Memories of Flying as a Child

I stood by the giant window at JFK, looking out at the sunny tarmac. A TWA 707, possibly our plane, waited at the gate. The big red stripe and the letters on the tail signaled a dimension of mystery and beauty apart from my world back home of walking in the woods. An elderly couple appeared you’d describe as kindly. The woman handed me a yellow butterscotch in its twisted little wrapper. When I found Mom she took it away. Don’t accept candy from strangers, she said.

As soon as the light went bing the man I sat behind reclined and lit a cigarette. The stewardess’s cart clattered with soda cans and baby liquor bottles. I had peanuts and ginger ale. Dinner was lasagna, hot and salty in the smoky atmosphere. The presentation excited me: the foil tight around the edges of the dish, the undressed iceberg and tomato salad, the dense and pale roll. And something strange and colorful and sweet. Utensils wrapped in plastic. We face forward when we eat on a plane. We do not face each other. Not that we really eat. It’s not about eating. I poked apart the pasta layers with my fork. I knew I’d be vomiting by the time we land.

The cabin was dark and still. On the screen a purple dune buggy bounced along the beach. I raised the window shade. The sky above the clouds was yellow, red and deep, dark blue. Was it sunset, sunrise, I don’t know. On the screen a man was getting acupuncture. The practitioner rotated each needle, an act that appeared devious and cruel but might bring healing forces into play.

I walked alone by the chain link fence outside Luxembourg Airport thinking if they could only see me now. My classmates from that awful year in Paris. If they could only see me in my winter jacket out there in the jet fuel-scented air. Me in my place, them in theirs. Planes taxiing in the distance with the logos on their tails. Much like the one that was to take me home. I could see myself the way they’d see me. If they could only see me now.

My sister and I took turns going to the toilet to steal soap. It was stacked in a dispenser, little paper-wrapped bars with TWA. I don’t know what we ever did with them. They seemed so precious in the air. Stewardesses would give us things, playing cards with a picture of a plane flying over the sunny Rocky Mountains, and I’d wonder how they took a picture of the plane. They gave us little wing pins, junior flight crew pins. Socks.

We sat in a dimly lit terminal at an odd hour of the night, waiting for our connection. Outside a squall covered the planes and tugs and luggage carts in a dusting of snow.

I stood by the checkout at the newsstand in JFK. I couldn’t see above the counter and the lady couldn’t see me. That’s what I figured anyway as she tended to a customer. At arm's reach before me sat rows upon rows of candy: gums on top, Dentyne, Wrigleys in blues and yellows and greens, Dubble Bubble and Bazooka; in the middle Necco Wafers, Smarties, Chuckles and Dots; the chocolate down below: Charleston Chews and Milky Ways, Reese’s, Kit Kats, Crunch. I took a roll of Life Savers. How was I not supposed to? I concealed it in the front of my waistband and walked away. On the plane it fell down my pants leg and rolled along the cabin floor. Mom saw it and said did you steal this, I said yes, full of fear, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and scolded me and said you may have one if you share them with your sister.

I try to progress through the airport in the optimal way, with a minimum of graceless, superfluous motions. Boarding passes in respective passports, bookmarking the photo page, all three together in the leather document pouch in my messenger bag. Are they there? Yes they are. One two three. Close the flap with the weakly magnetic snaps. Are they there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three. Security is problematic. Will they be checking passports on the way in? I think they do at JFK. But what about Heathrow? If they don’t I’m holding mine like an asshole, nakedly American. Does it go in the gray tray alongside my bag, electronic devices, belt and loose change? Or do I carry it through the detection portal, holding it out as I stand in the full-body scanner and make myself into the shape of a stick figure man? Sometimes they say take off your shoes. Sometimes they don’t. Maybe we’re now past the ritual as a civilization, the shoe bomber’s name having finally been eclipsed from the last of our brains. Richard something. I had only just learned to properly navigate this step, slipping on my sneakers quickly after retrieving them and then, so as not to hold up the line, gathering everything and walking to the nearest row of chairs to put it all back down, step on the seat to tie my laces, then put my jacket back on, then my bag, then my hat, are the passports there? Open the flap. Yes they are. One two three.

