July 31, 2006. Day 1 of my NYC Trip
Some kids want ponies when they are growing up. I had a pony. Some kids want dogs. I had two. Some kids want a play house. My grandfather built me one. It was the size of a dining room. I had a lot as a kid, but we weren’t rich. Having so much, I naturally wanted more. I wanted to fly places. I wanted to see the world. Mainly, I wanted to climb aboard a silver jet, sit in first class and order stewardesses around. “Get me a coffee,” I imagined barking. “I want caviar.”
Only a kid would think coffee and caviar were an exotic combination. As I grew up and started flying places on my own, I realized that air travel was not at all what I had dreamt of as a child. In fact, the number one problem with flying was that planes were full of kids. And tall people. Really tall people who don’t quite fit in coach. Or fat people. Fat people don’t go out of their way to get good seats. It’s one of those psychological phenomena, the way poor people started voting for Republicans even though it wasn’t in their best interest. Fat people always end up in the middle seat next to me, their legs, spilling over into my space so that we sit knock-kneed from Vegas to New York.
If the person next to me is not fat, they are a squirming Cantonese child, spoiled by her aged grandmother sitting in the aisle seat. Cantonese children like to sit next to me and stare at me. They like to pull on my hair while they sleep. When they wake me, and I stare nastily at their grandmother, the grandmother puts a Cantonese hex on me or gives me an evil eye. “Do not criticize me or my grandkid,” they seem to be saying with the evil eye.
If the person sitting in the middle seat next to me is not a fat person or a Cantonese child, it is a young man who wants to talk. And talk. He has confused the plane for a fern bar from the seventies. He thinks the plane is a place to meet women, or score.
“I know you,” one guy said to me once on a flight from Dallas to San Francisco.
I looked at him, searching his green eyes, trying to find something familiar. I had never seen this man. He had sandy hair and a mustache that wouldn’t quite grow in though he must have been thirty.
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“Oh we know each other,” he said, quite serious. He seemed slightly hurt that I didn’t remember him.
“I’m really sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met.”
He shook his head, my vacuity clearly annoying him. “Not in this life, silly,” he said. “We knew each other in a previous life.”
What was truly scary about this encounter is that the young man was not hitting on me. He believed we had known each other. I was his sister, Mirabelle. We lived on a plantation in Virginia. I’m so glad our past life was nothing cliché.
In my job, I fly a lot. I fly to Hong Kong, to New York, to small towns like Orlando, which I guess is not so small, but seems that way in comparison to New York of Hong Kong. I fly all over. I have learned many things from flying. Bring a jacket on board, even if it is the middle of summer. Airplanes are cold. Bring a water spritzer on board to freshen your face. Don’t drink alcohol when flying, it makes jet lag worse. Don’t drink caffeine either for the same reason. Of all the things I learned, there is one large pervading truth: people are jackasses when they travel. They are rude, self-centered, loud, smelly, inconsiderate, arrogant, and thoughtless and if they have brains, they forget how to use them.
As I write this, I’m on a flight to Newark. The plane is a pungent algorithm of smells. There’s flatulence, mixed with smelly feet and armpits, and the sharp scent of burned coffee. The movie has just ended and people who didn’t want to watch the flick, a show about a teenage mermaid, sleep, or try to. Behind me somewhere sit two women from what I imagine is Brooklyn or Queens. I’m not good with accents. One of them has not stopped talking for the last twenty-five minutes. Her voice hits our ears, an aural invasion. I think, “Go ask her to be quiet.” I don’t. I shift in my chair. I think, “Go slap her.” I don’t. I look at the woman across from me, who has plugged in her iPod and is listening to music of her choice. I envy her and wonder why I can never remember to pack my own iPod. That’s what they are for, to block out the world you don’t want to hear.
Oh great, the woman next to me is now snoring. The man in the seat ahead of me and across the aisle has removed his shoes. He really should not have done that. He stretches his long legs, bumping the back of the seat ahead of him. The person, a young man with spiked blond hair, a Billy Idol almost wannabe, turns around and gives him a look. The long legged man does not se it. I think of myself, as I strike these keys. Is the click click click annoying the people around me, as they are all annoying me. We are out to get each other, we people in rows 19-21, just as the people in the rows 22-24 and so on are doing.
When I boarded the flight, the attendants had stuck one pillow in between the aisle and middle seat, and laid a blanket over the aisle seat. One blanket, one pillow per row. Presumably, the winners of the prize were the people in the aisle seat, if they got their first. When I reached my seat, 20c, an aisle, there was no pillow or blanket. Someone had taken it – not my row mates, as they had not yet arrived. A kid sat ahead of me in 19C. She did not want her blanket, and for two hours, it lay where the attendant had left it, over the top of her seat. I grew cold and debated taking that blanket. But she is just a kid, and she might want it, I thought. I sat there and thought about it, but I was afraid if I took it, someone would say something to me. “God, you’re so rude,” the long-legged man might say. “That blanket is for that little girl.”
Just as I had almost convinced myself that I was not cold, and the even if I was, cold was good for you as you burned more calories, the woman sitting next to me leaned forward, and casually lifted the blanket from the back of the kid’s chair. She took it for herself. She did this in a way that I could tell she did not give it a second thought. She did not have an internal dialogue between her inner angel and devil. She just did it. No regrets. No looking back. “How selfish,” I thought, with utter envy.
I got up and walked down the aisle to the bathroom. I had to wait, and wait. There were two restrooms, both occupied by people inside who were evidently writing a novel, slowly. There’s a little boy behind me, holding his treasures in his hand and stomping his feet back and forth. I think of offering him my place in line, but my middle-aged bladder wants immediate relief, too.
As I stood in line, between the woman in the aisle seat in 30 D and the woman in the aisle seat in 30C, they started talking around my body.
“This is so rude,” 30 D said. “I have no privacy back here. People just stand in line and crowd us.”
I looked around, uncertain where else I could stand. I thought of crawling in her lap. Would that be less rude?
“And then I have this big Norwegian goof ball who is crowding my tray,” 30 D said to 30 C who acted as if she didn’t know her. “Look how far I have to lean over.”
I stole a glance. I recognized the Norwegian goof. He had been in front of me in the queue to board the plane. The boy knew tall. He must have been 7 feet. Seriously. I imagined that he had pituitary gland issues. I did not even come up to his elbow. He sat in 30 B, the middle. His knees crunch against the back of the seat ahead of him. I looked at 30 D, and she returned my look with the evil eye. This flight had more people giving the evil eye than a Turkish Knitting Circle. I think, "this is what flying has become. A plane full of people giving each other the evil eye." It's the best response we have to noisy kids, smelly feet, flatulance, burnt coffee, all circulating in a flying can.
