Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers (37 page)
I decided that I was not going to sit in coach. I decided that I was better than these and deserved better accommodations. I’m moving to first class.
Once I decided I was going to sit in first class, I ran into a series of problems:
- I didn’t have an upgrade voucher.
- I didn’t know anyone who worked for this airline.
- I was not a member of any sort of Elite Gold Ultra Club.
- I didn’t have $1500 to pay for an upgrade.
Which pretty much derailed the plan.
Most people would stop here. But I’m not most people, I’m Tucker Max, and I’m going to find a way around this. I thought and thought, running through all sorts of ridiculous permutations of plans. Then it hit me. The most obvious solution in the world, I cannot believe I’ve never thought of it before. I waited until most of the plane filled up, and saw that there were still three empty seats in first class, so I summoned the my A-game charm, and approached a young female flight attendant in the back cabin:
Tucker “Hey, how are you?”
FA “Hi, good.”
Tucker “I really hate to bother you about this, but can you possibly help me out?”
FA “Yeah, what can I do for you?”
Tucker “Well, when my people booked my flight, they made a mistake and put me in coach. I hate to make an issue about this, but is there any way you can move me to first class? Normally I would just live with it, but I’ve already had a few people pestering me for autographs and it’s a long flight…and I just can’t get any work done back here with everyone trying to get a piece of me. I’m sure you know how it is. I can’t be the first person you’ve had this happen to.”
FA “Oh my gosh, yeah, no problem. Hold on, let me just make sure we have room, I’ll upgrade you right away. Stay right here.”
Remember, this was 2005, before my first book even came out. NO ONE knew who I was, I was completely bullshitting her. But it worked. Three minutes later, I was in first class throwing back free beer and putting complimentary slippers on my feet. No one “bothered” me the rest of the flight, and none of the flight attendants even asked who I “was.”
After a few beers, I noticed the guy sitting next to me. He was a few years older than me, mid-thirties, clean cut, wearing normal clothes—but he had a huge bulge on his hip. Well, he wasn’t black, so it couldn’t be his dick…this motherfucker was packing a gun.
Tucker “I hope to God you’re an Air Marshal.”
Guy “I’m not an Air Marshal.”
Tucker “Great, Al Qaeda then?”
Guy [laughs] “Don’t worry, I’m FBI. I’m off duty, but we’re required to carry our sidearms whenever we fly.”
We got to talking and trading stories. I told him “The Buttsex Story,” which he thought was hilarious, so in exchange, he told me an FBI story:
“At the FBI Academy, there is this simulation where you shoot at a huge screen. They throw scenarios at you to teach you how to react to them. Kinda like a video game, but life size. You even get a pneumatic gun that feels just like a regular gun when you shoot it, with a recoil and everything, but it only shoots a laser, obviously.
Well, in one of the scenarios you are in a hallway trying to clear a house and a 12-year-old kid comes around the corner with a gun at his side. He walks around in a daze, and you are supposed to react to what he does.
When I did the scenario, as soon as he came around the corner I told him to drop the gun, he didn’t, so I started lighting him up. But strangely, he wouldn’t go down. It was so frustrating; I knew I was hitting him, because the little red dots were hitting him center mass, but he wouldn’t go down. I emptied the first clip, slapped another one, and kept firing.
By the time he went down, I had advanced right up onto the screen, and was about to start pistol-whipping the canvas. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. He finally dropped on the 17th and 18th shots. I added the 19th when he was down, just for good measure. I wasn’t taking chances with the Bionic Twelve-Year-Old.
The lights come on and the instructor was in total shock, ‘Do you know why you had to shoot 19 rounds? The simulation ISN’T EVEN SET UP TO REGISTER SHOTS THAT EARLY. I’ve NEVER seen anyone RELOAD in that scenario before!’
Apparently, since the weapon was only at his side and not raised, we were supposed to yell some jibberish about ‘This is the FBI,’ and something else along the lines of, ‘Put down the weapon,’ and then give him time to comply before we fired. I wasn’t having it. You don’t brandish a weapon at Agent Jones and live to tell about it.
