1) Leaving Vegas

Morganstern goes “on the lam.”

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When the last few days of that trade-show came — the one in Las Vegas that my editors had sent me to, with the tricky financial arrangements — I was prepared to go through with my intention to abscond, using the company credit card. It was just that in the week I had spent there, in the normal routine, I hadn’t given much thought to the idea; much time to formulating a plan. So far, it had only been a matter of flying somewhere other than home — probably to San Francisco.

I went to the “closer” in the lobby of the convention center to have my two complimentary beers. There was no crowd while most of the exhibiters were still packing up. We’re not meant to sit, so they don’t bring in any chairs. Maybe we’re meant to mingle — in a way we can’t all do on the exhibit floor. This was how I found myself talking to a couple of aquaintences who had little interest in my work; who nonetheless pumped me for convenient chat about it, parting with, “Well, good luck with that…” I couldn’t remember talking about anything they wouldn’t have seen as a foregone conclusion. I was working what little conversational grace I had left. Their’s had been a way of saying, “We wish you well, as long as somebody else is doing the well-ness.” The opposite of, “Let’s get together on something.”

I realized that having worked consistently on filing all my reports straight out of the press-room, back in the staging areas of the convention complex, I had given no thought to making any connections; made no anticipations. A lot of people at a trade show probably found that a little creepy. Maybe they could give some thought to accounting for other kinds of plans. Like one where a guy steals the resources from his publisher to do a different kind of journalism. Is anyone that considerate? How difficult can it be to make distinctions between a job and a reason to exist? Obviously too much to ask.

There was no need to go back to the soon-to-be-demolished hotel — a waning dowager of gangster-primal Vegas. Most of my plan was to sling my work-bag over my shoulder and drag my suitcase outside to the free shuttle that would get me to a plane at LAS. I was glad not to have hassled with a cab, because the bus was a better platform for viewing the landscape on the trip out to the airport, though it occured to me that I was at a point where unauthorized expenses were moot. I had made one test during the week to see if the account I was planning to filch from was being monitored. I used it to buy a good meal. Food had not been any part of the itinerary that had been planned for me. Hunger is a major temptation.

The strip-mall landscape along the way to the airport is a version of the clean sordidness that you see all over Las Vegas — cheap-vice retail — and typical of cities that have no other sprawl to converge with, in that the original landscape intrudes here and there. The fresh interstitial patches of desert — reddish earth, with a few cholla cactus and and small joshua trees, in this zone — were a comfort. The same could be seen from the airline concourse and from the light-rail-style tram with no seats that carries passengers about a half mile to and from the main terminal. I killed time riding the tram back and forth, drinking a beer and playing a few dollar slots under a giant desert panarama with horses, painted on a panel that wrapped around part of the ceiling system below the skylights. Winning the slots was a problem, because it meant being weighed down with about five pounds of coins. Losing most of it back was a good time killer.

I had bought a ticket to Oakland, figuring that would have less ostentation for the people who might be there to arrest me when I landed. I could easily catch the intercity light-rail — BART — there and take that, or that and a ferry, into the city. It might be nice to spend part of the trip on water — a drink and then up on deck watching the skyline approach, then a streetcar to a business-class hotel.

It’s not in our nature to say what we might have seen from a window seat on a commercial airliner. Never mind that anybody a hundred years ago would have felt like a god, floating above that real-life version of the model railroad in Aunt Genevieve and Uncle Aloysius’s basement. Once you’ve gotten to monotony with the tiny airliner window, what will you want to say? You may be horrified with the what-goes-up-must-come-crashing-down possibilities, but how many times is that going to be part of a good story back home? Big deal, if you depart Taipei for Paris in a howling storm for the first airplane ride of your life and the plane buffets beyond any expectation, seeming to climb almost straight up, roaring. You may level-off after that in blinding sunlight above the clouds with nothing to look at out of the window for hours and hours but a flat expanse of puffy whiteness just below the plane, until nightfall, when there won’t even be that.

How well can you regale the folks at the office on Monday with a story about coming into Orange County International and seeing that one of the nearby squares of lights on the grid below had sparkling little puffs of fireworks from Disneyland? How about seeing the intimate details of two hundred houses and yards in twenty five seconds, landing at San Diego? Or say you came down from over the pole into Scotland, the north of England, and you could have counted the shining lochs, rough stone walls and hedgerows, the few cars on the narrow roads between and the fewer houses and churches in the corners of that rocky plaid. There’s a cabin on the lee side of a hill on the approach to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska that you could see somebody waving from and tell how they feel about it. From far enough out, Fiji might look to you like a greenish floating muffin that you’re going to land on, until you see some of the smaller associated islands. Those were corroded corrugated metal roofs of a jumbled shanty town, not drifts of giant dried leaves just beyond the apron around the runway at Sahar Mumbai. But who wants to hear about it?

