I Know They’re Pilots
written by: Richard Korst
I thought it was a good trade. My daughter lets me attend an NCAA semifinal basketball game, and I agree to come a day early for a free concert in downtown Indianapolis. I love road trips, sensed this would be a great bonding opportunity, and, at the very least, it got me out of the house. I like my daughter’s music, generally, and this group, particularly, but for years I struggled with the band’s name, calling them the Twenty-One Stone Temple Pilots, The Stone Pilots, or the Temple Pilots, much to my daughter’s dismay. She repeatedly corrected me until finally giving up, muttering under her breath,
“God, he’s an idiot.”
I’d like to argue with her assessment and, in my defense, I often confused Loggins and Messina with Seals and Crofts and misspelled the Monkees on several occasions. Their actual name is Twenty-One Pilots, now part of my lexicon, and I know two lines from one of their most popular songs but, not necessarily in the right order. Anyway, my daughter insisted we arrive by ten a.m., claiming people had been lining up since 7:30, implying there was no guarantee we would get in. We arrived at the prescribed time, marched four blocks to join a rag-tag group of about three hundred people who probably arrived the night before, and began our waiting vigil for the next six hours. The line never got bigger than five hundred people. Could have slept a couple more hours and still gotten in.
I’m not complaining, but I must have been forty years older than the next oldest fan, my conspicuous nature attributable to my age, but also my attire; no wool beanie, the absence of black clothing, and the fact my arms were devoid of tattoos and my face free of piercings. I wore Levi’s and a white T-shirt promoting Scottsdale’s “Bicycle Haus,” going more for the “Boss” look, although I could count on one hand the number in the queue aware of who he was.
I was perched on an orange traffic barrier about an hour after our arrival when an elderly gentleman, sporting khakis, a pressed striped shirt, and a windbreaker, approached me out of nowhere,
“You look like someone in the know,” he said, assuming out of the morass of people, I looked more like him than anyone else.
“It all depends,” I responded, not sure if he needed help or wanted to sell me insurance.
“Can you tell me where the live Stations of the Cross is being held?”
Although it was Good Friday, the question seemed out of place unless he thought this menagerie of disillusioned youth was sitting in line for the event. Why ask me? Nonetheless, I gave him my full attention. I’m a pleaser by nature.
“I wish I could help. Maybe we could Google it.”
We found nothing. He explained his recent conversion to Catholicism, how his wife told him the event occurred on this spot every year, adding she would be arriving shortly. I told him I was raised Catholic; we bonded. I then turned my head for an instant, and he was gone. I looked in all directions and not a trace. Was he real? My daughter hadn’t seen him. Maybe I was being tested, a good Samaritan exam. Did I pass? I’ll never know, well, I may find out when the end of times arrives, but I do hope he found what he was looking for.
At 12:30 p.m., four hours before we were let in, I informed my daughter I would try and find us some food and walked six blocks to downtown Indianapolis. I turned off my phone, apparently a mortal sin, and ambled to an empty metropolitan wasteland, bought some fries at “Five Guys,” stopped at a men’s clothing store, and tried on some sportscoats. Granted, a houndstooth jacket may have expanded the existing schism with the fans, my intent was calculated; reduce my waiting time sitting on the sidewalk and paralyzing my buttocks. I got his business card and meandered back to the line, stepping over groups feasting on snack foods and snapping endless selfies. Upon finding my daughter, I encountered her immediate wrath, adding to the anger of my other daughter at home, who was in a panic after several attempts to reach me.
“I thought you got mugged,” said my daughter from home, a logical if somewhat hysterical first assumption, I suppose. My waiting daughter seemed disappointed I’d escaped this fate until I handed her the fries. She still managed a biting shot,
“The line’s been moving. What would you have done if I’d gone in already?”
I bowed my head and held my tongue, tempted to say,
“I probably would have driven back home. Good luck finding a ride,” but I didn’t.
We inched our way forward, getting closer to the main gate. News trucks and reporters came by interviewing people, and I waited patiently for the opportunity to humiliate my daughter. If only I had bought that coat, I thought. The lead story would have featured me responding to the question,
“Are you a big Twenty-One Pilots fan?”
“Twenty-One Pilots fan? My daughter told me we were waiting to see the Rolling Stones.”
I told my daughter after the fact what I was thinking of saying, and she looked coolly at me, shaking her head, “Not funny, Dad.”
Hmm, what does she know? Today’s generation is humorless. Maybe mentioning Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead would have been more appropriate given the nomadic nature of the Twenty-One Pilots fan base, but the newscaster was long gone, interviewing a girl who looked like a Pippi Longstocking doppelganger.
