Middle aged guys are a sucker for a pretty face, as this odiferous saga proves.
I was headed overseas from New York to Paris, which is always a relatively painful transcontinental experience back in the Economy section. But my trouble started even before we left the gate.
I had selected an aisle seat near the rear of the aircraft. That is not my favorite choice, but it was all that was available on the flight.
There was a frankly gorgeous young woman sitting against the window, on my right. She had the slight scent of perfume about her. She looked up when I sat down, but didn’t speak. We exchanged smiles, and then settled in with no more immediate conversation.
At this point, the Boeing 757 seating chart becomes relevant. I, illustrated as a red square, was seated in 35J. The young lady sitting next to me (illustrated by pink) was in 35K. As the plane took off, I settled in for a tiring but otherwise uneventful flight.
Once we reached an altitude where seatbelts could be undone, the girl next to me explained that her boyfriend was a couple of rows back (marked by a blue square), and asked if I could change seats with him. Well, I am not one to impede young love, so I graciously agreed to move further back, from seat 35J to 37J. It was only two rows, I reasoned.
As I strapped in, feeling proud of myself for doing a good deed, I found myself seated next to a young Caucasian man, probably in his mid-twenties. We exchanged cordial glances. Although he seemed shyer than usual, to each his own, I thought. Perhaps he didn’t speak English.
Within seconds of settling in, I detected a foul odor coming from the shy man in 37K (indicated by black) that, unlike the passing of gas, seemed to linger. I made sure the overhead vents were on full blast, but still the odor was inescapable. It was so pungent that I briefly thought it smelled like putrefaction, as if the man had a gangrenous leg hidden underneath his trousers. But the man did not appear to be in pain, and he clearly was not dead, yet, so my thinking, and revulsion, began to gravitate towards a horrific case of unchecked body odor. As one of my professors used to say, the smell was bad enough to gag a maggot.
I then realized I had been bamboozled by the cute girl in 35K who had taken advantage of this luckless middle-aged man. Once her boyfriend was seated where I had been just a few minutes before, I saw the two of them glancing back at me, smiling. Yes, that couple in love had pulled off a coup on a gentleman, and this gentleman was now stuck flying through the night immersed in a suffocating stench that defied description.
There was another young lady, also lovely but lonely, sitting across the aisle from me. She kept looking longingly up the aisle, as if someone she knew was sitting there. Meanwhile, I was contemplating means of escaping the fetid odor overwhelming me. I considered shredding a paper towel from the lavatory, soaking it in airplane whiskey and thrusting those alcohol soaked tatters up my nose.
Now, I’ll admit I’m not a fan of whiskey. However, if it would somehow disguise the potentially lethal odor I was inhaling with each breath, it was an increasingly viable option. I had already ruled out the other alternatives, including accidentally throwing him out the passenger door. I’d heard those doors can’t be opened at altitude.
And then like a voice from heaven, the lovely girl across the aisle, in seat 37G, said the following: “Excuse me. My boyfriend is seated up there”, pointing to seat 34J. “Would you mind exchanging seats with him so we can sit close to each other?”
I could be mistaken, but I thought I heard a chorus of angels singing “Halleluiahs”.
Of course I could not deny young love. So, within seconds I was sitting in seat 34J, one row forward from where I had started this flight, and breathing far less foul air.
A couple of hours later I headed to the back of the plane to find the lavatories. As I passed the young man who was seated in seat 37J, as his girl friend had requested, he gave me a mean look. But to be honest, as I passed him I simply thought, “All’s fair in love and war.”
In love and war, sometimes you just get lucky.