I got into a 30-minute argument with the instructor about how to write it up cleanly. I won, and he passed me.” What a cool dude. This was a plane seating jackpot, but…I had to call him out on something:
Tucker “You can’t just plug kids like that. Dude, I went to law school and I know there is no way a cop could do that and get away with it.”
Agent Jones “Oh no, of course not. Cops are different. They have very different force continuum rules than we do.”
Tucker “Force continuum?”
Agent Jones “Basically, it means when you are allowed to initiate force on a criminal. Cops have a whole ordeal they have to go through, warning the criminal, giving him time to stop, etc. For the FBI, it’s not like that. If there is an immediate threat, we don’t have to say a thing, we just shoot.”
Tucker “So if we were in a bank and some guy came in with a gun and held up the teller, you could just walk up behind him and do a contact shot to the base of his skull, no warning? Just fucking smoke him?”
Agent Jones “Oh yeah. As long as we don’t endanger the civilian, sure.”
Tucker “Have you ever done this?”
Agent Jones “No, never shot anyone. I mostly do white collar stuff.”
Tucker “Does this ever cross your mind, that at any moment someone could commit a violent crime in front of you, and you could kill them without even warning them first?”
Agent Jones “You think I don’t wish for that every single day of my life?”
Now
this
was the type of person that deserved to sit next to me. I decided to tell him the part of “The Austin Road Trip Story” where I shit the lobby, and he loved it. He came back with this one about his exploits with the US Border Patrol:
Agent Jones “I thought I was bad ass until I hung out with those guys. They’re unbelievable. One time I was out with them right at the border. There is a big fence with concertina wire and what not all along this stretch, but the Coyotes had cut a hole in it—”
Tucker “What is a Coyote?”
Agent Jones “They are the guys who smuggle illegals back and forth over the border. Anyway, the Coyote was smuggling about a hundred Tonks through the hole, and—”
Tucker “What is a Tonk?”
Agent Jones “Oh—that’s what Border Patrol calls illegal immigrants who have made it into the US. They can’t call them ‘wetbacks’ or ‘spicks’ because obviously those are racially charged names, and ‘Mexican’ isn’t accurate since a lot of illegals are not from Mexico, so they say ‘Tonk.’”
Tucker “Why Tonk?”
Agent Jones “That’s the sound it makes when you hit them on the head with a Maglite.”
Tucker “HO-LEE-SHIT.”
Agent Jones “It’s messed up, I know. I told you, those guys are nuts. Anyway, so there we are, four trucks on this hill like 200 yards from the hole in the fence. We are totally blacked out, wearing night vision goggles and we can clearly see the Coyote hustling about a hundred Tonks through the fence. The Border Patrol guys wait until all of them are through the hole and about 50 yards into our side, when all four trucks simultaneously turn on all their spot lights and sirens. Of course, the Tonks shit themselves and bust ass back to the border…and in the darkness, they all run right into the concertina wire. It was a fucking mess. Some of them did not make it.”
Tucker “You have to be kidding me.”
Agent Jones “Nope. You think our force continuum is loose? These guys shoot anything they want. You should see their situation reports for deaths. They’ll take out guys with rifles at 100 yards and write in the report, ‘Subject was threatening agent with a rock.’ It’s a joke.”
I got off the plane and parted ways with Agent Jones, who was officially in my Awesome Guy Hall of Fame. Riding a great buzz, basking in my ingeniously slick maneuvering into first class, and having just heard some hilarious stories about disproportionate and illegal acts of violence, I headed to the gate for my Nantucket connection in a great fucking mood.
Then karma decided that my day was going too well and kicked me in the nuts. My flight to Nantucket was canceled, stranding me in the Newark airport for six hours. Not to be outdone by the whims of karma, fate then decided to reroute me through Boston. This meant I would get into Nantucket at like midnight instead of 7pm, and the Nantucket bars close at 1am. Fuck you, karma. And fuck you too, fate.
