Mass Destruction

I've a confession to make. It's not that I made the connection right away, nor did I make any moves to confirm my suspicion. It was like one of those sequences from Lucky Number Slevin when you're in the present but you keep flashing back to about an hour ago to see how the present situation developed based on the events in the previous moment. There's a freeze frame. There's a moment of clarity. Time stops and sound gets drowned out by the silence of the standstill. The music changes as suddenly as the time halts.

Here's how it went down. I was at Gate 30 at Oakland International Airport yesterday. The folks on the plane that would be my ride to San Diego were beginning to de-plane. De-plane is always one of my favorite things to say, images of Herve Villechez, a Chicago suburb, and to peeling the silver skin off a plane and seeing the rib cage made of rows and rows of tightly packed seats swirling in my head. A mountain of a man came lumbering up the jetway, carry-on bags in tow. He proceeded to turn left and walk past all of us waiting to board.

"It must be horrible for him on the plane," I thought to myself. It's bad enough for me, and I'm only really hurting if there's no legroom, or if the ceiling in one of the little planes was particularly low. This was no little plane though. It was a Southwest Airlines737-700 series, the RTD of the sky. Plenty of room for everybody. Well...that is...everybody but us folks of exceptional size.

I lined up with all the other people in the A group waiting to board. I was a part of Southwest's new Business Select group. Not only was I in group A, but I was in position 5. My favorite seat was definitely within reach. It was exit row heaven for me. The gate agent took my boarding pass and I floated down the aisle to my 75 minutes of airliner luxury. Well, not really. But it was going to be infinitely better than that S.S. Amistad tight-pack that I rode back from DFW last week. The Andrea Bocelli music was playing loudly (in my head, that is...or on the soundtrack of Destah the Movie) and he was hitting that part of that little opera song that they always play as background for of scenes of Italy or 2 young lovers running through a field of poppies just before a long embrace and then...

Scratch! The music stopped and my eyes widened as I saw one of the flight attendants standing in one of the first few rows trying to prevent boarding passengers like myself from sitting in a particular seat that she was partially obscuring. But I saw it anyway. I couldn't help but notice it. It was like a trainwreck. You want to look away but you just can't. For the record I am very much NOT pro-rubbernecker. I try really hard not to look at an accident when I pass one on the freeway on the way to work. I'm usually so annoyed by the time I reach the front of the traffic jam that I want no part of it. But this one was unbelievable. This seat looked like it had been hit by...well...an airplane. It was in pieces. What happened? Who could have done such a thing?

Freeze. I was sitting down in my exit window. I was like Brick Top in Snatch, having that epiphany far too late after the fact, realizing what has probably taken place. The mountain man...er..uh..mountain of a man appeared in my mind. Perhaps he...? Naw...well...? It's possible. I felt bad for even having the thought. But how did he do it? Stop! That is so wrong. He must've been pretty mad at something? For the last time, he didn't do it. He couldn't have.

Well, my little voice and I finally stopped arguing. I won.

They delayed the flight for about 45 minutes to fix the seat, citing something like all of the flights for the rest of the day would be sold out, so they'd need this seat. Of course, they let us in on this piece of information AFTER that got us all boarded on the plane.