“He was filming me!” she growled, squish, squish, squish. “That bastard filmed the whole thing!”
“Think of it as a compliment,” I tried to reassure her. “Your incident was far more fascinating than the stupid lady stuck on top of the wheel. You had action going for you! You had drama! You had the element of surprise! Plus, I think I peed my pants laughing at you.”
“You know damn well that we’re going to see that footage pop up on some home video blooper show and he’s going to win ,” she said angrily, squish, squish, squish.
“Dude, I was basically naked at Disneyland after Splash Mountain and then evil children openly mocked me when I ate it in the dirt on Tom Sawyer Island,” I told her, trying to be nice. “We’ll do whatever you want for the rest of the day.”
“Well, we could walk up to the Golden Gate Bridge and I could fall off that,” she replied starkly, squish, squish, squish. “Or I could try to swim to Alcatraz. I really just want to go back to the hotel and take a shower. I smell like a California roll.”
As we walked back toward the front gate, we passed by the wooden wheel, which was now empty and didn’t show any signs of freshly spilled blood, and then we saw the first warning to USE CAUTION!, directly across from the ticket booth.
Jamie stopped suddenly, walked straight over to the booth, squish, squish, squish, and knocked on the window.
“Hey, in there!!!” Jamie shouted at the ticket lady, as a large droplet from my wet friend’s hair plummeted to the ticket counter. “YOU NEED A BIGGER SIGN!”
Going Down
To be honest, I’d have to say I have a rather lengthy list of things I’d rather not experience on an airplane, and coming in in at least the top five would be hearing the terrified screams of other passengers.
Yet there they were, a small, collected grouping of gasps, cries, and screams coming from all directions.
I wanted nothing more than to join them, though I was too frozen to do anything but clutch my armrest.
It had been a horrible flight almost from takeoff; odd, loud noises emanated from above and below the cabin as we swerved our way into the sky, desperate to reach thirty thousand feet, and as soon as things appeared to be leveling off, we hit a trail of turbulence that was destined to bump us from state to state.
Things would calm down for a bit, if only to trick those of us seated in that airbus death trap that all was smooth sailing, and then, like a sucker punch, we’d hit another rumbling pocket of discord and passengers would begin another round of patiently holding their breath, trying to ride it out.
And that’s exactly where we were when the terror struck—we were leveling out, just a minute bump here and there, when WHOOSH, all of a sudden the plane dropped suddenly and deeply, quickly and profoundly, as if we had fallen into a bottomless yawn in the sky.
Shrieks sprung up all around me; the gentleman behind me yelped like a dog. The pilot corrected the plummet immediately and straightened out, but in my mouth, I was still chewing on my heart, my stomach, perhaps even a tip of my small intestine. I had been far too stunned to do anything, I realized, during that moment in which it seemed as if God had reached down and hit the plane with a flick of a finger.
A minute later, my heart was still in my mouth, but I had started to breathe again.
That’s when I looked down at the can of Diet Pepsi and thought to myself, Just what in shit’s name are you doing? I mean, that plane had dropped, A LOT. It was the closest I had ever come to feeling a real, genuine smack of mortality. And if that’s what it took to shake me back into reality, then so be it.
After all, my biggest fear (on land) was not that my husband would leave me for another woman or that I’d be imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit (but wanted to). No. My biggest, most tremendous, horrifying fear was that I would one day go on a diet, work night and day on the treadmill, bravely fend off the stabbing pains of hunger and luring pulls of temptation when I passed roughly 95 percent of all food housed on grocery store shelves, and, finally, after months and months of living gruesomely, depriving myself of every last joy and suppressing every human desire, I would be rewarded by reaching my high school weight, the elusive, holy grail of every woman on the face of the earth, and the same day that I stepped on that scale to reveal that triumph was indeed mine, that I had climbed the high school weight mountain and had beaten the odds, that I could, yes, fit into that pair of size six Jordache jeans and victory was my crown to adorn, the conquest mine to claim, the very next day I would get a walnut lodged in my throat and choke to death in a public place, or encounter a soccer mom driving her Ford Expedition while simultaneously making an appointment for an eyebrow pluck on her hands-free headset when she would sideswipe me and propel my nearly weightless, birdlike body out of my car, seventy-five feet into the air to certain death because she would be too busy trying to figure out how to get to her call-waiting without using her hands. That is my greatest fear, that I am skinny for only one day and I have spent the last months of my life hungry, sweaty, and with a headache.
