Robin Gibb

You might have to squint pretty carefully but this is a picture of the shanty-town near our apartment.  The squatters there have to use whatever materials they can get their hands on to create shelters for themselves.  Plasticised billboard coverings are often used. I looked out one morning and saw the face of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees looking back at me.

On a Plane to Lebanon

         One little nugget I’ve been saving up for you is something I witnessed on the plane while travelling back from Canada in August.  I have to paint the whole scene in order for you to enjoy the full effect.  Noonie and I were in Heathrow airport, passing a headachey and scratchy-eyed five hours after the all-night flight from Vancouver.  Finally it was time to go the gate for our connecting flight to Beirut. Well, you know what finding your gate at Heathrow is like.  They don’t post the gate number until about five minutes before the plane is supposed to take off and you have to somehow traverse four miles of dingy corridors in that time or face the very real prospect of  missing the plane. Your carry-on bag, which was a neat, tightly-zipped single piece when you left the house seventeen hours ago, has degraded into multiple, impossible-to-carry items.  You can no longer fit your sweater inside the bag and have tied it around your waist where it drops and catches under your feet every few steps.  The bag of snacks has likewise mysteriously expanded and bulges threateningly from a side pocket which will no longer close.  Water bottles pull down your pockets.  Headphone wires dangle.  You’ve got a hot pretzel in one hand and a bunch of one pound coins in the other because that’s the only kind of change the pretzel guy would give you.  And all the while you’re barking at your child(ren), “Hurry up!  We don't have a minute to spare!  When and only when we get to the gate you can use the toilet, eat the pretzel and extract the wasp from your undershorts.  Until we arrive at said gate everything else ceases to matter. Anybody who can’t keep up will be considered missing in action and must find his or her own ride back to Beirut.  That includes you in the diapers. Move!  Move!  Move!”

            Because the thing about Heathrow is, you might reach your gate in five minutes but on the other hand it might take you thirty.  You just don’t know unless you travel there often enough to commit the gate numbers and their general whereabouts to memory.  I never remember.  I just know that once we walked so far that I thought we’d crossed over into France and refused to believe that the sewage treatment plant in the distance wasn’t the English Channel.

            So there we were, Noonie and I, panting and sweaty and dishevelled, arriving at our gate in rather better time than I had dared hope.  The plane had begun boarding early, which was a rare treat in my experience with Middle East Airlines.  We shuffled down the loading bridge and into the plane, wheeling our bags back to economy class while cracking the kneecaps of all aisle seat dwellers foolish enough to let their legs fall apart an extra quarter inch.  We had two seats by themselves and the overhead bins above our spot were completely empty, also something of a rarity.  I arranged and rearranged our belongings in the bin with giddy delight, trying out different positions of the bags and saying now and again to Noonie, “Well, would you look at that. There’s enough extra room in here for some good-sized item or other: a dachshund in a crate, a hibachi, a Kirkland pack of toilet paper. It seems a shame we have nothing else to put in.”

            Most of the empty seats around us never did get filled.  The crew shut the doors and we taxied off with about half the economy class seats vacant.  When we reached cruising altitude and the flight crew stirred to life with a clatter from the back our flight attendant, leaning over to give us the dinner menus, caught our attention.

            It was her makeup and her accent.  She spoke with a real Lebanese accent but she was of African descent.  Well, I don’t mean to give you the impression that I have been living under a rock but Lebanon is still a pretty homogenous place.  I just haven’t seen many people with her features and colouring speaking with a Lebanese accent. There was, as I say, her makeup as well.  It had been applied so thickly that it was that you felt you were looking at, not the girl buried beneath.  It wasn’t clumsily done; she had clearly spent a lot of time carefully dabbing and sculpting, but the effect was better suited to the stage of live theatre than the close confines of an airplane cabin.  Her eyes in particular were startling because besides the great, mascara-laden lashes and surrounding black shadow she had those kind of unnatural coloured contact lenses which make the irises look creepy and brittle, as if they had no depth.  But her eyebrows really set the whole picture off.  She had evidently gone right over them with her foundation before powdering them in (ladies, you know what that means– Santa Claus eyebrows) and had added a generous top layer of sparkly, toffee-coloured eyebrow pencil. They didn’t look like eyebrows so much as two strips of pasted-on fur.

