by Adam Carolla
AIRPORT
2010
The airport simultaneously represents all that is right with our society and all that is wrong with it. The idea that I can be standing in front of my self-flushing urinal, evacuating my bladder with the gent to my right expelling a Diet Coke he may have consumed on another continent, while the sweet scent of the Cinnabon wafts under both our noses is nothing short of miraculous. Not to mention the most well-lit four hundred square feet on the planet, the duty-free shop, with its thirty-gallon Grey Goose bottles, oil-drum-sized containers of Chanel No. 5, and bricks of Toblerone in the window. Take that, terrorists. The airport is also a metaphor for why this country works: people of all shapes and sizes, from all parts of the globe, putting aside their religious and cultural differences for the common goal of getting drunk on a plane. There, I’ve completed my paragraph about what’s good about the airport. Now I can dedicate the next thirteen pages to why it sucks.
Airports are one big rule followed by a pile of regulations. If you’re not showing your ID, removing an article of clothing, or being patted down, there’s still a very good chance that somebody in a uniform will be telling you you can’t stand here or park there or leave your bag anywhere. Unless you’re a fat guy in black Reeboks with a vest and a camera. Then you have run of the airport. I was walking through LAX and there was a guy from TMZ with a camera on his shoulder walking backward, filming me, weaving his way through a maze of wheeled luggage and weary travelers. I thought, This guy is one baggage handler tying his shoe away from killing himself and taking out three Asians along the way.
A moment on the paparazzi. Why are these douchebags able to exist? How can they profit off celebrities without their consent? When we used to do a man-on-the-street bit on The Man Show, we were not allowed to air footage of anyone who didn’t sign a release form. And when we did Crank Yankers, we couldn’t air even the voices of people we called without them signing a release form. And when I was on the radio, we couldn’t do a March Madness bit because the name “March Madness” was copyrighted: Thus “Mad Marchness” was born. If Harvey Levin was a watchmaker, do you think he could just take a picture of George Clooney, Photoshop his watch onto his wrist, and use it for advertising? Of course not. You’d have to pay Clooney millions of dollars for that. But you can run a website, a TV show, or a magazine all for profit using nothing but celebrities who don’t give consent to use their images, and there’s not a fucking law on the books that this would fall under? Any sane person who had even a cursory understanding of our society and its laws would have to admit this should be illegal. So then why does it remain legal? One answer: Nobody feels sorry for celebrities.
I know it seems too simple and not technical enough, but that’s the bottom line. That’s the only reason this is allowed to continue. If these were Hopi Indians instead of Halle Berry, not only would they think you’re stealing their soul but the public outcry would be deafening. The map of the stars’ homes is another example of a clear breach of privacy. If you ever visit Hollywood, for ten bucks you can buy a map of the stars’ homes, for twenty you can buy a fifth of Jose Cuervo, and for thirty you can buy a hunting knife and finish the job.
Whose idea was it to let these paparazzi jack-offs, most of whom have extensive criminal backgrounds or are at least deadbeat dads, have a retarded-fat-guy panty raid in the same place where they strip-search old women and force guys like me to empty the contents of our toiletry bags into the garbage? Am I the only one who thinks a bunch of guys who have no business at the airport shouldn’t be allowed in the fucking airport? Ironically, if one of these guys left the airport and decided to film the Brooklyn Bridge instead of Renée Zellweger, he’d be arrested. Couldn’t we just make one more rule in a place where if you light up a cigarette in a bathroom you’re dragged out in leg irons? The only people allowed at the airport are people who have business at the airport.
Dear a-hole naysayer who thinks telling these guys they can’t be at the airport is tantamount to wiping my ass with one of the founding fathers’ wigs: The airport is already a civil-liberties-free zone. I can’t make a joke about shooting pool with Osama bin Laden without being arrested and I have to pass through a machine that’s manned by a nine-dollar-an-hour guy who gets a front-row seat to my botched circumcision.
