This past weekend was a crazy fucking weekend.
I went to San Diego for the first time. I attended Cross Festival with “da boys”.
It was meant to be fun.
…And it was. It was a shit-ton of fun actually. Some completely insane shit went down, and I’m going to resist the urge to tell you about it now, and tell orate the tale orally, in the form of a podcast. That’s right—me and Chris are going to tell you all about the weekend in our first podcast not about wrestling, and about some shit you can actually relate to! We will be bringing in a third member who was also a pivotal character in the weekend’s events, the man known simply as “Jon”. Podcast will be out in the next few days.
Anyhoo, Sunday night after the festival ended, and I was high as fuck—on “natural endorphins”, obviously—I got a call from my boss. Usually when he calls me late at night, it is never good news; it is news of the “breaking” kind, which can strike anytime when you work in the news industry.
I wearily answered his phone call, going into the hotel bathroom and out of ear shot of the raucous hip-hop blaring in the other room.
“Hello?”
“Darby, did you see the news? There was a shooting in Las Vegas.”
“What? What the hell?”
“I need you to research it and tell me if we need to go or not.”
Researching the matter was going to be an issue, since I wasn’t home, and I didn’t have any of my journalist tools. No computer, no list of important phone numbers, no nothing. Just my phone. I would have to make the best out of the situation.
And so I looked into the matter. For the next 30 minutes, my cheerful spirits dampened significantly. I watched as the body count in this shooting went from 2, to 10, to 50 people dead. It quickly became apparent that the answer to my boss’ question was a resounding “FUCK YES,” we needed to go to Vegas and cover this story.
Or in this case, they needed to go and cover this story.
I was in San Diego. We had a midnight reservation at one of the best speakeasy’s ever (the entrance is hidden behind a fake wall of beer kegs, in case you were wondering). I was here to enjoy my weekend.
And I was enjoying it, right up until this shit broke.
I had already extended my trip, and instead of coming home Sunday night, I was planning on attempting to take the Amtrak back to Los Angeles at 5:55 AM, arrive in LA at 9 AM, then train/Uber/hitchhike across the city to Santa Monica and be at work in time at 10 AM.
Now, there was no earlier option for me to be back to Los Angeles before then. And there was no way in hell I was making it to Las Vegas any sooner, either.
I told my boss over the phone exactly that, and he got quiet for a second. He wasn’t mad, because… how could he? It was the weekend. I needed to get my music festival on. I can’t not travel and have new experiences during the freakin’ weekend. Ya feel me?
But that phone call is emblematic of my job as a producer for a foreign TV channel.
I am always on call. Like a doctor. Except I’m not.
I passed out involuntarily sometime around 3 or 4 am, woke up to my alarm blaring, and realized that I had missed that morning train by a full hour. I wasn’t making it back to work on time, and I had no idea what time the next train was.
I grabbed my sunglasses (which were actually Jon’s), and took an Uber to the train station.
When I got there, they informed me that I could change my ticket to the next train, which was at 8:20, and would mean I wouldn’t be at the office until noon, two hours late. Punctuality is very important when you work for a news company, doubly so when it is a Japanese one.
I hadn’t showered and stank like ass, was still drunk, and was wearing my clothes from the night before: some tattered, ripped-ass blue jeans (a la Kurt Cobain), a blue floral t-shirt and some awkward blue sports jacket. Oh, and pink socks. I figured I would be able to change into my normal dress pants (work appropriate) on the train, but when I went into the train bathroom to change, I realized I had left the pants in the hotel room.
I went into work that day looking like I had been out all night partying. Which was accurate.
Thankfully, our bureau chief is a cool lady and didn’t say shit, but goddamn. What a journey that was.
And it wasn’t even finished! Aside from providing my boss with ancillary information about what was happening in Las Vegas while he was IN Las Vegas, we had to jump around between trying to confirm whether or not Tom Petty had died (he hadn’t, and CBS news had wrongly reported he did), and figuring out whether or not a supposed report of gunfire at University of Southern California was true or not. That also wasn’t; a teacher who had four friends shot in Las Vegas the night before had come into work drunk, had a breakdown, and then told her students to call the cops and report gunshots, of which there were not.
It was a crazy day. But that’s my job, and that’s my life.
Being on call always, living the life of a doctor… except, you know, minus being an actual doctor.
