My Place in Line
"How are you special? Why are you getting an escort?" a guy at Costco Wholesale in Issaquah yelled at me last Wednesday. He was there to get his copy of My Life signed by Bill Clinton, and judging from his place in line, he had probably been there since the previous evening. The line began halfway into the store, in the vacuum aisle, and extended out the building for several blocks. As I approached, someone asked a cop, "Where's the end of the line?" and the cop said, "Five hundred people that way, and it's too late, they're not letting anyone else in." The only way to see the president in the flesh, other than getting there obscenely early, was to be a member of the media. This is what, in the parlance of the aforementioned man, made me special.
But being in the media pen was not exactly the honor of a lifetime. It was warm and frankly miserable, and not because the media was confined to a roped-off area closer to giant boxes of ceiling fans than to Clinton, nor because there was nothing at all to eat (even though it was lunch hour and the air in Costco smells of pizza), nor because we couldn't even go to the restroom without forfeiting our place. It was miserable because Clinton was 115 minutes late, and a certain hellcat employed as a photographer by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer spent every one of those minutes bitching about the fact that we had all been shunted into the ceiling fan corner, that we weren't being given anything to eat even though it was lunch hour and everything smelled like pizza, and that we weren't allowed to go to the bathroom.
She kept saying it was "fucking ridiculous" that Costco had "corralled" us in this area without putting out a tray of food for us, trays of food being so easy to come by in a Costco. An employee of Costco informed her, rather cleverly I thought, that any such tray of food would have to be inspected by bomb-sniffing dogs. "I'll pay," the photographer said, clearly to reinforce that she thought food should be free, and in response the Costco employee produced bottles of water for the media people, which only inspired, on the part of the P-I photographer, another tirade about the bathrooms.
There is nothing to say about the signing itself. Clinton looked like himself, only more tired. We couldn't hear him. People shook his hand and were gone, looking vaguely happy. The only thing notable about the rest of the event, with the exception of one shrieking female fan, was when a conspicuously mentally handicapped young man made his way up to get his book signed. The grabby giddiness that ensued in the press box was, well, notable. Images of the mentally handicapped are evidently the bread and butter of daily newspaper photographers. In the clamor for a good angle, the P-I lady sneered, "Mind if I get where you're standing since you're just writing?"
I maintained a Clintonian calm. I stepped aside.
