Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (23 page)

Fifteen minutes before the flight landed, I was buckling up in preparation for landing and the girl and I made casual eye contact. I smiled, she smiled, and then she asked, “Where you going?”

“Home,” I yawned. “I’ve had a horrible experience with this airline today. They just booted me off my last flight because they said I was too fat.”

That’s when she revealed the heartbreaker. “They just did something like that to me, too—before we took off.”

She explained that every time she flew, she chose to sit in the back row so as to be out of plain sight. But as she boarded this flight, she was instructed by the flight attendant to sit in the front row instead—the same row I was in. Then, ten minutes later, she was instructed to follow the flight attendant back out into the Jetway, where she was told, “You should be purchasing an extra seat for travel, ma’am. It’s not fair to other passengers.”

“You’re sitting in a row where there’s an empty seat,” I pointed out. “I bought two seats.”

“The flight attendant said that I would have to ask you if it was okay if I shared your row without buying an extra ticket.”

That performance piece, courtesy of the Southwest Players, was intended to show me that
all
fat people get “the talk” at Southwest. How sick is that? They used that
poor girl—literally forced her to sit in my row—just so they could pull her off the plane, shame her, and send her back to her seat, crying. They’d hoped I’d hear what happened to her and figure I wasn’t being singled out. They tried to make it about fat again, ever covering for the jackasses who colluded to get me off the plane. There was no reason for that flight attendant to have that conversation with that girl except to be a cunt. And the girl was telling me through tears, “I could still put the armrest down.” We must’ve been quite a sight: a couple of chubsy-ubsies talkin’ about how proud we were that we could still buckle the seat belt without an extender, and you could tell it was the only shred of dignity we had left.

We landed in Burbank and I remember thinking, “Boy, there better be nineteen fuckin’ Southwest Airlines people …”

Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. So I tweeted …

It was tough shit making all those fat jokes at my own expense, but I figured it’d be worth it to see this dopey company called on the carpet for fucking over customers, caught by a guy who boasts more Twitter followers than their airline. See,
I
thought the story was about how a corporation got caught fucking over the little guy again, except this time, the little guy had a lot of mouth and even more Twitter followers. But look how long that sentence is. Why the fuck did I expect the media to understand all that when
there was an easier, funnier story staring right at them? And that story was
Fat Guy in a Little Chair
!

Almost every news outlet spent three days stripping away my humanity, as people discussed me more like a concept than an individual. My picture graced the
Philadelphia Daily News
with the slug, “Blimp landed.” I learned firsthand that fat people are the recipients of the last remaining socially acceptable prejudice. Racism and sexism will get you ostracized in more enlightened communities, but you can mock fat people all you want. I saw some intense hate rhetoric online, all stemming from some subtly antifat propaganda that made me wonder if Goebbels had really died in the bunker, or if he’d ducked out, come to the States, and gotten a job in Dallas, working for an airline.

For three days, I’d wake up and find Jen sifting through Google News, reading all the Too Fat to Fly stories as they accumulated, updating me on the count.

“Four hundred articles now,” she’d announce, much to my chagrin. Even worse: “You’re also at the top of the news page.” Then, two days later: “It’s up to five thousand articles and you’re
still
at the top of the Google News page.”

By the morning after I got back to L.A., there was national TV coverage of the incident, and by midday, the coverage was
international.
Larry King reached out to me via Twitter. Larry King—in his final year in the big broadcast suspenders—invited me to guest on his show and tell the story. For as many times as I’d wished Larry King would’ve had me on his program to talk about my
art
, here he was reaching out to
me
—via
my
medium of Twitter—to talk about
this
shit. I flashed on a future in which I was the current incarnation of the Octomom, making the media
rounds barking about the rights of the morbidly obese while scarfing donuts and plugging my new movie. Or DVD. Or action figure.

So as tempting as it was to be on one of Larry King’s last few broadcasts, I opted out of appearing on
Larry King Live
to discuss the Too Fat to Fly incident. I opted out of doing
Good Morning America
as well, but they’re the date rapist of morning shows, as far as I’m concerned—because even though I turned down their interview request out of the New York office, they came to my
house
with a camera and knocked on the front door. Hey,
Good Morning America
: Next time I’m not giving you what
you
want, just force my head down there and
make
me do it. How about, in the future, you respect the simple notion of no means no, you fucking pigs?

To be fair, they weren’t the
only
media jackasses to “weigh” in on the matter. Dr. Endorsement TV Whore Quack said something. I got no justice from Emaciated Old Woman Fake Judge, who sided with the corporation that advertises on her TV program.
Forbes
, too, circled the wagons around their corporate fuck-buddies at Southwest and wrote that I’d done
myself
more harm than Southwest with this fiasco, hurting my “brand” in the process. I stopped being a person to all of these people. None of them listened to my account of the incident; they all profiled me as fat, hence guilty of this obvious fat crime. Lots of folks online were telling me to stop crying and lose weight. I kept telling them, “I know I’m fat. But I’m not too fat to fly on Southwest Air.”

Southwest eventually reached out to me. But they refused to ever admit that I wasn’t too fat for the seat. They
kept insisting that it was the pilot’s decision, and in a post-9/11 world, who the fuck is going to question a pilot when it comes to safety? Eventually they backed off even that claim, saying simply that an employee made the determination I was too fat.