Of course all this security would be unnecessary if we’d just start doing what everyone secretly wants to do anyway—profiling. We’ve turned profiling into a dirty word. Sort of like what the English did with cigarettes. We never stop talking about profiling and why it shouldn’t be tolerated in our society. The problem is, as humans we can no sooner stop profiling than we can stop our fingernails from growing or our cells from multiplying. It’s woven into our DNA. When you walk down the street and you see a dog coming toward you, you immediately begin the process of profiling. Is it a Labrador or is it a rottweiler? My holier-than-thou friends to the left would argue that since I don’t know either one of these individual dogs personally, I should refrain from judgment. But we all know that the statistical likelihood of a Labrador attacking is far less than a rottweiler. I’ll bet you if the guy in the Birkenstocks with the FREE TIBET bumper sticker on his Honda Insight was taking his teacup poodle for a walk and saw the rottweiler, he’d cross to the other side of the street. Yet when it comes to security, we’re supposed to throw away the most important tool we have in the fight against terrorism. It’s not racial profiling. It’s including race as part of the profile, just like age, gender, weight, et cetera.
My cruel fantasy is that one of these assholes who rail against profiling as a crime-fighting tool gets his kid abducted. Then when he sits down with the FBI profiler, the guy says, “According to our data, there’s a ninety percent chance your daughter was abducted by a white male between the ages of thirty-eight and fifty-two who lives within a two-mile radius of your home and has some previous relationship with little Cindy … oh, wait a minute, I’ve just noticed your name is on our list of assholes who’ve taken a bullshit showboating stance against profiling. Well, now, that’s different. Instead of going up the street and questioning the forty-seven-year-old unemployable loner who drives the primered van, we’re going to have to talk to everyone in the city. The other statistic we’ve learned in our profiling is that there is usually a forty-eight-hour window before the search turns into a recovery. But we’re going to waste a whole shitload of time talking to people who obviously didn’t commit this crime so that we don’t hurt the feelings of a few.”
And speaking of blanket policies that make no sense. I was at the Phoenix airport in 2008 coming back from shooting the Top Gear pilot and decided to go into the bar and order a round for the guys I was traveling with. The bar was empty except for one heavyset, gray-bearded, grizzled guy who looked like he just rode his donkey into town after a long day of panning for silver in them thar hills. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s straight up, and that’s when I overheard the young guy with the earring behind the bar asking Charlie Daniels if he had ID. At first the old sea captain just laughed—he probably hadn’t been carded since he was trying to join the merchant marine in World War II. But the guy with the twinkle in his ear asked again. At this point it became apparent that he was serious. Dan Haggerty’s dad fired back, “You’ve got to be shitting me, son.” The bartender replied, “New policy. Everyone has to show their ID. No ID, no drinks.” Then I watched Burl Ives reluctantly reach into his dungarees and pull out his ID. This may sound like nothing to you, but I saw it as a very sad testament of our times, and also an eerie harbinger of what the future holds. Obviously this is corporate lawyering at its worst.
I was carded myself leaving Burbank airport a few days earlier. The guy said, “Hey, Man Show. I used to love watching that. Now let’s see your driver’s license.” Does he think I shot The Man Show when I was fourteen? No. He knows I’m twice the legal age. It’s just some asshole who went to law school decided to take the ability to make decisions away from the poor fuck who makes the Bloody Marys.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. Maybe the old man at the Phoenix airport was in reality a local teen with a diabolical plan that involved purchasing an airline ticket and seven hours in a makeup chair having prosthetics applied for the opportunity to spend eleven bucks on a well drink.
And the legal insanity doesn’t stop once you get on the plane. As soon as your ass hits the seat, you hear this familiar refrain: “Tampering with, disabling, or destroying the lavatory smoke detector is against FAA regulations.” I have this fantasy where sometime after “tampering” and before “disabling” I spring to my feet and yell, “Shut the fuck up! You just said ‘tampering.’ You’re covered. We certainly don’t need the ‘disabling,’ and we sure as fuck don’t need the ‘destroying’ part of your retarded soliloquy. You’ve somehow managed to make the SkyMall catalog a rich and compelling alternative to your flight-cabin State of the Union. Nice work, toastmaster.”
Was there an incident that necessitated this run-on sentence about the smoke detector? Was there a case fifteen years ago on a Pan Am flight where a guy went into the first-class head, lit up a butt, and took an ax handle to the smoke detector and his case had to be thrown out of federal court because his dream team argued “the stewardess only said ‘tampering with’ when, in fact, my client disabled and destroyed the smoke detector, and thus no jury in the land can convict him”? I know it seems trivial, but someone’s got to point out every droplet in this ocean of time-wasting legal bullshit.
