I sat quietly in my seat, trying to appear calm. Although still frazzled from the Thanksgiving rituals with my family, from bombarding me with questions of "why I wasn't married" or "was I ever considering having children?" I was flipping through the in-flight magazine. It was upside down, but I didn't notice. All I really noticed was the nausea starting to build. The passengers on either side of me, arm rest hogs, were asleep, oblivious that we were moments away from tumbling from the sky to a squishy fate below.
"Excuse me, stewardess," I whispered, in my sweetest southern charming dialect, getting her attention as she walked by. "At what point do you expect the fuselage to tear apart like wet toilet paper?" She smiled at me politely.
She looked like she was in soft focus, a haze of blonde hair and essence of Eternity by Calvin Klein. I decided she must have been the most popular girl in her junior high school, and now she was doomed to die a horrible death at 35,000 feet. "What does fuselage mean?" she asked.
"Thank you," I said, and sat back in my seat. I was now about to prepare my Olympic Gold Medal worthy performance of projectile vomiting.
It's called turbulence. It's what happens when the air outside, pissed off because you were too lazy to drive, tosses you around like thong underwear in the spin cycle.
Most people don't understand this, but Mother Nature wants to kill you. She tries like hell from the day you're born. She sends torrents of rain, shafts of lightning, tunnels of wind and dust, hoping she'll get lucky and nail your ass good. And she sends turbulence, which in turn creates motion sickness. She loves turbulence. I think she likes to experiment: she wants to see how much stress a rickety aircraft that was built in the seventies (a company business plan that was designed on the back of a damn napkin) can take when she turns on the sky like a blender making daiquiris. Little human daiquiris. Although this unfortunately was not a daiquiri flight -- it was strictly peanuts and pretzels.
"Wake up," I said, nudging the person next to me. "Wake up! Mister, I am going to be ill!"
He stirred, and glanced over at me with sleepy eyes. "What?" he asked.
"I am going to die from motion sickness," I told him. "I thought you'd want to be awake for it, since it is heading your direction"
He looked at me for a moment. His hair was angled skyward on one side like a skateboard ramp, pressed into shape by the pillow he was lucky enough to receive. "Uh, what do you want me to do?" he said.
"Not a damn thing," I said, recalling a few reasons why I got divorced.
He curled into his pillow again and went back to sleep.
"Miss?" I heard a soft voice call. I turned. The most popular bitch in school had called for reinforcements. Another stewardess was smiling patiently at me. "Is everything all right? You look really green" A real Mensa observation on her part.
"Oh yes," I said. "Just reading a magazine," I explained, lifting it to show her. A giant bead of perspiration rolled off my nose and slapped onto the glossy pages with a snap. "Just reading a magazine, waiting to die a vomit induced death"
"Would you like something to drink?" she asked. "Something to relax you?"
"That would be nice," I said. "Rubbing alcohol, please? Perhaps I can go blind and that way, and I won't see the ground rushing up to meet us."
"Oh miss," she laughed lightly, "you won't see the ground rushing up to meet us."
"I won't?"
"Of course not," she said, handing me a small vial of vodka and a glass. "We're over water."
"Water?" I repeated, a little too loudly. The passenger in front of me turned and gave me a nasty look. I lowered my voice. "Stewardess," I explained with a whisper, "The landing gear won't work in the water."
"I'm sure the captain is more than prepared to make a water landing if it's necessary," she tried to reassure me.
"Has he done it often?" I asked, horrified I was on a plane with a pilot who habitually ditched his planes in oceans. I informed her I grew up in the marine business and was not aware of anyone with anything beyond a 100 ton license qualified to land anything with multiple engines going mach .10 on a runway of white caps in the Gulf.
"Our flight officers are well trained," she said, and handed me another vial of vodka, realizing I required heavy medicine.
"Don't get me wrong," I said, trying to revert to my calm, cool, I-don't-care-if-we-die demeanor, "the fact that my seat cushion is also a floatation device gives me no end of reassurance," I patted my seat as if it were an old friend, "but what about the sharks?"
"What sharks?" she asked.
"The sharks below," I snapped. "The sharks that have been following this damned plane since we left the airport!"
"There are no sharks in Lake Ponchatrain," the stewardess told me.
"Sharks can smell blood," I told her. I realized I was shouting, so I lowered my voice again. I didn't want the rest of the passengers to be alarmed to find out they were airborne dinner entrees. "They can smell it from miles away," I continued quietly. "And they'll come. Believe me. Lake or no lake, they will come."
She handed me another vial of vodka. "Just try and relax miss," she said. "We'll be in New Orleans shortly."
"Fine," I said, trying to recapture the essence of being unconcerned. I smiled as I twisted the cap off my Absolut. The sides of my mouth twitched uncontrollably, but she was convinced enough to leave.
Five minutes and three samplers of vodka later I stood and made a short announcement.
"If I could have everyone's attention please," I said. I tried to appear calm and managerial. "We should be tumbling from the sky into the shark-filled waters below at any moment now, so I'd like to take this opportunity to let everyone know that I happen to be the CEO of a very important dot-com company, I am a part-time supermodel/Playboy Playmate and a very famous writer (yet to be discovered). My survival is most essential. So please pass me your floatation devices and be sure to get the hell out of my way when I head for the exits."
To make a long story short, losing your shit on a Southwest flight is an effective way of getting a seat in first class. HA! There is no first class. All they do is put you to a row by yourself so you don't throw up all over the other passengers. This did get me upgraded from barf bag to trash (20 gallon) bag when I completely lost everything I had consumed over the Thanksgiving holidays. You get shackled to the chair, but you're heavily tranquilized so you don't even notice. The extra leg room is refreshing enough to make up for it. And frankly, dying isn't nearly as frightening when you know you're going in imaginary first class.