So Big Business won again, spreading the gospel of “Look, I’m Sorry: He’s Just Too Fat. And Seriously—Don’t We All Hate Fat People Anyway?” I’ll carry this shit with me like herpes for the rest of my life, regardless of my waistline size—all because a shitty organization didn’t have the simple Southern decency to admit they were wrong.

Hurled from the skies like the son of Odin himself, after the Too Fat to Fly incident, I was understandably hesitant to go near an airport ever again, unless it was to get a Cinnabon. And considering
why
I didn’t want to go near an airport, Cinnabons weren’t going to play a big role in my life for a while. This was compounded by a posting I read on a paparazzi Web site, offering a bounty for new pictures of Fatty McNoFly in the wild. The price of my further humiliation? Five grand for a picture of me sitting in a little chair, and ten grand if I was also eating a sandwich. And when I go to the airport, all I
do
is sit in little chairs and eat shit.

Being cast out of the heavens is fine if you don’t have a shit-ton of Q & A shows scheduled all across the country. Less than three weeks after the Southwest fiasco, I had a pair of gigs in Austin and Houston. The week after that, a show in Milwaukee. The following week was Devils Classic Sweater day back at the Prudential Center in Jersey, and the next week was a George Carlin celebration at the New York Public Library, followed by shows in Detroit and Kansas
City two days later. Tough to get thousands of miles without an airplane. Tough, but not impossible.

So I called around looking for a tour bus I could rent that’d get me to Austin and Houston. The folks at Coast to Coast Coach were helpful at first, then really confused.

“How many people in your band?” I was asked on the phone by the booking agent.

“Just me,” I said. “One guy.”

“One guy needs a whole tour bus?” the agent asked.

“It’s for a spoken-word tour,” I said. “I like my space.”

There was a pause, and then the voice on the other end of the phone said, “Wait a minute … are you that Too Fat to Fly guy?”

In the two years since the fake-heart fascists added Chubby-Hater to their list of sky offenses, Southwest Airlines has ejected
more
people from their planes: A member of the band Green Day was kicked off one of their flights for wearing baggy pants, and months later, Southwest booted a star of Showtime’s
The L Word
because she was kissing her girlfriend. I used to think Southwest just had an issue with fat people, but it became clear that they don’t like anyone
different.
If you’re fat, slack, or gay as the day is long, it would seem you’re not always welcome on their planes. That’s okay: Last year, while in midflight, a hole ripped open in the ceiling of a Southwest jet. Call me Too Fat to Fly all you want, but I call
that
Too
Fucked
to Fly. When an airplane’s roof opens in midair, not even the forced purchase of
two
seats will save your life.

But, as with all of life’s big, bad boo-boos, I’d have to say it was Mom who ultimately made it all better. A day after I was deemed Too Fat to Fly, my mother sent me an
e-mail, reminding me why I was in this mess in the first place: Not because I’m
fat
, but because the big guy (ironically
not
me in this case) fucked the little guy (somehow me)—plain and simple.

“LOVE YOU VERY MUCH,” Mom wrote. “MAKE POP HAPPY. A POOR POSTAL WORKER’S SON GOES POSTAL ON SOUTHWEST AIRLINES. HAHA.”

Not a bad bit of biting social satire from a woman who yelled at my dad once for letting twelve-year-old me watch
Carlin at Carnegie.

T
hey say you should never meet your heroes. For an all-too-brief moment in time, they could’ve amended that sentiment to include the caveat “… unless your hero is George Carlin.”

My first exposure to the Smartest Man I Ever Met was through his albums. My father worked the night shift at the post office, and on his dinner breaks, he’d buy used records from a coworker’s car trunk: country albums for him, comedy records for his kid. Bill Cosby was a staple and easy to get by my mother, as Cosby never worked blue. But one morning when he came home from work, my father gave me an album while I was still in bed.

“Don’t show your mother,” he cautioned me. “She’s not ready for this.”

But
I
was. I’d become a huge fan of language and writing
by age twelve, and Dad recognized the intelligence of Carlin’s—so much so that he wanted to impart it to his preteen boy, much in the same way sports-fan fathers like to share a beer with their boys while watching the big game, even if they’re not of drinking age. Dad felt Carlin was onto something new, real, and relevant with his comedy, and he thought it was necessary to share it with his comedy-cravin’ kid, blue language be damned. So even though we were a church-every-Sunday Catholic family of five, here was my father suborning subversion.

And with good reason: As I spun
Class Clown
for the first time, I was
transfixed
. This man Carlin spoke the truth, but more important, he was hysterical while doing so—a funny prophet.
FM & AM
and
Class Clown
became as memorized and shared in my world as any
Monty Python
routine or
Saturday Night Live
sketch. And in the Catholic school world of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, being able to quote a Carlin bit was pure pop-culture currency.

In 1982, HBO aired the
Carlin at Carnegie
stand-up special. A commercial for the premiere featured a clip of Carlin talking about the clichéd warning to criminals, “Don’t try anything funny …”

“When they’re not looking,” he added mischievously, “I like to go …”

BOOM! George disappeared into an explosion of goofy expressions and pantomime so wild and woolly, you half expected the Tasmanian Devil to be standing there when he finally stopped. It was the missing piece in all those comedy albums I’d been listening to: I could
see
the brilliance now as well. Carlin used his body like an instrument onstage,
creating noises, striking poses, and treading the boards with all the passion of a preacher, but none of the irritating piety.

I was about to ask my parents if I could tape the comedy special on our brand-new Betamax video recorder when my old man pulled me aside and said, “George Carlin’s gonna be on the HBO this weekend.”