At a dinner party, a female friend of mine once confessed an amusing event that happened to her on an airplane. She had been flying alone, Economy Class, from London to San Francisco, and was sat next to a small, overweight, middle-aged man. The cabin lights were dimmed for that strange time period when flight attendants arbitrarily decide it is bedtime (regardless of the fact it is daylight outside and only 2 o'clock in the afternoon), and she awoke from a nap to find she was inexplicably masturbating the man sitting next to her.
She told us she couldn't recall whether she had initiated the activity in her unconscious state, or if the stranger had taken advantage of her sleeping arm; but either way, she shrieked in horror and let go immediately upon realizing what was happening. For the remainder of their journey, the fat man had winked frequently at her, as though they shared a secret equally beautiful to them both.
This funny story lived with me for a long time and would particularly come to mind when I was traveling on an airplane. I would no longer fear the peculiar phenomenon of flying itself, but rather, whom I might start touching up if I closed my eyes for a few minutes during the flight.
And then something happened to me that wasn't a million miles away from my friend's airplane story. It's an incident I still think about now, whenever I am flying, and one I daydream about quite regularly, even when I'm nowhere near a plane.
I have racked up quite a few air miles in my life. My work as a journalist frequently takes me on long-distance trips overseas. Most of these flights have now disappeared from my memory as 'lost time', in that way certain events in our lives - like waiting for buses, walking the dog, and filling in taxes - have a tendency to do. But one particular flight, from Vancouver to London, will be etched in my mind forever, with the same eternal brilliance that the sun burns in the sky.
I was 29 years old at the time, flying Economy on a fully booked flight that left Vancouver around nine in the evening. I had checked in late and was unable to get my preferred seat on the aisle, finding myself instead in a window-seat, which had two other seats between the aisle and me. I found mine before the inhabitants of the two empty seats beside me had found theirs, and I anxiously surveyed the passengers flooding through the cabin, hoping upon hope that the most unpleasant looking ones -- the overweight, the most unclean looking, the youngest kids - were not going to be my immediate neighbors.
I don't wish to sound like a snob, I have nothing whatever against people who are fat, filthy or children (or even those that are all three), but as I'm sure you are aware, it's every man and woman for themselves on a flight. All love and tolerance for your fellow human is abandoned on a long haul Economy flight. Being in transit is a mysterious limbo where your ethics, goodwill and personality are suspended.
It wasn't long before I discovered my seat-neighbors were to be an attractive looking mother and her extremely sexy teenage daughter. The daughter must have been around 19. She had long, sun-streaked brown hair and the most beautiful green-black eyes, thick with a naïve but devastating layer of mascara on the lower lids, and a few cute specks of make-up glitter on her cheeks.
She wore a white vest top with what looked like a loose gym-bra underneath, and a pair of pale blue jeans that stopped at her calves. The nails of her toes, visible from a pair of straw sandals, were painted silver and chipped. She was chewing gum and intermittently created little pink candy-bubbles from her moist-looking lips. They would pop and burst with a smack, before her tongue sucked them back in.
As if I was not lucky enough to have this delicious young woman as one of my neighbors for the 12-hour flight, to my delight, she took the seat immediately next to mine; her mother preferring to be seated on the aisle where she could stretch her legs. I gave silent thanks to the God that tends to be remembered on those occasions when we want something, or have just been given something we suspect we didn't deserve.
It was going to be a joy to be sat next to this gorgeous girl. We smiled a polite hello to one another as she sat down, and although she didn't seem too bothered by mine, her own smile successfully melted my heart.
I gathered from a conversation she held with her mother about where to find the cellophane-wrapped blanket beneath the seat, that the girl's name was Laura. Ah... Laura, I thought to myself, the most beautiful of all women's names, although I had naturally never thought twice about it before.
I have flown frequently enough to know the importance of wearing comfortable, loose fitting clothing for a long flight, so I was dressed in a t-shirt and jogging pants. After twenty minutes or so of pre-flight rituals -- i.e. reading the movie brochure in order to feel disappointed about what films are being shown, and ignoring the safety demonstration -- the plane was up in the air.
We were all being handed rolled up hot-towels by the flight attendants who served them to us with tongs from a silver tray. Everybody took one -- people will take anything that is offered to them when it's free -- and I watched other passengers wonder, just like me, what the hell they should do with it.
The gorgeous girl beside me was having a problem plugging in the flimsy headphones we had been given to access the in-flight "entertainment". I came valiantly (but casually) to her rescue, and showed her how to attach them to the power input on the arm of her seat. She was warmly grateful and smiled another beautiful smile my way.
I noticed she had the most divinely soft looking, sun-varnished skin and the sort of sexy, pouting lips that rarely revealed her teeth, despite the fact she was continuing to chew gum like it was an Olympic sport she was training for.
On her cheek she had a beauty spot that on anybody else would have simply been a mole. I noticed her slender-fingered hands had something illegible scrawled on the back in crude felt tip. This luscious brunette was blissfully unaware of the sexual allure that virtually dripped from her.
Her breasts were small -- no more than a modest palmful each, but they struck me as the perfect size and form of any breasts, because they were attached to her. The proximity of her long bare arm to mine was painfully close as she fiddled with the radio stations on the inside of her seat.
A short while later, the flight attendants announced that dinner would be served. It had gone 11pm and I doubt many passengers were hungry for a meal - most of them having probably eaten before the flight, but we were forced to surrender to the benevolent dictatorship of in-flight planning, and be given an indigestible tray-meal nonetheless.
The male flight attendant served a dinner to Laura and her mother and then asked me if I wanted the "chicken" or the "fish".
'Neither, thank you', I said. 'Nothing for me'.
'Oh, but you must eat something", the man said, looking worried sick; as if he were a robot about to malfunction at any strange request that fell outside his program.
'Really, I am ok', I promised.
'But there won't be any more food until breakfast', he said, trying to thrust a foil-covered tray in my direction.
