Coachella pt3

i find myself scavenging the perimeter fencelines in my hopeless attempt to recover some shred of evidence, a clue to my lost bag. nothing.. just empty garbage bags and pretzel boxes. a blue beam of light catches my eye as i bend down to pick up a lost cellphone. i flip it open, check the last outgoing entry and hit call.... brrriiing .... brrring. a voice on the other end.

"hello"

"hi, i think your friend lost their phone, i found it and am calling from it"

the connection drops.

i call again

"hello"

"hey, i have your friends phone, let's meet ssomewhere so i can give it to you"

i'm compelled to karmically retrieve my lost bag with this gesture of do-gooding. spent the next half hour trying to meet the phone's owner's friend. we finally connect and 'fabrizio' tells me that his friend is a pretzel vendor who's been looking for his phone for the past couple hours. we spend another half hour locating his friend in the vendor area... he zips by on an empty golfcart and we make the exchange. after a brief exchange of gratitude, i ask him for a lift back to the front entrance.

"Sorry man, I'm really busy, i got a lot of shit to take care of"

In my head, i'm holding a blunt object and bludgeoning this ungrateful prick to submission. He picks up some aural cue from me and reconsiders.

"get on back, i'll take you"

fucker drops me off as at the front gate. i wave 'later' and wonder how people get to become such assholes. is most of the world a bunch of assholes? Or is it just in palm springs?

I rendezvous with the posse back at Julia's car in parking lot 5. we wait around for an hour for shannon, who's managed to lose the location of her car. ish's stuff is in her trunk so we wait some more since we're there anyway.

the next day, i wake in the hopes of being able to cajole ticketmaster into issuing another ticket for me... this should be a breeze, i think. of course, as my luck would have it, ticketmaster has a policy where once tickets are issued at will-call they cannot reissue them. they tell me that i'm at the mercy of the event management staff. great. how am i gonna convince the box office that i lost my ticket inside the venue last night and that i need to get another one issued?... we leave for the 2nd day of the festival as i begin to swallow the idea of having to pony up another 80 bucks for my 2nd days worth of fun.

geez, this story is much shorter when i tell it.
i'm just gonna wrap this up now.
so basically, we get to the box office outside of the gates and i explain my situation. of course nobody in the event staff knows how to help me, they're all just volunteers. i ask how i can get to the lost and found so i can check to see if my stolen bag is there along with my stolen ticket. but nobody knows where the lost and found is, so i'm sol. chris and i run into another victim of theft from the previous night. she's with 3 palm springs policemen who are assisting her in finding the lost and found. they'd been with her all morning in the hopeless attempt to try to get some clear answers from members of the staff. we share stories and part ways. as they walk away, i hear the girl ask the cops if they can get her back in through the gate (as there are no in's and outs).
...
seconds pass as the flashbulb triggers in my head
... i chase after the cops and throw this out there, "would you guys mind getting me in as well?"

"sure, where's your friend?"

and that was it, i get in with the help of these friendly cops who recognize the fact that there are people getting screwed here and were gracious enough to cut me a break. thanks mr. policemen.

and that, my friends, is what i call karma.