PSA: reclining your plane seat is a dick move, sir
On the way back home to New York, I did a good deed.
I helped love and intimacy along. Are you traveling alone? asked the man in Seat 36J. And then he added: would you mind moving your seat, to 25C, so we can sit together? I'm not a monster, man. I said yes, of course (after determining that it was an aisle seat. Seven hours is a long time and my disproportionately long limbs need all the room they can get). The flight attendant in her smart green suit said to me in her Irish accent, oh, you're good, in the way Irish and some British people say and mean it, and her compliment made me feel as though I had gently cradled the head of a large, beloved old dog as it eased itself into dog heaven. I felt like a saint. I forgot that quite a few of the saints suffered a good amount of persecution in their lives before they reached saintly status. I would soon remember.
"It'll be turbulent over the mid-Atlantic before getting better over the eastern coast of Canada," said the pilot before we took off from Dublin. My head came up when he said that. Was that an on-the-nose metaphor for the transatlantic slave trade or am I just dangerously sleep deprived? At this point, I had been awake for several hours and it wasn't even 10am. I had set an alarm for 3:30am to make my early morning flight from London to Dublin. On that first plane, I stretched my body across three seats. In Dublin, I knew at the gate I would not get such a luxury again.
In Seat 25C, somewhere over the Atlantic and south of Iceland, the man in the seat in front of me reclined his already inclined seat even further, jerking the a cup of ice water on the table directly into my lap. I mean 'ice water' literally: the two massive ice cubes that had been sitting in the plastic tumbler flew out gracefully and landed between my thighs. According to the information on the screen, the temperature outside was -53°C and we were travelling with a headwind of 135km/hr. When that ice water landed in my lap and began to travel, through my jeans, all the way to my arse, I briefly heard the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme tune in my head, and my face fixed itself into a rictus grin. The woman next to me, a friendly, pretty redhead, sympathetically handed me the napkin that had come with our pretzel snacks.
The thought counted, where the napkin did not.
With a wet bottom, and the attention of three eagle-eyed fellow passengers, I went to the loo, leaving my seat looking like a crime scene. I grabbed a wad of paper hand towels, came back, and with my cold, wet arse in the air, gamely tried to soak up the liquid in my seat. After five minutes of pressing towels to the seat, I gave up, like a woman with a selfish spouse, and resigned myself to the wet spot. I placed the airline pillow on the seat and settled in. I did not look in a mirror but I know the look in my eyes was one of pure murder. I'm going to memorise this man's face, I thought, and then I am going to find him when we get to NY, and then one day, when he is happily sipping coffee, I will flip his cup. What kind of barbaric fuckery compels you to do this? Who the fuck reclines their chair on a 7-hour flight, anyway? History's greatest monsters, that's who.
Hours later, over Boston, the man shifted in his seat again. This time, my cup of tea went flying into the carpeted aisle. I watched him reposition his airline pillow, and wished a bad thing for him.
My butt stayed damp all the way to JFK.