BOOK EXCERPT

PLANE INSANITY

When Fists Flew on the San Juan Special
 
Back in the mid-1980s, when DC-10s roamed the air space between New York and Puerto Rico, when I was new with the airline, when the world lay before me like a virgin wearing nothing but a wicked grin, I worked, on occasion, the most dreaded of all flights: the infamous San Juan Special. The S.J.S. had the dubious distinction of departing from JFK shortly before midnight, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It was always filled to capacity with two-hundred-ninety-five cut-rate passengers who didnít give a damn about the 3:30 a.m. arrival time. What mattered was the $99 one-way airfare.

Only the hardiest flight attendants remained mentally and physically unscathed after working a typical three-and-a-half-hour flight. The Saturday night departure (a.k.a. the Saturday Night Special) was particularly rough. It seemed there was always a fight, always a problem, always an incident to add to the pages of airline folklore.

On one particularly comical Saturday Night Special, I watched a new flight attendant experience a nervous breakdown while she collected tickets at the boarding gate. A hoard of overanxious New Yorkers the likes of whom the poor, naive Texas girl had never seen descended upon her, trying to board the airplane all at once. From my faraway position at the aircraft end of the jet bridge, I could barely make out her frantic shouts: "Please please, back up," she cried. "Y'all listen to me, nooooooo!"

Forgoing my assigned position at the aircraft entry door, I stepped into the jet bridge, looked down the corridor and saw one of the strangest sights of my airline career. The flight attendant was sprinting toward meóarms flailing, knees pumping, big hair splashing around her head like a waterfall gone berserk. A herd of heckling passengers crossed the jet bridge in leisurely pursuit.

"They won't listen to me, they won't listen to me," she cried. "They won't listen to me, they won't listen to me," mocked a voice from the approaching crowd.

Riotous laughter erupted inside the jet bridge, but from the flight attendant's perspective, the eruption might just as well have come from a volcano. Crazy with panic, she shifted into overdrive. I had no idea a country gal could run so fast wearing three pounds of make-up and two-and-a-half-inch heels. She seemed to be more than ten feet away when she launched herself, flinging her arms and legs around me as if I were a soldier returning from war and she was the expectant fiancée. Sobbing uncontrollably, twin rivers of snot running from her flaring nostrils, she trembled like scrub bush in a cold Siberian breeze.

With the hysterical flight attendant still glued to me, and a smile struggling to blossom on my pseudo-serious face, I announced to the passengers that boarding would commence in a moment. They waited impatiently smirking, rolling their eyes, jostling for position with an elbow or a kneeówhile a coworker escorted the traumatized flight attendant to a lavatory where she could collect herself. But she never did. The very next day she submitted her resignation and returned home to Texas where only the cattle stampede.

Such was life on the San Juan Special. The passengers ate you up and spat you out. Only the strong survived.

During the beverage service, it was not unusual for a female passenger to demand a can of Coca Cola. Not for herself, mind you. The high-octane soft drink was to be fed to her infant child. S.J.S. flight attendants have been known to shake their heads and sigh while pouring oceans of Classic Coke into baby bottles. I've done so many times myself. To add insult to a very possible long-term injury, the same retro-mommy might request five or six packs of sugar which would be torn open, poured into the baby bottle filled with Coke, and then, like a tit plump with sugar and caffeine and carefully-balanced phosphoric acid, the bottle would be jammed into the screaming infantís mouth.

At any time during the flight you might witness a card game with serious money involved. Gold chains flashed on a regular basis. Boom boxes, while not uncommon, had the uncommon habit of blasting music loud enough for everyone to hear. Rumor had it that on one exceptionally rambunctious flight, a group of hookers worked the coach-class lavatories. Passengers who wished to use the lavs for conventional purposes simply had to wait.

Patience never fared well on the San Juan Special, however. Whenever the lavs were occupied, even when alleged hookers werenít on board, passengers sometimes found creative ways to purge their swollen bladders. Once, I saw a man standing absently, a few feet away from the lavatory. Upon closer inspection, I realized he was peeing into a free-standing garbage bag. As if squirted from a figurine in some debauched European fountain, the golden arc of fluid glistened in dim light that, for one fleeting moment, made the lurid scene appear respectable.

Considering the distance between man and bag, the passenger was blessed with remarkable aim and trajectory. Had we been young boys engaged in a peeing contest, I might have been impressed. But we were grown men on a goddamn airplane. I walked up beside him, threw up my hands in exasperation and said, "What the hell are you doing?" He tossed a sidelong glance, nodded his head, and smiled the blissful smile of a man who had finally found relief.

On one of my very first Saturday Night Specials, airport security was summoned to the departure gate to break up an airplane brawl. The fight was initiated during the boarding process, by two men who, as children, probably suckled hundreds of Coke-filled baby bottles and pissed liquid sugar well into their thirties.

Here's how the action unfolded.

I watched a nervous-looking gentleman as he placed his new Panama hat in the overhead bin. Noting the tremendous care he bestowed upon the hat meticulous placement of it, the way he moved it a few inches to the left, turned it slightly, then moved it a few inches to the right I couldn't help but smile. This was a man who loved his hat, a man whose hat was as precious as a newborn child. Clearly, this hat was not to be touched by the unsavory hands of strangers. Though the overhead bin was otherwise empty, the man closed it gently, leaving his prize to rest in uncluttered peace.

