Pittsburgh

By Jon Konrath

Here's my travel advice for the day: if you have to catch a flight at LaGuardia and you also have to get a bite to eat before you fly, EAT BEFORE YOU GET TO THE AIRPORT. LGA has the sorriest excuse for a food court of any airport I've seen, save South Bend's "International" airport which I think has a guy in the parking lot selling grilled cheese sandwiches and cups of lukewarm Sanka. (South Bend has such a small airport, it's FREE to park there!) I found a pseudo-Burger King and ordered a Whaler or whatever they call it now, but only managed to eat about half of it. After a call to Marie, I decided that the best way to take this series of municipal shuttle flights would be to get as drunk as possible for takeoff.

And so I did. Okay, first I found this arcade machine that had Galaga, Pac Man, and some other game but then as I fed in my change, I found it out was 50 cents to play, which is bullshit. So I found a Micro-Chili's or somesuch, sat at the bar, and said gimme whatever's on tap. Five bucks later, I had this giant schooner of beer, probably 30 ounces, and the waitress said if I wanted another, she could give me a take-with cup to bring on the plane. Hot damn! Bukowski was right about drinking before, during and after a flight. Too many people are high-strung, they act like they are the only person in the world and they'd kill your grandmother to get in front of you in a line and save five seconds they're going to lose anyway because the plane has to be full before they leave. Normally, my reaction is to fight these people tooth and nail, to make sure I get ahead of them. And that's probably why I'm going to have my first heart attack in about a year. Instead, I decided to get tanked, and then I'd have no problem dealing with anything on the flight.

Next was the Budget car rental place, which was about three steps from the luggage conveyor. (Side note: if you're one of those travel warrior types that packs everything in a carryon, cut the shit! Check your fucking bags and save everyone a lot of time. You only tie up the security people, take longer to load on the plane, and why? It only takes a few minutes to get your bags. Give it up.) I got a Ford Ranger, because it was the same price as the tiniest car, and I wanted to try driving a truck for a weekend. They were surprised that I even got a car, because it turns out that the Hyatt is connected to the airport with a peoplemover. At least I'd be able to get some food later on, I thought. I went outside into a slight rain, got my car^H^H^Htruck, and drove into the Pittsburgh night.

Oh yeah, first I triple-parked at some kind of service entrance of the Hyatt and checked in. The rooms were nice, the hotel was nice, but it seemed like they tried to screw you on everything possible. More on that in a minute. First, I left and drove into the night to listen to the new Dream Theater album a bit in the truck's CD player as I looked for a place to eat.

I didn't want to get lost, but I wanted food, so I headed back to the hotel. I got back to my room about 7 minutes after room service ended, and then took a walk down the peoplemover to the airport, the whole time thinking how my movie would work and if it was even a good idea after I was sober. I got to the airport and found out two very bad things. The first: everything was closed. The second: even if it was open, it wouldn't do any good, because after 9/11 you can't just go wander the concourses anymore, and that's where the food is. So I went back to the hotel, found a vending machine, and loaded up on snack mix and expensive bottled water. I'd have to make up for it with a good breakfast.

The hotel was nice, though. I thought about going for a swim, but I found out they only had a lap pool with ridiculous hours during the day. I envisioned a big pool like a Holiday Inn, or maybe a hottub where I could get a soak at 3AM. No dice. I went back to the room, spread out my laptop and other gear on the table, and ate my snack food. The tables at the hotel were impressive, probably better than most CEOs would have in their office. I didn't have a view of anything but a parking lot, but it still beat the view in my apartment. It was deathly quiet in the place, but that's what I like when I pay for a room. A big bed, some good cable TV, and a mighty bathroom with free supplies - that's heaven to me.

