The Flight Of Grace
“This is Captain Corgan. Welcome onboard United Airlines, Flight 957. We hope you are going to enjoy your flight. Please pay attention to…”
And so on… Safety instructions. Who cares? Does anybody ever really look at those stewardesses for any other reason than to check out whether their skirts are as short as in the commercials? They never are. And they are never hot either. I used to fly all the time, all over the world, and the number of hot stewardesses I have seen is incredibly low. Maybe I am in the wrong section? Maybe the hot stewardesses don’t serve apple juice in the cattle car? And even if you did get that uber-hot and sexy MILFY stewardess taken out of an airplane porn flick, where the seats are actually big enough to have sex in without accidentally sticking your dick in the guy next to you and you throwing out your back in the process, how would you do it? Say she was hot, and that she did wink at you with those Jenna Jameson fuck-me eyes, motioning towards the back while miming suggestive fellatio with her hand and mouth. Where would you bang her anyway? Those claustrophobic bathrooms don’t even allow you to jerk off properly, without you slamming your funny-bone into the sickly shiny wall, and it smells like fucking Diarrhea Fest 2000. Maybe people fuck in the pantry in the back? Yeah, right. There is always some ugly she-male Russian “flight-chef” arranging plates and stuff back there. Is she just going to leave and pull the curtain closed behind her? What of the old couple with their grandchildren right outside? Would they mind? And would you wear a condom if you ever got to porn fuck one of these Aerial Vixens? I guess you should, because if she’s loose enough to fuck you in a shit stained aluminum closet, she ain’t that picky with her sexual encounters to begin with. The romantic possibilities are endless. So you just jerk off under your blanket after everybody in the cabin is asleep instead. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Not that it really mattered much to me anyway. I was practically a married man. Well, spoken for, at least. I could just sit back and relax, day dreaming about making out with the love of my life (and a sexy stewardess) while this plane took me to my destination: New York.
It was such a nice day too. I had left London earlier that Tuesday morning and the the time zones graced us with a perpetual Tuesday morning outside, with a slight edge towards noon. I would land at JFK around 11 AM sometime. Not only the weather made this flight nice. This was The Flight - the one I had been waiting for since forever. The Flight to end all Flights. I was FINALLY going to New York to meet the love of my life, the other half of me, my baby… Brandy.
Internet Love. Doesn’t the very term make you wish you hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning? How severely screwed up do you have to be to fall in love over the Internet? What kind of emotionally challenged social outcast resorts to the digital transfer of feelings across cyberspace to save their souls from a life of loneliness and misery? Are there no women where you live? In real life? Then WHY? An Internet persona is just that fabled ghost in the machine. As much as you make yourself look like a super hero, with Internet Nerd as your secret identity, how can you be sure that she isn’t also doing the same thing? If she REALLY is that hot and smart, why the fuck is she wasting her time talking to you online, when she could go out and get laid by any number of successful men in Real Life? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Well… Been there, done that, wrecked that shit. Guilty as charged. I did fall in love on the Internet, and no… I didn’t want to. After all, only nerds and losers even go to the kind of places where you interact with other people online. I got sucked into it through a music website, and ended up a total message board junkie. Warn your children, people! It’s a cyber-jungle in there. In my defense I will say that we took it to e-mails and phone shortly after taking an interest in each other, so 95% of the actual communication was mouth-to-mouth, without the tongues since we still hadn’t physically met.
I was so fucking nervous, and still so perfectly at peace. It’s hard to describe. I think the confidence I felt in how RIGHT all this was choked whatever anxieties I naturally also harbored. We had dragged this out for over a year now. We had agreed that I wouldn’t go over to the US until her crazy ass jealous ex-husband had moved on enough not to be “bothered” by my arrival. But most of all it was for the kid’s sake. Her daughter. We didn’t want to make her life even more complicated as she had just recovered from the divorce years earlier. We were the Gandhis of Love, very considerate and passive and trying to protect everybody else. But now the time had come. The crazy ass ex could be as nuts as he wanted, and the kid would sooner or later have to get used to the thought of a new man, hopefully me, in her mom’s life anyway. Here I was. All hopped up on love and ready to rock’n’roll. Damn, was I nervous. And excited. And nervous. (Did I mention I was nervous?)
