Therein resides the Kennedy mystique. For JFK is as comprehensive a melting pot as you'll find -- a round (literally) little microcosm of El Mundo itself, not to be outdone anywhere in America. For a guy who hates crowds, and has the same distaste for the stinks and habits of the unbathed as anyone, I nonetheless find this a big part of what makes Kennedy so exciting. I love seeing Sikhs, Moroccans, Colombians, Arab women with their faces covered, all in a frantic, teeming mingle while muscled Port Authority cops look on suspiciously. It's an illusion, of course, a forced integration that lasts exactly until final call once again splinters the masses into their respective creeds and colors. But for now, as the departure lobbies fill and the check-in lines swarm, it's a snapshot of multicultural nirvana that would make any campus radical weep with happiness.

Outside, the crazy colors of a hundred different airlines line the tarmac, pure exotica for an airplane nut. The inter-terminal bus says it all, its stops along the necklace so saturated with international carriers that the P.A. blares not the airline name itself (i.e. Malev), but the country it serves (Hungary). Ghana, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa. They're all here.

Kennedy might be the perennial loser in the minds of weary travelers, but I suppose one learns to love it the way Martin Scorsese, who himself immortalized the place through the infamous Lufthansa heist in "Goodfellas," loves New York itself -- as a multiform world of grit, corruption and beauty.

And crashes. What about crashes? I'm thinking too about the many ghosts of this place. I think of Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie plane. KAL 007, shot from the sky by Russian fighters. TWA 800, gone in a mysterious fireball. EgyptAir 990, its copilot diving for the sea in a surrender to Allah. The Air France Concorde, slamming into a hotel outside Paris. Swissair 111. Eastern 66. Avianca 52. Even the Pan Am 747 at Tenerife in '77 -- the worst disaster in history. Acts of willful sabotage, acts of God; bombs, suicides, simple mistakes. All of these airplanes, and others too, had taken off from, or were enroute to, John F. Kennedy International Airport. Thousands of fates intertwined with that of this enormous swath of asphalt, glass, and aluminum flying machines at the far end of the world's greatest city.

A voice in colonial-tinged French announces the boarding of the Air Afrique flight. Then in English, "Now departing for Dakar and Abidjan." My pulse races. What I wouldn't give to be on that flight, sandwiched in the back of the overbooked Airbus with all these luggage-laden Africans en route to some Third World hellhole. Or in the cockpit. It's the very stuff of why I wanted to become a pilot in the first place. Do you think I did it for the money? So I could find myself at 31 making $14 grand a year? When I was a kid I saw myself at the helm of a Pan Am 747, docking in from Johannesburg or Bombay at this very same airport. A job well done, then off to my pretty wife and my feisty Dalmatian at home in the Connecticut woods, both of whom will be happier than piss to see me.

A scenario that never panned out. Pan Am, for one, went bust in 1991. The Worldport, where I stood that day in 1979, once the haunt of dignitaries and movie stars headed off to every conceivable longitude or latitude, has been renamed, in a gesture of almost sacrilegious ignominy, Terminal 3. As for me, my best efforts got me a job flying an old cargo plane in the middle of the night, arriving and departing under the greasy glare of warehouse lights in deserted corners of the airport, dodging forklifts and screaming mechanics. Whose fault is that, if anybody's? Forget it. God knows I've agonized enough over what became a pathology of lousy choices, terrible luck, and a propensity for turning difficult situations into impossibly hopeless ones.

And with that on my mind, and as the Africans head off toward the metal detectors and, eventually, the coast of Africa itself -- a genuine homeland, something I have almost no conception of, but which, I suspect, is at least as important to them as a dream job or a house in the woods was to me -- I turn and pass again through the big revolving door, and into the humid night of JFK.

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Epilogue

Since this was first written in 1999, Patrick Smith found a great new job and was immediately laid off. Air Afrique went bankrupt and ceased operations. Passages from this story were cannibalized for use in earlier Salon articles and columns.

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