Don't Get Too Comfortable (6 page)

Brill described getting arrested that day as the best thing that ever happened to him. It allowed him to forage full time, he says. But “allowed” is hardly the word I'd use. If Brill and his family are to stay alive, he is going to have to forage full time. Brill is trying to embody—and to sell to us, if only over the course of the afternoon—a lifestyle that was found to be impractical and unsustainable ten thousand years ago. As for those people on the globe still unfortunate enough to have to rely upon this method for getting their food, they definitely aren't vegans. Or if they are, it's not by choice. I would bet cash money that, if dropped down into Prospect Park, they would forgo the pokeweed, however plentiful, and the rare mushrooms, however delicious, and make a beeline over to the easily accessed protein of the hot-dog cart a hundred yards away. Even Brill, for all his obvious knowledge, industry, and sheer love for what he does, concedes this point in a way when I ask him if he ever has to shop for ingredients.

“Occasionally,” he says. “I haven't seen too many tofu trees.”

All of human civilization—from the first agrarian settlements at Jericho, all the way up to now—in that simple statement. Wildman heads toward the subway.

AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

T
he takeoff is intense, so the rumor goes. A filling-loosening interval of judder and roar, our ascent as steep as a rocket. The interior is cramped. As we approach Mach speed, we will lurch forward twice, the sonic boom will be an audible thud. At cruising altitude, almost eleven miles above the earth, I will see the curvature of the globe below, and above me, the dark blue of the stratosphere, the very edge of the black vastness of outer space. Also, a spontaneously occurring red streak runs along the ceiling, some kind of inter-cabin mini–aurora borealis electrical thingie, apparently. There is the smell of burning fuel and metal throughout the flight, I will receive a present—a pen, a silver picture frame, something like that—the food will be magnificent, and the landing will be abrupt and snap me forward in my seat.

It's like gleaning one's sex education from a group of eleven-year-old boys. Some of the information will turn out to be true-ish, some of it completely spurious. Not surprising, given the fact that, at upward of $13,800 for a round-trip ticket, those with firsthand knowledge of the Concorde are a smallish population. I have been offered a seat on one of the final voyages and now, two days before my own Concorde trip, my head is filled with thoughts of the aircraft's twenty years of metal fatigue causing a hairline fissure that lets in superheated air that roasts us all alive.

Jon, a friend, mentions how he flew on it when it almost crashed. I beg him not to tell me the story. “Oh, but it's one of my most charming anecdotes,” he counters, and gaily launches in. Apparently, just as they were reaching Mach 2, they experienced a sudden loss of velocity. The fellow seated behind him (a civilian, as opposed to the fellow to Jon's immediate right, who was Keith Richards) leaned around and said not unexcitedly that this had happened before and last time everyone was given a £500 gift certificate to Marks and Spencer. As they were turning the plane around and heading back to London, the co-pilot emerged from the flight deck to talk to the passengers. When he was reassuring Jon directly, his backseat neighbor leaned forward and whispered, “Ask about the vouchers.” In the end none were forthcoming, leaving the passengers with nothing but their lives to console themselves for the inconvenience.

My worries are assuaged somewhat by the thought that the very rich would no sooner climb into a death trap any more willingly than the rest of us. The Concorde is hardly the unballasted, top-heavy ferry across the river, the rickety wooden roller coaster whose pilings have been eaten through by termites, or the subterranean nightclub with no fire exits packed with young revelers smoking cigarettes and standing waist high in flammable Styrofoam packing peanuts. Except, of course, when it is, viz the chartered Concorde that caught fire and crashed within minutes of takeoff, killing everyone on board. It was because of some errant sharp metal object on the runway that wasn't supposed to be there, but still . . .

The specter of mortality that hounded me floats away when I enter the first-class lounge at Heathrow. The place is packed to the rafters and the air is musical with clinking glassware and the collective seal bark of good fortune, a peristaltic guffaw that happens when simultaneously quaffing champagne and tossing hors d'oeuvres into laughing mouths. It is June 2003, but it might as well be Paris before the Germans marched in, so penetrating is the whiff of memory in the making, the glow of an era about to end. Air France flew its last supersonic flight a month prior, and British Airways will put its Concorde out of service forever in October.