The guy to my right (I always have the window seat – it’s non-negotiable) was an Indian guy named Sahmet. He was on his way to New York, also for the first time, to work as a chemical laboratory engineer on Manhattan. He was a nice but rather timid little man, flashing shy smiles and politely carrying on conversations about this and that and everything that thankfully took my mind off things. Beyond him, across the aisle, was a guy from Connecticut, Mark. He was returning home after having backpacked through Europe for a while. We were all pretty much the same age, late twenties.
From the outside, what B and I were doing probably looked gay as fuck, and utterly incomprehensible. Why would two grown-up intelligent people take such a big risk with their lives? Why would anyone consciously choose to complicate their lives to the point where they put all their hopes and dreams in one basket and just pray it will all work out? Because we are fucking insane. That’s why. Neither B nor I are your typical run-of-the-mill people. We have both lead extremely exciting lives up until this point, so what’s the worst that could happen? We hate each other on sight and the relationship crashes and burns. Or we could get our feelings for each other confirmed and just settle in for a nice long boring life together, as old age approaches with unforgivable strides. Either way, both of us had lived the kind of lives that could hang with both scenarios. Boring is as boring does. You can’t be a spectator in your own life where the chances are that all the good stuff happens while you take a bathroom break. Take charge and face the music. Maybe this is why we fell for each other. We were both as opposite and as like as two people could possibly be. Me: a cold hearted, arrogant, cynical Swede from a tiny family, with little appreciation for happy happy joy joy. She: a crazy ass hotheaded Brooklyn Italian with more cousins and uncles than there were people in Sweden.
Meeting in person would be the last piece of this gigantic puzzle we had been piecing together for the better part of a year, or more… This flight was the last thing separating us from each other, and NY was slowly approaching by the hour. The knot in my stomach loosened and un-loosened like a beating heart.
“Dinner” came and went. I don’t even remember what we had. Does it matter? It’s always the same obligatory meat of questionable heritage, served with rubberatoes (the potato and veggie mix) and shrink-wrapped bread. The fucking astronauts eat better, squeezing beef paste out of their friggin’ tubes. I passed on the “coffee” (which would later prove to have been better than any sad excuse for what passes as coffee in America) and decided to take a nap. Like when you were a kid and forced yourself to fall asleep the night before Christmas, so it would arrive faster.
I awoke to Sahmet nudging me in my side, asking if I wanted to eat anything. It was last call for the snack cart before we approached the East Coast. We had an hour or so left, and the stewardess was looming over me. No, she was not hot. She looked like your friend’s NOT hot mom. I thought “what the hell” and got a Coke and a bag of those disgusting saltless pretzels they insist on serving people. What the fuck are they, “Welfarios”?
I checked our progress on the in-flight simulator map thingie on the monitor in front of me. We were so damn close to New York now! Damn… I sat there staring at that little animated plane making its sluggish progress across the screen, but much like a pot of water won’t boil if you stand there waiting for it, I had to rip myself loose from playing control tower.
I talked to my two guys for a few minutes but decided that I could kill the rest of the time watching a fragment of a movie instead. As I reached to switch from Animated-Flight Map to movie mode, I noticed two things. We had been making good time throughout the flight and were almost at the Eastern tip of Long Island already, so screw the movie, but I also noticed that our little animated plane had turned north. North? You could feel the plane turning too. There was a horizontal shift outside my window. What the fuck? Maybe it was some kind of turn they always made to approach the landing strip from the right angle? As I looked up I saw the stewardesses struggling not to run down the aisle, ripping people’s cups from their hands, cleaning off their tables like Cheetahs on PCP. They just threw everything in the big trash can they had on the cart, without separating the way they always do. This struck me as rather odd. What was the rush? We seemed to have at least another 20 minutes or so before we were anywhere close to making our final descent. I checked the monitor. We were slowly ascending instead! We were going back UP! The stewardesses were done and here comes the captain’s voice:
“Ladies and gentlemen. Unfortunately they are having some severe traffic problems in New York and due to circumstances out of our control we cannot circle above the city. We will change route for Halifax, Canada, instead and await further instructions there. We apologize for the inconvenience but assure you that we will try to minimize this delay as much as we can.”