            I tried not to stare and could see Noonie out of the corner of my eye fighting the same impulse.  The woman under the makeup was neither warm nor helpful but whoever expects such things from a flight attendant?  Sometimes you luck out and get a really nice one, and in such cases I usually have to fight the urge to hug them around the middle and thank them with weeping eyes for not being a horrible, rude, tyrannical ogre, but most of the time I just hope for disinterested efficiency. 

            We hadn’t been cruising long – the drinks cart had just come around and the ads were still playing on the tv – when over the drone of the engines I heard a raised voice.  I looked up and about six rows ahead of us I could see our attendant with a very angry look on her face looking down at someone sitting in an aisle seat.  She said something to the person in the seat, then a shrill female voice answered, “You dare to call me crazy?  You’re crazy!”

            The flight attendant shouted back, “You are the one who is crazy!”  They raised their voices even more and began to hurl insults back and forth while I strained to catch the words and understand them.  Then the seated woman shrieked hysterically, “Don’t touch me!”

            Everyone in our section of the plane had stopped what they were doing to watch.  Some stood up for a better look.  Another flight attendant now joined the first one and was trying to calm both her and the angry passenger, and very soon the cabin crew manager was there, too.

            Fur-Brow wasn’t taking any flak from anyone, apparently.  To my astonishment she not only refused to back down but seemed to be building up to something physical.  I sat up as straight as I could in my seat, the menu with its choice of chicken or ravioli falling forgotten to the floor.  To my indescribable frustration I couldn’t catch even the smallest glimpse of the lunatic shrieking in the seat but from what she was saying I decided she was the kind of person who spent her life blaming others for everything that went wrong.  But it was worse than that.  She didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with behaving so rudely or aggressively and that a flight attendant – especially a black flight attendant – could be abused without consequence.

            The passenger then shouted something I didn’t understand – dang it, I wish my Arabic wasn’t full of holes like swiss cheese – and mutters of protest rippled through the plane.  One man called out, “Shame on you!” and several other people echoed, “For shame, for shame!”

            I whipped my head around to Noonie. “What did she say to her?  Are they saying ‘shame’ to her or the flight attendant?”

            “I couldn’t understand what she said either, Mom, but it was something bad.  They are saying ‘shame’ to her, not to the attendant.”

            Things seemed ripe for cataclysm right about then and the other flight attendants clearly thought so, too, because they took hold of their colleague’s arms and began to drag her away toward the back of the plane.  She was a tall girl with rangy, powerful-looking limbs.  I hadn’t noticed it before but her superior physique manifested itself as the other attendants tried to get her moving.  It was a struggle. She was flinging insults and accusations back at the passenger just as fast as they were coming to her and she seemed determined to finish the job.

            But eventually the attendants did succeed in getting her away and they hustled her down to the little back area where the rest of the crew got busy heating up dinners.  Fur-Brow didn’t serve us nor make any appearance during dinner.  Meanwhile, the crew manager spent what seemed like about an hour talking to the fruitcake six rows up.  I couldn’t imagine what he was saying to her; he gestured a lot, but calmly, and his expression was impassive.

            Sometime after dinner a reconciliation between the two warring parties was staged, apparently by the cabin crew.  Fur-Brow was brought – with a very sulky look on her face -- back up the aisle and presented to Fruitcake who still sat queen-like in her high-backed chair, invisible to all the deserving eyes of rows 25 and up. Fur-Brow had barely arrived at Fruitcake’s elbow when tempers exploded again.  For the second time I thought it was going to come to blows.  A young man sitting behind us thought so, too; we saw him hold up his phone to videotape the scene.

            The attendants didn’t waste a moment dragging Fur-Brow out of there this time.  They got her moving away from Fruitcake but she shook them off as they went past our row and, pulling herself up to her full height, spun around and shouted, “Whore!”

            There was a collective gasp through our section of the plane. Someone gave a low whistle. Fur-Brow was hustled away and passengers who had scrambled to their feet sat down again.

            “See, now, this is a perfect example of why Lebanese people often express the belief that Canada is boring,” I said to Noonie. “Air Canada flight attendants, though undoubtedly wishing it at times, don’t call passengers whores.”

            The show was almost over, but not quite.  Presently a man of about forty in a striped shirt and jeans came down the aisle from farther up in the plane and began to berate Fruitcake.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I caught his tone and in true Lebanese style his hand gestures told us much. He gave Fruity a dressing-down which I think everyone in our section of the plane enjoyed to the fullest extent.  He kept it up until the cabin crew manager came and shooed him away. 

