sweet alcohol on his breath that made me hesitate, "can you help us out at all? I mean you've been sah nice and all...but anything?" By the time he turned around to expose the Leech Lake reservation emblem on his back to motioned for the backpack of meat again I had already produced the $20.50 that was in my pocket.

Driving home, all I could think about was the gulf of magnitude between his problems and my problems. It had been a busy week.

Posted by jordanh at October 15, 2005 12:07 PM

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