I’ve had my intimate places patted down by a thousand bored TSA agents, and I’ve seen some fine suitcases disappear forever into the twilight zone of lost luggage.
Airports and I just don’t get along. So it came as a real surprise when I checked in for a flight at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and the nice lady at the desk bumped me up to first class for my flight to San Jose, California, to give a poetry reading.
I was immediately suspicious.
“What’s this all about?” I asked nervously.
“Well, because your departure was delayed,” she explained. (It was.) “This is our way of thanking you for your patience.”
I was astounded. This was the first time an airline had treated me as anything other than a minor nuisance or a potential terrorist. This was the first time someone at the check-in desk had smiled at me. It was weird.
It was also my first time to fly first class. For me, a career economy-class person, the short passage through the first-class cabin on the way to the cramped, squalid quarters I secretly believed I deserved had always been a kind of walk of shame. The rich and beautiful denizens of first class would glance up from their Forbes or Conde Nast Traveler and give me the kind of curt, dismissive glance a duke might give his stable boy.
The first-class people were always tanned from doing important things in places like Monaco. They had very white teeth. Their wristwatches cost more than my house. These were people who owned villas and speedboats and ate tiny fish eggs for dinner. I was afraid of them.
But here I was, sitting among them in a chair the size of a Barcalounger. The flight attendant asked if I’d like some Champagne — something else that had never happened to me. And instead of contemptuously tossing a bag of pretzels my way, she served up a nice chunk of Brie — or was it Gruyere? — with a couple of those crunchy pickled onions on the side.
I sat there feeling like some country bumpkin who had blundered into the court of Louis XIV. Were my teeth white enough for first class? Should I hide my Timex in my pocket?
But when she handed me a pillow and offered me a selection of “reading material,” as flight attendants are for some reason required to call magazines, nothing in her manner indicated that I was pond scum or vermin or human waste product. Furthermore, the other first-class people preening themselves in the cabin didn’t seem to have a problem with me. No one stood up and shouted, “Imposteur!” No one snapped a manicured finger and demanded that I return to my stables or pigsty or whatever.
My confidence began to grow. I sat up a little straighter. I leaned back and stretched out my legs, something I had never experienced in my cramped little bench in the back of the plane. I ordered more Champagne, and the attendant sensed in my voice the bluest of blood, the purest of breeding, leading back through generation after dynastic generation of wealth and privilege. She recognized my unmistakably first-class je ne sais quoi and was irresistibly drawn to it.
I gifted her with the faintest of smiles. And I picked up The Economist, a journal I had never opened before, and leafed through its sagas of hedge fund triumphs and global financial upheaval with world-weary cynicism.
I slipped my phone from its distressed ostrich skin case and tapped out several extremely important emails that profoundly affected the economic well-being of millions of people around the planet. Then I asked for a few more of those little onions and sat there quietly immersed in the full-bodied, barrel-aged, faintly oaky wonder of my first classness.
When a bit later the economy class was herded past me like a bunch of serfs and vassals, I’ll admit I was amused by their cheap, ill-fitting garments, their coarse language and unschooled manner. There is something so charmingly naïve — so childlike — about the peasant classes that one cannot help but feel a certain affection for them. A noblesse oblige, if you will.
But at the same time they were undeniably a bit smelly, a bit earthy-ripe, which I found offensive. I detected the danger of lice. These people were redolent of the fields, of the factories. I wished for them to be removed as expeditiously as possible from my presence, a presence which at that point had occupied first class for only about 10 minutes.
But soon enough they were gone, leaving behind only the faintest, lingering odor. They were back in economy where they belonged, with all their petty problems involving money worries and legroom. I popped a first-class onion into my mouth, washed it down with a swig of Champagne and went back to my reading material. In a moment, I’d forgotten about them altogether.
And that, my friends, is how I came to understand the French Revolution.