I was standing at the rear of the airplane, about twenty-five feet away from the hat man, when a heavyset gentleman plopped into the last row of seats. His eyes were red. He stank of liquor. He was sweating and panting and seemed on the verge of collapse. Still, he looked up at me and smiled. "Pssssst, pssssst ...," he said. "Yo necesito un vaso con hielo (I need a glass with ice)." He opened his jacket, pointing somewhat stealthily to a fifth of rum tucked in his breast pocket. "Yo necesito un vaso con hielo," he repeated. "Ahhh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

This was the kind of passenger we occasionally greeted on the Saturday Night Special a tipsy traveler impressed by his own resourcefulness.

As the final passengers squeezed into the crowded cabin, I noticed a man dragging a heavy carry-on bag along the right-hand aisle of the aircraft. He hurled repeated insults at his wife, who, though she was half the size of her husband, was dragging a carry-on that seemed twice as heavy as his. His wife snapped back at him, delivering a Spanish-speaking retort that sent ripples of laughter through the crowd of nearby passengers. Embarrassed by this public display of female disobedience, the husband flew into a frenzy. He yelled and cursed, berating her with a volley of conjugated verbs that drew ice-cold stares from passengers. In the midst of his tirade, the husband threw open an overhead bin. In one blind movement, he picked up his massive carry-on bag and slammed it in the overhead bin, directly on top of the precious Panama hat.

The hat man sat still in his seat, frozen momentarily by the ramifications of this callous act. When the paralysis finally broke, he leapt to his feet, cursed the assailant, then reached beneath the bag to extract what was left of his hat. To his extreme displeasure, the crown had been completely crushed so that now it was level to the brim. It looked like a broken Frisbee. Like a nest built by druggie sparrows.

The hat man's jaw came unhinged. He began to tremble. His eyes filled with something more complex than rage. Without taking a breath, the hat man spat a fusillade of insults in rapid-fire Spanish. The husband responded with a foul-mouthed blast of his own. Their shouts attracted the attention of everyone on board, including first-class passengers who were poking their heads in the aisle, trying to get a glimpse of the ruckus in the back.

I threaded my way through the crowded aisle, hoping to intervene before things got out of hand. But by the time I reached the two shouting men, the first punch had already been thrown. The hat man had been leveled by a vicious right cross.

A collective gasp seemed to suck the air out of the cavernous DC-10 cabin. Many of the two-hundred-ninety-five passengers and ten crew members froze in their places. There was no sound. The seconds floated by like Goodyear blimps. Like a heavyweight champion refusing to be beaten by a ten-count, the hat man rose slowly from the floor. He massaged his chin for a moment, grinned sardonically, then let loose an ear-piercing battle cry:

"Hyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaa!"

That's when all hell broke loose.

To the best of my recollection, the full-scale brawl broke out as the husband prepared to defend himself against the hat man. When hubby cocked his arm to throw another punch, his elbow inadvertently whacked the head of a seated passenger. Infuriated by this unprovoked assault, the man jumped to his feet and pushed the husband who then fell atop a fourth man who proceeded to push the husband upon a fifth. Like the climatic scene in a Jackie Chan movie, fists were suddenly flying everywhere. Stranger battled against stranger in an aircraft skirmish fueled purely by angst and testosterone.

Not to be outdone by the guys, some of the tougher-looking female passengers joined in. I ducked beneath a misguided punch thrown by a thirty-year-old woman in a tank top. I glared at her, thought briefly about delivering a jab to the ribs or maybe an uppercut to the chin. But then I remembered I was at work and in uniform. Besides, she looked like the type who might whup my ass and live to laugh about it. Instead of throwing punches, I threw a look and retreated to the rear of the aircraft.

Unfortunately, my escape was blocked by a massive presence in the aisle. It was the tipsy traveler. The big guy. The one who asked for un vaso con hielo. He stood there, wobbling, a sudden sense of purpose gleaming in his bloodshot eyes. Until that moment, I hadnít appreciated the mammoth proportions of the man. He stood well over six feet and weighed in at no less than three hundred pounds. Amid the shouts and screams of the escalating brawl, the big guy gathered his considerable voice and yelled something in Spanish. Something cruel and daunting and suicidal. He charged up the aisle, slamming into the fray with a fearlessness instilled by the makers of Barcardi. Had I not slid into a row of seats, he would have bowled me over like a cricket wicket.

The captain's voice soon came over the P.A. system, demanding that everyone be seated, but the escalating clamor made his command difficult to hear. Cheering sections had formed on the opposite side of the airplane. When a favorite brawler connected a punch, one group would yell "Whoooaaaaa" while the other group sighed "Ooooooh." From a protected position near the aft bulkhead, I watched an entire familyómother, father and three kids applauding and throwing phantom punches, like spectators at a Tyson fight. Iím certain that in some hidden corner of the aircraft, someone was placing five-to-one odds on the big guy.

As law enforcement officers stormed the airplane, as punches froze in mid-arc and pugilists suddenly became pacifists, the big guy moved to the back of the airplane and looked me dead in the eye.

"Pssssst, pssssst" he said, his eyes like wet tomatoes. "Yo necesito un vaso con hielo. Ahhhh, ha, ha, ha, ha"

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