Farmer Bob

Jill won’t stop calling my cell phone, and I’m all-of-a-sudden wishing that Sprint’s reception wasn’t so good in Salt Lake City International Airport. “What am I going to do with all these damn Rosh Hashanah beads?” she asks. They’d come from our beer distributor the previous week, in preparation for the Jewish New Year on September 17th.

Having noticed the spike in sales that accompanied Mardi Gras every year, Blue Sky Beverage Distributors were actively trying to turn every conceivable holiday into a “Show me your tits” celebration. They’d already done it with Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Spring Break. Last year at the Cup and Saucer, we’d made a Rosh Hashanah killing off all the Rabbinical students from the Yeshiva school downtown.

“Girls won’t be going wild next week,” Jill predicts. What happened was, four days ago, terrorists blew up the World Trade Center.

I’ve been sitting in Salt Lake City International airport for four hours. Jill calls my cell phone every time she has to ring up a sale. People have been drinking a lot since Tuesday. Business is hectic, and Jill can’t remember how the cash register works. “Just leave the drawer open and stick cash in it. Don’t try to ring things up,” I tell her.

“How do I make the drawer open, again?” she says. I tell her to push the CASH TENDERED button. She doesn’t hear me, because she’s holding down FEED and watching the tape spool out of the receipt slot. It keeps going. Maybe she’s hoping that there will be a prize at the end. Then, over the line, I hear the drawer pop open with a little Ching! noise. “Never mind,” says Jill. “Gwyn opened it.”

Gwyn is almost one year old, and likes to push buttons. It’s been Take Your Daughter to Work Day for the last few days at the Cup because Jill’s been covering my shifts. The previous week, I’d flown to Oregon to visit my friend Jim.

When I told her my plans, she said, “Wow, wouldn’t it be so cute if you were thinking of asking for paid vacation time? Like a baby polar bear wearing glasses! While trying on his daddy’s oversize shoes! I could just die!” I’d anticipated this, and saved up the money for the trip. I arrived in Portland on September 7th. Jim and I spent the weekend alternately drinking and recovering. Then, on Tuesday, all the airports in the United States were shut down. I was stuck in Portland until the 14th.

I finally got a flight back to Kansas City, with a connecting flight in Salt Lake City. On Tuesday, every plane in U.S. airspace had to land at the nearest airport, and now all of the planes and pilots were in the wrong cities. As a consequence of emergency logistics, there was nobody available to pilot my connecting flight. Now I’m stuck in Utah.

To pass the time, I’ve been drinking weak Utah beer in the airport bar and asking Mormon-baiting questions to the bartenders. “Hey, Brigham Young,” I say. “If there are two guys ‘Plural Bartending,’ why is my bottle empty?” And, “Hey, you know how to make a Joseph Smith? Check The Bartender’s Bible. I mean, The Bartender’s Book of Mormon.” When they start ignoring my empty bottles, I go back to the gate and ask questions at the hospitality desk. At least I assume it’s the hospitality desk. “So, have they found a driver for the plane yet?” I ask the woman behind the counter.

“We should have a pilot soon, yes,” she says, but I’ve totally moved on.

I point to one of the other passengers waiting at the gate. He’s a foreign-looking guy wearing a turban. “Listen,” I say. “I think that guy might be Islamic. Or maybe Muslim. No, don’t look! I’ve got my eye on him.” I want her to know that we’re on the same team: Team USA!

“He’s not Muslim,” she says. “He’s Sikh.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna be ‘Sikh’ if I have to drink any more of that weak Utah beer they’re serving,” I tell her. I roll my eyes. Then, when she doesn’t say anything, I say, “Am I right? C’mon! Who’s with me?”

“I don’t drink,” she says.

“Right? Like, how would you know, in this state?” I say. “I drank three Budweisers, and I still had to huff my lighter to get a buzz.”

“If there’s nothing else I can help you with, I need to talk to the next person in line,” she says.

“Okay. I gotcha. No problemo. I’ll just keep my eye on our friend the Imam over there.” I wink at her, but she’s glanced away. So I wait until she looks back over, and I wink and shoot a finger gun at her with a lateral clicking noise. At that point, my cell phone rings. It’s Andee.

“I used your apartment for a date last night,” she says. She’s been apartment-sitting while I’ve been waylaid by the terrorists. Andee lives with her mom, and doesn’t often get to pretend she has her own place.