* * *
This next tale is another condemnation of attorneys and what they force the airlines to do. I was flying back from a college gig in Florida and sitting in first class attempting to get drunk when I realized we hadn’t moved in an hour. I looked up and found out what the problem was. It was an overhead storage compartment. The latch was broken, and the spring-loaded door kept raising on its own. The flight attendant said we couldn’t take off until all the overhead compartments were securely closed. At that point I said, “Why don’t you just take the luggage out of it—that way nothing can fall on anyone’s head and we can take off.” She replied, “Oh, it’s empty.” I said, “Fine, then let’s take off.” Now I get the answer that’s prefaced with “sir.” “Sir, we can’t take off until the overhead bin is securely closed.” I again point out that it is empty, and that the law is only in place to prevent Samsonite from crushing midgets. She once again, but this time with a little more emphasis on the “sir,” tells me we can’t take off until the hatch is secured. At that point I suggest holding the lid closed with a piece of duct tape.
Fast-forward to an hour and a half later. The maintenance guy has boarded the plane, attacked the latch with a screwdriver to no avail, and finally settled on my original suggestion … duct tape. We’ve removed the ability to reason from the people who are supposed to be in charge.
Of course, post-9/11 the airlines get to use safety as an excuse for all this stupidity. A quick funny story related to 9/11. I know what you’re thinking, Aren’t all stories related to 9/11 funny? Of course, and this one is no exception. I was flying to New York with Jimmy to do the Hugh Hefner roast. This was in September 2001, mere days after the attacks, so everybody was understandably a little bit nervous. Jimmy declared at the airport that his head was on a swivel; he was ready to roll, and if he saw anyone darker than Tom Petty heading toward the cockpit he would spring out of his seat and tackle him. As the plane was taxiing, I put my magazine down and glanced over at Jimmy. His head was tilted back, his mouth was wide open, and he was sound asleep.
Another thing I can’t wrap my mind around is the fact that you can fly with your dog, but if I have more than three ounces of Prell, I end up on a terrorist watch list. Every time I go to the airport there’s some guy holding my toiletry bag upside down over a trash can, shaking it. Meanwhile Paris Hilton and her menagerie stroll right past me. What the fuck is that? You can’t bring your dog into a Starbucks, are you really allowed to bring it on the plane? It’s especially unbelievable with all this allergy nonsense. There’s got to be more people who have dog-dander allergies than people with peanut allergies.
But of course no more peanuts on the plane. They’ve been replaced with fiesta mix, whatever the fuck that is. Apparently fiesta is the Spanish word for “crap that tastes like a ground-up bouillon cube.” It’s essentially the crushed and broken stuff someone swept off the floor of the Frito-Lay factory and put into tiny bags. This stuff doesn’t exist on the ground. Have you ever met anyone who’s eaten fiesta mix below thirty thousand feet? Of course, people make the financial excuse. But is there anyone who wouldn’t pay an extra fifty cents on their ticket price for real snacks? Halfway through a six-hour flight I’d suck a guy off for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
A decision that makes no sense logically or financially is the lack of a sleep channel on the plane. Airlines would love it if everyone just passed out as soon as they boarded. If you get on a plane later than nine in the evening, they immediately hand you a pillow and shut the lights. Obviously they want you to sleep. And they program the stations. They have two country stations, classic and contemporary rock, hip-hop, probably even a ranchera station. But no sleep station.
The closest channel they have is the classical one, but even that’s ineffective. Just as you are nodding off to Pachelbel’s Canon, a douchebag who sounds like James Lipton chimes in with a long-winded history of the song. “You’ve been listening to ‘Air on the G String’ from Orchestral Suite Number Three in D major by Johann Sebastian Bach. Originally written for strings and piano, it was later arranged by violinist August Wilhelmj, who transposed the key of the piece from D to C major and lowered the melody by a full octave. Therefore Wilhelmj was able to play the piece solely on the G string of his violin. Thus, ‘Air on the G String.’ A fascinating piece of musical history. I’m glad I could share it with you. You are listening to Classics in the Air.”
