Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

“’Keshie, where’d you grow up?” asks Lovell, bemused.

“The deep South Bronx,” I explain in my finest Southern Gentleman accent.

“What was that like? Was it tough?” asks Charlie Pickles, whose youth was spent on a Virginia horse breeding ranch.

“Fort Apache? Let me put it this way,” I explain, “I joined the Marine Corps and went to Paris Island, South Carolina to escape The Bronx.

“Actually, when I was a kid, The Bronx was a great place to be raised. My neighborhood was a mixed bag of Jews, Italian, and Irish. Nice people. Then along came “Hizzona,” Mayor John Vashel Lindsey, elected from some silk-stocking district in Manhattan. He had that bullshit political charm of our past President Billy, and the dashing, high-cheek-boned good looks of a young Robert Redford…he was beautiful. He won the election, then he really fucked up New York City.

“Lindsey was a Liberal tinkerer, one of the first ‘social engineers,’ you know the type. He immediately doubled welfare payments, and eliminated any residency requirement to collect benefits. Can you guess what happened? Yeah, you’re right! All the Southern Blacks and a trillion Puerto Ricans flooded into the city. Those people were like animals, no normal, conventional, middle-class values. Suddenly, our

apartment houses stunk…. urine soaked hallways and garbage everywhere.

“The City built these brand new Projects, high-rises, to accommodate the flood of new poor. They had the copper wiring stripped out of them within weeks, to sell for drug money. Garbage was thrown out of windows, or dumped in halls. And the Gangs! I was a teenager, with two younger sisters, and there were the “Egyptian Crowns,”

“The Medallion Crowns,” the “Fordham Baldies” I used to have to fight to not join a gang!

“The whole white, middle-class world I knew fled for Clearview or Whitestone, or some other suburbs, we got stuck there, no money to move. The ‘Shwogs’ filled the vacuum, and the rest is history. Look at all these fuckin’ inner cities. Black, and ‘people of color’ on the inside, white, suburban bedroom communities around the outer perimeter. That’s the fuckin’ liberal, fuckin’ democratic, mother-fuckin’ Social Tinkerers for you!”

I’m hot. Nobody has ever seen me ever like this before.

“Hey, don’t hold back, Rabbi, tell us what you really think.” …this from Lovell.

Charlie is just staring at me in hypnotic, wide-eyed amazement. He’s never experienced his mother being punched in the face through a subway-car window, by some black man, on her subway ride home. He hasn’t experienced the thrill of his aging Grandmothers’ apartments being ransacked, and one of them being beaten during the occurrence, for the fun of it, by our beloved people of African-American descent.

I calm down, and explain some of all this to him… “Hey, Charlie, when my folks, and most of the Italians, Irish and Jews came here from Europe, it was the turn of the century, about 1910…. They had never seen a black person before, no less brought slaves into an already free society…. what the hell did they have to do with the plight of the blacks already in America? They paid their taxes, supported welfare, walked picket lines to end discrimination, then they got shit on by the same

colored bastards they’d been trying to help. Ask Farrakhan how many Americans were in the U.S.A. at the time of slavery? Better yet, ask him which Black Chiefs sold their own people into slavery in the first place? What the hell do we have to do with slavery, for Christ’s sake, other than having to feed the black pigeons now, now that they’ve developed that lovely “gimme more, gimme more, I’m a victim attitude?”

“I can’t believe it man,” says Charlie. “Believe it!”

The trip to Bangladesh is uneventful. These prisoners are the unlucky bastards who overstayed their work permit expiration dates, trying to send a little more money home to their families, and were nabbed by the religious police, the Matawah. In jail for months, they stink and are infected with lice and fleas. This cockpit door is remaining shut, period,” we notify Mike. “Maybe well leave for a piss break, but that’s it, and don’t let them use our upper-deck lay!” Charlie commands.

Mike, the Purser, keeps the entire upper-deck clear of our human cargo.

No matter, Jerry Lovell, Charlie Pickles and I still wind up flea bit around our ankles. We’ve hardly left the cockpit. Some of our cabin staff came down with some weird-shit type of T.B., and other exotic ailments. I don’t know how the flight attendants put up with what they’re forced to deal with.

“Hey Rabbi, you know its not politically correct to use the term “lesbian” anymore?”

I’ve been discussing my opinions regarding Janet Reno and Hillary Clinton.

“So, what’s the P.C. expression now?”

“Vagitarians!”

“Damn carpet-munchers, they get more pussy than I do.” This from Captain Charlie extra pickles.

I bitch about not getting laid much. Geri and I are friends, and are more like brother and sister, than husband and wife. Whenever one of us asks the other if our lack of quantity sex seems abnormal, we placate each other with our relationship was never based on sex, to begin with.” We started out as friends. But when we do occasionally get around to it, it’s always great…we always wind up asking, “Man, why don’t we do this more often?” But today I’m feeling sorry for myself, sharing my gripe with D.B. and Jerry.

“Hey, ‘Chubster,’” Jerry asks, “You know what rodeo sex is?”

“No, what?”

“When you slide up behind your wife, slip it in nice ‘n gentle, grab her around by the tits, and whisper in her ear that she’s not as tight as her sister… then you got to try to hold on for 10 seconds!”

“Hey, Jer, once a year if I wake up and Geri’s already up I pretend I’m still sleeping, stay real still. Then I slowly ‘come awake,’ look over at her like I’m still groggy, and ask. ‘What base did you say you were from?” Geri always falls for that one, gets her real pissed-off, and I always get a punch in the arm, or something!”

“Chubby Stevie,” this from Jerry, “you’re getting to be as big as Sheamus O’Connor!”

No wonder you don’t get laid a lot, Rabbi!”

I pose, a la a body builder, No way, Jose, I’m on Adkins now! Stevie SchwartzenKeshner.”

Charlie asks us, “Know what pilots use most for birth control?”

“What?”

“Their personalities!”

“No dick, shit Tracey!” Jerry Lovell is about sixty, but a well-earned reputation, well earned, as a smooth talking, ladies man. He’s been divorced for years, is the single parent to a little girl he adores, back in Texas, and between his Zam-Zam scam and his personality, he gets laid alot.

We’re heading out on a military charter to Guam and we will have 36 hours on the ground before continuing to Kadena and Yakota in Japan and Okinawa. I know Jerry’s got some female phone #’s in Agana, and he’s already set himself up with a ‘cheap date.”

“Yeah boys,” he rubs it in, “I’ll take her to Shirleys for fried rice and coffee. She loves Shirley’s fried rice.”

So do I, but jealously, I keep it to myself.

“…then we’ll head back to her place” smirks Lovell, …“life is good!”

Zeppah Zaydeh-Revelation

Not even the loudspeakers’ overlap wailing, jarring their echoing prayers, nor the smell of cheap paint and the over-chlorinated pool can upset my tranquility this day.

My head is reeling with new emotions. I have finally flown with Zeppah Zeydah, the quiet Captain with the riveting, intelligent eyes. Zeppah has a gentle, loving spirit, is a multi-faceted, thinking, caring man. The hours I’ve just spent with him flew by with our animated discussions about Persian history, the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Rehza Pahlevi, and its effects on Zadeh, and his family. We talked of our children, his Bahai Faith, our mutual love of Italian opera, classical music, impressionist painters, and of racism.

I unpeeled my defensive layers for Zaydeh, and he awakened in me not a hope for some kind of a faith, but for some kind of dignity! You see, unlike me, Zeppah has been able to create a Disease-Free zone around himself,