Stephen Keshner: Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

As expected, not two minutes later, all three flight attendants are crowded inside the cockpit. They’ve been briefed by the senior flight attendant. They are fearful, but they know what to do. The pilots are busy, but allow the girls to stay in the cockpit on descent, and as they get in range, they point out the smokey fire-fights and the rebel locations, surrounding the airport. The girls are fascinated, and scared shit-less.

Landing smoothly and pulling quickly up to the gate, the Captain yells back, “ OK, get ‘em off, get em off!”

The flight attendants stampede their passengers out the door. D.B. hollers out, “Close it up! Close it up! Now get down! Get down under them seats!”

The three flight attendants, scrunched down on their bellies beneath the seats, are crying their eyes out. The two pilots behind the closed cockpit door are crying too, while laughing hysterically as they taxi across the field to get refueled for the trip back to Houston.

Fifteen minutes later, when the truth comes out, the remainder of the flight is taken up with vigorous oral sex between the pilots and flight attendants.

“Fuck you, Darius!”

“No, fuck you! “

D.B. and I are together all month, based in Guam, flying to Saipan to Narita or Nagoya and back, every other day.

Geri and I have known D.B. and Lois, his Flight Attendant wife, for years. She’s the big-hearted, adventurous type. We’ve attended their “orphan Thanksgiving” parties, for people with no family on Oahu, many times.

Beautiful Tumon Bay is always sunny and hot. At the Tree-Bar, poolside at the Hilton Hotel, D.B. and I are drinking Jack and Coke. D.B.’s mournfully focused on a table of six young Japanese girls, obviously on holiday here in tropical Guam, clerical types escaping the harsh winter in Narita. They are all giggling, drinking “whiskey,” which to the Japanese is any alcoholic drink except beer.

D.B.’s first sexual encounter, at about age eleven, was at the instigation of an older neighbor boy who took Darry into a back bedroom of the other kid’s trailer. He starts to play with and suck on D.B.’s dick. “Hey, man, if he wanted to do that, I weren’t gonna’ stop him.”

Suddenly, they’re caught by the neighbor kid’s 35 year-old mother. She pulls her son’s head off of D.B.’s dick, and drags her kid by the hair into another bedroom. D.B. is shitting, not knowing what she’s going to do to him. She comes back in, closes the door, and gently pushing Darry back on the mattress, she goes down on D.B., finishing him off in her mouth. D.B. smiles, remembering. “That went on for awhile, don’t remember why it ever stopped.”

Earlier that afternoon, walking the beach, D.B.’s confided “I don’t have it anymore, man.” Now in his fifties, he’s still a good looking man, with white, unruly hair, a twinkle in his eye, and a great physique. He’s going through some kind of mental male-menopause, doubting his own good looks, and his sex appeal. Nothing I’ve said to D.B., or can think to say, dissuades his self-doubt.

“You see all these Nipper girls? I’ve never had one of those Nipper girls, in all these years we’ve been coming to Guam.” I know that some of our younger pilots have scored, or claimed to, with these Japanese girls, away from home on holiday.

Later now, during the course of the evening, tables are pushed together as we are joined by other flight crewmembers. The six, now tipsy Japanese secretaries are now part of our party. Eventually, the party moves to D.B.’s room. The “Jack and Coke” on the rocks has been flowing. D.B. is glowing, one arm around a friendly Nipper girl, the other holding his cigarette and drink.

I’m happy for him, knowing he’s finally gonna get some Nipper Nooky; and we last four revelers leave D.B. and his new friend to themselves.

En route to Narita next evening, D.B. looks over, grins, and says, “You ain’t gonna believe it man.”

“What?” He’s obviously happy, but we haven’t talked yet about his night with the Nipper chick.

“Jerry, Steve, you know how sometimes good luck can be bad luck, and bad luck can be good luck?” We wait for the story.

Seems that shortly after D.B. was left alone with his girl, she became nervous, and no longer wanted to be in his company. She left, no kiss-kiss, no Nipper-nooky, no nothing.”

He was so upset that he finished the Jack Daniels, put on the “Do Not Disturb” sign and collapsed alone into his bed.

Guam’s Hotels hire staff from all over the Philippines and Micronesia. They are famous for disregarding ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs. Many mornings, at six or seven A.M., I’ve had to shoo away the mini-bar man…."Just want to check your mini-bar, sir;” or housekeeping staff, getting an early start on the vacuuming and sheets.

At six A.M., someone is knocking on D.B.’s door. “Go away,” he manages, still drunk and comatose. Louder knocking. “Go the fuck away!” D.B. shouts, giving himself a worse headache, “I don’t want any!” The knocking becomes more persistent. Fully awake now, his head throbbing, Darry flies out of bed, throws open the door, ready to strangle the mini-bar man.

Pushing past him into the room is his wife, Lois, who has taken it upon herself to surprise him. Her own charter trip was cancelled, so she hopped the Air-Mike flight from Honolulu, arriving at Agana Airport at 5 a.m. “Surprise, Honey!” They hug and kiss, as D.B. thinks of what the scene would have been had he “gotten lucky.”

“Holy shit!” is all anybody can say. D.B. had been cured of his lack-ofnooky despondency, and he was his old self again. Back in the cockpit with Jerry Lovell as Engineer, I say:

“Hey, D.B., tell Jerry about the “doggy with no legs.”

“Man walks into a bar carrying a doggy with no legs, sets him the doggie on the bar…” Darry is now exaggerating his Texas twang. “…bartender walks over and the man orders a drink. Bartender pets the doggy and says, “Nice doggy, what happened to his legs?”

“Nothing happened to his legs, he was born that way.”

“Oh,” says the bartender… “What’s your doggy’s name?”

“Ain’t got no name.”

“Ain’t got no name?”

“Don’t make a shit, can’t come if ya call him!”

Yeah, D.B.’s back to himself for sure, that’s his favorite joke, and he’s been telling it for years.

My mind wanders back to my first ever flight with Darry Swayde, years earlier. He and I were alone in the cockpit, he was a distinguished Captain, and I was a lowly new hire, Second Officer, Flight Engineer. The co-pilot had stepped off the flight deck for some reason or other.

D.B. turned to me and in the serious, confidential tone of a man imparting some wisdom:

You know young fella, I must have painted…I don’t know, maybe a hunnert, a hunnert and fifty houses, but no-one ever called me a house painter. And, you know, I bet I helped build about a hunnert barns and silos, but nobody’s never called me no carpenter….” Now, leaning forward, he places one hand high on my thigh as he says, “….but you know, just suck one dick….” He smiles.

I was so scared and uptight, that it took a few seconds for me to get the joke, but I fell in love with D.B. right then, and I’ve loved him ever since. God, it’s been 10-15 years, longer than most of my marriages.

Returning to Honolulu, someone cuts an outrageous, stinking fart. We all reach for our oxygen masks, nobody admitting who did it, another advantage of a three man flight crew.

“Man, what crawled up inside you and died,” Jerry asks D.B.. “Hey, it wasn’t me, man.”

“That’s the worst fart I’ve ever experienced,” I said.

D. B. proudly confides that his wife’s poisonous clouds can “take the paint off the cockpit walls. You know, one time, I was down there, eating her out, and she farted and singed the hairs in my nose.”