I'd join in on the bacchanal, but my ticket is a special cheap rate (£500, coincidentally the same amount as the mythical sorry-we-almost-killed-you consolation voucher) so my seat is by no means guaranteed should someone walk up who is able to pay full fare. My presence is probationary and second class. I feel like Lily Bart in
The
House of Mirth,
who has to augment her weekend invitation to Tuxedo by doing private secretarial work for the hostess. Any minute now and I'll be asked to serve drinks. I kill some time in a carrel in the business center and check my e-mail. Opposite me is an American man on a cell phone. Midfifties, sleek ponytail, thin-soled loafers, the gold buckle of his belt half hidden beneath the gentle spillover of his well-fed, Merino-coddled belly, he has been oiled soft with wealth. He could also be an audience plant, there to reinforce the lounge's sense of exclusivity, so very Aaron Spelling is his conversation with his architect as he wonders aloud in a public voice where they might put the new entertainment/media room, gym,
and
movie theater in the remodeling of his home. He suggests, “Maybe near the stairs, where the waterfall is now.”

A proper, tweedy, white-haired chap walks over and asks us if one can get online at these computers. Yes, I say, although they're dial-up connections so it might take a while. The man on the phone interrupts his conversation to agree. “Yeah, they're slow as shit,” he says. The older fellow rears back ever so slightly, as if our friend has actually just taken one. Trying to dissociate myself, I retire to the smoking lounge where I run into Ponytail's travel companion, a perma-tan big shot with a silver pompadour and pornographer's goatee, heavy gold-link jewelry, chino shorts, and blinding white sneakers. He saunters in and lights up a cigarillo, despite the numerous signs requesting that we limit our tobacco consumption to cigarettes. Without asking, he changes the channel on the flat-screen television to a golf tournament. He paces the floor with a swagger of entitlement, somehow managing to take up more space than he physically occupies, and yells at the set, “Low side! Pussy side! No balls!”

As various subsonic destinations are announced, it is the older and better dressed among us who get up to leave, winnowing our ranks down to a rather normal-seeming group. There are no visibly famous people that I can see, and nearly every conversation I overhear is between people who have either upgraded, cashed in miles, or blown a wad of savings to fulfill a long-standing dream of finally being here. When the aircraft finally arrives at the gate, there is much excitement and picture snapping. The Concorde really is as beautiful as a heron: sleek, immaculate, very white, and needle-nosed.

I had been expecting some of that same
Clockwork Orange
brightness inside, but the cabin is low-ceilinged with small windows. The seats are dark blue leather and narrower than normal. It feels darker than other planes, clubby, more like a Town Car. The very nice businessman beside me once flew next to Michael Jackson, who amplified the claustrophobia of the experience by spending the entire flight with a blanket draped over his famous head.

The takeoff feels standard, not the vertiginous climb I was expecting. The captain comes on and warns the novices among us that after one minute and seventeen seconds, he will be turning off the “reheats.” It will feel like we're suddenly losing speed and altitude, apparently, but it's nothing to worry about. Once we get out over the ocean, they can turn them back on again for the extra thrust. Reheats, I wonder? My neighbor tells me, “It's something incredibly dangerous, I think. Like they light the exhaust fumes. A bit like riding a huge firework.”

Moore's law about information technology states that the transistors on integrated circuits will shrink to half their size every two years, until they are so small that they reach atomic widths. At that point, an entire paradigm shift will be needed to take computers further. It has been said that the demise of the Concorde represents that rarest of occurrences in civilization: a technological step backward. But the Concorde has always been more a triumph of consumption than of science. There's no great trick in getting people across the Atlantic in three hours. Burn twice as much fuel as a 747 and carry one quarter the payload. It is a beautifully controlled yet hideously wasteful bonfire. That it has continued to be in operation even this long is frankly amazing.

WE FLATTEN OUT
for quite a while at a measly 6,000 feet and Mach .66 (about 470 mph). The crew is already up and walking around. At 12,500 feet we can unfasten our seat belts even though this is about one quarter of our target cruising altitude of 58,000 feet. I know all of this because there is no movie on the Concorde, nor are there any audio channels on the arm of my seat. What there is, and it makes for completely diverting and fascinating entertainment, is an LCD readout at the front of the cabin ticking off Mach speed and altitude.

We reach the speed of sound. I feel a little bit of g-force in the back of the teeth, but there is no discernible boom. Of course there wouldn't be, since it would be happening behind us. There is the definite tang in the air of burning fuel. Like smelling a recently used cigarette lighter.

