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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Singing the temp worker, furloughed pilot, punk-rock blues. Snapshots from a life aimed aloft.
Apr 1, 2005 | Once a pilot always a pilot. That's my rejoinder -- and perhaps, on some level, a pitiful one -- when hit with the question: "Oh, so you're not actually flying anymore?" Or even more hurtful: "Oh, so you're a former pilot?" I get that a lot, couched in a tone of suspicion that sends me racing to defend my credibility.
"Ask the Ex-pilot" would, of course, be a terrible name for a column. Meanwhile, it's likely the only thing less glamorous than being a pilot in 2005 is being a laid-off one. Furloughed, street meat, made redundant -- whatever your choice of term, I've been out here with approximately 10,000 pink-slipped brethren, watching in bemused horror as our industry wretches, convulses and collapses on itself.
Not yet 40, I'm still young enough -- do you think? -- to accept it in stride. I've been grounded before and chances are good I'll be grounded again. I've met fliers who've been to the unemployment office on four, five, even six different occasions. Imagine a résumé that includes Braniff, Eastern, Pan Am, and TWA -- and the unstated misfortune of having to start over, at probationary pay and benefits, each time around.
It can be interesting to look back on the how and why of whatever career path we chose or were otherwise badgered into. Somewhere along the way, though I can never pinpoint exactly when and where it happened to me, the idea of a job takes on all the gravity and seriousness your parents warned it would. Once again they were right (if overly dramatic about it), and you were wrong (no matter how cool you looked with an orange mohawk). This is the moment when you stop thinking of work in that easygoing, something-to-do-for-the-summer way and actually begin worrying about it, in the context of an ever-encroaching adulthood. Gone are the days when the sole focus of employment was nothing more weighty than earning enough money for a single tangible object, be it a new cassette deck or, in my case, airline tickets to Singapore, Hong Kong and Kenya -- acquisitions that provided summary release from whichever droning part-time tenure had been endured to save the cash.
While there are several fabled gauges of when, precisely, we kiss off our youth and embrace -- or are floored by -- adulthood, that first typed résumé or job interview requiring a tie is, maybe, as good a benchmark as any. Thinking back to my teens, and the anarchy-espousing, leather-jacketed social circle I found myself immersed in, I'm surprised that day ever came. I've still never recovered from, or forgiven, the relentlessly competitive Catholic boys school where I spent grades 9-12, where the kids had the admissions addresses of each Ivy League college memorized by sophomore year (also the kind of place that gave us a half-day when Reagan got shot). Talk of careers -- part and parcel of some greater, beckoning suburban nirvana -- was ceaseless at St. John's Prep, delivered by teachers and guidance counselors with all the fear and seriousness of a pre-dawn air-strike briefing. Our Xaverian Brother elders shook their fists and boomed in full Cotton Mather tradition, warning us that unless we buckled down and sold our souls to the gods of SAT, we would be back at whatever public high we ran from to attend St. John's, ultimately destined for agricultural school or, much worse, community college.
Which is exactly where I ended up. The good Brothers' histrionics had me carving Dead Kennedys logos into the desks with my pocketknife, and as a graduating senior I was member of the less than 2 percent of my class not proceeding immediately to an accredited four-year university. I'd leave campus in May 1984, instilled with a virulent disdain for the notion of gainful employment and a work ethic rife with ideological pranksterism. After a year of post-Xaverian twilight and recovery, I enrolled at a nearby community college that offered an aviation program. I was returning to my roots, more or less, following through on my childhood dream of becoming a pilot. I'd made it through four tyrannical years of black robes and Latin only to pursue the very thing I least needed them for.
I'd need some spending money along the way, and that meant getting a job. And for some of us, luckily, no matter how awful our present straits, whether we're a furloughed airline worker or a displaced dot-commer, things will never be quite as unenjoyable or degrading as they were at age 18.
It would take both hands to count the number of blow-off positions I held between the ages of about 17 and 21, more than one of which I resigned from with no more ceremony than simply walking home for lunch and never walking back. Such is being young. You get bored and quit, and at this stage in life -- a grace period from vocational responsibility -- nobody really faults you or cares.
The best job I ever had was in the summer of 1986, two years after I bid farewell to the boat shoes and Izods of St John's. Roger Clemens was pitching the Red Sox toward another doomed World Series, and I was taking classes and learning to fly at the small woodside airport in Beverly, Mass. I'd found a job driving Subarus around a giant processing lot near Castle Island in South Boston. Enormous ships -- great rectangular car-carriers that looked like floating warehouses -- would pull in from Yokohama and disgorge their cargo. The longshoremen would drive the Subarus onto the docks, and we would then zip them around the cleaning, fueling and primping stations. If you've ever bought a new car and wondered where that handful of odometer miles came from, here's your answer.
The longest stretch was about a quarter mile, from the washing station to the hot-wax machine. There was lots of moving around, back and forth. In an eight-hour day, I'd probably move a hundred cars a cumulative total of four miles. Having been trained in stop-and-go Boston traffic, I saw this as nothing out of the ordinary. The managers cruised around in vans whistling orders or telling people to slow down, but mostly they sat in the shade playing cards.
It would have been fun to navigate the cars down the huge steel planks that led from the cavernous ships to the docks, but the longshoremen's contract carefully stipulated a buffer zone of 50 feet around the hull. Only a genuine longshoreman could drive inside that zone. He'd roll down from the ship, cruise out a few feet, then slam on the brakes and hand over the keys with a snarl. What sort of career these surly, tank-topped guys had I can't say, but I'll guess they made as much money as I came to make flying cargo planes to Europe.
At five bucks an hour it wasn't a bad gig for a kid weaning himself from the raucous, anti-establishment trappings of the punk-rock world and back toward a more temporal ambition of flying planes. I was playing with a kind of double-ironic idealism -- that of a quasi-rebel realizing the naiveté and disillusionment of one scene, and replacing it with the ultimately more disappointing naiveté and disillusionment of another.