The planes look slow and lumbering as they take off and land, almost like you could catch up to them by foot, grab hold of the fuselage.

I love the names on the planes. Like Kalitta on the 747s, a familiar-sounding name, I thought maybe just from every other airport I’ve been to in my life. I looked it up and saw it’s Connie Kalitta, drag racer, Beau Bridges in “Heart Like a Wheel.”

The waiting area by the gate, one flatscreen showing a storm surge lashing Florida’s coast, another showing golf, white men hunched in a green expanse, the tedious unchanging leaderboard displayed. Plus. Minus. Even. The bar and grill across the way is closed but already at this early hour you can glimpse a server behind the screen of idle taps, getting things ready for the coming onslaught of anxious, booze-mad fliers. The agent at the gate informs us that boarding will begin at five forty-six, one minute past schedule.

Man he really is concentrating on that putt. 

Last call for San Francisco from the neighboring gate. The others in our seating area are utterly unremarkable. No defining features, mannerisms. No intriguing conversation. A terrible torpor has set in; they barely reach their hands up to their faces. They’ve been reduced to this: travelers. When they get back to where they come from they’ll reinhabit themselves. People with jobs, friends, hobbies. Secrets. Features that define a life. But for the time being they’re in a state of grace: they’re nothing.

In fact the TV screen with golf has been frozen all along.

The plane from the tail cam looked Christlike in the rain in the morning.

Outside you couldn’t see anything but the wing. The instructions regarding step here, don’t step there. For maintenance personnel and monsters from the Twilight Zone.

Charles de Gaulle smells of piss and perfume in equal measure. The piss has gotten more pronounced over the years, renovations deferred, maintenance budgets cut. Rate your experience with a sad face or a smile.

The jetlag dreams were difficult. An enormous project at work, as big as the sky, impossible to complete. But I had to try.

Adventures in Smoking, pt. 3

When we got sick of playing guitar Jeff and I would walk out to the dike between the airport and the reservoir. Watch the planes come in. Little ones—Cessnas—turning in big, wobbly arcs around the water and over our heads to land. Some higher, some lower, some so low you could almost touch. I remember one swooped down below us, pulled up just in time to buzz our heads, trying to scare us, and it did. And we smoked.

We drank if we had anything to drink, and we smoked pot when we had it, but we smoked all the time.

Back at his house we smoked between tunes. I would light one up and stick it between the strings and the headstock, then play, letting ashes fall wherever. Jeff had a burn mark there on his. We’d take a break and sit cross-legged around the ashtray and listen to his hissy tape of Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, Missouri, August 3rd, 1982. Franklin’s Tower. To Lay Me Down.

We caught a Lyft to JFK. The driver said he was from Uzbekistan.

“How old is Nighted States?” he said in his nearly impenetrable accent.

I gave an answer, dumbly, lazily neglecting to really do the math. “Two-hundred, uh. Two-hundred fifty,” I said. “Two-hundred forty-five. Or something.”

It’s like when someone asks you for the time and you’re afraid to be precise. Three-thirty, you say. Maybe three thirty-five. But you feel like an asshole saying three thirty-two. Even if it’s the truth. But everyone knows what time it is. Everyone knows 1776.

He didn’t seem to hear me anyway. He gave me the age of Uzbekistan in a statement that seemed prepared. Two-thousand something, except it wasn’t something of course, it was as precise as mine was vague: two-thousand six-hundred eighty-two. Or something.

“That’s old,” I said. Of course.

We were just now getting on the Belt Parkway, five o’clock in the morning. Maybe four fifty-nine.

You enter a new realm when you walk down that jetway to the plane. From the unhappy bustle of the terminal, the lines for bad food, the flatscreen watching over all to remind them of the even greater misery outside, to the hush of the carpeted, windowless, downward slope, reeking of jet fuel suddenly, an uncivilized odor—no one would ever tolerate it for more than a minute but it’s intoxicating—to the independent nation of the plane, where there’s an otherworldly hum and colored lights glow from nowhere, and you can’t get reception now for some reason, and there’s a Muzak version of “Every Breath You Take” playing soft and low.