What the hell was I doing with a Diet Pepsi when I had come so close to the brink of my own extinction? If this wasn’t an example of how fragile, thin, and fleeting our opportunities to stay alive on this earth was, nothing was.
A Diet Pepsi?
For WHAT? To not consume 180 more calories in the last seconds of my life?
If I was going down, or if the opportunity was there and more than willing to present itself, as it very well just had, I was going to at least perish while drinking my favorite soft drink!
And then, just at the flight attendant walked past, I caught her arm and said, “Would you please bring me a glass of Pep—” but then I suddenly had a genius amendment to that thought and finished the sentence with the word “wine.”
Wine, I thought to myself as I smiled and nodded as she walked away, wine. Why, yes, wine. Hadn’t I deserved it? Hadn’t I just about come that close? Because really, if we were indeed going down, if we indeed hit the next turbulence pit and did not recover and my run as a mortal had just crossed the finish line, then, yes, by all means, I should at least catch a buzz.
Absolutely! I chortled in my head as I seconded my own motion, bring on the wine!
It was a glorious glass of wine (to tell the truth, the attendant could have handed me a mug full of purple gas and I would have eagerly chugged it down) and quite precisely what I did indeed need. Gulp, gulp, gulp.
Within a matter of minutes, my nerves smoothed to the texture of velvet, my head had begun to clear the anxiety and I saw there was no reason to worry at all about being on a plane in a very bumpy sky. After all, I reasoned, we’re in the same sky as clouds. Clouds like on the toilet paper commercial that I recalled may have featured something like a fluffy bear or angel bopping around from one soft cottony bank to the next.
That’s right, I told myself, if this plane gets any bumpier, I’ll just jump right out and sit on a cloud until this whole mess clears up.
And then I giggled.
I was drunk.
Drunk. Drunk off one glass of silly Chardonnay, drunk and giggly like a sorority girl who was having trouble holding on to not only her dignity, but her liquor as well. But add one glass of wine to one empty stomach and then multiply that by 30,000 feet, and well, you get sauced.
It was just shameful.
Certainly, hindsight is a glorious gift and a sharp, fine-honed learning tool when you have the benefit of distance, but that element was at least an hour’s trip to sobriety or a cold shower away. In the meantime, there was mortification to be had, and I was rushing at it like a locomotive fueled by crystal meth.
Now, of course, getting drunk on an airplane because you are afraid the plane is going to crash is truly not a wise idea. In the first place, in the event that the plane does go down, the survival instinct inside all of us kind of counts on the fact that its owner won’t be tanked when the moment arrives, since the use of all or a significant percentage of your fac
ulties would be not only quite helpful, but rather relevant. Particularly, I might mention, if circumstances require that you have to go down the puffy yellow slide. Contrary to popular belief, the slide is not as simple and whimsical as it may initially appear. In fact, I believe it is in a sense complicated, despite the misconception that survivors, maimed and whole alike, simply step onto the slide and glide down it as if they were enjoying a day at the water park. The truth is disturbingly different. I have learned from a friend who once was employed as a flight attendant that the proper—and only—possible way to ascend the slide is to cross your arms and JUMP onto it. It’s true. Watch the “Survival Tips for the Attentive” film the next time you’re on an airplane and you’ll see. There’s no step, it’s a jump. A quick, medium-grade hop. Now, I ask you, if I can’t walk a straight line at this point, how is any inebriated passenger supposed to save herself with a complicated physical maneuver that pretty much requires the coordination and agility of Mary Lou Retton? Frankly, I do believe that the survival slide engineer should have added handrails for the benefit of those passengers who have been partaking of the hobby known as spirits, but apparently, no one had either the foresight to include them or ever considered that the alcoholics on the plane would stumble that far, a conspicuous and discriminatory act as far as I’m concerned.