            At some later point during the flight I looked up to see Fruitcake getting up from her seat and following the crew manager.  It was about time we got to see her.  She was younger than I had guessed – about thirty – and unremarkable in appearance except for the very ugly expression on her face.  She had regular features and figure but her mouth was twisted in a peculiar mix of embarrassment and defiance, and her eyes were shifty.  But she certainly wasn’t mentally unbalanced, that was immediately evident.  You could see from the expression in those darting eyes that she was fully aware of being in the wrong; yet she wasn’t prepared to apologize for it or even allow herself to look a bit ashamed.

            Fur-Brow must have been judged by the crew manager to be too much of a loose cannon because we didn’t see her again for the rest of the flight.  That is to say, she didn’t leave the back of the plane again but I did see her once when I went to use the toilet.  She was standing in a fierce, proud posture with her back to the other attendants while they supplicated her to calm down and forget the whole thing.

            When we landed in Beirut the flight crew did an unprecedented thing and actually enforced the rule about passengers remaining seated until the seatbelt sign goes off.  Everyone who’s ever flown into Lebanon knows that it’s a wild cattle stampede the moment the plane slows down after landing.  Everyone leaps out of their seat no matter if the gate is still a ten-minute taxi away and starts hauling out their bags from the overhead bins and clogging up the aisles.  If you don’t jump up with them you’ll be trapped in your seat until the plane has completely unloaded.  This was the very first time and -- I must be realistic – probably the last time I saw the flight crew put a stop to the anarchy.  Man was it satisfying to watch them force even the people feigning deafness back into their seats: “Sir.  Sir! You must sit down until the seatbelt sign goes off.”

            For a few beautiful minutes I thought Middle East Airlines had instigated a zero-tolerance policy as part of a new campaign to force its passengers to behave like civilized beings instead of chimpanzees night-raiding a fruit warehouse. But once we had docked at the loading bridge and the doors were opened and we were still not permitted to get out of our seats I knew there was something else going on.  I wondered if there was someone up in first or business class who needed a doctor.  Maybe they were being hauled off on a stretcher or something.  And then I saw three police officers coming down the aisle of the hushed cabin.  Even at that point it didn’t occur to me that they were coming for the Fruitcake.  But they were, oh yes.  They collected her from her seat and escorted her off the plane and the rest of us were allowed, with much excited chatter, to disembark.

            We kept catching glimpses of Fruity as we walked through the terminal, waited at immigration and collected our checked bags.  While waiting for our turn at immigration Noonie saw the policemen take Fruity into a room and shut the door behind them.  Later we saw her near the baggage carousel, the policemen still walking along beside her,  arm in arm with a man who could only have been her husband.  I was surprised to see that she had a husband (did she shriek at him when he forgot to put the milk back in the fridge?) and that he looked like a normal guy.  She was talking animatedly to him and I wondered what version of the truth he was getting.

            When we came out and found M waiting for us he said he had seen policemen going inside and thought it had had something to do with two middle-aged women having a screaming match at each other in the passenger greeting area.  We said, “What? Middle-aged? No, they couldn’t be-- Was one of them a flight attendant?”  No, no, neither was a flight attendant and when M went on to give a detailed description of the women it was clear that they were completely different people than Fruity and Fur. His two had begun arguing over some insignificant thing or other and it just escalated until they were pushing each other and exchanging insults.  Once of them apparently kept yelling at the other, “Don’t you know who I am?  If you knew who I was you wouldn’t dare to speak to me that way!”

          “So who was she?” we asked M but he just shrugged.

         We then gave M a brief rundown of the altercation on the plane between Fruity and Fur.

            “So, a bit of excitement for you then,” said M as we pushed our trolley out into the warm Beirut night. “Now doesn’t Canada seem dull in comparison?”

            All around us was chaos.  People were yelling, cars were triple and quadruple-parked outside the terminal doors, car horns blasted.  I could imagine half a dozen more screaming matches happening right there in front of the terminal that evening. I thought of the farmland we'd driven through in Canada on the way to the airport, the green fields and grazing cattle. I thought, too, of the long line of people queued up at the Tim Horton's inside the terminal where I stopped to buy us a sandwich and how no one tried to push ahead or even raise a voice. 

            Canada dull?

            Hmm...

            

                       

           

           

           

                       

           

           

Beautiful Lebanese Sandstone Building

Side building -- the rectory, I suppose -- of Saint George Maronite Cathedral in downtown Beirut