It’s fun to look at the destinations from the other gates at the airport, wondering what it’d be like to go there instead of where you’re going. Wondering if you could get on their plane instead, go AWOL from work, start a new life. Detroit, Santa Fe, Wichita, Boise. Places you’ve heard about but never been. At Heathrow the gate near us said Beirut. I tried to apply the same fantasy. Where would I stay the night after I landed? What would I eat? I examined the people in the departure lounge, sitting and waiting or milling around the counter with concerns about their seat assignments. Middle-aged, Middle Eastern men with mustaches and weary eyes. Just going home like anybody else.

Jackie told me about when we were at the airport, and we went to Dunkin’ Donuts, but there weren’t any donuts. So what did we get? I asked. Not imagining she’d remember. Croissants, she said. You’re right, I said.

Pedro's Back From Jail

We exited wearily into the arrivals terminal at JFK and walked that weird gauntlet of disregard, the rows of other peoples’ families and limo drivers holding up names in magic marker. Almost as soon as we entered the main space, gypsy cabbies descended upon us: Need a taxi? Where you need to go? Taxi? Taxi? Where you go? I had anticipated this little ritual and had fantasized about telling them Fuck off. But I didn’t. This is what they do. Let a man make a dishonest living, after all.

Outside, we got in the long line for Yellow Cabs. On the other side of the railing the non-licensed guys ranged up and down the median, trying to rope in their marks. We watched with some amusement as a young Asian woman talked one down from sixty-five bucks to thirty for a ride to Nassau County, only to leave him twisting in the wind.

Suddenly one man’s voice cut through the rest.

“Yo Pedro’s back!” he bellowed. “Pedro’s back motherfuckers! Y’all can go home now,” he told his rivals. “Pedro’s back from jail!”

You Never Take Candy from Strangers

There was a quick storm that left beads of rain on the office windows. There’s a hole in the sky up on the right where the sun was shining this whole time. But the clouds are moving fast. They cover it up. They let it shine again.

I can see 14th Street from here—from 26th. Just the intersection with Eighth. All the way Downtown the rising Freedom Tower glitters from behind a shroud.

I’m in an odd little annex to the main room on the floor. The 13th floor. 12A if you want to know the truth. There’s a glass partition between us in here and everybody else, as though we’re exhibits in a diorama, or they are.

In the front corner of our space two steps lead to a door that opens upon a strange space behind a parapet. A walkway, except it’s not for anyone to walk. There’s a gutter there, and two industrial air conditioners. It’s the sort of door that no one’s ever meant to open, leading to a place that no one’s ever meant to go.

It reminds me of being about five or six at JFK Airport. We were going to France. I was excited—as usual. The clean and modern, formal space. The candy stands and restaurants and bars. All the people walking by so resolute.

My mom and I ambled through the passageways, looking at the planes. There was ours, a TWA 707, in peppermint-stick white and red stripes in the sun. I saw a door that led to the graveled roof of the concourse below. A door you should not open. A door you must not open.

An old lady with lipstick on appeared. She leaned over me, saying what a cute boy, what a nice boy. She handed me a Jolly Rancher. I took it.

“What do we say?” Mom said.

“Thank you.”

And the lady was out of sight. My mom demanded it from me.

“Why?” I protested.

“Because you never take candy from strangers.”

We arrived in the morning and traipsed blearily through the airport, killing time, as our apartment wouldn't be free till mid-afternoon. Passengers passed by us in waves, coming or going, but full of purpose either way. Not us. We took an elevator to a deserted floor containing only an angled hallway and a restroom.

We bought sandwiches at a little stand. The girl behind the counter was put upon, unhappy. An older man complained about his bill, she dispassionately pointed out his error. A homeless man hovered, asking everyone in line to buy him something.

The Enterprise - 9

David and I had twenty minutes or so before our flight to San Francisco. I followed him up the stairs of the Continental departures terminal at Newark Airport.

"Let's go to the lounge!" he exclaimed like a child, and led me to the hushed and privileged sanctuary. We'd used our miles to upgrade to first class, at his insistence. An elegant woman welcomed us between the double doors and showed us in with a gracious bow.

