The Friendly Skies?

Is there anything like time away from the old grind? If ever you’ve been on an airplane, the experience can be as stressful as a day at the salt mine. To board your plane on time you have to arrive at the airport hours ahead of time while your jet is still refueling in Cucamonga.
If you are lucky enough to traverse the maze of a metropolitan airport, you know how much energy it takes to travel, and that’s just reaching a gate! It’s no wonder they call it a terminal! You could die by the time you get there.
There are shops filled with $7 coffee, flip-flops for $10 (you can get a bushel of ‘em for a buck at the dollar store), and my favorite, the airport bar. Getting a healthy airline-size drink (the kind that comes in a Billy Barty baby-sized bottle) can cost you twelve bucks. In my day that was a month of beer money, or a week’s worth of cover charges to Dr. Slaphappy’s massage parlor! Oh, for the good old days.
The airline industry is the only one where you can buy a product (a ticket) and get to the airport to find out that “Ooops, we sold too many tickets.” If you want to get squeezed onto the plane you’ll have to sit in the bathroom for the flight or out on the wing. Talk about your mile-high club!
You could, of course, wait in the airport for another flight. “There will be another one along shortly,” is attendant doublespeak meaning “Pull up a trash-bag pillow for a few hours, pal, and enjoy a snooze on the floor of the skid row airport hotel.” Sometimes during holidays you’ll see rows and rows of bodies on the airport floor in a kind of airport Bowery.
You’ll find yourself wheezing when you finally arrive at your gate which is usually after a mile-and-a-half jaunt. Often large airports take travelers to long-distance gates via some sort of semi-altered golf cart. That thing is always loaded with enough people to make it look like monkeys clinging to the banana tree at harvest time.
All of these honors you get to endure after you have been subjected to security! You might have anything inflicted upon you, from the shoe search given by a frustrated out-of-work porn actor tuned security wiz with a foot fetish, to a full-out strip-search by the guy who always wanted to be a proctologist but couldn’t cut it because of his oversized knuckles!
Once on the plane you have wonderful options for entertainment. The first course is the stewardess doing the crash run through to a chorus of cackles from the indifferent and sarcastic passengers. These are the same folks who will have the fear of God in their eye as they fight you for the flotation device that’s under your butt when the big nosedive comes.
Fresh food out of a can and more tiny alcohol bottles are available on board served by stewardesses who used to look like supermodels and famous actresses. Today they are tougher and though they have a pleasant smile, they’re not much fun in an enclosed space for five or ten thousand miles.
Seats that are as comfortable as a bus terminal bench and poor ventilation make your trip all the more precious. Add a few screaming babies and you’d be in steerage on the boat from ol’ Calcutta.
Of course, it’s not all bad. Modern marvels of aerospace technology have you going from coast to coast in a matter of hours. You’ll be so grateful that when you land you’ll kiss the ground under your feet after you disembark. That is, of course, until you find out that while you may be in New York, your luggage is in Denmark having a better vacation than you!
* * *
Giosue’ Santarelli is a prolific political columnist, humor columnist, and feature writer who has been scribbling for nearly 40 years. Visit his humor column website “The Devil’s Advocate” at www.devilsadvocate111.blogspot.com.