Up in the Air

sign on the spot, you don’t hold out for dental. They’re ex-Foreign Service agents, ex-LA cops, ex-ski bums, ex- seminarians, ex-junkies. They’re the establishment and its overthrow, too. They don’t use letterhead, just plain white bond with a faint embossed omega at the top. No logo, no web site—just a street address. In Omaha, of all places, blandest Omaha, whose location suits my schedule perfectly. On Thursday I have a conference in Las Vegas and on Saturday a wedding in Minnesota—my little sister’s third and biggest yet.

I’ll see MythTech on Friday and ISM will pay for it. No appointment yet, but if I’m right that they’ve been sniffing around and checking references, a brief, get-acquainted, happened-to-be-in-town, hear-great-things-about-you, flying drop-in at 1860 Sioux Street might flip the switch. I’ll ask for old Lucius Spack, the number two, formerly of Andersen Consulting by way of the Chicago Board of Trade. Spack is the man, though the news outlets suppressed it and the government will never confirm it, who basically got NASA off its crutches, internally and public-image- wise, after the Challenger flameout. He’s a hero. I sat in on a five-person dinner with him once at an industry confab in Santa Cruz. I hear he has issues with prescription pain pills, but I have issues, too. And if he likes me? Maybe, just maybe, a peek into the office of Adam Sarrazin, age thirty-one, MIT dropout, no known hobbies, bald, reportedly either gay or celibate despite his marriage to a pet care heiress who’s bankrolled his projects since he was seventeen, and known in the world of leading-edge market research simply as “the Child.”

Just five more days. Just nine thousand eight hundred more miles. Even if nothing much comes of Omaha, something big will come of leaving Omaha for the Twin Cities late Friday afternoon. That’s the magic leg. I’ve worked it out. The math was complex, and it’s subject to adjustments, but Omaha-Minneapolis is the leg.

The walkway drops me beneath a bank of monitors. 3204 to Reno via Elko is set to take off fifty minutes late, I see, which isn’t what I was told an hour ago when I phoned the airline from my room. Great West just can’t be trusted anymore, it lies to its most loyal customers, and if it didn’t monopolize DIA, I’d be shooting for my mark with Delta, although it wouldn’t mean as much at Delta. They fly overseas and Great West doesn’t yet—just a route or two in Canada—and Delta is old and Great West is new and Delta has scores of mileage millionaires and Great West, since the merger and the renaming, has exactly nine.

I’ll be the tenth.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought of Great West as a partner and an ally, but now I feel betrayed. The focus of my anger is Soren Morse, Great West’s rock-climbing, playboy CEO, a New Think smoothy from the soft-drink world brought in to charm the federal regulators and fend off Desert Air, a no-frills start-up whose ancient Boeings feel like prison vans but tend to land on time. One perk of breaking six zeros, traditionally, is a private luncheon with this sexpot, and I plan to give him an earful. I can’t wait. For years he’s been centimetering away my legroom, buffaloing me with tales of storm cells somewhere between Denver and the coast, and blowing cold air on my hot meals—all the while telling the nation through corporate image ads on the classier political talk shows that at Great West “We’re Taking America Higher!” The rumors in the first-class cabins are that he’s launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to be the next commissioner of baseball and that he has a new girlfriend—the young wife of the head of the Downtown Renaissance Committee. I’ll drop her name during dessert and watch his face.

Right now what I need, though, is not revenge but coffee, hot, strong, and black, to cauterize my throat. I smoked last night for the first time since college, and once again, I blame the cowboy boots. I was in bed when I tugged them on again, wondering if I’d bought too snug a toe; the sudden boost in height transformed my mood and prompted me to turn off my cable money show, toss on a jacket and my cleanest khakis, and pop downstairs for a nightcap in the lounge. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well, anyway; my mind was on MythTech. They’re scary, they’re so good, and some of the deeper work I’ve heard they’re doing on consumer-nondurable price resistance spooks me. If you find yourself at the beauty counter next year buying your first-ever thirty-dollar bottle of shampoo-conditioner, and it’s just a six-ounce bottle and you’re a man, blame it on Omaha. Blame it on the Child.

At the bar I bumped into Danny Sorenson, a salesman for Heston’s, the class-ring company, who I’d last seen on an early-morning hop from Des Moines to Madison. Thirty years my senior, with bulging eyes, and still vibrating from his second heart attack, Danny spent the flight soliloquizing about the importance of legumes in the diet. When I spotted him again last night, he was gobbling mixed nuts and steaming about a Giants game showing on the TV above the bar. He announced when I sat down that he’d beefed up and didn’t intend to survive his next attack, then offered me a menthol, which I took. I don’t know what moved me, though it’s my job to know. Maybe MythTech had won the Kool account and flashed a prompt across the Giants’ scoreboard.

“This team gives me a gut ache,” Danny said. “Nice pitching, but no fielding to back it up.”

I nodded, tapped my ash. “It’s sad, all right.”

“I thought you backed the Rockies. You’re a Denver man.”

I shrugged and sucked down a load of minty smoke. The truth is that I root for ball teams depending on where I am at the time and who I happen to be sitting with. Three years ago, during the NBA post-season, I started the evening rooting for the Bulls in an O’Hare microbrewery and finished it whistling for the Timberwolves at the Minneapolis Marriott. I follow the crowd, I’ll admit it, and why not? It’s not their approval I’m after, it’s their energy.

“How’s business?” Danny said.

“Quiescent. Yours?” Quiescent was a featured “focus word” from one of my Verbal Edge cassette tapes. Years ago, a few months after my divorce and a week after I stopped peddling “storage solutions” to rural western hospitals, it was a touring self-improvement seminar—a Sandy Pinter production—that fished me out of the bottle I’d slithered into. I’ve tried to keep something perking ever since. The World’s One Hundred Greatest Ideas, Condensed. The P. Chester Prine Negotiating Course. My goal is to speak at least three new words a day. It can be a struggle when I first use them—they sound like they’re in brackets or quotation marks—but later on they come naturally, I find. The only problem: the world is going visual, so I’m forever clarifying myself. The assumption behind Verbal Edge is that fine speech provides an advantage in business, but I’m not sure.

“We’re working to open Japan. It’s going fine. Highly sentimental about their schools there. Nice contrast to what’s happening in the States.”

“Interesting,” I say. I’m always interested. I’m big on hearsay and inside information, and I pay the price in my portfolio—an assortment of esoteric, long-shot tips whispered to me over in-flight scotch and sodas. I forget my losers when I hit a winner, which I’m told is a sign of a gambling addiction. In truth, I just don’t care much about money. We always had enough when I grew up, and then one day, when my father went bust, we didn’t. Not a lot changed. The house and car were paid for, we never ate out, and we’d always shopped garage sales for everything but major appliances, which my father knew how to repair. We threw a few more garage sales, that was all. It’s like that in Minnesota, outside the cities. A town finds a certain level in its spending and almost everyone clusters around the mean so that no one has to feel bad if poor luck comes.

“It’s the freelance mentality,” Danny said. “Americans now like to think they don’t owe anyone. Everyone’s an original, self-made. Class rings depend on nostalgia, on gratitude. I tell myself it’ll swing around someday, but