Inside, we sat in silence at the bar. It was like any other airport bar. More or less. But you couldn't see out a window to look at any planes. I liked to look at the planes.

David's left leg fidgeted maniacally. He checked his watch.

"Guess we better get going!" he said.

We were on a mission to better understand our users. Or to better understand our product, as there were in fact no users yet. To understand what a prospective user might expect from the Product, such as it was. In anticipation of launch – with the shot clock in the lower twenties – an idea had been floated around senior management that David and I should fly out to assist in the conduct of a round of usability testing. We were at our desks on a conference call with them – Sam, Neil, Bill, Elaine and Judy, the West Coast-based Vice President of Product Development.

"We need some end users to poke some holes," Judy explained.

Mutters of approval and encouraging sentiments followed. Judy proposed a Tuesday and a Wednesday in early November, not two weeks away, and David and I were told to make plans.

Now we floated high above the Rockies in vast leather seats, warm nuts and whiskey arrayed on the wide flats of our armrests.

David drove us in the rental from the airport down Route 101 to Silicon Valley. As we approached our destination we gazed left and right at the gleaming industrial parks, immaculately landscaped, housing the intrepid startups that would still beat back against the season's dismal tide, repositories of vain aspirations and tragic dreams, some, perhaps, destined to be spared.

One of these companies was ours.

A creased photograph of a dreary street appeared on the luggage carousel, between suitcases.

We're back in France, the country that smells of coffee and perfume and sweat.

The flight out of JFK early on Saturday morning had a distinctly LA vibe. A commuter plane of Angelenos returning to their sunny home after the dutiful completion of errands back east. I spotted a woman I knew ages ago, when the band played New York City. She's an actress who's succeeded in the margins; she's just famous enough so that you'd probably recognize her but you'd never know her name. I made eye contact at the coffee stand but she betrayed no recognition at all. It's funny the people you see.

I watched the line to the Jetway, waiting for them to call my group. There was a very fat black man, shuffling and lurching in his orthopedic shoes. He pushed a wheelchair that was loaded with bric-a-brac, bag lady style. He was speaking into a Bluetooth earpiece.

"Sir, are you going to check that?" an airline employee asked.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and returned to his phone conversation. I listened in.

"Yeah, so listen. I'm with a rapper who's having problems with dem 5150 boys. That's Tony Yayo's crew. He with G-Unit."

I looked around for the rapper. Eventually he sauntered up, a fairly inconspicuous youth, and took his place beside the fat man.

Planes taxied spectrally in the darkness out the window of Gladstone's at Los Angeles International Airport. A montage of NASCAR crashes played in the sky, reflecting a television high above the bar. The woman to my right ordered a gin and tonic. The bartender, a matronly woman who had once tried to act, asked for her ID.

"They make me ask everyone," she said apologetically.

"I'm two and a half times legal," the woman said.

"I'm three times legal."

A knife rested on the floor, blade pointing away from the dirty table where it belonged.

I peered out at the engine through the grated window up near where the Jetway met the plane, the turbine turning in the wind. Coming to a halt. Turning a little more. No one talks to you on airplanes anymore.

Swept Away in a River

We were buckled in and waiting when the captain came on and sighed. He said the water doesn’t work. We’d have to use a different plane. (Are they so interchangeable? Is it like when you get in a dud bumper car and the acne-scarred attendant directs you to the purple one that’s parked against the rail? Wasn’t this plane blessed and prepared for us, expertly calibrated to the rigors of our journey? Loaded with our luggage and victuals from Gate Gourmet? How is there another one which we may fly instead?) He instructed us to return to the waiting area to await further instructions. Faint grumbling broke out amid the rustle of clothes and carry-ons. Back in the terminal, I went to get a coffee. On my way back I was swept in the exodus of my fellow travelers trudging to the new gate: 48B.

A woman in her late fifties wept inconsolably as a stewardess peered at her and frowned, holding her hand up in a gesture both soothing and defensive. Do you speak Spanish? she asked. It happened that she spoke French. I found myself approaching and volunteering to interpret.

