Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

what, if the Matawah get wind of it. My memories go back to a gentleman on his knees, facing his executioner. Saudi prisons are not fun, either. It could be weeks or months before anybody actually finds out that you are in a Saudi Jail. Prisoners cannot bathe, and are not fed. If nobody you know brings you food to the prison, you do not eat.

I try to express these concerns to Father Larry, but he’s not listening to me… he hears a higher voice. His demeanor reminds me of an old time

Victor Mature movie I once saw. As the Christians were being fed to the lions, one devout Christian drops to his knees, a beatific calm reflected in his face. He is going to meet Jesus, dying gladly for his faith. This is the radiance glowing now in Father Larry.

“Come meet and pray with us, Steve… it’s Easter and the Lord has risen.”

No thanks, Larry,” I say as I push away from the table. But do say a prayer for me.” I leave the room.

Take Me Home, Country Road

Kiley’s alone this time. What is she doing driving the car? Just outside her car window is the black box, that menacing master of modernity. Any human contact is well hidden behind the looming smirk of this machine.

The hum and buzz of technology manifests itself in the sudden explosion of human voice into the open car window: “FRIES WITH THAT?'

Garbled, but somehow decipherable through the webs and crackles of wires and static… “FRIES WITH THAT?” …and Kiley’s answer, somehow now very important: words spoken and recorded on the other unseen end by the push of a button, these same words recorded again only morphing now into the fries themselves: calories; lard; complex carbohydrates; mono-unsaturated linseed oil; pooling and sinking into the dimpled yellow sad limp fry, recorded not on paper but on flesh. No longer a fry, but clumps of cellulite, folds of fat and dimpled wobbly flab… born from the grease that feeds our drive-thru generation.

Floating, I watch as in it’s digested form it clings to thighs and bellies and arms, desperate and maniacal, a Marine to clinging to his fallen flag.

This Fat. Worthless, inanimate and pointless, not just an additive or an ingredient, but it… of and from and by…. polyhydrogenation!

And finally this: this box, screaming and roiling, shaking and over and over the voice: “FRIES WITH THAT?”

“FRIES WITH THAT?” And Kiley too, shaking and cowering, all at once hating the lumps of polyunsaturates that feed her and ruin her, forcing her generation to try to squeeze into their acid-washed jeans and cheap polyester tube tops, stretching over rolls of stomach.

Kiley answers, softly at first, but then louder, finally drowning out the relentless blare of the microphone: “I DON’T! I DON’T! I DON’T WANT THE FRIES! I DON’T WANT THE FRIES!”

“KILEY, HEY!” I cry out, waking with a jump.

Oh man, I’ve got to get home… I’ve got to get home, my mind keeps repeating over the splash of pee I’m donating free of charge to my Saudi toilet. I lean against the bathroom wall, watching the stream in the mirror.

I’ve got to get home I announce to the aging, sagging face looking sadly back at me.

Asleep again, now I’m on a checkout line at Winn Dixie.. I know I’m asleep, I know I’m watching myself advances on the line. Then I see The National Enquirer and I know my time is near. The Enquirer is just like death… you try not to think about it, but it’s always there waiting for you right above the Tic-Tacs and there’s not a thing you can do about it!

When my turn came, I was all alone on a grassy knoll at the front of the store, facing the cold hard stare of the checkout girl, the girl with Kiley’s face.

I placed the milk of the lower fat persuasion, all two and one-half pounds of swordfish, and the stuffed dog on the fast moving blackness of the conveyor belt.

“Is that all?” she asks in a manner some checkout girls with the rank of Assistant Manager use. It was a kind of dialect, but I understood it well enough.

“Isn’t it pretty to think so my little rabbit?” Now I was pleased not to have left the stuffed dog unbought on the shelf.

“Paper or plastic?”

This was the question I hated. I never knew how you were supposed to answer. My wife Geri always knew, but her cell phone would be turned off. For a moment I felt the responsibility of the whole environment on my shoulders and this was maybe the toughest thing I’d ever have to do.

“Shit, nothing, nothing” I screamed, exiting quickly through the automatic sliding doors into the warm suburban air.

There is never any end to suburbia. “Maybe suburbia is what we have instead of God?” I would ask Geri, she would know…maybe I could page her.

The Hajj Breakfast Club

Pilots love to bitch, and breakfast at the Sofitel in Jeddah during the Hajj, is always a bitching session. Fed up with Saudi Arabia, Arabs, and the Saudis in particular, Islam is usually the butt of our jokes.

Mark Lippi, “Herr-Lippi” poses this question to us… “what do you call an Arab with a slab of pork on his head?… ‘Ham-head,’ and what do you call an Arab with two slabs of pork on his head? … ‘Mo-Ham-head’…. and what do you call that same fuckin’ Arab with two slabs of pork on his head, squattin’ on his vibrator?… ‘Sheik Mo- Ham-Head,’ get it?”

This is my 37th day without a beer,” moans Wally Hudson, “fuckin’ sandbox!”

“Herr-Lippi” asks: “What were Mohammed’s final words to the Arabs, before he ascended to heaven?” ….silence, Mark’s on a roll “Act stupid until I return!”

Not to be outdone, Bubba adds: “Hey Mark, Mohammed returned… He told them ‘I didn’t mean that stupid!’”

“Fuckin’ beans and rice again,” Wally complains.

Mark, “Moses and Jesus and Buddha are meeting for coffee and donuts They’re discussing their comparative religions…. One of them looks up, looks around, and asks ‘where’s Mohammed?’… ‘Oh yeah, says Moses, ….Hey Mohammed, more coffee!’”

Jimmy Lynch, with his mouth full of rice, The fuckin’ Saudi’s and their fuckin’ squattin’ attitude. They invented nothing, developed nothing. The Brits and Americans found the oil, and did it all for them. Look at them, strutting like Allah’s fuckin’ chosen people.”

Herr-Lippi leans forward and pulls his glasses loosely down to the tip of his nose. “Hey, Bubba, what did Moses say to God, when God offered that the Jews become the chosen people?”

“What?”

Mark feigns studying the contract presented by God for Moses’ signature. Mark peers left over his shoulder (looking at the Arabs). Then looks down closely at the “contract.” Looking over his right shoulder, at God, Mark says: “Moses says to God” (this in a pretty good broken Jewish/Yiddish accent): ‘Now let me get this straight… THEY (the Arabs over his left shoulder) get all the oil…and WE get to cut the heads of our WHAT off?”

Al-Waleed, turning serious now, “Al Brandon is great for the pilots, but fuckin’ Lithgow is a snake, a fuckin’ opportunist, he’d sell anybody out for money!”

“Yeah,” I volunteer, “for a quarter of a million a year he’s gonna get someone killed. Lithgow’s gonna’ force someone into a dangerous situation and it’ll bite him in the ass someday….. look at Jesus, He was an opportunist, and look what it got him!”

“Rabbi, you got too much Jew showin'’ says Sheamus O’Connor, as he relieves me of the podium.

“Jesus was no opportunist,” Sheamus continues, “He was a young schmuck, duped by his own parents. Jesus