It is at this point that it’s relevant to mention that I’m drunk and sitting in first-class, thanks to my frequent-flier miles, and I’m in Row 1, seat A, otherwise known as “The Helper Seat.”
The Helper Seat, for those of you who have not had the good fortune to sit in it, is the seat which, before take-off, the flight attendant is obligated to inform any passenger sitting there that “Since you’re sitting in the first row, I have to ask you if you would assist me should I need some help. If not, I’ll have to move you to another seat.”
Now, in any given nine out of ten situations, I cannot help myself, let alone strangers, even when my judgment isn’t riddled by substance abuse, so obviously, an answer escaped me. But I knew one thing for sure, and that’s that I was determined to hang on to my first-class seat, and that I wasn’t going back there. You know what I mean, back there, the poor part of the plane, where wine costs four bucks a glass, you get a Hot Pocket instead of a Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken and Chocolate Mousse for dessert, and you’re touching legs with a guy who has brought his own cocktail bar with him in a small Coleman cooler, no shit. The part of the plane that I am now unaccustomed to. I’m sorry, it’s true. I have seen the promised land and there is no going back. My advice to anyone who has never sat in first class is simply, “Don’t.” Don’t do it. I mean it. Compared with first class, everything else is just a rickshaw.
So, in light of that, I just nodded my head to the flight attendant before this plane even took off, signaling that yes, indeed, I will be your helper girl, although I was not exactly sure to what level of responsibility I had just committed myself. I mean, “help” is a pretty general term, don’t you think? It could mean a lot of things. It could mean passing out peanuts; what if someone had an allergic reaction to peanuts? Clearly, this was not a peanut-free zone. I didn’t even know CPR. I supposed I could fake it by punching people in the chest until the peanut popped out. Or now that we’re in the Terrorism Age, it could have meant wrestling a passenger who’s waving around a weapon—or a stupid asshole like Richard Reid who tried to light his shoe on fire—to the floor. Of course, he’d be in coach. He’d be stupid enough to be back there. That man was in coach and he tried to light his shoe on fire. Anyone who has ever flown on a plane knows you can’t even see your feet when you’re sitting in coach, let alone put a match to them. You’re not even reacquainted with your feet until you’re at the baggage carousel well after the plane lands. I believe the only person capable of touching his own feet in coach was a sixty-seven-year-old yogi whose main hobby was squeezing himself into mailing tubes used by architects, and even then it took him an hour and sixteen minutes to grasp his own little piggies on a flight from Albuquerque to Cleveland. But if there was someone as dumb as Richard Reid on board, guess who would be the one going down swinging? Me. It’d be me. The flight attendants wouldn’t want to do that. I mean, of course they’d send out the new helper girl. “No one’s emotionally attached to her yet and she weighs as much as all four of us!” That’s what they’d say. So there I am, the helper, leaping onto the back of a terrorist like a feral cat while the flight attendants hide, all four of them together in the soda can cart. Or it could be a South American terrorist/guerrilla after money and I could be taken hostage. That happens to helpers, you know. They’re helping, and all of a sudden, they’re hog-tied and eating bugs in some jungle hut. Of course, I’d probably lose some weight, but then I’d gain it all back anyway when I got over the Post-Traumatic Stress “See, That’s What You Get for Helping” Syndrome. Or I might achieve my ideal weight from starvation just to end up beheaded as an example to the other hostages. Sure, I’d be able to surpass my wildest dreams, and attain my sixth-grade weight, but how exactly is that positive if I am missing a head? Tabloids would call me the “Headless Hamburger Helper Girl,” and the only guy who would get to see how much weight I lost would be the one sliding my cadaver into an oven like a baguette. And, if by any chance, the Hamburger Helper Girl survived, I bet the same day she was released she’d get squashed while scrambling like a golem to the first Cinnabon she saw, mowed down by a soccer mom with unruly eyebrows who was behind the wheel of a Ford Expedition.
