May 23, 2006
Through some bizarre twist of fate I got to fly back from Phoenix first class this morning.
It was, as I always imagined, awesome.
Among the highlights:
Coach has flight attendants, first class still has stewardesses. The difference is, stewardesses are universally attractive in a 60's Bond movie kind of way, and welcome, nay, encourage objectification. I obliged by tossing around the words "toots" and "dollface" a lot. They obliged me obliging by bring martini after martini, which, instead of making me drunk, made me swanky. So swanky a man next to me offered me a job as a superspy in a particularly sexy province of the USSR, which, in first class, still exists. I declined because I have an allergy to needlessly elaborate spy-killing devices.
We were allowed to smoke, provided we lit our cigars or cigarettes with paper money. I didn't have any (you don't get excited about being in first class if you're already rich) so the stewardess was more than happy to provide me with some of the airlines' currency. Apparently the airline prints its own money, available only to first class passengers. You can also use it to make purchases out of the AirMall magazine, which is not called AirMall because it is a catalog for planes, but rather, because it is a catalog (again, first-class only) where you can buy the rights to the elements, such as Air, Water, and Fire. I briefly considered buying The Ether, but thought better of it.
My favorite part was when the stewardess brought around a tray of peasants for us to crush beneath our guilded bootheels. People who didn't already have gilded bootheels were offered free pairs, much like coach passengers are offered headsets to watch the inflight movie.
Speaking of which: the first class inflight movie was "A Summer's Passing," a two-hour scene of Mariah Carey having sex with a polar bear. I was informed by a tycoon two seats over that the rich have come to consider themselves above such proletariat-bait as plot and character, and have come to prefer a series of films, available only to the super-wealthy, of starlets fucking endangered species. Not that it gratifies them sexually, but rather, because they can tell the starlet exchanged her dignity for a great deal of money, which they find comical, and because the endangered species remind them of the rugs they have back home.
Anyway, the gilded bootheels were free for the asking, so besides my own, I took a pair for my wife, a wealthy, frigid dowager, and my mistress, a chorus girl who I will soon try to turn into an opera singer just to prove that I can. Not that I have either of these things in the real world, but all one-time first-class passengers are provided with a dossier of a rich person they should pretend to be for the rest of the flight. This is so they can engage in polite conversation with other first-classers without molesting their delicate ears with talk of such foreign concepts as Going Outside Without An Entourage of Courtiers, Coming By Money Through Means Other Than Inheritance, and Work.
I did meet one woman in first class who told me she'd rather I told her about my real, poor life, as she found it lurid and exotic. She then asked to feel my hand, which she said physical labor had clearly made as hard and calloused as the underbelly of a Komodo Dragon. When I asked how she'd know how their underbellies felt, exactly, she replied that she fucked one on camera one time, how else did I think she got the money to fly first class everywhere?
Posted by DC at May 23, 2006 11:27 PM