"What does she want?"

"Qu'est ce que vous voulez?"

She wanted to know when the flight was leaving.

"When's the flight leaving?"

The stewardess turned around to face the counter. "Bob, when's the flight leaving?"

"In an hour," said Bob.

"In an hour."

"Dans une heure."

"When's it boarding?" I asked.

"Bob, when's it boarding?"

"Half an hour."

"Half an hour."

"On part dans une heure et on embarque dans une demi-heure."

I was pleased with the simple, emphatic quality of these answers but the woman continued to stammer and weep. I suggested lamely to the stewardess that she might be scared.

"Does she need anything?"

"Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose?"

The woman must have sensed we were frustrated and so tried to gratify us with an answer of some kind.

"De l'eau," she said, almost like a question. Whisperingly. Water? It's what you say when someone asks you what you need but you can't tell them what you really need.

"Water," I said.

"Can you ask her what's wrong? Why is she crying?"

"Qu'est ce qui va pas? Pourquoi pleurez-vous?"

"I fly from Papeete," the woman said, in halting English.

"Long flight," I said to the stewardess.

"That is a long flight," the stewardess said.

"Maybe she's tired."

"Must be tired."

The woman broke in. "I go to New York. I must go to the funeral of... of --" The syllables expanded in her throat and she succumbed again to sobs.

"Tell her to have a seat and I will bring her water."

"Installez-vous quelque part et elle va vous ammener de l'eau."

We finally seemed to reach a sort of resolution. She turned and walked unsteadily toward the chairs. A few were empty but she did not seem to distinguish them from those that weren't. As she hovered nearby, the stewardess thanked me and we broke off. I went to look at planes awhile. When I came back I saw the woman from afar. She was sitting as the stewardess and some other airline people tended to her. Talked to her and touched her. Helped her manipulate a cell phone.

Later, on the flight, the stewardess served me drinks.

"I hope she's all right," I said.

"I think she's OK."

"Good."

"Her husband died. In that country where she --"

"Papeete?"

"Yes, Papeete. He was swept away in a river. So she's going to the funeral. And his body's on the plane."

"Wow. That's... disturbing." Right away, I regretted saying disturbing. I wished I'd said a warmer word. Sad, maybe. Even awful.

"I know. It is," she said.

The Longest Runway

Sitting on the tarmac at JFK, on the way to LA, I became entranced by the languid dance of the signalman. At a certain point he walked beside the plane and fell behind a bit, and then he disappeared, a solitary man loosing the behemoth. Just as we began to taxi along the mysterious crisscrossed pathways that lead to the runways, the captain got on. He told us we were headed to the longest runway at the airport, three miles long, and it was the only runway they had open 'cause of the fog. And there were, it looked like, maybe forty planes ahead of us. And it was going to take a long, long time, and frankly he couldn't even tell how long.

I don't know why he said it was the longest runway. I mean - I'm sure it was.

The ebullient man in the aisle seat reached over the lady in the middle and touched my arm just as I was most lost in thought.

"What's it like out there?"

"It seems foggy," I said.

People evidently grew restless as we inched our way toward the runway. There were exasperated messages from both the captain and a stewardess telling people no, they absolutely could not go to the toilet. Faint groans of dismay. An indistinct stir in the canned air. The awakening, perhaps, of some nearly atrophied instinct in all civilized men towards mutiny. Before long the captain came back on and said OK, OK, he'd pull over so that people who absolutely have to can get up and go, but they better make it quick.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

We observed a couple arguing, from above. In a balcony café at Heathrow. She gestured with her cell phone and indicated it to him a few times. Like it was part of the issue. He barely said a word the whole time, just hovered, facing her. Sometimes retreating a step or two, sometimes coming closer to her face. We speculated, something with another woman. It seemed to be a bit more dire than you were late. Sometimes it seemed she became depleted and spun around as though to walk away. But where would she go without him? They were together. Finally she walked to the departures board, for no real reason but to go where he was not. He waited a few beats, too proud to follow her like a dog. But then he did, and they walked off together where we couldn't see.