Fresh from my experience with Scabby McFly, I wandered back to the lounge.  I didn’t even tell Donna about it because I still wasn’t quite sure whether someone had slipped some bad acid into my water.  I managed to decompress a bit, and started thinking about the upcoming flight. Silly me, I was actually looking forward to my first flight on a 767. I hadn’t been on a widebody since I took a DC-10 to LA in the early 70’s in an ill-fated attempt to cash in on a connection I’d made with Don Henley. What a clusterfuck that was. One of these days I’ll have to write about it. 

What I was forgetting, of course, is that it doesn’t matter if the aircraft is wider than Paris Hilton’s hoo-ha if the airline decides to cram the seating equivalent of the Hollywood Bowl in there.  Check me on this, but wasn’t it American that had the ads about how much legroom their seats have? Yeah, right. What they don’t tell you is that that particular seating configuration is, as near as I can make out, only on certain domestic flights. Flights to Europe during the season? Haaaaaaaaaaaa.  I bet they tried to figure out a way to get some more seats in the baggage compartment. Hey, it’s pressurized! Besides, it’s not like they need it for baggage. It’s a little-known fact that your baggage is loaded onto the plane, and continues out the other side onto a different plane that takes it directly to the Fred Noonan Memorial Lost Luggage Auction and Thrift Store in Branson, Missouri.

Update:

Whoops. That wasn’t ready yet. The rest of the post is after the fold.

Donna and I board the plane, and I, in my state of blissful ignorance, say to no one in particular, “Look! Two aisles!” Then we get to the seats.  I have a carry-on that I always put under the seat in front of me.  It has my crossword books, magazines, snacks, etc., and I always get a window seat, so I don’t want to have to make everybody move every time I want something from my bag. I stuff myself into the seat, and right away I can see trouble. There is no room between the arm rest, my arm, the bag, my other arm, and the bulkhead. Zip, zero, nada.  My knees would be in my chin except for the bag I have between them.  On the plus side, the zipper on the bag is giving me a pretty darned clean shave.  Of course, if I’d wanted to shave, I would have DONE IT BEFORE I LEFT.

This obviously needs to be re-thought. Donna says, “You want to put it in the bin?” As any guy knows, this is now war.  “No, no I don’t want to put it in the bin.”

It’s now me, the bag, and AA and their Gitmo torture seat.  I make everyone back out into the aisle, hand Donna the bag, and kneel on the middle seat so I can maneuver the bag.  I try it lengthwise.  Nope.  I try it sideways.  Nope.  At this point, any normal person, and by that I mean a girl, would have given up and put it in the overhead bin.  Uh uh.  This fucking plane ain’t taking off ‘til that bag goes under the seat.

“You want to take something out of the bag?”

“NO.  You got a hex wrench, by any chance?”

Eventually, I get the bag under the seat, but it’s now about a size smaller than it was when I started.  And now begins the Danse Macabre.  If I leave it under the seat, I don’t have anywhere to put my feet.  Not only that, but every time I want something, I have to wrestle it out from under the seat and pull it up to my lap, which means squeezing it between the front of my seat and the back of the seat in front, which pushes said back forward slightly.  Which means that the person sitting in front of me is cursing the day I was born.  If I leave it at my feet, I can get my feet into the 3-inch space under the seat in front of me, but I can’t turn my knees to change positions.  To make matters worse, as if they could be, it’s a nine-hour red-eye to Rome.  I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble sleeping on a plane without having to do it in a seat that was designed by Billy Barty’s sadistic Uncle Ernie.

So I spent nine hours in airline purgatory, not quite awake and not quite asleep.  We didn’t even have any male flight attendants on the aircraft for some comedy relief.  One time I was on a flight and the guy in front of me says to a male flight attendant as he’s passing by, “Hey, this sandwich is bad.” He might as well have called him “waiter.” The attendant stops and looks at the guy for an excruciatingly long moment.  Everyone sitting around him holds their breath, and finally, the attendant, doing his best Alan Sues impression, rolls his eyes, flaps his arms and says, “I’ll take care of that right away for you, sir.” Then he grabs the sandwich and starts poking it and yelling “Bad sandwich!  Bad sandwich!”

Next time:  Uzis At the Airport.