I finally got to Boston and found my way to the right terminal just as they’d begun the boarding process. They opened the gate doors, but instead of going down a jetway onto a real plane, we took a flight of stairs down onto the tarmac. We were outside, on the fucking runway, with all these huge jets around us. But we weren’t getting on one of those.
Sitting right there in front of me was the smallest joke of a plane I had ever seen. It was like I was in an episode of “Wings” or something. This is what it looked like:
Photo: Stinkie Pinkie
Look at that fucking thing. LOOK AT IT. It’s a fucking short bus with wings, and I was about to spend 45 minutes in it, flying over water? Great.
I turned to the guy next to me, “This is a funny prank, but where is the real plane? This is some kid’s model airplane or something.”
He gave me a look of complete disdain and turned away. Obviously this guy didn’t realize that he was beneath me. I was about to enlighten him, when one of the ground crew guys came up and looked at the five of us like we were cattle at auction. He kinda furrowed his brow:
“Alright, we have to assign seats to distribute passengers according to weight,” then he points to me, “You’re in the front.”
I nearly had to crawl to get through the tiny door into the plane; I felt like I was in the play area at McDonald’s. I sat in the front seat, and the pilot was literally right in front of me. My sense of cockpit security vanished as I realized I could just reach up and choke the pilot to death without even leaving my seat. The ground crew guy popped his head in:
Ground crew “No man, the very front. Next to the pilot.”
Tucker “WHAT?”
Pilot “Yeah, it’s fine. Come on up.”
Tucker “You can’t be serious. You want me to co-pilot? A PLANE?”
Pilot “No. Just sit here. We need the smallest person in this seat.”
It took me about ten minutes to calm down. Then, once I re-attached my nutsack, I realized how fucking cool this was. I was sitting in the co-pilot seat. The controls were right there in front of me! The throttle, the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, the suction gauge, the tachometer, everything. Even the goddamn co-pilot control wheel! I could just grab the thing. In fact, that is exactly what I did.
Pilot “No no, you don’t want to do that.”
Tucker “I was just trying to be helpful.”
After awhile, my fear completely evaporated, and I was more curious than anything else. I’ve never flown a plane, but I have played a lot of flight simulator games, so I had a good idea of what some of the controls actually did. I asked the pilot a few intermediate questions, so he’d know I wasn’t a total assclown. Then I asked him:
Tucker “Can I fly the plane? You know, when we are up in the air? Like take the controls?”
Pilot “Sure. That’s fine.”
Tucker “And can I switch on the marker beacon when we get there? It’s this button, I remember from Microsoft Flight Simulator. That’s my favorite part, night carrier landings.”
Pilot “Sure, OK.”
Tucker “WOO-HOO! Alright, you be Maverick and I’ll be Goose. It’ll be great!”
Pilot “Uh…OK.”
Tucker “Did you like that movie? You know, being a pilot and all?”
Pilot “Yeah, it was pretty good.”
Tucker “The Defense Department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid!”
He kinda gave me this look and put his earphones on, which I guess was my cue to shut the fuck up. Once we were up in the air and cruising, he gave me the nod and I took the wheel. It was loud as shit in there, so I had to yell.
Tucker “I FEEL THE NEED, THE NEED FOR SPEED!”
As I yelled, I kinda shook the controls accidentally, the plane wobbled slightly, and he immediately took back the controls. Seconds after it began, my career as a pilot unceremoniously ended.
We came up on the island, and it was covered with clouds; I couldn’t see shit. All of a sudden, a line of lights popped up, right down the middle of the runway, but I could barely see it through the clouds. He motioned for me to press the marker beacon button, but told me to wait for his signal. We went into the clouds, and the whole fucking plane whited out. I couldn’t see anything. We started bouncing around, and even though we were only in there for about five seconds, it seemed like forever. As we started to come out the bottom, he motioned for me to hit the beacon, and almost out of nowhere, the entire runway lit up. It was awesome.