Air Force One
Global financial crisis
I fly into New York but can’t exit the plane for a long time. The captain says look out the window, it’s the President. We sit on the runway and I watch the Air Force One plane and security bring the airport to a halt. My job in New York is to organize a logistics program between China-U.S. with men who have a transportation company, the stupidly complicated subterranean delivery spot on Fifth Avenue, and a union. The union is the most difficult element, they won’t let you press a button on a freight elevator without their consent. I go to the New Jersey shipper’s dispatch office where there’s one man at a desk with a phone in an industrial office with a tidy pile of boxes. This man is reliable and obedient to his boss, I’ve worked with him before. Nothing seems recorded in any database, it’s him and a pad of paper managing millions of dollars of product. He can’t help me with a women’s bathroom because there isn’t one. I get around with my new boss: the company president hosts dinner at the best New York Italian restaurant I’ve eaten at —it’s me and ten men, procures front row tickets in minutes to a broadway show that’s been sold out for a year, and we’re okay’d rooms at Soho House where from my window I watch the transportation boss lean out his window during the night, smoke cigars, and direct orders on his phone. What I figured out is if a shipping company doesn’t lose a single box through the whole supply chain maybe one of two things is going on: they are immune from both acts of God and drivers’ cousin’s scams which would be supernaturally fortuitous, or the freight is shielded by a durable web of connections. I gain nothing by confirming either. The windows on Air Force One look tiny, the plane is bigger than you’d imagine.
New York, 2008