Traffic problems? Hundreds of planes landing in New York is a surprise to Traffic Control at JFK? Hardly. What were they talking about?
Many murmured conversations were exchanged between seat neighbors, and the stewardesses knew nothing, so asking them was useless. On our little monitors we could all watch our plane’s distance to the cold hard northeast of Canada shorten by the minute. We were actually going to Canada! Fuck. I could feel my heart still pulling towards New York, like it was attached by rubber bands to my original destination. Now I was wrenched towards Buttfuck, Nova Scotia instead. Why? Why the fuck did this flight have to be the one to not fucking reach its destination on time? Everything had gone so smoothly. I cursed a lot in Swedish under my breath, but it didn’t matter much; we were still going for Halifax.
The captain would burst in with little encouraging messages, saying things like, “This will be a short stop” or “We have to re-fuel” or “Ladies and Gentlemen I can assure you…” and whole lot of other pointless info that did us no good.
I had a flashback to a certain phone conversation I had had with B’s ex-husband on the phone some weeks earlier. He had tapped B’s phone and gotten my cell phone number off the wire. He told me that if I ever set foot in New York he would kill me. No shit. He would have a couple of guys take me to some basement somewhere, put my head in a vice and crush it until my brain leaked out of my ears onto the floor ( just like in “Casino” - although I later found out he never saw the movie – life unknowingly imitating art and the other way around) . This was a promise from him to me. I told him to go fuck himself, worrying more about B than about anything this schmuck could do to me.
As we descended to touch down on Halifax’s seemingly ONLY landing strip, passing over the endless Canadian forest, I actually thought for a few minutes that this was the ex-husband’s doing somehow. After all, he worked at JFK. Maybe he had called in a tip that I was some terrorist with a bomb in my bag? What if one of his customs buddies would “find” drugs in my bag? I was starting to work myself into a little freak out here. But why Canada then? It didn’t make any sense.
We touched down around noon, taxied around the little terminal, making a full circle so we ended up catty cornered, almost facing the runway/landing strip. Our captain addressed us again:
“Well, ladies and gentlemen. It seems the problems in NY are worse than we thought and all air traffic into the US has been suspended indefinitely. We are the first plane to be diverted out of the US, so we will be the first one back in once this business is resolved. But until then we have to stay here in Halifax. We do not know how long this will be, but as soon as we do know, we will let you know. All cell phone use is prohibited at this point as it interferes with our instruments. The Air-Phone channels are reserved for traffic control. We apologize once again…”
All air traffic suspended? What in the fuck of Satan was going on? From where we sat we could see plane after plane, touching down on the tiny little strip: American Airlines, Delta, Swiss Air, Lufthansa, Air India, Alitalia, SAS, Finnair and on and on… They landed with no more than 45 seconds between them. I stopped counting after 73.
What would be serious enough to suspend all air traffic into a country? A nuke? A UFO landing on Time’s Square? It just had to be something seriously fucked up.
Damn! I needed to get hold of B, to tell her what was going on, and to find out what she knew! Even if I could sneak it past the phone Nazis, my cell didn’t even have a signal. Why did this shit have to happen on the most important day of my fucking life? If I could pick ONE fucking day out of my life where nothing should be allowed to go wrong, this was that day. And now here I was, thousands of miles from where I was supposed to be, perfectly ignorant about what was going on in the world. Damn.