“I hope you cleaned up after yourself,” I tell her. “Hey, you didn’t drink the bottle of Zubrowka in the freezer did you?”

“Hm. How can I answer that question without actually answering it?”

“Goddammit! Who’d you have over?”

Weirdly, it was Chico. “I knew he was never going to ask me out, so I invited him over to listen to your CDs and look your art,” says Andee.

It was the most magical night of Chico’s life. Now he had a girlfriend. But Andee was still in school; she had to drive back to Lawrence every day, and they couldn’t get together very often. In the ensuing weeks, Chico would spend a lot of time at my apartment, because all of my stuff reminded him of his first date with Andee. “Dude, put on Back in Black,” he’d say. Or, sighing wistfully, he’d suggest watching Dario Argento’s Suspiria, because that’s what they’d done on their first date: watched Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

When the pilot finally shows up at the gate, he gets a standing ovation from the other passengers. At this point, things start moving pretty quickly. Within ten minutes, they start boarding the plane; they’re barely bothering to check boarding passes. “Hurry up!” yells a Southwest employee. “We need the gate!” Another plane is already trying to nudge in next to ours.

My boarding pass says 17A, which is on the aisle. But when I find it, the terrorist dude with the turban and the business suit is already there, and sitting in my seat! He stands up to let me take the middle seat. Yeah, thanks, Osama.

I’m not good at confrontation, so I decide to fight his terrorist ideology with the most powerful weapon in my arsenal: Passive aggression. I’m already silently planning to make him stand up and sit down by making twenty or thirty trips to the lavatory, but then I notice the Skymall catalog in the seat pocket. I flip through to the Self Defense Technology specials, grab the seatback phone, and call Skymall.

“Hello?” I say loudly, to make sure he’s listening. “I need to order a taser. How fast is your expedited delivery? Because we’re about to take off. I’m in seat 17-B.” I put a loud, annoyed spin on the seat number to drive home to my fundamentalist Islamic seat mate that he had stolen an aisle seat from the wrong hombre. “You deliver directly to seat assignments, right? I’ve got a long trip ahead of me, and I might have to put a motherfucker down.” I want him to know I’m vigilant and also a good American who won’t back down in the face of his evil seat reassignment.

Apparently, some of the other passengers are suffering from some kind of “pussy” condition, because they complain to one of the flight attendants, who comes over to bitch at me. “Sir,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to hang up the phone, now.”

“Uh — excuse me?” I say. “I’m shopping here. Like the President told us to.” I looked at her employee badge. “Are you Canadian or something? Why don’t you shake your little butt back to the galley and mix me up something with alcohol in it? Or do I have to wait until we’re out of Utah airspace? Also, could I get a seat next to somebody more American? Because this seat seems a little hijacky to me.”

“I’m from Overland Park, Kansas,” says Osama.

Into the phone, I say, “Skymall? Are you still there? Is my taser on the way? How long does it take for delivery, anyway?” I start to ask if they take Frequent Flyer Miles, when I notice that the flight attendant has been joined by the pilot. He starts to say something about leaving the plane, when I notice that he’s holding a taser. “Never mind,” I say to the Skymall operator. “I think it just arrived.” I hang up. “Is that for me?” I ask the pilot, reaching for the taser.

There’s a bright flash of light. Then I’m laying face-down on the carpet back in the terminal. My hands are behind my back, cuffed to my ankles. I can see the high shine on the shoes of six policemen standing around me. “…we ended up tasing him three times,” the pilot is telling them. “He wouldn’t stop screaming for his mom, his grandma, and the names of what we think are several other female relatives.”

Sneering, the copilot says, “I guess he’ll be screaming for his grandma… in jail.” Everyone stares at him. “I’m just going to do the pre-flight checklist again,” he mumbles, walking away.

A man in an expensive suit leans right down into my face. “Buddy, you’re gonna be sorry you ever fucked with us,” he says. He’s wearing a SkyMall lapel pin. Poking me in the chest, he says, “You do not fuck with SkyMall.”

I had to spend the night in a Utah jail and subsequently buy another plane ticket. All of which meant another couple of days of weak Utah beer and sleeping in the airport terminal. It was Rosh Hashana by the time I got back to Kansas City, but Jill was right: None of the Rabbinical students at the Cup and Saucer were remotely interested in partying. 2001 started with Douglas Adams dying and ended with this, and there aren’t enough fists in the world to punch it with.

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