I’m going to start this post with a warning for the squeamish: it’s icky. I don’t mean “I-ate-an-octopus icky,” ‘cause I obviously did not, but this isn’t that, anyway. It’s substantially less subjective and much, much worse.
I had a bit of a roller coaster in getting onto the plane at all: the spur-of-the-moment work on our kitchen lasted until Friday afternoon, when our brand-new washing machine decided to stop working. The error code indicated a possible problem with the pipes, so I raced out in my socks to catch the workmen and read them the riot act.
Turns out it was my fault, not theirs.
And fixing it caused a small flood, and people are staying in our place while we’re gone, and there’s a good chance that the flood-stemming towels won’t dry properly and will be horrible and mildewed by the time they arrive, and I finally raced off to the airport having done my (certainly inadequate) best to put everything in order.
At which point I was informed that my flight was overbooked, given a sandwich voucher (good at any of the closed or closing restaurants this side of security!), and told to come back in an hour or so. Evil.
Naturally I did get on the plane—aisle seat of the front exit row, in fact. It even looked for a few minutes like I might have the row to myself, but then a worried-looking giant of a Russian man sat next to me and, just before the doors closed, his even taller Russian friend (in substantially better spirits) took the window seat.
And off we went.
There was an adequate meal, the requisite screaming babies, and then the lights went out. My Russian neighbors were still chatting animatedly—and did I mention the screaming babies?—so I fished out the standard-issue earplugs and stuck them in about three seconds before passing out cold.
Not quite six hours later, I opened my eyes for a minute; the window-seat Russian was in an impossible shape in the little bathroom corridor, along with a flight attendant. They wouldn’t be dancing—fighting? But he was three times her size, and yet oddly passive, almost bashful, his arms flopping and head nodding as she pulled at him.
My eyes closed again.
When I woke up a minute later, it was because another flight attendant was shaking the man next to me. “Excuse me, sir,” she snapped. “You are travelling with that man; you are Russian, yes?” I slipped out one earplug. “You need to come now; there has been an incident. Your friend woke up and walked through that curtain there and, how do you say…pissed on a customer in business class.”
Go back to sleep after that; I dare you. Actually, I don’t know how the poor Japanese man who got urinated on will ever sleep again—how do you recover from a thing like that? The Russian man locked himself in the bathroom, the Japanese man washed up and changed his clothes, and the four men (the principals and their friends) traded seats.
Don’t worry; the Japanese men still got business-class service, and I assume that the corollary followed. It was all very awkward when I tucked into my dry croissant while the attendants put down tablecloths for my neighbors and served them chocolate crepes, but I’d have a pretty hard time grudging them anything at that point.
Oh, but talk about a situation tailor-made for gossip: everyone spoke English well, but I had eavesdropped enough to know that none of the four men mentioned spoke more than a couple of words of French (the peeing Russian knew “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” obviously). So the Russians could chat, the Japanese could communicate privately with about half of the flight attendants…and I could gossip freely with the other half, even though we were technically within everyone’s earshot that we might be talking about.
What the woman who had seemed to be dancing with the Russian told me triggered a memory: right after dinner he had gotten up and taken down a pink duty-free bag from the overhead bin. I had never seen what was in it, but according to the friend it was a bottle of whisky…which the man then proceeded to do his level best to drink in its entirety. So that explains that.
Also, the attendant shook her head at one point and declared that in the 18 years she’d been working, nothing like this had ever happened. I mention that in case you, like I did, start to wonder if this is just one of those things that you’ll occasionally have to put up with on overnight flights.
When we finally landed in Tokyo, Nick had surprised me by waiting the five hours between his flight and mine, a sweet little gesture that made the stress of the last fourteen start to fade. But it also got me thinking:
Okay. Let’s say I were flying with A Friend. And Friend got trashed; I mean absolutely wasted drunk. And then, in the middle of the night, Friend got up and peed on some stranger. I could see where it would make sense to move Friend into the pee-splashed seat, but me? They made it sound like he got a little on the next seat as well; what, in this scenario, would I have done to deserve being placed in the other pee-seat? A husband, sure; a child, certainly…but a friend? How good of “friends” would we have to be for me not simply to say, “No, sorry—I don’t know him?” and go back to sleep?