I am fascinated by my own hostility to lines. I don't just dislike waiting in them; I hate it. I've walked out of restaurants, abandoned grocery carts next to the checkout and driven to see a movie, only to flee at the first sight of a ticket line. If circumstances conspire to force me to confront a line, I will usually wait for it to ebb. Though it would make no difference to a sane person, I would much rather stand to the side waiting for a long line to wind down than to queue up. If forced to be a total weasel, I blame my hostility on lines on how my job has spoiled me. But I've always been this way.
So, upon seeing the two huge lines, I was dumbstruck by my foolishness at arriving more than two hours early at the Hard Rock for the taping of the NBC show Last Call with Carson Daly. Though it didn't get near the attention of recent visits to Las Vegas by Howard Stern and Jay Leno, attention is a relative thing, and apparently about 200 people were willing to abandon a beautiful afternoon to wait for hours in the standby line, just for a slim chance at getting in. And though I was placed at the very front of the just-as-long ticketed line, I was still miserable. Front or back, time spent waiting in line somehow seems to go slower.
I also felt guilty about being bumped to the front of the line, ahead of a guy from San Diego in a Sagittarius T-shirt who was reading a book on astrology and a young woman visiting from Nashville. They were at the front and so had been waiting longer than anyone else, and I felt like a cheater.
I rationalized this with the view that I was working and thus ought to receive more efficient treatment than those lucky enough to be off the clock. After all, I don't get to cut to the front at the DMV line. And if I was on my own time, the last place I would be spending my day is waiting to get in to see Carson Daly. Nothing against Carson; I've run into him a lot—backstage at Tiger Jam, parties in LA for the Grammy Awards and once at an MTV remote from the Freemont Street Experience—and he is about as nice as he comes across on television. Or, at least, as nice as he comes across on MTV; I've never seen the NBC show. Amazingly, I soon discovered, neither had the Zodiac guy.
He in fact had no interest in Caron Daly at all, but was only there for Liz Phair, the musical guest. "It's not a concert, you know. She is only going to do one song," I tell him. I tell him this this because I can't imagine anyone waiting so long to see a five-minute performance. But I have underestimated the depth of his dedication to Liz Phair, the former indie rock queen who in recent years has made her self over as the ultimate MILF for Avril's fans. He found out about the taping from an e-mail alert sent from her website, and he knows she is an Aries. When I tell him that I've interviewed her, he tries to debrief me on contact names for her management and publicity team. This tedious process is only interrupted when he flags a passing production assistant for the Late Show and tries to get her to take a letter back stage to Liz Phair.
"Don't you think this is kind of creepy?" I ask the woman from Nashville.
"I'm trying not to think about it," she says.
This guy is not a teenybopper, by the way. "How old are you?" I ask him, unable to disguise the contempt in my tone.
He tells me he is 24.
I tell him, "You are the sort of fan that rock stars pay management and publicists to keep away from them."
"Really?" he asks, looking hurt.
I immediately feel bad and try to bond with him: "I'm that way about Bob Dylan."
He says nothing. I try again. "My friend Doug, who writes for the morning newspaper here, he thinks Liz Phair is as good as Bob Dylan." Nothing. "He told me when he interviewed Liz Phair, he made her cry."
That perks him up. "I can't see her crying," he says.
As if on cue, the production assistant returns to place Review-Journal music critic Doug Elfman with us at the front of the line. I immediately introduce him to the fan, and they exchange Liz Phair talk. Doug, of course, manages to loose a few brutal barbs about Dylan, including an opinion of the masterpiece Love & Theft that ought to draw him a sentence at Abu Ghraib.
Finally, a full 30 minutes after the taping was supposed to have started, something happens: security comes to frisk us. Things are routine until the burly guard discovers an object tucked into the sock of the Zodiac fan. I instantly move away from the guy, who at that moment looks a lot like Mark David Chapman. The production assistant drifts over to us. It turns out, of course, to be nothing more than a Liz Phair CD ready to be signed should he get close enough to her during the taping. But I suspect security and the production assistant will not let that happen.
When we finally enter, Doug turns to me and says: "Isn't this the longest line you've ever waited in?"
"I know," I tell him. "I know."