sprayhawk

The Landing

And I’m 96 miles outside Newark coming in at 319 miles per hour.  Clouds are whipping by like weightless cream over the wing.

Middle seat.  Two movies.  Exit row.  Legroom.

The 30 something woman to my left has bad blonde hair and too much makeup.  She is flipping through gossip magazines.  Women could teach men how to objectify women.

The landing gear gets out of bed, groaning and banging around one floor below.

It’s either during landing or takeoff that planes usually crash.  Last night, my uncle, who used to be a pilot for British Airways, told me of one such plane crash.

It was a Boeing 7 something or other passenger jet, climbing as normal just after takeoff.  A spark ignited one fuel tank that had been allowed to run nearly dry.  High oxygen + low fuel = explosion.

The nose of the plane ripped off in one bite with the crew up front.  As the nose plummeted to the earth, the rear of the plane, with engines intact, began to climb.  Most of the passengers were still alive, though what was once a lavatory and the cockpit became a giant portal to the sky.

For three minutes the jet climbed at a near vertical until around 10,000 feet.  Then it stalled.  Slowly, ever so slowly, the plane submitted to the sky, tilting its great aluminum arms in a final arcing salute.  The noseless jet dived to the earth for another two minutes.  It was obliterated upon impact.

What do you do?  What can you do as you realize that even if your seat back is upright, you are still going to have to watch as you dive face first into a final liquidization?  These people sat helplessly for five minutes knowing that they were going to die.

As we bank for our final approach, I try not to think about this.  We probably won’t crash.

It is an interesting situation.  Watching certain death approach at 500 miles per hour.

It is an interesting situation.  But it is not out of the ordinary.  We are just squishy things on an extended dive bomb.

“No bags,” the flight attendant says.  “No bags.  No bags.”

The man to my right is trying to read what I am writing.  Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

The Airport

People are going to start dying soon.  My flight from Newark to KC has been delayed an eternal hour.  Therefore, I will be spending another hour in this goddamn fucking terminal god fucking damn shit fuck damn shit fuck taint.

Whew.  Glad I got that out of the way.  But I’ve been up for a while now, and I can’t seem to figure out how long or when or if it will end.  I woke up this morning at 6:00am, English time.  It is now 4:00pm, Newark time.  And yet I have been traveling for 87 hours.  I’m no mathematician, obviously, but I’m too annoyed with everything in existence to care.

Terminal A at Newark is a giant circular prison.  At the periphery there are ten gates, which look in on hundreds of vinyl seats.  At the center is Hudson News, selling all the shit you do not want or need.  Also at the heart there lies an Uno’s Pizzeria, selling mini pizzas for $9 a pop, which are 9 days old and have 9 pepperonis.  I purchase one and don’t have to chew it.  I suppose this is the one plus side of soggy food.

I have visited Hudson News six times so far.  I promise you that it does not get any better upon each visit.  I have staked out a sticky vinyl chair at the center of the action, right in front of Hudson News.  There is a circle of skylights above this location.  I name this place “The Eye”.  Depressing white light glares tiredly through the windows down onto the blue gray stained carpet.

There are countless anonymous people walking through The Eye.

A little girl with no shoes and apparently no parents is running in circles, possibly expressing the delirium inside of all fellow prisoners in Terminal A.  She runs over to a condiment stand and tries to climb on top of it.  My jaw drops as the whole plywood yellow shebang begins to fall to the earth, like an old elephant shot through the heart.  The girl jumps away and the stand slams into the ground with a deafening noise.  Everyone in the place looks over and the girl is just lying there screaming.  She is flipping shit.

An adult shows up who appears slightly more concerned than all the other gawkers.  The mother.  She seems surprised that her precious little minx should get into trouble.  However, I presume she knew that her troll daughter was practically feral, living off of dropped pepperonis from Uno’s Pizzeria and hydrating with fresh stains on the carpet.

The girl has a scratch on her chin.  Lucky, considering the stand sounded like it weighed as much as a Honda.  The barefoot freak child proceeds to scream and rave hysterically for the next twenty minutes.  I despise her.  I despise her parents more, who probably want to sue the airport.

Next to me there sits one of a thousand passengers who are all trying to have the loudest and most obnoxious cell phone conversation in Terminal A.

“Ah, ya catheter?  Ya catheter?  Ya catheter?  Ya catheter still in?” she asks, in a classic New York accent.  Her purple and blue and white flowered button up shirt makes me think she might be part timing as a shower curtain.  I gather, and not by listening carefully, that she has a relative who is unwell.

“I tried to call you!  I called ya last night!  I called ya the night before!  I called ya the night before that!” she yells into her cell phone.

For fuck’s sake, this person, though sick, obviously despises you as much as I do.

I look back at Hudson News.  Other people wander back and forth, gesticulating on cell phones, holding some sort of flight pattern underneath the skylights.  Pacing.  Pacing.  Pacing.  Lions do the same thing in cages.  People do it while on the phone.

“I loooove crème brûlée!  I just loooove it!” the shower curtain lady next to me exclaims to the sick person.

I look back at the cell phoners pacing.  They crisscross randomly, completely ignoring each other.

“Ah, I loooove ya, babe.  I love ya, ya hear me?” shower curtain says.

Yeah.  We all hear you.  Bitch.

I lock eyes with a man on his cell phone, pacing among the others.  Normally, I would look away.  It isn’t polite to stare, and on a primal level, sustained eye contact between two males can result in a fight.

However, I decide to stare at this man.  I stare at him with a determined, angry glare, hoping that it will trigger a lingering violence within him.  Then, here, at the heart of Terminal A, in The Eye, under the weak sunlight and fluorescence, we will fight to the death with our bare hands.  This prospect excites me more as I realize that he will have to end his precious cell phone conversation before he dies.

I stare into his soul.  He looks away.  Coward!

I get up and pace around, gnashing my teeth and dragging the soles of my feet back and forth, back and forth across the blue gray stained carpet covered concrete floor.