The mystery of the blue cross dagger.

DISCLAIMER:  If you run out of altitude, airspeed and ideas all at the same time, it’s probably time to pray.  Don’t chase the needles.  Don’t chase the Flight Attendants.  Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.
My 10 year wedding anniversary was on September 4th.  I planned accordingly.  Got a week off.  Wife warned me that if I took her to the NASCAR race for our anniversary, we’d be divorced on Monday.  Obamanomics, lack of a sitter and poor planning on my part conspired to keep us at home instead of nurturing sunburns and hangovers on a beach somewhere.

I am a traditional guy.  I was sick at our wedding.  Lots of cold medication and sweating for cameras.  So I caught a cold for our ten-year and called in sick for my trip on the 1st.  Surprisingly, my wife was less than wooed by my sentimentality.

So on the 4th, I was quarantined in the basement.  The sitter had the kids, and my soul mate went to work at the track/airport.  Spent a good half hour hanging with my favorite driver, Carl Edwards after she parked his plane in her hangar.  Told Carl to call if he needed anything.  No problem.  He already had her cell programmed into his phone.

She ended up working late and just rounding out our anniversary partying at the track and spending the night there.  Pretty sure the divorce clause only applied if I was there too, so I got that going for me.

Day 1:
I can’t find my watch.  No biggie.  As I’ve mentioned, I have a multitude of SPWs (Stupid Pilot Watches).  I don’t like wearing them anymore, but going tempo commando makes me feel unsettled.  Mine is a very time oriented job, and trying to catch a glimpse of the time on someone else’s watch, or screen or over shoulders during conversation is a neat way to suggest you might be down for a little eye fucking.  Or maybe some friendly pick pocketing with a side of stalking.
I’ve been there and back.  Once upon a time, the watch was all-important.  An essential symbol of masculinity, status, profession and class.  Big.  Multifunction.  Plastic or leather. (Metal bands can backfire and imply copious cologne usage and a closet interest in men’s fashion magazines.  Besides, metal bands pull my fur.)  Tough guy watch.  Something that says, “My function can kick your form’s ass.”

Now I crave temporal ignobility.  The time piece equivalent of an “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt.  Something so utterly forgettable and utilitarian that the absence of cool is a statement of cool.  A black hole of anti-cool.  Crisis averted.  Hampster brings my Timex.  Left it at his house playing Rock Band Beatles a couple days ago.  Doofy on drums.  Me on guitar.  Hampster on bass.  We all sang.  We all rocked toy instruments.  We drank a lot.

My car keeps to the S&M theme, but all the beeps and warning lights from Coche Craptacular have become background noise.  The base line of annoying has been raised.  What else you got?  Even the queer stares from other drivers because my sunroof is open and it’s raining can’t break-a-my-stride.
The plane is parked at an overflow gate.  I go out for the walk-around.  I don’t know the door code to get back in.  I ask a ramper sitting in the aft cargo bay.  “Muueh-fuuui-fren-@&£€.”

The APU is running.  I can’t hear her.  She says it two more times.  Finally, long acrylic claws are deployed as a visual aid.  It seems to be mentally taxing to say the numbers and hold up the correct number of fingers.  For the two at the end, she actually makes a fist.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not the right code anyway.
Out of respect for the heightened security protocols in place since this date 2001, I knock on the door.  One of the passengers lets me in.  I try to look shifty and nervous.  Act like I’m not sure what to do now.  I’m sweating.  I’m sure that helps.

Don’t know what to make of the Capt.  The more I talk to him, the more peculiar he gets.  Mid forties.  Fit.  Turns out he’s of Lithuanian descent.  Has a rock solid Hank Hill imitation.
On his left hand, between the first and second knuckle, he has a small tattoo of a blue faded cross that ends in a dagger point.

The tattoo is doubly odd because I’m fairly sure he’s Jewish and most pilots with felony records were weeded out the background security sweep of ‘02.  I can’t bring myself to ask him about it.

He’s a P2P (Pilot to Pilot) guy – a union enthusiast privy to strategic info and charged with informing the rest of us clods of the latest and greatest contract negotiation dirt.  This is also unusual because most of the P2Ps I’ve flown with seemed in need of a punch to the face.  Maybe a pile drive to the face.  This guy seems laid back.

