MY PLANE CRASH…ISH

“We — we have an indication of a problem. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem. Just a… an indication…. Flight attendants prepare for landing.”

That was the sentence issued forth from the captain of FLIGHT 1063 from Chicago to LAX on Wednesday, October 14th.

Now, other than the obvious, there were many things wrong with the above declaration. For starters, it wasn’t uttered by a pilot from the United States. The accent was eerily European, perhaps even British. I’d been conditioned over the past 20 years to hear that distinctly American, Capt. John Steele voice come over the PA…soothing, deep… the type of gentle bass that tranquilizes you to the point where you want to take a huge, steaming dump — YOU know the voice! (On an unrelated note, I’m convinced that the aforementioned “bowel-relaxing” voice is at least partly responsible for my incessant plane flatulence).

What made it extra wrong was the fact that the voice stammered. The captain of a plane may do a lot of comforting, Halls-mentholyptus-style ‘Uhhhhhh’s’…. but a stammer? Never…

The passengers on the flight already knew something was wrong previous to the announcement over the intercom.

The Eddie Murphy travesty, ‘IMAGINE THAT!’ had been playing for approximately 54 seconds before the audio cut and the plastic screens retreated ominously back into the ceiling. For a brief second, I suspected the American Airlines plane felt guilty for playing such a crappy movie and the mechanical reverse was a ‘mea culpa’… but then the shaking started. A horrific grinding whirr shortly followed suit. The trifecta of terror was complete when the plane started abruptly losing altitude.

Almost on cue, two stewardesses double-timed up the aisle toward the cockpit like frantic little Geishas in a Gilbert and Sullivan play. I was stiffly sitting on an aisle seat on the right side of the plane as they brushed by me. I looked at the redneck next to me in the middle seat for some acknowledgment of the tumult, but he just calmly fixated on his Sodoku puzzle. I snaked my head into the aisle and looked forward toward the gaggle of flight attendants convening in first class.

Then I saw something that utterly convinced me I was going to die: one of the attendants suddenly opened her mouth wide and quickly covered it with her hand. She was out of earshot, but I could almost hear the sharp inhale of breath. Also, I’m pretty sure that in the flight attendant manual, the hand over mouth gesture is the symbol for ‘Oh, no, we’re all going to die a fiery death!!!’

Immediately after that, the two flight attendants silently did their Geisha shuffle back to their jump seats as passengers vehemently yelled out questions after them: ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Is the plane going down?’ ‘Can I have extra peanuts?’

The noise and rattling in the cabin fought for dominion over my fear until my brain suddenly leapfrogged over terror into a new plane. My soul seemed to cleave itself entirely from my body (like some Voldemort Harry Potter spell) and hang out in the aisle, where it stoically witnessed my soon-to-be dead and on-fire body.

“I’m going to die. Of course.” I said out loud, to no one in particular. Why the ‘of course’ caveat, I wasn’t certain. All I knew was that it made perfect sense that THIS would be exactly how I perish: on a plane after a protracted booty call. It couldn’t have been when I was on a cargo plane in Iraq which had to make an unscheduled emergency pickup near the Iranian border — that would have meant I could have died a quasi-hero. No, it just HAD to be after a weekend of frivolous skirt-chasing. Yay, my life!

From the ethersphere, I kind of witnessed my physical configuration in space. I was in the aisle, my left leg perched up on the armrest of the row in front of me, my shoeless right foot awkwardly wedged in the seat pocket, my left cheek resting on my hand, and my butthole wide-open and farting, either from the stress or the CHEESE FIX MUNCHIES I’d been consuming. I looked and smelled retarded.

Still, the older redneck to my right didn’t seem to notice the commotion on the plane or in my bowels. He just focused on that fuckin’ Sodoku like if he finished it in time, the plane would stop plunging… which it was now doing… ferociously….