We sat on that airplane for five hours until the captain gave us the real story. There was almost a riot before he was given the go-ahead from whoever was in charge to inform us what was going on. New York had been attacked by terrorists. The Twin Towers had fallen. Thousands and thousands were dead. There was a dead silence on the plane, an eerie feeling of stunned people processing information that just seemed out of this world crazy. The Twin Towers gone? They had always been there. They couldn’t just go away, right? What kind of motherfuckery was at play here? Most of the people on the plane, I would say 95%, were Americans returning home from wherever they had been vacationing in Europe, and a lot of them had family and friends in NY. Some people even had loved ones who worked in the World Trade Center. After the first shock had settled in for a few seconds, pandemonium broke out. Everybody wanted to call somebody. Not a single cell phone worked. Not one. No signal or not the correct provider on local phones. The Air-Phones were disconnected by the pilot on orders from the powers that be.
Wait, one cell got through. One person in first class managed to get his cell to ring a number in New York, with just one or two dots in signal strength. (It was a Siemens S-40 in case you’re wondering. I bought one the second I got back to London weeks later – best cell I have ever had.) The pilot “confiscated” the phone after the person had called his family to assure them he was safe. He informed us that we would do this row-by-row, letting every person use the phone to call ONE person and let them know we were OK. They started up there on row 1, and it was taking forever. I looked at my row-number, 27, and figured out that the battery would be long dead by the time the phone got half-way to me.
Unacceptable.
I went up to the pilot and said to him that this whole arrangement was no good. I told him that I would gather up the info of ONE family member or friend of each and every passenger on the plane and then call my “wife” in NY, and have HER call all these people’s loved ones, letting them know Flight 957 is OK. Otherwise half of us would be left with families living in ignorance as the phone dies. I promised him my wife would be the best equipped to handle all this crap. Of course, I just wanted to talk to her, so in love and war and all that… He looked like a man clutching at straws at this point, so he was happy somebody else took charge. He got the phone for me and I called B’s number:
Riiiing
“Hello?” B’s frantic voice. An edge of hysteria I had never before heard in her.
“Babe. It’s me”
“JAMES??!!!”
“Yes, babe! Are you OK?”
“Yes! WHERE ARE YOU, YOU STUPID ASS!!?!?!?!”
“Shhhh baby. I am OK. I am in Halifax. We are waiting here for them to let us back in NY.”
“The BLEW UP the towers James! It is HORRIBLE! They…”
“I know, honey. Now listen… Do you have pen and paper?”
“Yeah, but…”
“OK… Write this down and call these people… Nukami Sakurai wants you to call his grandmother in Osaka and let her know that he is OK. Here’s the number. Anthony Frizzi wants you to call his wife in Hartford and let her…”
And so it went down that B got over 200 people’s names and numbers and spent the better part of the next 24 hours trying to get hold of them from home. The phone bill? Astronomical. The phone died five minutes after I gave B the last name. We had no time to talk to each other, just exchanging the “I love you” and promising to get in touch somehow, somewhere, later.
It was 1:00 AM, in the middle of the night, before they informed us we weren’t going to New York for a while and that they would let us disembark the plane and house us in Halifax. We had been on that plane, on the ground, for 13 hours. Never mind the 7 hours we had already spent in the air before that. We later found out that all American Airlines and United flights had been saved for last, since those were the airlines of choice for the terrorists. They wanted all other passengers out of the way before they dealt with the potential threat “we” posed.
A ladder was rolled up to the door, and one by one we were allowed out. Mark and I had made friends with one of the stewardesses. She had let us raid the bar in the pantry, so we had tons of little mini-bottles of Bailey’s, Cointreau, Kahlua and others in our pockets. We all clutched our carry on bags as we blinked against the cold and the uber-bright spotlights that were bathing the ground in merciless whiteness. It looked like the whole Canadian Army was camped on the tarmac. Jeeps, Hummers, machine guns… It looked like a goddamn movie. As soon as our feet touched Canadian soil, we were instructed to put our bags on the ground. And then we were all lined up next to each other, out in the high grass growing on both sides of the strip. From where we stood we had a perfect view of the strip. Behind our plane, dozens upon dozens of jumbo jets were parked, nose-to-tail with the next plane, as far as you could see. That is still the most visual image I have in my head of this whole experience. Me standing in the wet grass in the cold and dark Canadian night with a soldier directly in front of me, staring me down, and all those dead planes lined up into the disappearing line of light. There were no other passengers from other planes anywhere to be seen. They brought in dogs to sniff our luggage and then we were allowed to approach our bags, pick them up, and return to the grass.
