For about a decade, when I was in my twenties, I was afraid to fly. It became a kind of mania. I’d work myself up for weeks in advance. When I got to the airport, I would pace the waiting area. I’d buy dubious short-term life insurance from the vending machines some airports used to have. (Someone, I thought, should profit from my fiery death.) More than once I made it to the airport and discovered I was too rattled to board the plane. I’d walk out of the terminal, drop some quarters into a pay phone, and tell my girlfriend I’d be there the next afternoon instead of that night. I’d take a saggy, flatulent Greyhound bus to Boston instead. I was miserable. I was also ecstatic with relief.
Clearly I couldn’t go on this way. In the fall of 1994, when I was twenty-nine, someone told me about an airplane-disaster survival course that was held regularly in Dallas. It had a bland corporate name, Traveling with Confidence Plus, which made it sound like a pocket-sized stick of deodorant. But it was intense. It was for businesspeople who liked to be prepared, a sort of Outward Bound for paranoiacs. I went not because I expected to learn anything useful but because I desired an exorcism. We pupils were put into a section of a DC-8 cabin installed in a warehouse. We ran through fake smoke and dodged falling luggage. We learned how to rip open emergency exits and watch the chutes deploy. A lot of what I remember has to do with clothing. As readers of this magazine have long suspected, dressing poorly will get you killed. Stick to natural fibers, we learned, because synthetics are flammable. Wear leather-soled shoes with laces, because loafers fly off on impact and sneaker bottoms melt on hot airplane wings. Omit neckties, which choke, and hair spray, which is lighter fluid. The class didn’t quite cauterize my fear of flying. What finally did it, I think, was having children. I couldn’t ease their high anxiety unless I managed some Zen calm myself.
I hadn’t thought about Traveling with Confidence Plus in a long time. But its lessons came rushing back to me this past summer when I learned, on a return flight from Milan to New York City, that I’d been bumped up to first class on Emirates, the Dubai-based airline. (I’d been in Monaco playing in the world backgammon championship—woo-hoo—but that’s a story for another issue.) We’re in the middle of an arms race in terms of the sort of bling and calculated pampering that airlines are offering the one-percenters among their customers: double-wide beds, gold-plated fixtures, studio-apartment-sized cabins, hipster cocktail lists. The players in this florid competition are companies such as Singapore Airlines, Etihad Airways, Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, and Lufthansa. In most comparisons, Emirates has landed at or near the top. (It better have: The round-trip flight can cost as much as $26,000.) I’d flown business class on a few of these airlines, when someone else was paying. But Milan to N. Y. C. was the first time I’d been in first class, and it will probably be the last. I am hardly pampering-averse, but the pasha in me can think of better things to do with $26,000.
Emirates is famous, among the very few people I know who are conversant in these sorts of things, for its opulent first-class experience, the lurid tales of which I will boil down to four items: private cabins, caviar, free-flowing Dom Pérignon, and the ability to take a hot shower at forty thousand feet. Aha, I thought, a Lil Wayne video with sick bags in the seat pockets. I didn’t recall my airplane-disaster training class because I anticipated problems; Emirates has a near-perfect safety record. I recalled it because I have a fear of dying a strange, bad death, and dying as some sort of faux plutocrat downing caviar and snoots of Champagne would qualify as a bad death indeed. I am from West Virginia. If I must die while eating caviar, it should at least be alongside a semipolluted mountain stream. Even in death, we West Virginians do not like to put on airs.
What you are paying for, when flying in business or first class, is really one thing only: the ability to go to sleep in a proper bed, with a pillow and a blanket, and wake up refreshed, rather than going to sleep sitting upright and waking up between two halitosis specialists from Phoenix. Everything else is an add-on. My favorite add-ons had nothing to do with the flight itself. If you fly first class on Emirates, a black car is sent to deliver you to the airport and to return you home. (I was once a junior staffer at Harper's Bazaar magazine, under the great editor Liz Tilberis. Whenever I climb into a hired car, I recall her observation: “Fashion is about long black cars when you need them.”) To be a competent traveler, you must be good at waiting. First class eliminates that. You are whisked into special lanes through the ticket line and then through security, as if you had a pleasant form of Ebola and they want to quickly see the back of you. Once you land, you are whisked through customs. This backfired for me. I went through customs so fast that I was flagged by one of their agents for a luggage search. I’d filled my suitcase with beautiful shrink-wrapped pork products (guanciale, lardo, pancetta, wild-boar sausage) I’d bought at a small butcher shop outside Siena. My suitcase was a clown car of pork. This contraband was all confiscated. I moped the entire way home.
Yet another add-on is the Emirates airport lounge, in which you wait for boarding. There are hot and cold buffets, a well-stocked free bar, showers, international newspapers and magazines, and enough macadamia nuts to put you into a coma. On Emirates, not only do you not have to mix with the common herd, you don’t even have to see them. You board your flight directly from the lounge, the way that Pat Robertson, when he dies, will be delivered straight from his stage set to his box seat in Hades.
The flight itself? My cabin had a live orchid, a personal gold-plated minibar that rose and fell with the push of a button, an amenity kit of skin-care swag from Bulgari, and some very nice stationery. Passengers were issued pajamas said to release moisturizing sea kelp with any movement. I hope these are marketed under the brand name Nocturnal Emissions. Since we are verging on the topic of sex, it is worth saying: This is not your chance to join the mile-high club. Sex on airplanes is illegal, and the private cabins on Emirates are easy to peek over. I have heard stories, however, about couples who’ve managed to have a very nice time in an Emirates shower. You must book your shower time in advance, by the way. You get twenty minutes in there, and five minutes of hot water. I thought it might be wise to book my shower for as late as possible, just before landing. An attendant advised against this plan. In the final hour, as the plane descends, she said, turbulence can really wreck a person’s alone time.
I had a double portion of caviar. I drank a lot of Champagne. I had a crisp martini in the cocktail lounge and better-than-I-am-used-to white and red wines with dinner. I deserved the headache that sprouted later. The food was good but not so good that it dispelled my dreams of someday flying David Chang Air. I’m one of those people who always end up watching other people’s movies between seats while on a plane. It’s impossible to do this when everyone is sealed inside private pods, so I tried to approximate that experience by watching two movies—John Huston’s Moby Dick and Woody Allen’s Love and Death—with the sound off. This worked beautifully. It took my mind off the amazing fact that, even in first class, unlimited Wi-Fi is not included. This was oddly pleasing to learn. Is Wi-Fi the last great social leveler? The next time you are in steerage, eating a meal that resembles a fist-sized portion of belly-button lint, take comfort in the fact that even those in the front of the plane can’t escape every one of life’s nuisances.
This article appears in the November '17 issue of Esquire. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
