A Fragment About Flight From an Essay In Something Resembling Progress
My traveling companion was a white girl, around 20, wearing a full-blown dreadlock situation on her head and a lot of what looked like hemp everywhere else. (Sartorial rebellion apparently remains a pretty uncreative way to hash out your relationship to your parents.) Getting into my seat proved difficult: she was editing photos on a larger PowerBook to which were attached an external hard drive, an iPod, and a few inexplicable cables fed into her carry-on backpack, and big chunks of this fairly involved portable studio had to be shifted before I could squeeze in and buckle up.
It may bear mentioning here that I fly at least several times a year, and that I am a fairly educated near-adult. It may also bear mentioning that I have not been living under a rock, in a cave, or on Mars—my living situation is almost entirely unaffected by clichéd prepositional phrases—and so I know that every joke about the next step in the air travel process has been made like a two-dollar whore. I’m going to cover it anyway, but I’m going to be brief.
I actually listen very attentively to the safety lecture. In part because even though I know I’ve got the basics—seatbelt-buckling, upright-and-locked-positioning, nearest-exit-identifying (even when it’s behind me; I’m that good)—down, I’m not entirely convinced that I’d know what to do in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure and it’s an absolute mystery to me how I’d be able to remove my seat cushion given time and a detailed diagram, let alone with the plane hurtling full-speed towards a body of water while masks with attached uninflated bags fall on my head. This isn’t rooted in a fear of flying and I don’t exactly believe that the plane is going to crash. But then I don’t exactly believe it can actually fly either.
I think my primary reason for giving the flight attendants my complete attention is the flight attendants themselves. They have to give this speech more often than I have to take it. And to groups of people distinguishable, I imagine, only by the degree of their rudeness. It seems polite, and somehow correct, to listen.
(SIDE NOTE: I am not putting in a bid for canonization here. This borderline-condescending attitude is sort of wickedly uncomfortable, though well meant. It’s, like, NPR-tote-bag awful, and it’s something I bring to most of my interactions with people I’m paying to do things, and I’ve tried to come up with a better solution, and I haven’t been successful.)
The case of the flight attendant seems particularly demeaning. Working a thankless sort of job and dealing with nasty sorts of people is hard on the psyche; I imagine working a thankless sort of job and dealing with nasty sorts of people in a rapidly-tarnishing but once-glamor-plated profession must be torture. Every flight attendant becomes a special kind of high-camp trope: the faded star, the aging actress. Think Norma Desmond or late Bette Davis. Better yet, think Joan Crawford via Christina Crawford via Faye Dunoway in Mommie Dearest: Christina’s/Faye’s Joan whose fury and indignation at being compelled to take a screen test—like any other actress!—for Mildred Pierce we’re never allowed to see directly. My suspicion is always that the flight attendant feels, on some level, a sense of continuity with the now-extinct Stewardess—a cultural–mnemonic experience likely to throw pouring Bloody Marys into plastic cups for aloof jackasses in Disney sweatshirts into sharply unpleasant relief.
Although it doesn’t seem necessary, really, to push too hard on any highfalutin overthought overwrought idea to make that point. Consider the linguistic shift from “steward” to “attendant,” which seems to move the analogous job from head of the household to head of the—well—head.
And so, due to a complex set of complexes, I listen when the well-meaning persons who may eventually be responsible for helping me get one of the overwing exits open describe how to buckle my seatbelt and harbor an intense distaste for anyone who does not.
My traveling companion did not. In fact, she continued to use her laptop and her iPod and—and this is truly awful—her cell phone as we taxied even after a flight attendant whose birth sex I had been trying to guess and who worked the aisle like a catwalk had asked her to stop. My feelings towards T.C. intensified to the point of breaking my pleasant gin-and-tonic-with-Klonopin-garnish haze. I concluded based on the dreadlocks and the hemp and the photography that she grew up on the Upper West Side, somewhere in the 80s. Her name is something like Halli but she goes by Hal. She claims to be bisexual—or possibly post-gay—but has never been attached to a girl with any emotional or physical seriousness. I began to hope that the bag of pot in her ass smarted.
