Crushed Dream Airways

Travel writing flying home from my latest vacation.

            “What sort of beverage defines me?” I ask myself as the drink cart rattles through the aisles.  I’m crammed between an older woman who looks like she has only a wardrobe of mottled sweaters, and a pilot with a sullen look and plastic wings.  I scan his uniform, and my nostalgic feeling of mysticism dissipates as I can count the loose threads on his clothing.  I’m reminded of a childhood photo, framed in a silver star of me hanging upside down smiling at the camera.  Darkly engraved in the cursive handwriting of Mrs. Mulligan is “future aeronautical engineer”. 

            “So you’re a pilot?”

            “Yeah, I guess.  You’re gonna miss that flight, you know?”  I now notice that my hand is gripped around my paper-thin boarding pass.  I envy his gaze out the window seat, and his quick summarization of my situation.  I pry open my can of worms, and think about how I could have been this man in another lifetime.  How I could have been him if only I found building fighter jets out of Lego pieces the limits of aeronautical creativity.

            “So, ‘hydraulic complications’?  What the hell does that mean?”

            “Someone fucked up.  Someone always does.” He offsets his bitterness by ordering a Coke, and I follow suit.  In times like these, you trust a professional when ordering beverages.  I ask how he became such a shiningly optimistic member of the airlines.  He regales his life a decade earlier, where he was in my situation, an undergraduate at college.  How he also went from an aspiring plastic star fighter captain to a man whose time with his family is delayed by a myriad of airline complications.  I’ve already given up hope of making my connection back to Buffalo, yet somehow he’s still mustering hope of returning to his four-year-old tonight.  I talk to him about my collegial experiences, and he never seems to lack jaded retorts, continually interrupting my ‘pissant sanguinity’.  My experiences are not as interesting to him as having someone to hear his rants, so I let him. 

            “I never see my kid, my wife makes more than me, and I’m the best damn pilot of 727s they got.  You know, everyone one of us dreams of flying those big dicked triple sevs, but it never happens unless one of those old farts harasses some suit exec because they took his pension away.  Then you become that guy.  Another grizzled husk with these cheap shoulder straps that enjoys the booze at Christmas more than his own family, if he has one.  That once perfect family means nothing to the miles he’s earned for these a******s.  The industry s**t itself before 9/11, and it’s gonna continue to s**t on itself.”  I am enamored of his abrasive language, while Granny Sweaters quickly turns down her hearing aid and rifles through her book.

            “Well, are you going to quit?” I meekly ask.  I’m afraid if I get him too aggravated he might stand up, and break through plastic barricades and strangle the pilot to take his place.

            “Oh yeah, I wouldn’t even give two weeks or two s***s.  I applied to thirty jobs last month, and ain’t heard back.  You know how difficult it is to convince businesses that an Airline Management degree means anything?  Christ, I can’t even convince myself most days.  It’s practically an MBA.  And can’t work for the Air Force neither, eye sights too bad.  I once talked to a naval recruiter, and he might as well just pissed on me.  Job security my a*s, I ain’t pushin’ paper for the military.  This way I get to see the world without worryin’ about fighting for oil.”

            “Just flying for baggage fees?”

            “Your ticket is a baggage fee, kid.”

            He continues his diatribe, and as we get closer to O’Hare, he laments how he’s going to probably spend another night in the airport.  I begin to wonder if the rare times I go to an airport is about the frequency he gets to visit his own home.  I think about inquiring this point to him, but the thought of enduring another half an hour about being lectured on the inefficiency of an industry whose sole job is to transport me at thirty-five thousand feet causes me to reconsider.  I stop trying to change topics, as it causes him to only become more vague and I let the conversation become as stale as the air we are all breathing.

            I disembark from the aircraft, thinking of my acidic companion for a bit before realizing that I could spend the night in the Chicago airport as well and possibly wake up as estranged as he is.  I think back to an earlier time, when I would take trips to San Francisco to visit my Aunt Kristi, or when I flew myself to Huntsville, Alabama to visit ‘Aviation Challenge’.  I reminisce about mock flight suits and simulators, and how I dreadfully gripped my arm rests on the flight back, fully knowledgeable of the difficulty of landing a plane on a small strip of pavement.  I suddenly wonder what happened to my younger fascination, which had adorned his bedroom with model jet kits, Star Wars posters and F-14 blueprints. 

            I pause my nostalgic slideshow and ogle the terminal, causing the people behind me to hurry around in annoyance as I absorb my surroundings.  I notice the staggered rows of sterilized leather seats, and their cleaning teams.  I see the forced smiles of weary flight attendants, who are now little more than glorified shepherds of travelers.  I stare at my boarding pass, expecting it to reveal clues on what to do next before I investigate it further and startle myself.

            “TYLER G PUGLIESE, 6:00 pm TO BUF FROM ORD; 11 E” Other countless cryptic numbers and coded terms gaze right back at me.   As I look at my ticket and I realize that he was right.  My resentful partner had it pinned: I was holding a claim ticket for human baggage.  I suddenly feel alone and estranged in a moving sea of vacationers.  An inverse nirvana strikes my vision, and I see the terminal in a different silhouette.   Cattle with luggage on wheels.  Frequent flyer businessmen, being shipped complacently from place to place, their resigned dutiful sighs at the ‘perils’ of airline travel: lost luggage, small children, the lack of a window or aisle seat.  These are the moments of agony that people carry with them until they die. 

            I attempt to swallow all my realizations at once, but all I can consider is how it only took one man two hours on a plane to make me feel as disillusioned about airlines as he is.  I digest my adolescent memories that have been muddled with the embittered influence of a man I could have been in another time or another place.  I ponder if some rogue and hostile man at some other meeting had shattered his younger idealistic dreams, and what sort of effect it had on his life.

            Now I look back at those enchanted memories of a cushioned Florida summer camp, and I only see a regular summer.  My F-18 hornet jets are just ordinary toys I used to play with, and I did not end up studying economics because some stranger on a plane had berated every other fantasy I created.  The pilot I sat next to may have become a warped display of a youthful fantasy I once had, but he taught me that dreams, like airline flights, last as long as you need them to.