“I’m on Lexapro so I never, ever cry. But I think I’m going to cry now.” It was a fat mother of two across the aisle to my left, seemingly making the statement for my benefit. Her two children were literally picking their noses and oblivious, as children are, to their impending mortality.

A woman in the row behind me, while simultaneously counting her rosary, leaned over and started rubbing fat mommy’s right shoulder with her left hand . “It’s okay. Let it out, it’s good to let it out.” In turn, mom started to grunt and furrow her brows like she was squeezing out a reluctant shit. This woman was going to cry, Goddammit, and no anti-depressant prescription drug was going to stop her from doing so!!!

“Unnnnnnhhhhhhhh!” she grunted/cried/sharted as her kids cluelessly picked at things. It was the most pathetic thing I had ever seen.

A really cute girl in the row in front of me was looking around, similarly terrified. She was tan, almost Indian tan (feather, not dot) with high cheekbones and wide, young eyes. She caught my eyes, possibly searching for an answer. With my body skewed in the same twisted position, I just looked at her and shrugged, like I was silently commenting on a wacky Aunt at the Thanksgiving table. I ransacked the archives of my brain and life experience and THAT is what I had to offer a terrified 20 year-old girl: “Eh.”

For about 15 minutes as the plane descended — the only calculus to determine how quickly it dove was the increasing pressure on my eardrums — I contemplated my life…

What have I DONE with it? I thought. I told dick jokes to strangers. That’s about the sum total.

I’m in my thirties, a ridiculous human being, an adolescent boy trapped in a man’s body. ‘Jesus died at 33 and I haven’t accomplished half of what he did,’ I said at loud, trying to crack up an imaginary audience. To my right, Larry the Sodoku Guy didn’t even crack a smile as he tried to work that tricky ‘4’ or ‘5’ conundrum with his pen.

Everyone else in the plane was whispering or muttering or frozen like a street mime as we dropped. I was dead….

Well, I’m here, so, guess what? I was wrong.

The plane eventually leveled out, hit the runway hot and skidded to a bumpy stop as fire trucks and ambulances converged on the scene like it was a Die Hard movie.

I had totally reconciled myself to death and, shit, I was alive after all. There was a teeny part of me that was just the smallest bit disappointed. ‘Crap,’ I thought, ‘Small things have to matter to me again now…’

As we waited on the tarmac for the maintenance crew to determine the damage (I found out later it was an electrical fire on the front wheel hub and the noise and shaking was the result of lowering landing gear at 35 thousand feet and maximum speed), I couldn’t help but notice the redneck was still chipping away at his Sodoku puzzle.

“Dude,” I said, “I went through Elizabether Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of loss and you never once flinched or stopped playing Sodoku. What’s that about?”

Finally, he put his pen down and looked at me.

“I’m 5 years out from being a Cancer survivor. I just look at every day as a bonus.”

Then he went back to his damn puzzle. I wish I could have thought of something clever to say to him to make him feel dumb for saying that, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Harumph…. One day, I will…

The End of the Road

The dusk-strewn view from the 13th floor of the Red Lion Inn in downtown Salt Lake City perfectly epitomizes the peculiar dichotomy that is the city itself. The azure blue fades into lavender and then into a smooth pink glow which serves to outline the deep dark silhouette of the not-so-distant Rocky mountains. When you track your eyes down from this majestic vista, they sweep into a cityscape that is, frankly, fuuuuuckin’ ghetto. It is devoid of industry, excitement, or even the slightest aesthetic reflection of its majestic background. Instead, there only exists an ironic acknowledgment of the shitbox lying at the western foot of The Great Divide — the grandeur of Brigham Young’s heaven ends with a rundown “Waffle Ho se.” (the ‘u‘ is mysteriously missing).

Okay, maybe I’m getting poetic and faggy, but I just finished two full months on a tour bus promoting the movie ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL‘ and I’m feeling nostalgic about the end of the road. (note to reader: You can follow my journey and consequent sojourn into my own personal heart of darkness if you goto: http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell.)

