I Didn't Upgrade My Seat on a Flight. You Won't Believe What Happened Next!

Airplane crashes have dominated headlines lately. If I were an investigative reporter, I’d scour FAA logs (click that “lately” link). I’d plug numbers into Excel, generate graphs of incidents vs time, and publish trends. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d tie the crashes to the FAA firings, shaping the story to prove my point. Happily for us both, I’m neither of those. I’m just a guy who flew to Dulles last December for a wedding, and chose not to pay to upgrade my seat. That decision turned out poorly.

I love meeting strangers. It’s a dance of discovery, learning snippets and snapshots from another human’s accumulated existence. You dip into an encounter, snatch a few facts, probe for any connections, however slight, and move on along your separate paths. Everyone has stories, and most merit listening to. For a few minutes. For these dances to be fun, they must be quick. Jitterbugs, not waltzes. You don’t want to find yourself stuck with someone who dances with two left feet.

Parties are great for meeting people. Flights, however, are risky. True, you’re plopped beside strangers, but you have no foolproof exit. If you rumba to the same rhythm, you meet, greet, chat, then nod and silently agree to ignore each other until the wheels have stopped on the tarmac at your destination. Some people, though, don’t know the dip-and-dodge. They’ve got a dance card, and they try to fill it with just your name. Maybe you’re stuck beside a salesperson who’s always closing. Or a lonely soul who leaps at the chance to connect. Or a flower child with a pocket full of crystals and an eye for kismet. I’ve learned the art of shoving my nose into a book.

I’m recovering from my passenger experience from that December flight. The encounter started tamely. As I never bother with upgrades, I selected a seat on check-in with no upcharge. Penultimate row, aisle. Two seats each side of the aisle. The window seat had already boarded – a twenty-ish dude with oversized headphones. No problem. He’s listening to Doja Cat, or maybe Zach Bryan, loud enough to ensure he’ll need captions on his TV shows by the time he’s my age. We might not even have to look at each other, let alone talk.

“How ya doin’?” he gushed as I maneuvered my backpack under the seat in front of me. I cringed a little — gushers aren’t my jam. “Doin’ fine,” I responded in kind. “How about you?” He responded, “Doin’ fine.” And just like that, we were on script. The conversation felt complete. We’d finished our conversational duties, and were now free to fly in silence.

Except we weren’t. After a moment, he continued, “Actually, that’s a lie. I’m not fine. I’ve been here since f**kin’ four AM.” My nose was halfway to my book. I froze. “OK, so maybe we bond a little over bad travel experiences,” I thought. I figured I’d let him vomit his travel horror stories, I’d cluck sympathetically, and then we’ll be done. I asked, “Was your flight delayed?”

“No, cancelled,” he said.

“Ah,” I clucked. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Killy,” he said. I mean, I think that’s what he said. He said it fast. Too fast. I asked again, and he spat it out the same way, “Killy.” I interpreted it as “Cali,” as in California. His next sentence chilled my blood. “This is going to Washington, right?” We were on the tarmac at the Jacksonville airport. As in Florida. Headed northeast to Washington, D.C. Someone from California likely wants to head west, like to Washington state, right? They didn’t mix up his destination, did they? Did they offer him a flight to Washington, D.C. instead of Washington state? And did his headphone-blasted ears not hear the difference?

I gulped and said, “Uh, Washington, D.C.”

“D.C.?!?” he yelped, and I readied for him to spring from his seat and collar a flight attendant to fix the mix-up. But no, he settled back almost immediately and started chatting up the woman in the seat in front of him, asking her what music she liked. In an accent that turned out to be Swedish, or maybe Swiss, she politely spurned his advances. He pressed on, offering her one of his AirPods, waving it like a wand through the seat gap. And that’s when I finally figured out what he’d been doing since four AM. Somehow, the slurred speech, the red eyes, and the chattiness hadn’t tipped me off. It was the AirPod, offered in a one-sided mating ritual, that clued me in. He was drunk. I dropped my book in dismay.

I usually stay out of stranger exchanges. Don’t get involved, none of my business, etc. This demure woman couldn’t fend off the flailing AirPod, though. Since my nose wasn’t sticking into any book any time soon, I stuck my nose into someone else’s uncomfortable situation. I tapped my seat mate, saying, “She doesn’t want your music. You’re going to leave her alone.” You might have imagined that line as coming out gruff, a forceful defense of a distressed damsel. Like a biker in a bar, flexing tattooed biceps and growling. Instead, I sort of cooed the instructions, as you would to a toddler. It sufficed, though, and he withdrew the AirPod, let the woman be, and settled back into his seat. Crisis averted.