So you see, in the event of a tragedy, not only have I done harm to myself, but I’ve put the whole plane in jeopardy because I forgot that I was the helper when I drank the wine, and seat 1A, just so you know, is their beacon of hope. Their very last chance. And that’s just what I was pondering when I caught the flight attendant’s arm and ordered my second glass of free wine, because, I figured, what the hell, I was drunk already, and well, impaired is . . . impaired. If I was going to lead people out the wrong safety exit on one drink, well, then I might as jolly well have another and perhaps even find some humor in it.
But you know, having two drinks sloshing around in an empty belly while you’re on an airplane should come with this prediction: “Chances are likely to excellent that when you get up and stagger to the toilet-ette after downing your second complimentary alcoholic beverage, you will entirely forget to batten down the hatch that flashes the ‘Occupied’ sign outside the door and the pilot will walk in on you when you are in midpee.”
In fact, I do believe it should be mandatory that the flight attendants pass on that nugget of knowledge when they are handing you that numero dos drink, as it certainly would have been helpful to me.
But there I was, and there was the pilot right after he opened that unlocked door and sucked the air right out of the powder room like a vacuum. It was an intimate moment, especially since I wasn’t clothed from the waist down, but the sad fact is that an intimate moment can be too easily spoiled when one of the participants has a look of pure and absolute horror on his face. He looked at me, his mouth immediately dropped, his eyes grew wide, as if he truly did see a half-naked golem gumming a Cinnabon on the shitter.
Now, quickly, the very first thought that popped into my alcohol-soaked brain was, “Hey! No—wait wait wait—I mean HEY! Get back in your chair! Get back there! What are you doing over here, go fly that plane! Don’t they give you guys bottles to wizz in or little straws to stick up there so that someone is in control most of the time? This isn’t a radio-controlled aircraft! Go on, get back there!”
But instead, I smiled, waved, and said, “Hi!”
I said “hi.” Complemented by a full-hand, frenetic, prom-queen wave, but really, tipsy or not, what are you going to say in that situation to wipe the disgust from the scene or even try to lend yourself a little shred of dignity? There’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. All you can really do is suck it up and thank the good, righteous, heavenly Lord above that you didn’t have a mound of toilet paper wrapped ar
ound your hand and were in a position of midhike.
Slam, the pilot shut the door hard and fast, although not quickly enough for the slack-jawed faces in seats 1C and 1D to get a load of the action going on in the poop booth.
Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. Alone again in the potty, I thought about what happened and I guess it was too much for my currently handicapped thought process to handle because I began to laugh. I just laughed. And I kept on laughing until little tears popped out of my eyes and I found myself slapping my own, naked knee, to the delight, I’m sure, of my fellow first-class passengers, who undoubtedly heard my maniacal cackling because although the lavatory is self-contained, it is not a sound booth on a game show.
Finally, I pulled myself together, washed my hands, and opened the door, only to find the pilot still waiting on the other side.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked at me some more.
Say something, the voice inside my head commanded. Say something witty, funny, say anything to make this whole thing seem not so bad as it really is.
All of a sudden, I had it.
“You know,” I said with a little shake of the head and a wry, intentionally placed smirk, “I usually get paid for a show like that.”
The pilot did not laugh. Neither did the flight attendant behind him or the spying little eyes from seats 1C and 1D.
“Really?” is all the pilot said.
“No!” I cried. “NO! I mean, no! You saw my legs and my fatty knees! Are you kidding? I was raised Catholic, my mom just came back from a Saint Francis pilgrimage in Italy and bought a huge statue to prove it, big as you. Big as you. Catholics aren’t like that, they can be a little slutty sometimes, sure, and there’s the pedophilia, but they’re not allowed to be strippers! It’s not allowed!”
And with that, the pilot slipped into the rest room and quickly closed the door.