Now, about the scams. First, I found this bottle of water on the nightstand. It was a typical one-liter bottle of Aquafina (this was a Pepsi hotel, and I hate that, but I'll leave my pro-Coke rants for another time.) But it had some sign on it that said it was FOUR DOLLARS if you drank it! You could buy a 20-ounce bottle of water in the vending machine, COLD, for like $1.25! So for a buck fifty less, you could get more water. And the fucking thing said it was provided "as a service." Yeah - a bad service! Moving on, the hotel had their own area code. Well, they had it wired so that any call - even a call to the airport across the street - was a long distance call. And we're talking hotel long distance, the kind of rates that make 1-900 porno calls seem affordable. Plus calls to another room were $1.50 each. It's bad enough that they now screw you out of using a 1-800 number for a calling card and they jack up the prices by an order of magnitude, but I also don't like that the cable systems in most hotels now have like 9 pre-determined channels, the bars of soap get smaller, the food choices on the room service menu get worse (this place wanted like $27 plus a 21% surcharge for A HAMBURGER), but they do stupid shit like the bottle of water trick. I could imagine this if you stayed in the hotel for free, like the way Juno used to give away email but bombard you with ads and nickel and dime you with stupid access fees. Write down this prediction: at some point in time, there will be hotel rooms where you will be asleep and some people from AOL/TimeWarner will bust in and pitch you their garbage. I'm serious, write this date down... put money on it...

A $2 bottle of water, only $4 warm.

Self-portrait, hotel bathroom

After my "meal", I called Ray and Michael to chat for a bit. I wanted to meet up with Micheal, but he already had plans and it was looking very tenuous. I called Ray and he gave me directions to Denny's, in case I couldn't get the laptop going. I did manage to dial in for a bit, using the Queens access number since it was going to cost me a fortune either way. With nothing else to do, I checked out the hotel porn situation, and then went to bed.

Where do hotels get this hallway carpet?

Self-portrait, Hyatt elevator

The tunnel of peoplemovers connecting the Hyatt to the airport

I woke up after accidentally leaving the air conditioner on all night, practically expecting frost on my luggage, but a quick blast from the heater and a few minutes in a powerful shower took care of that. I went out to the truck, took another good look at it, and snapped a few pictures. You may think I'm suddenly becoming a redneck, but the reason I wanted to try my hand at a pickup was because someday when I'm building a house out in Colorado, I might have to get a truck to haul stuff. So I thought I'd give it a run first, and I'm happy to say I liked the little Ranger. This one had a cab-and-a-half with a lot of storage behind the seat and a set of little doors that opened forward behind the main doors - perfect for kids, dogs, or junk. It had a good CD player, standard car-like controls, and pretty much everything your stock Corolla would make you expect. It also had a hardshell cover on the bed that made it more like a big trunk. I could definitely see buying something like this whenever I head out west again.

So armed with some maps and a huge appetite, I headed out and found that the fucking Hyatt people lied to me, and I had to pay ten bucks to get the truck out of the lot. They make this as confusing as hell, and I considered just parking it in the Budget lot at the airport next time. But I couldn't stay pissed for too long, because I had to drive to my next stop: Denny's.

I love Denny's. I love eating there, I love writing there, I love going there late at night with a bunch of friends to cause trouble, and I love eating Saturday brunch there. I used to eat dinner there almost every Friday in Seattle, and then go to Barnes and Noble to get books - it was my ritual, my routine. I eat at Denny's on my birthday every year; I think this year was the tenth time in a row. I practically started my writing career at the one in Bloomington, and I visit one every chance I get. I even love their food!

Of course, the big travesty is that there isn't a Denny's in New York City. The closest one is way the hell upstate, or maybe in Allentown or something. There are so many business models that won't work in the strange environment of Manhattan, and obviously good food, good attitude, clean restaurants, and low price is one of them. There are a few IHOPs around if you can find them, but otherwise, nada.

On the way, I stopped at another favorite that's not in New York City, the 7-Eleven. I got a slurpee and remembered all of the marathon writing sessions I had in Seattle, where I'd always stop at midnight to get a Big Gulp or a Slurpee. In the "city that never sleeps", I can't even find a place to buy a $2 Coke after 10PM, so it always feels good to see my old hangout again.

