My other job — a musician, lucky enough to tour regularly — often requires that I sit in a chair in the sky, wearing a seatbelt, going 500 miles per hour.
Flying is still mind-blowing to me. The joy of looking out the rounded window and seeing sunsets, or circle-cut midwestern fields, or Siberia is stronger than the short-term havoc wreaked on my nervous system when turbulence hits. It took me decades to arrive at this semi-zen state.
My grandparents flew to Florida most winters during the ’60s and ’70s, when flights offered you keepsakes, like a pack of playing cards emblazoned with a lush illustration of your chosen destination. (I still have their Miami/Fort Lauderdale deck, courtesy of Delta.)
But no way in heck was I ever going to step foot on a plane. My family and I would drive Memere and Pepere to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, accompany them right to the gate and then press up against the window to watch the craft taxi away and climb into the sky. I was fascinated, but also committed to keeping me on the ground.
And then came Christmas morning of 1984. My siblings and I opened up a present of plane tickets to Orlando: In two days my family would be en route to the brand-new Epcot Center. I was excited to go, but not via plane. Butterflies battered around my guts.
On the DC-9, waiting to take off on our first-ever flight, my dad snapped a pic of my brother and sister and me. I was so nervous (and bratty) that I refused to look at the camera.
Somewhere over North Carolina, the plane dropped in the sky for a second and made a sound like a sheet of metal getting violently whacked with a shovel. My petrified expression made my dad laugh as he tried to reassure me (or maybe he was just getting a kick out of my panic.)
It was more than a decade before I dared fly again.
In 1997, my girlfriend and I decided we were desperate to get out of the New England winter, so one harsh January we flew to Florida. When the ride got choppy, I burrowed my left ear into her shoulder in hopes of tricking myself into believing I was just in a car on a pothole-pocked road, not in a little tube at 36,000 feet. My teeth chattered so much I started making her nervous.
During my short time as bassist in the local but nationally known band New Radiant Storm King, we got a gig at the big “South by Southwest” music festival in Austin, Texas. We had to fly, and the trip down was another turbulent one. It got so bad — with that disconcerting sensation that you’re on a roller coaster — that I wrapped the complementary maroon blanket around my head to try and mentally remove myself from the situation.
I was also playing drums in The Mammals, a new-wave old-time group that was soon going places — literally — which meant I had to make the decision to either fly regularly or not be in the band. I chose the former and called my doctor for medicinal help. The prescribed pills made me see double, but did nothing for my nerves.
One tour ended with a long flight back east from California, a ride that was bumpy with a vengeance. I was sitting in the very back of the plane, next to a bandmate who’d decided days earlier that he wouldn’t talk to any of us for the remainder of the trip. And he hadn’t. The stress of the rocky flight and the constant underlying tension of him being aggressively silent was too much to handle, I guess. I started crying. That broke the ice.
In the last decade I’ve flown around the world with the Young@Heart Chorus, calmly(ish) spending lengths of time in the air that would have made the 13-year-old me lose his anxiety-addled mind: 14 hours to Tokyo, during which we flew over the Yukon and the aforementioned lumpy, lonely, snowy Siberia; 22 hours to Singapore on a superior plane with refreshing hot towels, actually good meals, ample leg room and at one point, Afghanistan down below (looking rocky and desolate).
There’ve been plenty of joyous “flying for work” moments. Like the trip to Colorado where the crew found out it was Y@H member Jean Florio’s 90th birthday, so they fashioned a “cake” out of a toilet paper roll, wrote a message on it with a Sharpie, stuck coffee stirrers with heart-shaped ends into the top like candles and stuffed a tiny bag of complementary pretzels in the center.
My threshold for turbulence has greatly improved in the last 30-plus years, but if the ride gets shaky — especially if the pilot instructs the attendants to discontinue the snack service and strap in — I have to stop reading or eating or listening to music. It’s as if I’m tempting the fates by trying to ignore the bumps.
In fact, I started writing this column on a recent flight from Phoenix to Charlotte, and when it got choppy, I put the computer away.
Also on that flight was a kid at the window seat across the aisle, flying solo. He had a lanyard with a massive laminated sign around his neck, and he was animatedly chatting with his neighbors and taking photos out the window with his Game Boy. When we began our final descent, he held his nose and blew out, trying to clear his ears. He was a preteen and a total pro.
My jitters usually jettison when it’s time to land — my favorite part of every flight. The bump of the wheels on the tarmac, the roar of the wind around the wings, the serious brakes, the ceiling rattling as if pummeled by an angry hailstorm. And then the calm taxi. We made it. Ground sweet ground.
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gmail.com.