MY PLANE CRASH…ISH

“We — we have an indication of a problem. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem. Just a… an indication…. Flight attendants prepare for landing.”

That was the sentence issued forth from the captain of FLIGHT 1063 from Chicago to LAX on Wednesday, October 14th.

Now, other than the obvious, there were many things wrong with the above declaration. For starters, it wasn’t uttered by a pilot from the United States. The accent was eerily European, perhaps even British. I’d been conditioned over the past 20 years to hear that distinctly American, Capt. John Steele voice come over the PA…soothing, deep… the type of gentle bass that tranquilizes you to the point where you want to take a huge, steaming dump — YOU know the voice! (On an unrelated note, I’m convinced that the aforementioned “bowel-relaxing” voice is at least partly responsible for my incessant plane flatulence).

What made it extra wrong was the fact that the voice stammered. The captain of a plane may do a lot of comforting, Halls-mentholyptus-style ‘Uhhhhhh’s’…. but a stammer? Never…

The passengers on the flight already knew something was wrong previous to the announcement over the intercom.

The Eddie Murphy travesty, ‘IMAGINE THAT!’ had been playing for approximately 54 seconds before the audio cut and the plastic screens retreated ominously back into the ceiling. For a brief second, I suspected the American Airlines plane felt guilty for playing such a crappy movie and the mechanical reverse was a ‘mea culpa’… but then the shaking started. A horrific grinding whirr shortly followed suit. The trifecta of terror was complete when the plane started abruptly losing altitude.

Almost on cue, two stewardesses double-timed up the aisle toward the cockpit like frantic little Geishas in a Gilbert and Sullivan play. I was stiffly sitting on an aisle seat on the right side of the plane as they brushed by me. I looked at the redneck next to me in the middle seat for some acknowledgment of the tumult, but he just calmly fixated on his Sodoku puzzle. I snaked my head into the aisle and looked forward toward the gaggle of flight attendants convening in first class.

Then I saw something that utterly convinced me I was going to die: one of the attendants suddenly opened her mouth wide and quickly covered it with her hand. She was out of earshot, but I could almost hear the sharp inhale of breath. Also, I’m pretty sure that in the flight attendant manual, the hand over mouth gesture is the symbol for ‘Oh, no, we’re all going to die a fiery death!!!’

Immediately after that, the two flight attendants silently did their Geisha shuffle back to their jump seats as passengers vehemently yelled out questions after them: ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Is the plane going down?’ ‘Can I have extra peanuts?’

The noise and rattling in the cabin fought for dominion over my fear until my brain suddenly leapfrogged over terror into a new plane. My soul seemed to cleave itself entirely from my body (like some Voldemort Harry Potter spell) and hang out in the aisle, where it stoically witnessed my soon-to-be dead and on-fire body.

“I’m going to die. Of course.” I said out loud, to no one in particular. Why the ‘of course’ caveat, I wasn’t certain. All I knew was that it made perfect sense that THIS would be exactly how I perish: on a plane after a protracted booty call. It couldn’t have been when I was on a cargo plane in Iraq which had to make an unscheduled emergency pickup near the Iranian border — that would have meant I could have died a quasi-hero. No, it just HAD to be after a weekend of frivolous skirt-chasing. Yay, my life!

From the ethersphere, I kind of witnessed my physical configuration in space. I was in the aisle, my left leg perched up on the armrest of the row in front of me, my shoeless right foot awkwardly wedged in the seat pocket, my left cheek resting on my hand, and my butthole wide-open and farting, either from the stress or the CHEESE FIX MUNCHIES I’d been consuming. I looked and smelled retarded.

Still, the older redneck to my right didn’t seem to notice the commotion on the plane or in my bowels. He just focused on that fuckin’ Sodoku like if he finished it in time, the plane would stop plunging… which it was now doing… ferociously….

“I’m on Lexapro so I never, ever cry. But I think I’m going to cry now.” It was a fat mother of two across the aisle to my left, seemingly making the statement for my benefit. Her two children were literally picking their noses and oblivious, as children are, to their impending mortality.

A woman in the row behind me, while simultaneously counting her rosary, leaned over and started rubbing fat mommy’s right shoulder with her left hand . “It’s okay. Let it out, it’s good to let it out.” In turn, mom started to grunt and furrow her brows like she was squeezing out a reluctant shit. This woman was going to cry, Goddammit, and no anti-depressant prescription drug was going to stop her from doing so!!!

“Unnnnnnhhhhhhhh!” she grunted/cried/sharted as her kids cluelessly picked at things. It was the most pathetic thing I had ever seen.

A really cute girl in the row in front of me was looking around, similarly terrified. She was tan, almost Indian tan (feather, not dot) with high cheekbones and wide, young eyes. She caught my eyes, possibly searching for an answer. With my body skewed in the same twisted position, I just looked at her and shrugged, like I was silently commenting on a wacky Aunt at the Thanksgiving table. I ransacked the archives of my brain and life experience and THAT is what I had to offer a terrified 20 year-old girl: “Eh.”

For about 15 minutes as the plane descended — the only calculus to determine how quickly it dove was the increasing pressure on my eardrums — I contemplated my life…

What have I DONE with it? I thought. I told dick jokes to strangers. That’s about the sum total.

I’m in my thirties, a ridiculous human being, an adolescent boy trapped in a man’s body. ‘Jesus died at 33 and I haven’t accomplished half of what he did,’ I said at loud, trying to crack up an imaginary audience. To my right, Larry the Sodoku Guy didn’t even crack a smile as he tried to work that tricky ‘4’ or ‘5’ conundrum with his pen.

Everyone else in the plane was whispering or muttering or frozen like a street mime as we dropped. I was dead….

Well, I’m here, so, guess what? I was wrong.

The plane eventually leveled out, hit the runway hot and skidded to a bumpy stop as fire trucks and ambulances converged on the scene like it was a Die Hard movie.

I had totally reconciled myself to death and, shit, I was alive after all. There was a teeny part of me that was just the smallest bit disappointed. ‘Crap,’ I thought, ‘Small things have to matter to me again now…’

As we waited on the tarmac for the maintenance crew to determine the damage (I found out later it was an electrical fire on the front wheel hub and the noise and shaking was the result of lowering landing gear at 35 thousand feet and maximum speed), I couldn’t help but notice the redneck was still chipping away at his Sodoku puzzle.

“Dude,” I said, “I went through Elizabether Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of loss and you never once flinched or stopped playing Sodoku. What’s that about?”

Finally, he put his pen down and looked at me.

“I’m 5 years out from being a Cancer survivor. I just look at every day as a bonus.”

Then he went back to his damn puzzle. I wish I could have thought of something clever to say to him to make him feel dumb for saying that, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Harumph…. One day, I will…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 3:49 pm and is filed under All blog entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.