I never use the bathrooms when I fly, neither at the airport or while on the plane. I have a thing against public restrooms. But now it had been more than 24 hours since I had even peed and I just could not hold it in any longer. I would pee my fucking pants if I didn’t get to go right that minute. I walked up to the soldier in front of me. Immediately all eyes were on me, army and passengers alike. What was this fuckhead doing? Was he the terrorist, giving himself up? I silently pleaded my case and the soldier motioned for an officer to come over. The two of them walked me out into the grass, rifles held ready, over to a shed and told me to piss right there. When I came back the two women to my left were crying. They had thought the soldiers were taking me behind that shed to shoot me. That’s how spooky the atmosphere was.
After half an hour school buses arrived and we were transported to a terminal, where we were processed thoroughly and had to fill out a “refugee form”. That was funny. Me, a Swedish businessman on the way from London to New York, ended up a political refugee in Canada instead. Then the buses took us to a high school outside the town of Halifax, in the boondocks of the boondocks if you will. There were just woods, woods and more woods, and then the high school. We were registered and told to go to the gymnasium and grab a cot. The cots were old stretchers. You know the ones they use to carry dead people on MASH on TV? Those kinds of stretchers. We were given a coarse blanket and a bottle of water to fill our immediate needs, and we were promised that the media room would be up and running early in the morning so we could e-mail and contact our friends and relatives.
Mark, myself, and a couple of other people dragged our stretchers into a classroom instead. The gymnasium was a little too Auschwitz for us. I managed to get hold of B on a pay phone in the cafeteria. During my allowed 5 minutes I learned that B had thought I was dead until I made that call from the plane. She had called flight information as soon as the towers were attacked to see what the hell was going on with my plane. She was connected to a “security officer” who had told her that all info on that particular flight was classified and then immediately directed her to a “survivor/relative” help line where they offered condolences and took her info. It turned out the first operator had by mistake transferred her to the line for relatives of Flight 93, the plane that was shot down in Pennsylvania by the US Air Force before it reached Washington (that stupid hero-story had more holes than Swiss cheese by the way).
The rest of that night (it was 4 AM by now) I spent getting hammered with Mark, drinking shots of airplane bottles of disgustingly sweet liqueurs. Who could sleep anyway? Plus, we didn’t want to miss our flight out of there the next day.
The next day we were informed that there was NO way we were going to NY anytime soon. We were stuck in Halifax. No planes were going anywhere, and it didn’t matter that we were “first in line” to return. We were effectively grounded.
Unacceptable.
After some back and forthing on the phone with B in NY, getting filled in on the magnitude of the events, we decided we couldn’t waste my vacation apart. We had to do something. Mark and I got a ride with the parent of some student at the high school (all the Halifaxians came in droves with food and blankets and stuff – even adopting people temporarily into their homes) who took us to the nearest Hertz car rental place. Had they any cars left? No. Nothing? Well, they had this beaten up Windstar that hadn’t been properly detailed yet. Didn’t matter. We took it.