If you manage to get past the lecture about Bach and Prince Leopold without rushing the cockpit praying a sky marshal would put you out of your misery, you might attempt to drift off to a soothing Beethoven sonata only to be jarred awake by a John Philip Sousa march or some Tchaikovsky piece with cannons. Did the airlines research this? Did they hand out a survey to their frequent fliers and realize that while 19 percent of their patrons said they prefer to sleep on the flight, a rousing 81 percent said they wanted a master’s-level education in chamber music? What the fuck is wrong with these people? There’s been two hundred different airlines over the last fifty years, and not one goddamn one of them has a sleeping channel on their prerecorded radio station. Why not a channel with just light classical, crickets, and rain-forest sounds?
You’d think that a way to avoid a lot of these hassles is to cough up for a first-class ticket. Wrong. Flying first class actually makes the process longer. One of the so-called perks of paying a king’s ransom for your ticket is that you get to board first. You pay more, yet you have sit there longer. Your flight is as long as your ass is in the seat. If you get on the plane last, your flight from New York to L.A. is six hours and five minutes. If you’re the first guy on the plane, your flight is six hours and fifty-five minutes. And there’s no movie showing, there’s no booze flowing, there’s no stewardesses blowing. It’s not like you’re getting a foot massage, a reach-around, and a martini the whole time. The flight attendants are helping the person who paid one tenth the price you paid get his luggage into the overhead bin. As long as you’re on the ground, you ain’t in first class. You’re not getting your Bloody Mary until you’re at thirty thousand feet. People think it’s a champagne fountain up there, but what’s really happening is you’re getting the stink-eye from the economy-class passengers as they shuffle by and whack you in the shin with their luggage.
Here’s what first class should be: Get me when everyone else is on the plane. Send the stewardess out to the bar to say, “Mr. Carolla, we’re ready to leave.” What if this was a bus instead of a plane? There’s nobody who would pay ten times more for a bu
s ticket if he had to sit there while everyone else was loaded on. Imagine the bus driver says, “Because you paid three hundred dollars, you get to sit on the bus and watch everyone else drag their asses on board before we leave. And by the way, this bus holds two hundred and eighty-three people, so it’s gonna be a while.” You’d say, “Fuck you, I’m going to a bar, come get me when the people who paid thirty dollars are buckled in.”
After you arrive at your destination, the torture continues. The first thing most people do when they get off the plane is head to the bathroom. Big mistake. From an olfactory perspective, you’d be better off heading to a Porta-John at the nearest construction site. The damage done in the airport bathroom is worse than any terrorist action that could happen on the plane. What happens in those bathrooms is the work of an international all-star team of shitters. It’s a combination of bad airplane food meets nervous flyers meets “I’ve been holding this in for six hours” meets “Who cares? No one in my country of origin will ever know about this.” It’s how you treat a rental car: It’s not mine, therefore I don’t give a fuck. People file off the plane, see that bathroom, and think, “Not my home turf. Let the games begin.”
Then it’s time to go home. The airport shuttle, at best, probably saves you twenty bucks over a cab. But the cost to your time, soul, and sense of smell will never be recovered. I was in New York covering the Video Music Awards for KROQ when I got the call to come back and audition for Loveline on MTV. I was poor back then, so opted to take the shuttle to my apartment. My shuttle smelled like a burlap sack of BO had been thrown onto a hibachi. Just this whoosh of hot air and foreigner funk. Different parts of the world have different stink. It’s a curry-based diet meeting synthetic-based rayon. They’re all wearing disco shirts, their beards are down to their chests, and they haven’t washed their hair in six months. That shuttle van smelled like I walked into an asshole. There shouldn’t have even been double doors; there should have just been cheeks that opened up. Of course, I’m the first guy in the van and we have to do that thing where you circumnavigate LAX twenty-eight times to fill it. So we’re doing that circle and I’m hanging my head out the window like a dog on a country road. The other four or five couples eventually pile in. Since I was the first guy in, I felt like I was the lead man, like I was at a deli and pulled the first ticket. But no, because there’s a guy whose apartment is between LAX and where I live. So we eventually drop off a couple of people and it gets down to me and one other guy. We head down the 405 and toward the 101 interchange. He lives out in Calabasas, which is fifteen miles north on the 101, and I live in Sherman Oaks, which is two miles south. We’re coming to the fork and I realize if we veer to the left, I’m going to this guy’s house in Calabasas with this smelly motherfucking driver. I literally grabbed the wheel and pulled us to the right.