I managed to find Denny's with no problem, and the universal Konrath rule of Denny's was observed: if there are three servers, one is always a drop-dead gorgeous woman, one is a fucking Mack truck of a woman, and the other is a gay guy. And of the three, I NEVER get the beautiful one. Oh well. I did my patriotic duty and ordered the All-American Slam, which was way more food than I'm used to eating. I also got a glass of Coke in their cool glasses, and enjoyed my food while I chipped away at my spiral notebook journal. I paid my bill, then headed back to the truck for my next adventure.

Denny's self-portrait (not as beautiful)

One of my guilty pleasures that fall into the "not in New York" category (along with eating at Denny's, driving a car, and shopping in big malls) is shooting guns. I'm a relative newcomer to this; I did shoot a 16-gauge when I was a teen, and I shot both an M-16 and an Uzi during my January trip to Vegas. I was hooked, but of course, buying a nuclear weapon is easier than buying a pistol in New York City, and there's no way you'll find a place to shoot, unless you drive out to Long Island. So I decided to find a good range and spend the afternoon shooting.

My web searches before I left brought me to a place called Bullseye Ranges in Collier, just a few minutes south of the airport. It took some wandering with the mapquest pages, but I found their building with a big blue stencil of a guy shooting a target on the cinderblock wall, and went inside.

The folks inside Bullseye were nothing but top-notch, and dealt with my total ineptitude with great care and patience. I picked out a Glock-20 10mm pistol, a hundred rounds, and some paper targets, then signed up for an hour of time. An instructor showed me how to load and fire the gun, showed me how the target system worked, and left me to blast away at the targets.

My opinon on the Glock is mixed. First, I kept jamming the damn thing on every cartridge change. Also, the cartridges are a BITCH to load. The spring pushes so much that after getting a few rounds in, I would split my thumbs open pushing in more bullets. I don't think I fully loaded the magazine once. And the kick was a monster, like I mentioned. You can fire a Glock as fast as you can pull the trigger, but what that really means is you can fire as fast as you pull the trigger and return the gun back to a stable shooting position, which means a shot every few seconds, not a clip every other second. Aside from all of that though, it was a sweet firearm. Very smooth feel, solid pull, compact yet full-figured enough that it didn't feel like a toy. Well, all of the plastic did make it feel like a toy, but a very cool one. And no, you can't take a Glock on a plane despite the composite body - it's still got enough metal in its guts to set off an airport metal detector.

I blew through 100 rounds in about 35 minutes, so I got another 100 and switched from circle targets to silhouettes. I also pulled in my target distance to about 20 feet, and had a lot of fun trying to see how fast I could shoot. I still managed to jam the gun constantly (I'm sure I was doing something wrong, though) but managed to get some three-round bursts and a few one-handed shots in there before I ran out of ammo. Total damage was about $100 for the gun, ammo, target, and lane time.

I woke up groggy and watched enough of The Shawshank Redemption to make me think I should build an underground house. Then I gave John Fail a ring to see what was going on. Fail's a guy I met maybe five years ago when we were both doing zines. He also had a whole series of web pages, and wrote a bit for my old zine, Air in the Paragraph Line. He kept fucked-up dreamlogs, played in bands, put out CDs, and ran an all-ages club for a while. The strange thing about him is I've known him forever and he's done all of this stuff, but he just got out of college and he's onlt 21. And I've never met him, so I wanted to see what he was like in person.

I called him and we agreed, based on my limited knowledge of the city and the limited availability of food, to go check out a Mexican place called Mad Mex. It was in an area of strip malls and chain stores pretty close to the Best Buy where I bought all of the Hicks CDs. We agreed to meet at a half price book store nearby, and then go from there. I cleaned myself up a bit, and headed out to the truck for a spin.

