The Guy Behind Me
I don’t really use Twitter or Instagram because I never feel that my whereabouts and my thoughts as expressed in short, clipped tweets or a selfie should be that interesting to anyone but my dearest closest relationships. Let’s put it this way, my wife might feel forced to keep up with all that, but I doubt even my kids would want that much information about me on a streaming basis. Therefore, I will acknowledge that publishing a blog might be taken as nothing more than an old-school version of that with me writing out in 1,000 words, things that are on my mind. The truth is that I write because I want to write and I want to “storyfy” my thoughts because I want to be an accomplished storyteller and we all know that nothing comes without practice.
My comment about tweeting has always been that I never want to be saying something like, “I’m on the deck” and expecting anyone to care. So here I am on a plane heading into JFK and I’m finding myself sort of saying the same thing. But naturally, I think this is different. In this case I plan to tell a story and that story is about the guy behind me in this plane. I will start by saying that if I was seated next to someone on a plane and I could carry on a polite conversation, that would be an entirely different set of circumstances. But I am in a single seat row of these lie-flat seats so there is no way to carry on a conversation. I will never know who he is or anything about him. We will get into JFK, he will stand in line at immigration and I will zip through the Global Entry line (Ha!). I have no checked bags because it was a short trip ( I can do up to a week’s travel for business without checking a bag), so I head right out to get a cab or Uber (I hate Terminal 4 at JFK for the loooong walk from the gates and because the damn cabs are God-knows-where, but certainly not close. Basically, I will go about my life and he will go about his life…as it should be.
So here’s the thing about this guy, for seven hours now (this is a day flight so not so much sleeping going on) he has been back there making noises. My kids tell me they can recognize me by my morning throat-clearing cough. We all make noises and fidget a bit, and some do this more than others. Not to mimic Henny Youngman, but take my wife for example. She tends to make a lot of noise in movies because she can’t contain her emotions very well. Also, she tends to sigh a lot without knowing she is sighing. I’ve pointed it out to her and she is always surprised that she’s doing it. And at night, before going to bed, where I lie down and am pretty much immediately still, she has to fidget to get comfortable. Now I’m a nervous energy foot-giggler, so we all have our issues. But this guy behind me has them all and in spades, and repeatedly.
He makes noises to himself (and me) about all sorts of things. He will open the shade on this sunny day at 35,000 feet at be surprised every time he does so that the sun is so blindingly bright. Once I understand. Twice I get. Ten times makes no sense. Then he loses things under the seat and has to rattle around grunting and cursing under his breath until he realizes he has the item all along on his cluttered side table. Not once, but a dozen times over the flight. He laughs out loud at movies. He engages the steward, chats him up, let’s him go and the buzzes for him to return. We have a very professional steward on this flight, but even he has started eyeballing me and raising his eyebrows as though to say, “it will all be over soon.”
When the steward isn’t around he talks to himself pretty much non-stop. It’s more a combination of talking and mumbling. What I can tell you, since I left my measuring devices at home, is that he talks loud enough to be heard through full-cover headphones (compliments of Delta) and wireless EarPods (compliments of Apple). I feel like I should know something about him by now, but it’s all pretty random or indecipherable. I’ve also started to learn how to tune him out.
By the way, he’s also got a bad case of monkey-see-monkey-do. If I lift my shade, he does too. If I turn on my light, yep, him too. I’m tempted to flip it on and off and on again just to see what he would do but that seems too cute for business class.
One of the funnier things to watch is him trying to go to the bathroom. He hot up a few times when the light was green, but we are in rows 8 and 9 so he got pre-emoted a few times. Then he just stood up by the bathroom and waited, but had to sigh and shake his head when the woman came out of the bathroom. This guy is making friends all over the plane. When he finally came back to his seat I think he bumped into just about every person ob both sides of the aisle in front of us.
Right now we are coming in over the beeches and he is squealing back there with lots of ohs and ahs. He looks and sounds American, but if I were judging on comportment alone. I would guess he was from Mars. I hope he gets home ok and doesn’t get thrown out of his cab by an irate driver who hasn’t come to know his simple innocence the way I have.
We’ve landed now, so I’m inclined to go in whatever direction he isn’t. I think I’ve had my allotment of tolerance for one day and two continents.