Origin Story, Part One

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a pilot.

The way I saw it, life on the ground was boring and slow. I wanted get higher, go faster, and I knew being a pilot was the only way to do it. It probably didn’t hurt that my dad was a jet jock, had been since before I was born. He flew every kind of fighter they made – F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Super Hornets, even the F-22 Raptor.

My mom ducked out when I was five, and Dad didn’t talk about her much. Any time I’d bring her up, he’d say some crap about how it wasn’t her fault, she loved me very much, and blah blah blah. I didn’t really mind; I never got the chance to know her, and as far as I could tell, most other kids’ moms just gave them a hard time.

So it was always just me and Pops. Sure, he had a couple girlfriends, but we moved around a lot, going from air base to air base, and they usually wouldn’t last. My army brat friends would bitch about the nomadic lifestyle, but I dug it. It was like I was part of The A-Team or something – every week a new home, a different adventure. I couldn’t stand to be in one place too long, seeing the same stupid faces, eating the same stupid food. Besides, moving kept me from getting too caught up with friends and whatnot, and let me focus on what I really wanted: learning how to be a pilot.


I’ll never forget the first plane I went up in: an old school F-4 Phantom II (see above). I was about seven, and my dad was flying it from some air base in Nevada to a de-commissioning facility in California. It was only an hour or so flight, so he got clearance to take me along.

As soon as I stepped on the wing, I knew I was home. I loved the feel of the warm metal under my hands, the sharp smell of the jet fuel, and the slick surface of the instruments. I had to sit against two parachutes and a cushion to get the straps tight around me, but it felt like I belonged there. And the take-off: Hole. E. SHIT. The velocity mashed me against the seat and I could barely open my eyes, but that speed was like taking a smack in the face from the hand of the Almighty himself.


It was a pretty uneventful trip, but I was absorbed the entire time. Dad kept us steady at about 10,000 feet, and I just gaped at the desert landscape below. He even let me take the stick for a little bit, and I’ll never forget the thrum of power I could feel in my hand. It was like holding the collar of some coked-up jaguar who was ready to go nuts at any second.

From then on, I was hooked. The second I graduated high school, I enrolled in the Air Force Academy. But two years in, my dad got sick – kidney cancer. He had nobody else, so I dropped out of the academy to take care of him.

You know what sucks about cancer? Everything. The chemo, the dialysis, and the frigging endless, tongue-swallowing line of pills. Eventually, both his kidneys were riddled in tumors and they had to take them out. I gave him one of mine, even though we both knew it would keep me from getting back into the Air Force.

But even that wasn’t good enough. This was some hardcore gangsta cancer he’d contracted, and it barreled through his body like a meth-head in a pharmacy. After five years of fighting the fucker, he died in a shitty VA hospital outside Flagstaff. There wasn’t much money left after the medical bills, and even though the Air Force said I could take a desk job at the academy, I couldn’t bear being around all those planes and not being able to fly them.

So I went on the move again, working a bunch of shitty jobs (hotel shuttle driver, pizza delivery guy, landscaping contractor) to pay the bills. And then one day I got a call from Dad’s brother Bill. (Don’t bother Googling; it ain’t his real name.) They’d never been really close, but he’d had heard I was looking for a job and wanted to help out. See, Uncle Bill was a brigadier general, and he knew about an opening at a military research facility. It wasn’t much responsibility, but it was stable and would get me working near planes again. There was just one catch:

The job was at Area 51.

Don't Get Too Excited ...

It’s not as glamorous as it sounds.

I know what you’re thinking: “Oooh, Area 51. We’re gonna learn all about aliens, and time travel, and shadowy government conspiracies run by old white guys smoking cigarettes!”

Wrong. I’ve been at Dreamland nearly two years, and I have yet to see an alien autopsy. I’ve never glimpsed anything that looks like a UFO. I haven’t spotted any flying DeLoreans going 88 miles an hour, or stumbled across secret weapons labs, and I sure as shit haven’t seen anyone smoking. That crap’s more illegal here than working for Al Qaeda, and twice as likely to cause death.

You ask me, that Roswell "incident" was staged to get people behind the whole “Trip to the Moon” idea. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff that goes down here, but none of it involves little green men. (Unless you happen to spill radioactive plasma on your testes -- wink, wink.)

But other than that, Area 51 is a pretty boring place to work. I’ve played more games of Minesweeper than I can be bothered to count (actually just checked: 11,634!), I’ve read the backstory of every comic book character ever created (thank you, Wikipedia), and I’ve played Scrabulous on Facebook with people from over 20 countries (current ranking: 1545). It’s so boring, kids, I’ve decided to start posting about it on this oh-so-secret blog.

Wait, you ask. If it’s so boring, what do you have to talk about? God, you’re a demanding bunch. Fine, it’s mainly an excuse for me to rant. But some part of me also hopes that by writing these entries, I’ll be able to find some meaning in something that has become so completely meaningless. And besides, a quick Google search tells me that people are pretty obsessed with the goings-on here at Homey Airport (11.2 million sites can’t be wrong). So if I keep my identity hidden, maybe I can actually find out some of the stuff that’s really happening here and (more importantly) keep myself from committing a boredom-induced suicide by jumping in the particle accelerator.

Working here is a lot like working anywhere else. Take away the bottomless government funding, the stupid codenames for everything, and the detox procedure you have to go through every time you enter the place, and it’s pretty similar to a sausage factory. I know this because I have a cousin who works in an actual sausage factory. From talking to him, we both have to deal with the same office politics, asshole co-workers, and inter-departmental fuck-ups.

Last night, for example. I’m on Day 2 of a six-day rotation. (Everyone at Area 51 works 24-hour shifts for a certain number of days, then has time off; I’m currently on the six-on/four-off plan) At 2 AM, Sanitation gets a buzz there was a chemical spill in the Experimental Weapons lab. Since I’m the guy on call that night, I pull on my Biohazard suit, head to Sub-Level 2A, and find out the stupid under-slept scientists actually dumped a container of inert plasma while trying to fill a Version 5.1 pulse rifle.

Which means I have to go all the way BACK to the supply hub and swap out my chemical vaporator for a sub-atomic nano-vacuum. Then I’m the one who gets chewed out because the crap ate through two layers of floor shield by the time I got back. But guess what, morons? You want me to clean up a PLASMA spill, it doesn’t help to tell me it’s CHEMICAL. I swear, the more PhDs they have, the dumber they act.

So that’s the basic deal. This shit hole’s a mess, but somebody’s gotta clean it. And until I hit three cherries on the million-dollar slot at Harrah’s, it looks like I’m the guy stuck doing it. But maybe writing about it here will at least make my existence seem a little bit less pointless.

NEXT UP: How I got sucked into this miserable gig.