After closely examining the map and realizing there were 24 hours of forest between us and civilization, we figured we might as well get some more people in on the trip, to take turns driving and stuff. So back to the high school we headed, only to receive word that we were flying out of there next morning. Damn, now we had this damn car to get rid of and the Hertz place had already closed. Well, we didn’t want to let it go to waste and we didn’t want to leave Halifax without checking out downtown, so we took the minivan for a little spin, cruising the streets like soccer moms at a bachelorette party. We ended up in a bar and got our Indian friend drunk. He had never had alcohol before. He passed out and we had to carry him back to the car. We had relied on him to drive us back, since both Mark and I were drunk, but the bartender and his friend took care of that for us. One guy drove us back to the high school (which we would NEVER have found our way back to if it was up to us anyway – wouldn’t that have been an ironic outcome of this night out?) and the other guy followed in his car. Fortunately we weren’t raped and murdered, but arrived safely at the school, catching a couple of hours of sleep before we were awakened to the PA announcing Flight 957 to get themselves ready for take off.
A few hours later, we were sitting hung-over and wrinkled in a terminal at the Halifax Airport. We were all wearing the same clothes we had flown in two days earlier. We had lived in them and we all looked and smelled like shit. The conversation was subdued and everybody was tired as fuck, since relaxing enough to sleep on a stretcher in a moldy gymnasium hadn’t really been an option to most.
As we were waiting for our plane to be ready for boarding, the fire alarm went off, blaring through the terminal. I don’t think any of us even reared a head or moved a muscle. We were beyond caring if the fucking world blew up around us, as long as we got on that plane. I just wanted to get to B. I was sick with a need to be with her.
The flight to NY was both uneventful and scary. I glared at every fucking Arab on the plane, hoping to catch them before they yelled "Jihad insallah!” and exposed a bomb duct taped to their chests, but nothing happened. We were all too drained to even think of doing anything but stare out the windows anyway, so I wouldn’t have had much success.
As we approached JFK, the pilot asked if anybody had an American flag we could fly out the window, but no one did. The closest thing we had was Mark’s star-spangled boxer shorts. So it was that on September 13th, Flight 957 landed as the first plane back in the US after the disaster, flying a pair of underwear out the cockpit window.
The airport was a ghost town. There was not a living soul except us from the plane and the customs officer, just waving us through after quickly stamping our passports. Never in the history of international flight has a plane been more thoroughly processed before it touched down. So out of the airport, into the shining NY sun we were ushered.
No matter how “exciting” all this had been, to me this moment, right there in NY – waiting to see B for the first time - was beating everything up until this point by far. Now my future would be decided. Would I love her at first sight? As much as I already did? Would we hate each other? Would we “click”? Standing outside that terminal, waiting while buses and taxis took my fellow passengers to their destinations, were the worst 45 minutes of my life. If I could have thrown up right there on the curb I would have. Mark left, Sahmet left… We just nodded a goodbye to each other. No secret handshakes or nothing. I was the only one left.
And there she came. Charging around the corner of the pick-up zone with screaming tires; a woman in a white Mustang, blonde hair flying. She cut off a bus and double parked right in front of a cop car. I could hear the cop telling her to move and her arguing with him. I dragged my suitcase up to the car and knocked on the window. She turned and looked at me, and that moment will forever live in my memory. It was just that look you know. Maybe not so much the look per se, but more that moment of total confirmation resounding in my heart, that THIS was her. She was mine. Fuck the towers, fuck the terrorists, fuck everything and everybody. This was my woman and I was gonna keep her forever. Let the rest of the world burn to bloody cinders.
We spent the next 13 days in Neverland. Just totally absorbed by each other. No honeymoon could ever come close to what we had at that time. It was a bit cut short by B’s ex-husband taking a contract out on my head, so I had to leave two days early while she sorted that out. Other than that rather trivial disruption it was everything we had hoped for. I returned to London, worked off my time in the bar I had committed to, and then moved to NY a little time later.
We were married July 17th, 2002, and the rest is history.
September 11th was supposed to be our day. We had planned for it for so very long. It didn’t quite work out that way, but it still all came together in the end. I still have a stamp on my passport stating I am a temporary refugee of Canada, and I still have that ring on my finger. See what happens when you decide not to be an onlooker in your own life? Take charge and good stuff happens. Eventually…
And did I mention? She put out that first night. Twice.