The appointed time finally arrived and security let us through the gates, although “security” was a misnomer. Anyone could have entered with ninja stars, nunchucks, or even shotguns had they shuffled through with their eyes forward and a large smile on their face. Even though we were in, we weren’t really in. The stage was in sight, approximately 200 yards of green grass lay ahead from our vantage point. We were herded together as one, controlled by a rope and a man sporting a whistle. My daughter turned to me,
“Now, Dad, listen to me. Don’t lose me,” she said sternly.
“What do you mean?” I asked nervously, my voice rising an octave.
“When they let down the rope, we need to sprint towards the front of the stage. You may never find me if the gap gets too wide.”
Sprint? Seriously? That expectation must have been hidden in our verbal agreement’s fine print. I ran cross-country and track in high school, but fifty years earlier, one less knee replacement and one less heart attack removed. Three young women, small in stature, stood behind us anxiously listening to my daughter’s strategy,
“Can we run behind you? We can’t see anything,” they said, their collective voices quivering.
This simple yet prophetic plea conjured up two simultaneous and disturbing visions: We were either in Pamplona running from the bulls, one step ahead of being gored, or we landed in some nightmarish Twilight Zone episode, transported to Pickett’s Charge crossing the wheatfield while heavy artillery and rifle fire whizzed past our charging husks. The whistle shrieked, the crowd surged forward as if participants in the Oklahoma land rush. I was losing about ten yards for every twenty, and my daughter turned back one final time, yelling,
“Find me.”
“Find you, really?” My last words to her and possibly my gravestone epitaph.
Her compassionate yet hollow entreaty concerned me. I wondered how caring she would really be when I was on my final deathbed. But there was no time for self-pity; the crowd poured forward, and our three women from behind shot past me, ignoring my whimpering. Surveying the remaining one hundred and fifty yards added to my concern, the open area undulated and was plagued with concrete steps appearing like land mines, taking down the unsuspecting wildebeest culled from the herd. My speed, or lack thereof, saved me from this precarious situation. My daughter reluctantly waved to me after I finally reached the promised land, about twenty rows of packed, standing youth blocking my path. I slithered through, excusing myself whenever I brushed someone’s body, fearing the speculative glare, the mistrust, the disdain,
“Look out for that creepy old man?” They didn’t say it. They didn’t have to.
There were still two hours before the main act appeared, and “the pit’s” temperature hovered about twenty degrees, maybe twenty-one hotter, than anywhere else in the venue. Once again, after forty-five minutes standing with my daughter, the piped-in music blaring, the bass reverberating like a cheap massage chair, I used sustenance as an excuse to leave. Her fear of losing me no longer an issue, as she had already made friends, trading past concert stories. I had nothing to add. Once, when I was eight, I spoke with Paul Simon at a concert.”
“Who is Paul Simon? Did they even have concerts back then, old man?”
I immediately sat down under a tree with no expectation of returning, not leaving, but not returning. An hour into my furlough, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. In the “pit,” groups of people started raising their hands and waving frantically. Had the chicken salad gone bad? The loudspeaker boomed,
“We need a medic. Make room for the medic.”
The crowds parted like the Red Sea as one, three, five, seven people were carted away from the group, passed out in the heat, and no means of rescuing victims save the slithering I perfected earlier. I started to panic. Is my daughter a casualty or will she be next? I hurriedly bought her two bottles of water and waded back into the mob; a pungent odor enveloped me, surely contributing to the rise of semi-conscious revelers. I found her. She was grateful and ok and I successfully dispelled the notion I was a narc. I wriggled through the crowd once more and would not see her again until the concert ended at 10:30.
The Twenty-One Pilots finally came on stage, the accompanying ear-shattering screaming blanketed the crowd, a tsunami of sound. One woman taken out for dead earlier now stood in front of me dancing, no worse for the wear, some potion administered, her memory whitewashed. I sang my two lines in the wrong order while standing next to a thirty-something couple who knew every line from every song. They belted them out like Ethel Merman in “Annie Get Your Gun,” not a care in the world, not a lyric in tune. It didn’t matter. The woman had seen them thirteen times. My daughter, her third. I told them this was the best Twenty-One Pilots concert I had attended, my only one. My ears were ringing, but I was happy. Happy that I had stepped out of my comfort zone and happy for my daughter. I found her afterward and took a picture with her in front of the stage.
“Whatcha think, Dad? Good, huh?”
“Yes, sweetie, great. Will have to do it again.”
The next day I attended the semi-final basketball game sitting alone in the upper deck of a seventy-thousand-seat football stadium, paying $600 for the privilege of watching my team lose. At least I was informed they lost, as the two teams were unrecognizable from such a distance. I didn’t stay for the second game, didn’t care. My daughter picked me up in front of the stadium, and we drove home. Three hours discussing the concert, not the game. Three hours of bonding and planning for their next concert. Three hours listening to Twenty-One Pilots on the car radio, no medics required.
- I Know They’re Pilots - September 9, 2026
- The Arena Lies Quiet - June 2, 2026
- A Reflection. A Glimpse. - February 26, 2026
