A Short Strange Trip

I make eye contact with a mother pulling her daughter towards herself with a puzzled and somewhat shocked look on her face. I half smile and shrug as Luke and I sprint past her. There are many puzzled looks on the faces of the commuters on this Thursday morning in the very crowded Dulles International airport in Washington D.C..

We're in the race for our lives trying to catch a flight out of this nightmare. Since boarding a shuttle van from our hotel to the airport we have been at points crawling through D.C. gridlock, waiting to get our boarding passes, and finally in a full on O.J. Simpson 70's era Hertz commercial run from the ticket counter to gate X. That's not Roman numeral 10 no that's an X, E-X, X. The gates only go to Z, so that's 24 gates we have to cover and we're already late! So we ran as if our lives depended on it, and in our minds nothing could be more true. We just needed out of D.C. NOW!

I've always wanted to visit our nations capitol, and I still do. This aborted trips genesis was about two weeks earlier. It was early fall 1989 in Gainesville, Florida, and a friend of a friend, had received a gold Visa card with a $9,500 credit limit. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on which side of the coin your on, it was addressed to the previous occupant. The guy had either not forwarded his mail, or it may have been an unsolicited offer to a recent University Of Florida graduate.

It was just to great a temptation to resist. So he activated it and proceeded to pimp out his crib, as we used to say. Satisfied and generous he passed the card along. Before to long it wound up in my roommate's hands, so about seven of us go to the mall. My roommate bought a $400 gold chain, somebody else got a Nintendo, a few other things were purchased, and to finish out the evening we all went to Red Lobster for a FEAST! We ate, drank, left a big tip and went home.

Once back in our neighborhood everybody goes their separate ways except my friend Luke, my roommate, and I go to my place and continue to drink.

Listening to music we discuss the evenings events, and Luke realizes we both have a couple of days off and we needed an adventure. “Let’s use the card to book a flight somewhere,” He tells me. “Of course, we do,” I agree. So, he calls delta airlines and finds out they have a flight to Jamaica via Miami leaving first thing in the morning. That sounded perfect! We book the flight, and Luke runs home to pack a bag.

When Luke gets back to my place he tells me "pack some Levis," because he's pretty sure we can trade them for weed. "you know I think I heard that somewhere as well,” I reply.

I wake my roommate, and fill him in on our plans, and get him to drive us to the airport in my puke green 1975 Mercury Comet. A little annoyed at being woken up, but not the least bit surprised at our plans, he gets ready and 20 minutes later we’re at the airport anxiously waiting to begin our adventure.

The only time Luke and I had ever flown anywhere our parents were handling all the details, so we didn’t know you had to arrive awhile before your flight. So we get there with no time to spare, and are rushed onto the flight to Miami.

When we land in Miami, we have to switch planes and have about 45 minutes to kill. As we spend the time talking and people watching. All of sudden we both kinda realize that we’re being paged over the intercom to go to our gate. They’d actually called our names a few times, but we didn’t notice because of course we’re both using aliases. Luke took responsibility for being Ryan Zipper the name on the credit card, and I was Alex something. We make the gate just in time.

Once onboard we settle in for a little longer than normal flight, due to the fact all flights originating in the U.S. are not allowed to fly over Cuba, and Cuba lies directly between Florida and Jamaica.

On the flight we start to relax, order some drinks, and flirt with the flight attendants. This is sort of the sweet spot in a short trip. Nothings gone wrong, yet, and all you have are plans and anticipation.

We land, grab our gear and disembark. The first thing I notice are the lush, green, rain forested mountains. I had lived my life to that point in Florida and a small portion in the Chicago area, and I’ve driven through the mountains in between those two places, but those are completely different looking than these. They just screamed tropical paradise. Being a flat lander, I’ve always loved mountains.

As we make our way down the concourse there are locals handing out complimentary rum punch and singing “Welcome to Jamaica.” As all that hits us we practically float with the other passengers towards others already in line. In line for what I wonder, and all of sudden it’s like the music stops, my heart starts beating a mile a minute as we realize uniformed men and women are checking luggage and I.D.’s. Needless to say we weren’t going to show them any identification. What are we going to do? The only we can do, act naturally and tell them we don’t have any.

Reaching the front of the line we explain how we do not have any identification. “What do you mean you don’t avv any I-DENT-IF-A-KAY-SHUUN MAAN? You no you kaant enta da kuntree wid out identifakayshun.That’s what the nice customs lady told us. And after the initial scare they were actually quite nice and just got us back on the same plane we came in on. We were the first and only passengers to board the plane for the trip back to Miami. It’s quite strange being on an L10-11 with no one except the flight crew on it.

The flight back seemed to take about twenty minutes, because Islept the entire time. Luke spent his time chatting up the flight attendants. He learned that the airline is supposed to check your documents before you board a flight. So with that information we decide our best play is to act really upset, but not rude, about having our trip ruined.

It worked great, the ticket agent even showed us a stamp that they put on your boarding pass, that reads ‘DOCMENTS O.K.’D”. Then they offered us a flight anywhere in the U.S. right then, and a $300 voucher that was good for a year.

Our first thought was Hawaii, but we’d have to turn around and come back almost immediately. Thinking back maybe we should have just got tickets to Hawaii and never come back.

So, looking over the departure board we selected Washington D.C. It was close, the flight was leaving soon, and we’d always wanted to go there.

Shortly after reaching cruising altitude I witnessed one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen. It was due to being 30,000 feet in the air and this giant orange ball of a sun is setting into a literal sea of bright white billowy clouds. It was like being on the Millennium Falcon on approach to cloud city. Twilight in the air was just as majestic as the sunset, and if that wasn’t enough, then we flew over D.C. at night with the all the monuments lit up with flood lights. It was a great flight.