Almost immediately, though, he sprang back up and asked me to let him out of our row. He had to go the bathroom. I took a deep breath, assuming we’d miss our runway window while we waited for him to return to his seat, and let him out. Someone else was using the bathroom behind us, so he weaved his way to the forward bathroom. I turned the man across the aisle from me, and we exchanged knowing looks. You know that look — the one in which you widen your eyes, raise your eyebrows, and tilt your head back ever so slightly. It says, “Can you believe this guy?”

After a few minutes, my seat mate sauntered back from the restroom and settled in beside me. Almost immediately, he laid his head against the window and fell asleep. Relieved, I read. We pushed back from the gate, taxied, and took flight. I read in peace. I finished my book. Started my next. We started our descent. Encountered a little turbulence. It jostled him awake, but just barely. Enough that he lifted his head from the window, eyes half-closed, and then laid his head back down . . . but on my shoulder. Not like that episode from The Office, when Pam gently lays her head on Jim’s shoulder. Pam’s sleeping head descends slowly, as if on hydraulics, and settles on his shoulder like a hanky. No. Not this guy’s head. It thudded. More like a coconut. Or a bowling ball. And there it sat, like a melon, through the descent, landing, taxiing. As if we were lovers on a weekend getaway. Sleeping with your head on someone’s shoulder implies a relationship with physical intimacy. I sleep, I’m vulnerable, I trust you, we’re physically joined. I felt uncomfortable, both from the implication and the weight of this guy’s noggin. I looked around a few times, eyes wide and incredulous as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?” No one would look my way, though. They all had their noses in their books.

And there we sat, together, touching. Even when the plane fired the reverse thrusters to stop us on the ground, and we all pitched forward, his head stayed firmly on my shoulder, as if velcroed. When the plane finally stopped at the gate, his head popped up. Eyes bleary. He pointed straight across the aisle. Unsteadily. He put down his hand, then pointed again. I didn’t ask why.

Since we sat near the rear of the plane, we had to wait a long time to deplane. I faced forward while we waited, acknowledging no one. Apparently, the guy next to me fell back asleep. When I finally walked down the aisle, I heard a woman say, “Wake up! We’re here!” I kept walking, putting all the distance between me and him that I could. We had no Jetway, but instead one of those metal stairways they roll up to the plane. I walked down the stairs, across the tarmac, to the door leading inside. I turned and looked; he stood in the plane’s doorway, at the top of the stairs. I avoided his eye and raced into the terminal. I never saw him again.

While I waited for my ride, I sat in a Dulles airport bar, jotting notes about my encounter. I nursed a Cuba Libre in the mistaken notion that it would channel Ernest Hemingway. I needed access to both his writing muse and his famous masculinity. I later learned that, even though Hemingway lived in Cuba, he didn’t drink Cuba Libres. Instead, he was partial to frozen Daiquiris. I felt let down, which is an odd feeling to attach to a drink. Then again, I’m a GenX man with age-appropriate notions and hangups that I may never fully decipher. Besides, what I was drinking wasn’t really a Cuba Libre. The bartender took my order and nodded as if she understood. Then, she walked to her prep area, yanked the menu to her face to read the ingredients, and brought me a Rum and Coke in a rocks glass. No lime, no highball. At least it was cold. It was an apt end to my flying ordeal.

The wedding I’d flown to D.C. for was full of family and fun. And freeing temperatures. We danced, toasted, ate cake, threw rice¹. No one put their head on my shoulder the whole time.

When I returned to Dulles for the flight home, I found a seat at the bar in front of the Commanders-Eagles game on TV. Jayden Daniels vs Jalen Hurts. I struck up a conversation with a local who was flying away while I was flying home. He sported hometown garb: Commanders hat, Commanders jacket. We cheered for the Commanders. I copped to being a Jaguars fan, and we laughed about that. We shared a few nice moments, the game ended, we paid our checks, and we went our separate ways. The perfect encounter.

Oh — and I left my second beer half-full. I didn’t want to be that guy on my return flight.