At cruise for the Pacific Northwest, I make the mistake of asking, “So what’s up with the contract?” He does not stop talking for two and a half hours.  I wish he would shut the fuck up for a second so I could jot down how he won’t shut the fuck up.
At the hotel, I spend some time in the gym to briefly and gently  reintroduce my body to rigors of not drinking and smoking cigars from dawn till dawn, which is life over race weekend.  Watch lots of racing to soften the malignant grinding of metabolic gears.

Meet the Capt. in the bar for dinner.  He’s embroiled in conversation with another crew.  #1xx on the seniority list, and his FO.  Gallons of tedious rants on the company’s callus incompetence.

#1xx regales us with daring tales of uniform rebelliousness.  Gave his wings to a kid on the plane a while back.  Never bothered to get another set.  Gave his shoulder board to a gate agent, folded in the paperwork, because she was clearly running the show and needed the stripes to cement her authority.  (The stripes showed back up in his mailbox a week later, but he still only wears the one.)

Lost his hat helping a woman change a tire one night.  She found it and sent it back, but not until it had been decimated by cars, critters and couple days in the ditch.  Got called out by one of our chief pilots for not having his hat, so he wore the road-kill coon cap around for a week or so.

The man is a rebel.  A maverick.  A trailblazer with impossibly small feet geishaed into size 7 loafers.  And a fuck tool of the first order.

He pontificates ad nauseum on his skill, experience, and the short sighted stupidity of “by the book” procedures.  His “co-pilots” are frightened and amazed that he can turn off the autopilot and hand-fly at will.

I buy him a beer following that same unspoken guilty logic that if you put your change in the Jerry’s Kids jar, you buy a little hex against that horror being visited upon you and yours.  Maybe by pouring a B-BAB (Barley-Based Adult Beverage) into this guy, I can avoid turning into a pompous fucktard.  Use the same logic recycling the little boxes my cigars come in to prevent cancer.

Day 2:
5 hours en route and I still can’t think of a tactful way to ask about the hand tattoo.  On the arrival into <<HOME,>> the Capt. begins to regret his Chinese food.  Makes one trip to the lav in flight.  Tells me he has to bolt for the John once the door opens and will see me at C1.  We park on D3.
He bolts and I collect my gear and head for C1.  It’s a hike. Over half a mile if you walk it.  Check the screens just to make sure before I get on the train.  My next flight departs from D5 – one gate over from where I started.

I induce the universal body language of “fuuuuuuck.”  Head back.  Eyes closed.  Shoulders slumped.  I’m 5 years old.  Drag my peach-bruised drama back to the escalator and back to the gate.  Decide this is the Capt.’s fault, until he shows up at the plane 20 minutes later having walked all the way to C1 and back.
Get to the hotel in MCO about 2330.  Capt. wants to go to Friday’s and get a beer.  I beg off with the intention of going to bed, but Rambo is on and I fall asleep around 0300.

Day 3:
The difference between a Continental Breakfast and a Deluxe Continental Breakfast is protein.  Usually hard-boiled eggs.  Sausage and egg-like patties if you hit the hotel jackpot.  In the same vein, the difference between a Fitness Room and a Fitness Center is weights.  Usually a universal machine with patchy delaminated cables, several pins missing and few or no attachments.  Barbells if you’re really lucky.

The Airport Country Inn & Suites has a Fitness Room dressed up in mommy’s heels.  Weights yes.  But only in 5 10 and 20lb denominations and no Uni-V.  I’m no Nadius, but 20lbs. means lots and lots of reps or moving with glacial slowness.  I guess both.

I do not throw rocks in the glass atrium of physical phitness.  I am a “before” picture.  If you’re doing it, you’re probably doing more than me.  But….  on the elliptical:  Doughy guy, 5’8″.  Little god’s eye of dryness just above his shorts line where the back fat hasn’t filled in yet, so the sweat hasn’t seeped.

