Also, I Have a Giant Blue Bull Named Babe

The first thing you need to know about me and my brother when reading this story is that we put the “wuh” in “wacky.” We see an opportunity for a prank, and we commit to it. We do not divert. We do not swerve. We do not detour. We head down that Great Road of Prank full throttle, potholes be damned.

My brother and I met in New Orleans for a connecting flight to Atlanta for DragonCon ComicCON. One would think that it would be easy enough to find a direct flight from Dallas to Atlanta, but Southwest Airlines only flies out of Love Field. If you know Texas, you know that The Wright Amendment is the biggest piece of bullshit legislation next to the misnamed Defense of Marriage Act. But I digress.

My flight getting into New Orleans was delayed, so I had to run through the airport to make the flight. Wubba was already on the plane. I picked up a lunch of cold-cuts, brie, fois gras, pistachios, croissants, and hand-churned butter imported from Sweden and packed in into a cooler that I proceeded to swing hither-and-thither through the concourse as I ran. (I may have knocked over a book display at a newsstand, but I won’t admit it.)(I will admit to hitting a pug in a baby carriage with a bow on its head only because that’s just sick.)

(If you’re asking, “How did a pug get in the concourse?” this was before 9-11 when they let concealed Molotov cocktails and semi-automatic weapons on the concourse.)

(Okay, I lied about the pug, but wouldn’t it have been funny if that had happened?)(No, not "funny-ha-ha,” but "funny-seriously-Robert-get-on-with-the-story”-funny.)

(I’ve always wanted to say “semi-automatic weapon.” Thank you, internet.)

(And I’ll get back to the story when I’m good-and-ready.)

(Jerk.)

I arrived at the gate just as they were closing the concourse door in clichéd fashion, and begged the gate-keeper let me on the flight. She or he did, and as I was getting on the plane, holding aloft my cooler of foodstuffs so as not to hit the blue-hair with the weathered face sitting in first class, Wubba saw me and yelled, “Dr. Turnage! Thank Mary and Holy Joseph you made it with the heart!” The flight attendant asked me if I really was a doctor, adding that they’re usually informed when a transplant organ was going to be on board; apparently, they have a special fridge up front that they store the hearts in.

Somehow I convinced her that I was indeed a doctor. (Again - pre-9/11.)

Twenty minutes into the flight, a passenger ten rows up from us started going into cardiac arrest. The flight attendant that I duped before asked if I could do anything for the passenger, so I went up to talk to the passenger. (Remember - Wacky. And. Committed.)

The passenger was red and sweating. I pounded on his chest, and I blew into his mouth. I grabbed the nearest box-cutter, ripped open his shirt, and made an incision vertically down the center of his ribs. I took the bone-saw I happened to have with me and cracked his ribs. I reached into his chest and massaged his heart. He had already fainted from the intense pain. The passengers around us were drenched in his blood. Pieces of bone and flesh dripped from the fresh-air valves above the seats.

His heart stopped beating. I yelled to the flight attendant who had become my makeshift surgical assistant, “Get my cooler. Now! Whore!” I added the “whore” because I felt that Dr. Turnage, the character I had assumed, would be the kind of guy that would throw out wild, unsubstantiated claims about another person’s dirty sex life. “This man needs a new heart!” I would find out later that the heart had stopped beating because he had bled out.

I opened up the cooler only to remember that I wasn’t REALLY a surgeon, and that the cooler didn’t really have a heart in it. I cut out his heart with the box cutter. I opened up my container of fois gras, and just kind of shoved it into his chest. Then I sprinkled the pistachios on top. No one was questioning my obvious authority because earlier I had shot everyone’s eyes out with my concealed Molotov cocktail. Because the brie wasn’t going to be any good without the fois gras, I threw that in his chest also.

I cracked his chest back together, and sewed it up with shoestring. Lucky for me, the plane crashed in a fiery ball leaving my brother and me the only survivors, so no one found out about our little prank.

Pure wackiness.