Unfortunately, as most of you probably do NOT know, the movie has actually opened in select theaters. That’s right, it has. Don’t worry, if you weren’t aware of the movie’s existence, join the other 307+ million Americans who similarly had no clue. The public at large just didn’t know about it, and therefore, didn’t show up. Tada! Like magic!

With the limited budget for marketing and advertising we had for this indie film, we barely got the word out to the roughly 2 million plus people who had purchased and/or read the book, much less the remaining 305 million assholes cluttering up the U.S.

Still, the producers of the movie gave it a college try… literally. We gassed up a pimptastic tour bus and hit over 30 cities — most of them in huge college towns — premiering the film and seducing the 18-24 demographic into spreading the word with promises of t-shirts, beer pong kits, and meetings with the author, Tucker Max. And yes, in this context, ‘meeting’ can mean ‘giving a blow job to.’

“This was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life!” was a common ejaculation from frat boys and sorostitutes alike after seeing the film at these screenings. Although in my head I couldn’t help but think ‘you are retarded or need to watch more movies,’ I was still excited it was making such a huge impression on these mentally challenged college children.

The film was screened for close to 15,000 people before the opening September 25th. The idea was that each person would tell their friend… they would tell their friend … and so on and so on, just like that classic Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial.

But, alas, the movie failed at the box office. Somehow, that buzz marketing fission reaction never quite happened. Maybe we were short one fresh-faced Heather Locklear. (She was sooo hot before she became a rocker slut, wasn’t she?)

So what happened?

Who knows and herein lies the rub. With any failure like this, Monday morning quarterbacks show up like… well, like Monday morning quarterbacks.

I mean, some are contending that, with the market as glutted as it is, it’s a sisyphusian task getting ANY movie seen, much less an independent film with no star names that revolves around a personality as polarizing as Tucker Max. Although ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL’ was protested and some people claimed it was ‘ruining women’s lives’ and ‘promoting rape culture,’ in the end the film itself didn’t really generate any controversy…. probably because it wasn’t really controversial. I would even, scout’s honor, take my mom to go see it (what old person doesn’t love a great shit scene, let’s be honest?!). I guess the movie was sort of like Mitch Hedberg’s old band. “You either loved us… or hated us… or thought we were just okay.”

Others argue that the economy was at play for poor numbers. Still others thought the film’s fate was sealed by a crappy marketing team. Couple of folks blamed it on bad reviews. Many thought the reason for mediocre attendence was because the trailer blew freshly rotting leper balls (mea culpa).

The most obvious reason was also the hardest to admit. And that is, the film, while good, wasn’t good enough to generate the requisite word of mouth to make it a hit. The movie is funny and well-written with great performances, but, when all is said and done, the product was seen by a lot of people and still didn’t take off. It looks like some people tried the shampoo, worked it into a frothy lather, and told their friends: ‘Eh.’

For two months, no one, including myself, could seem to acknowledge the fact that the movie might not garner momentous word of mouth — the same word of mouth that catapulted ‘District 9,’ ‘500 Days of Summer,’ ‘The Hangover,’ and currently, the micro-budgeted ‘Paranormal Activity’ into box-office smashes. The idea that the film itself might not be enough was the big pink elephant in the tour bus… wearing a tutu, riding a unicycle, and juggling dildos.

Apparently, the film ITSELF wasn’t enough, because after 2 weeks and close to 100 thousand people seeing it, it seemed like the general populace was gently telling us: “We like you a lot, little independent movie… but we’re just not THAT into you….”

So I’m sitting here, last day of the whole tour….on the 13th floor…with the dead, and now darkened, Salt Lake cityscape spread out before me like a smallpox blanket. I’m drinking alone, a quaint and charming habit I seemed to have picked up on this tour. Tucker has just texted me, saying a bunch of HOOTERS girls want to meet him at a local bar. He wants to know if I’ll be going. Ugh. Hooters girls?! Sounds like the worst possible way to cap off this experience….

And of course I’m going.