I got hopelessly lost on the way there, but managed to make it with no problems and find John and his girlfriend Miriam in the cookbook section. We started talking about books and the impossibility of walking through a place like this without dropping a lot of money. It's always cool to see someone face to face and find out a lot more about them as they talk to you, instead of the limited exchange of email. For some reason, I felt like I knew John well from his zine and everything else, even though we only spoke on the phone once prior to that weekend and didn't even exchange a lot of mail lately. But he was pretty much what I expected and more, and it was also cool to talk to Miriam, too.

Mad Mex wasn't much to write home about - just your average Chi Chi's or Chili's fare, nothing more. The conversation continued and it struck me that both of them were exactly ten years younger than me. They were at the point I was at in 1992, more or less. I consider that my high water mark in many ways, and I'd give anything to be back there now. So it was weird for me mentally to think about where I am now, and to talk to them about it, even though on a general maturity and comprehension level, they seemed very equal to me.

Enough with the heavy stuff, though. It was good to trade stories and hear their views on life and the area, and talk shop a bit about computers. But the food ran out, and it was time to head back. We headed back to the book store where I left my truck, and parted ways.

She cleared me, and I ran out to the walkway, only to find out it dumped out onto the fucking tarmac and there was a tiny jet, like a learjet, on the runway. And it was a Comair, and I was asleep still, and I didn't know if it was the right jet or not. So I'm wandering across the tarmac, expecting the Secret Service snipers to take me out at any moment, but I ran to the jet, they pulled the door shut behind me, and before I could even get my ass planted in a seat and my seat belt on, we were moving.

There's nothing like flying in a small plane, like I said before. I think part of it is that so many people are scared of small planes, so you don't get a lot of the bottomfeeders. There are the business folk, and regular fliers, but not as many kids and old people. Plus you have the great views, and it's usually a shorter trip. I also found out that short segments usually count as a certain minumum number of frequent flier miles, so you can rack up time faster. I wasn't worried about that though, I just wanted to enjoy the view and play with my computer for a bit.

This was a short flight because we were hopping west to the Cincinnati airport again (in Kentucky). After I got out my laptop and started cutting video, I realized that the woman on the other side of the plane looked disturbingly like an ex-girlfriend of mine from years ago, and I was really hoping she's go a different route instead of following me to New York. I got far too worried about that and got almost no work done, but luckily the plane landed with no incident, and I managed to "deplane" in about 7 seconds due to the good design of that jet and the total lack of baby machines and associated luggage and whatnot.

I entered and found that we were in the "old" part of the airport, which was good because I thought maybe I was having some mass-hallucination about that time seven years ago I was there. But it looked like this area had been untouched (and uncleaned) since then, so that was cool. I considered stopping for a Pizza Hut pizza there, because I didn't want to brave another one of those hot dogs, but instead I tried to hunt down the shuttle or peoplemover or whatever that got me to my next flight.

Turns out that there's actually a bus that goes from one concourse to another, so I loaded onto that and took a strange ride across the tarmac. This wasn't some sanitary, hidden tramline that took you through the land of Delta fantasy and magically deposited you on the next set of gates; it actually crossed the fucking tarmac like a service vehicle. I took a ton of photos, which made everyone think I was a terrorist, but it was still cool.

Not much to say about the terminal there except that the food service sucks. There's a McDonalds, a KFC, and maybe one other thing that feeds tens of thousands of people. I went to a Cinnabon stand that had almost no line and ate about 10% of it before I remembered I hate those things. I also found a bank that was open on Sunday, which amazed me. They had currency exchange there, so I got a 20 Euro bill (which was about $20 - I wonder why that was so convenient? Future world currency, maybe?)

And that's it. Got back to LGA again, got the M60 bus and it was as easy going back as it was getting there. I got back in the late afternoon which gave me time to throw my bags on the floor, get some food, and relax. Not a bad trip at all.