At 42,000 feet and Mach 1.71 (1,110 mph), we are given some small canapés. Triple rounds of edible money: filet mignon topped with caviar, smoked salmon, foie gras and a gooseberry; followed by a salad of duck confit with still more foie gras and greens; and a cheese course. A glass of white wine, and three small chocolate truffles, flavored respectively with Earl Grey tea, passion fruit, and champagne. We are served on linen place mats and porcelain, but for post-9/11 safety's sake, the cutlery is all plastic, an empty concession since my napkin ring is a sharp-edged cuff of machine-cut stainless.

It's time to check out the promised phenomena. The window is warm, but the wall of the plane isn't. The curvature of the earth is extremely subtle, if visible at all. It's probably just the refraction of the fish-eye windows. As for the darkness of the stratosphere, it's a no-show. I ask the flight attendant. “Myths, all of it,” she says. What about the red streak? She's heard tell but it, too, is erroneous. But, she says, the plane genuinely does expand with the heat, some eight to ten inches, in fact. This is most visible in the cockpit, where we are no longer allowed to go.

Something incredibly sweet happens at 56,000 feet and Mach 2. Something no one told me about: people come up to the front, easily twenty different individuals, to have their photographs taken beside the readout. They all smile for the camera, their faces like those of children, unashamedly delighted and amazed. The wonder of aviation revived, a full century into its innovation.

We land. Powerful, but again, no thrustier than usual. No Concorde-embossed gifts, alas, but who really needs one when you arrive in New York fully an hour before you even left London? I move through the airport like a man in love, dreamy and dancing and wanting to tell the world.

THAT CRAZY, CALLOW,
buoyant feeling couldn't be further from the furtive embarrassment with which I skulk through the terminal at Newark Liberty International just a few short weeks later.

It was the Concorde's unsustainability, despite its two decades of operation, that ultimately rendered it the tangible cousin of utopian impracticalities like Smell-O-Vision and personal jetpacks. The foreseeable future of air travel is neither superfast nor super-exclusive. I have come to Newark to experience flying for the capitalist masses aboard the latest example of the new populism. Although, for something supposedly available to one and all, it is proving very difficult to find. I walk the concourse three times, looking fruitlessly for my carrier. After half an hour, I break down and ask a security guard, my voice a discreet mumble, where I might find the check-in counter for Hooters Air.

The ticket agent is handling a number of airlines. He only asks me where I'm going. When I respond with Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we both know why I'm there. Our transaction is encoded, like I'm visiting a whorehouse. I remind myself repeatedly that there is no reason to be embarrassed, paraphrasing perhaps the most un–Hooters Girl of them all, Eleanor Roosevelt: no one can humiliate me without my consent. Although it is not for lack of trying. At the metal detectors the security guard, an older Trinidadian woman, takes one look at my boarding pass and lets out a high, fluting “Hoot hoot!” before breaking into cackles of laughter.

Hooters Air was started in 2003 by the restaurant chain known for its chicken wings and hyper-mammalian waitresses. Every flight has three attendants who are dressed in traditional airline uniforms and trained in safety procedures, and two Hooters Girls, who aren't and aren't.

The aircraft arrives at the gate. White and orange with a blue racing stripe, the restaurant's owl logo graces the tail fin. The curious bird's eyes are bugged out in voyeuristic shock, forming the “OO” in the name. There is no rush among those of us waiting to photograph the plane through the windows. Numbering just eleven individuals, we are four more passengers than the seven who disembark. Behind them, the two Hooters Girls, one blond, one brunette, emerge dressed in body-covering track suits in sherbet-orange viscose. This is their more modest walking-around-the-airport attire. They look like Olympic athletes representing the tackiest country on earth, which I guess they kind of are.

They return in time to board before us and peel down to their uniforms of white tank tops, orange shorts, ribbed white athletic socks, and white leather sneakers. (They also wear nude-tan hose to even out skin tone and give their legs that just-off-the-beach sun-burnished glow, although it's actually closer to a barbecue-chicken-under-heat-lamps shade of orange.) Their hair is styled, their makeup prom-ready. Our pilot is a heavily Southern young man with strawberry blond hair and rosy cheeks. He looks confidence-destroyingly young but is thirty-seven and already in his second piloting job. Previously, he was employed at American International Airways, a cargo carrier. I had been expecting some bitter old drunk, drummed out of legitimate service, barred from the pilot's lounge. There is no ignominy in this posting. I ask if he ever gets teased by air traffic control when he flies in or out of airports. Occasionally, but they usually seem to be jokes about chicken wings.

I sit across the aisle from a couple from Staten Island, a friendly Vin Diesel type and his fiancée girlfriend. She has a house down in Myrtle Beach, right near her grandmother.