What I can say is that when I’m stranded in a long line at the supermarket, being assaulted by the tabloids, I’m not dreaming that an editor will assign me to hob-nob with the foible-and-pecadillo challenged celebrities on those magazine covers — none of the soul-sucking conflicts and mutually disappointing expectations in those “narratives.” I’m dreaming of passing slowly above a scene of moon-lit breakers and California coastline with clumps of lights that suggest any number of possible ways of life; what I saw on the ocean-route flight from LAS to OAK that night, on my way to write a story about some people who know that fame-and-fortune is only one possible byproduct among many, when you’re being creative. I would likely be daydreaming of wide horizons. Fast Lane? Uh uh. Scenic route.

OAK was industrial, in a Bay Area kind of way. Almost military — an Air Force base for civilians. Easy to imagine a flat gray coastal edge to middle California from there, were it not for San Francisco and Marin. The bus from the airport to the BART station at the Oakland Coliseum runs through ugly light-manufacturing tracts and BART does much the same, slowing and rattling through turns, even though they are banked. The BART planners seem to have made it a point to give us a view of the backyards of semi-urban houses, like a monorail ride through Todayland at the World Of America exhibition that might tour third world lands looking to impress guest workers, if we had a fabulously bankrolled labor shortage, or maybe if we decided that a portion of our national debt should go toward full disclosure.

The ferry landing’s waterfront area on the east side of San Francisco Bay has seen a lot of urban renewal and the ferry runs through a shipping port estuary, before gaining the open water.

San Francisco has, of course, examples of working public transportation from every era that didn’t use horses. I could squint on the streetcar and be at any time in a seventy-five year span. We even got some sparks from the overhead wires that I could see flashing in adjacent windows.

When I got settled in my San Francisco hotel room, I realized that you don’t have a very good plan if you can’t account for big problems with having to go back to “square one.” If you can scrap the whole thing at any time without landing in the gutter, you are free. Mostly, I was thinking, planning is about modifying the plan based on what comes up as you go along, even if you have scoped-out all the information about your itinerary. I must not have really thought I would get that far, and between the Las Vegas convention center and San Francisco, nothing had come up to carom off of.

Having gotten this far, I began to rethink my idea that I would just use a few days or a week of freedom to bring all my notes together into one peice on what “my” kids were all about. It had once seemed like a dream to be able to spend that much time off the thoughtlessly bucking treadmill; time enough to do nothing but write. Now I started to dream about writing the biggest story I could get into before getting caught. Rather than planning to sit there and wait, I started to think about running.

I would figure out a way to buy tickets to fly out of the country from any of several different cities. I would use the company account to fund several new accounts with cash in between. My preliminary thought was to travel randomly on the ground to each airport and spend each night in a different hotel. It was not just an idea to be a moving target. I was also thinking that the whole thing would be too complicated to be worth the effort of anybody thinking about trying to track me down. When my publisher’s office stopped allowing transactions on their credit card, I would be able to leave the country, if there was a big enough lag between that cutoff and the police getting involved.

Bobby — one of “my” kids, who routinely hacks into engineering projects that he can contribute to — tells me he has no credit cards, just ATM cards with credit card function. “If I don’t fill out any credit card applications, they’ll have a hard time proving that I was ultimately about defrauding them, which eliminates a whole huge layer of intrigue. You know how easy it is for me to live below my means.”

I asked him what he did if any of his vast array of hacked interships offered him access to a credit card account for expenses or comps. He said, “I tell them to buy whatever I might need or ‘No thank you. I only accept authorized cash payments for contracted work or gifts of merchandise with a transaction record.’”

“Above all, it’s always best to be who they expect, not who you are.”

“What if they want to take you out to dinner?”

“I tell them it’s impossible for me to physically be there. Some medical reason, fear of flying, scheduling conflicts…”

“And if it pisses them off…”

“I walk. Quit the project. I have all the work I need. The trick is to never waste time on their company politics. Just produce until they make it inconvenient, then produce for somebody else. There are more overextended workgroups on short deadlines than I could ever run out of offering to help. On an internship, I have no liabilities. Besides, production is about eight percent of the average high-level engineer’s time on the job, if you really count everything that isn’t hands-on. See, there’s no other way to get any pleasure out of the work.”

And Bobby still has plenty of time for his friends.

I wondered how many little checking accounts I would manage to open before there was a hand on my shoulder.

Obviously, it had been a long day, but I still spent a few hours that night and into the following morning typing up some hand-written notes. These were things I had put away quite a while back, with no good reason to expect that I would ever get to get back to them again. I just wanted to start feeling like I was “home” — that I was finally doing what home wouldn’t allow.