He’s pedaling backwards.  The elliptical is already a feminizing machine.  You really can’t look cool on one.  But backwards adds a disco ball.  If this motion were performed on solid ground, jazz hands would be mandatory and maybe a “Sssssssssssssss”

Whatever.  It’s a pretty good workout.  Problem is, he’s eating a big blueberry muffin.  Pedaling furiously backward.  Hips sashaying in a way no man’s should outside Bangkok.  Both hands occupied with the muffin like he’s vampirically sucking the blood out of a house pet.  Crumbs showering down and collecting on the rims of his no-socks.  There’s another muffin in the cup holder.
At one point he uses his teeth to scrape the last of the gooey goodness off the wrapper.  Red-shifting himself out of the “good for you dude” spectrum into the deep crimson shades of “Are you fucking stupid?”  After he finishes muffin #1, he takes a quick phone call.  Pedaling all the while.

I decide to warm up on the bike immediately to his right.  The angle is sublime.  From here the TV is directly over his right shoulder.  I’m just barely behind him like we’re flying formation.  As I watch the tube, in the mirror, it looks like I’m giving him the big fat hairy eyeball.  Just drilling into the back of his skull non-stop.  He keeps looking in the mirror and glancing over his shoulder.  I pretend not to notice.

He bails after about a half hour and I dismount for some slow-mo “Eye of the Tiger” montage reps with 20lb dumbbells.  As I leave, I have to turn sideways cause my awesome won’t fit through the door straight on.

On the arrival into SJU, I pull up the arrival weather. ATIS information (W) Whiskey.  I usually write the letter big on the top of the ACARS printout so I can see it quickly when I forget it checking on with Approach Control.  I draw a big W.  Look at it.  Look at it again.  My handwriting is atrocious.  I block print everything architect style because otherwise I can’t read it myself.
My W is an imperfect W.  But there, in the right half of my W, I’ve drawn a perfect breast.  Perfect.  Couldn’t do it intentionally for any amount of money.  But there it is.  My fleeting artistic zenith.  An accidental right boob that would make Michelangelo envious of its subtle elegance.

As I’m saying ‘byethanks’ to the pax in SJU, a matron in a coral pantsuit makes eye contact with me as she comes through first class.  I get that she doesn’t speak English.  She hangs her tongue all the way out the right side of her mouth.  Rolls her eyes a little.

I am completely fascinated by this gesture because I don’t have the first clue what she’s exhausted/exasperated with.  Normally there’s some wafting contextual tether to this kind of gesture. Some faint positional artifact to connect it to the experience it refers to.  But there’s nothing.  It could mean anything:

The flight was long.  Getting old sucks.  This bag is too big for these aisles.  Shouldn’t have packed that second ham.  The guy she’s following has terrible dandruff.  The service sucked.  Her husband is incompetent or incontinent.  The baby two rows back cried the whole way.  Somebody farted.

It’s intoxicating.  Rarely is this sort of intimate gesture just lobbed at a total stranger.  It has to be attached to something shared.  She knew I understood what she was talking about even though I can’t even guess what it might be.  Be like thinking of something funny and nudging whoever’s next in the bank line to see if they got the joke in your head.  Beautiful.

We get to the hotel in MCO (different hotel) around 2130.  I can’t weasel out of beers again.  We go to the little store behind the hotel and buy some beer.  Sit at the pool till they kick us out at 2200.  Sit on a bench like it’s our first date and stare at the parking lot.  I ask him about the tattoo.  Won’t tell me what it means, just that he’s had it since he was 15.

Day 4:
The Capt. asks if I’m writing a book or something.  ‘Sort of.  Not really.’  Can’t really tell him since he’s sort of a central feature.  Think about trading Follies for the meaning of that little dagger cross on his hand.  But I’d probably have to rewrite it first.
On approach, with 27 people on board, I’m giddy with anticipation.  We are almost empty.  Stupid light.  It’s his leg and landing this thing at less than 100,000lbs. is usually a simple and inexorable recipe for a crushing impact of a landing.  The kind of thing that makes children cry.

The wing on <<My Airplane>> is so well designed and so slick that the plane hovers in ground effect about 30 feet off, slows to about 100 knots, then just gives up and clatters to the ground.  Like one of those insurance commercials where the cables break and the piano plummets 3 stories onto the sidewalk.  Funny as hell if it’s not your landing.

There’s a trick.  A work-around, and unfortunately, he knows it.  Keep a little power in as you raise the nose up to build more drag.  Disappointed.  I was ribbing him the whole way down, waiting for the big thud. Anticlimactic.

‘Nice landing fucker.  What does that fucking tattoo mean anyway?’

He still won’t tell me.

– end of line.