Our feet and minds back on the ground, we have absolutely no plan, no idea where we really are(in comparison to where we think we want to be), very little cash, a credit card we’re not sure what it has left on it, and no real knowledge of D.C.

Lack of funds and the sketchiness of the card were our only real concerns, as we counted everything short of being arrested as a plus. We were twenty-two years old, and we were getting away from our normal sort of bohemian existence in Gainesville.

So we eventually gathered enough intel to find a hotel near the city that would send a van to pick us up for free.

Outside we find D.C. in October is nothing like Jamaica, and quickly double back inside to change into the jeans we fortuitously brought with us.

The van eventually shows up and we drive to the hotel. On the way I noticed after passing what appear to be nice clubs and restaurants, and then every twenty blocks or so is a corner with thirty guys selling crack to yuppies in beamers and caddies. The driver informs us the entire capitol is smoking the crap. It was not to long after that, that mayor of D.C. Marion Berry was arrested for crack.

After about a thirty-minute drive we get to the hotel. Check in goes well enough, and we go to our room. I order a pizza, find something on cable, and we begin to discuss what we want to do the next day. As we’re eating pizza, the phone rings. We look at each other with concern, because nobody knows where at, so any call is probably not good news. Sure enough it’s the front desk telling Mr. Zipper that there is a problem with his credit card, and that the folks at Visa would like to speak to him.

Ryan Zipper A.K.A. Luke hangs up the receiver and fills me in on the half of the conversation I couldn’t hear. Seems the card is not only maxed out but a few hundred dollars over it’s quite substantial limit. We will be forced to vacate the room if we cannot come up with a way to pay for it, and the desk clerk was kind enough to give us the number for Visa customer service.

Our immediate reaction was panic, but we pulled ourselves together to play out the hand. Luke puts on his best mature voice and places the call. Once again I only hear half of the conversation, but the jist I get is the card company is extremely concerned at the rate in which “Mr. Zipper” has reached the limit on a $9,500 card, and also the number of duplicate purchases that have been made. I knew of at least 3 Nintendo systems that were bought and few gold chains.

I think I’ve known only a few people over my life that could’ve pulled off what Luke did. He convinced ME he was Ryan zipper and that there was absolutely no reason for concern on the part of the credit card company. He not only quashed their concern but got them to put whatever the remaining balance of the hotel bill was on the card after we paid what we could with our remaining cash.

As soon as he hung up the phone we went into flight mode. The next call was to the front desk seeing when the first van to the airport was. Once that call was complete he phoned the airline to book the first possible flight out. The escape route was planned at least, so we watched T.V., talked, and slept, the entire night expecting whoever arrests people for credit card fraud to bust the door down.

I awake not to the sights and sounds of flashlights in my face, and some of D.C.’s finest handcuffing me, but to Luke answering our wake up call. As we gather ourselves and our belongings, we discuss the previous day and start getting anxious to get out of town, and put our short lived life of crime behind us. At the least put some distance between ourselves and our aliases.

I have no idea if the route we took from the airport is the same we took back to it, but the difference was literally like night and day. Five minutes from the hotel we hit the mass that is weekday rush hour D.C. area gridlock. With each tortuous mile our anxiety about missing our flight increased substantially. At that point we’d had enough, we just wanted to back to our anonymous lives. The sense of adventure was gone.

Finally, we arrive at the airport, along with the majority of the commuters we were stuck in traffic with. The airport was extremely crowded. Finding the Delta counter we get in line behind what looks like a hundred people. The line seemed endless, and the whole time we’re thinking that we’ll probably be arrested when we reach the counter and tell them who we aren’t. But the ticket agents only concern was for us to make a flight that had already started boarding. She explained we’d have to run and she would call the gate to let them know we were on our way, but they wouldn’t hold the plane.

We grabbed those boarding passes like it was a baton in the second leg of a 400 yard relay race, and started RUNNING for the gate. Luckily, we could both run. Luke was an avid soccer player, and I was the veteran of about 8 baseball seasons and later 4 seasons of football, and we were both still very active in various physical endeavors.

It was actually really fun, not caring, running full clip through a very crowded airport, full of business types mixed with a sprinkling of vacationing families. Seeing the shocked looks on their faces, jumping over luggage, zig-zagging like Walter Payton running through the Lions weak defense. We had to cover two hundred yards at least, though.

Finally, we make it to gate X. Out of breath they rush us on board and we find our seats.

We made it, unbelievable! The thing I remember the most about the flight home was shortly after take off, at only a few thousand feet off the ground flying over Arlington National Cemetery. It was partially shrouded in fog, which made it look surreal. The hills would pop up out of the fog with the brilliant white grave markers against the deep green of the lawn. It was truly awe inspiring.

After that, the flight home was, thankfully, uneventful. I believe we switched planes in Atlanta, because I remember arriving back in Gainesville in the early afternoon. My roommate was supposed to pick us up, but we weren’t due back until the next evening. Gainesville being what it was back then we weren’t worried about a ride, we’d get home somehow. We could easily walk the distance to our neighborhood in about an hour if it came to it. But sure enough though, the first guy we asked gave us a ride to within a block of my place.

Luke and I went to my place and collapsed. Later we told everybody what happened, and thinking back I guess we were pretty crazy, because nobody doubted a single word we said. I don’t know if you believe this tale, but everything you read happened.

A few months later I decided to buy that one way ticket to Hawaii(with my own funds). But that’s an entirely different story.

I never received anything tangible from that credit card, but I did get one hell of an adventure! Thank you Luke, thank you Visa, and thank you statute of limitations.