I flew overnight to London after a two-day engagement at Hendrix College in Arkansas.
Looking ahead to an eight-hour, trans-Atlantic flight, I hoped my seatmate would be easy to sit beside and maybe even sleep next to for most of the night.
She was not.
Instead, she was a lot.
So much.
It started when she arrived at our pair of seats. I was already seated when she asked, “Did you put your roller bag in the overhead space?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s not going to work for me,” she said. “I need my bag in the bin above us, because I need access to it throughout the flight.” Then she mimed going back and forth to the overhead with a great deal of flourish.
She was seated at the window, and I was on the aisle, so this back-and-forth would require me to get up and down in the middle of the night, which struck me as less than ideal.
Thankfully, it never happened. She never needed her suitcase even once.
Even better, a flight attendant overheard this outrageousness and told her to put her bag in a bin three rows back.
Conflict averted.
Five minutes later, she called a flight attendant over and pointed from our business class section to first class, indicating an empty seat and asking to move to it.
The flight attendant assured her that first class was full and the seat would be occupied soon, but she pressed on, accusing him of being classist and unhelpful. He was remarkably calm given the degree of lunacy on display and again assured her the seat would be occupied soon. Then, as if on cue, someone sat down in it.
Hope was lost that this would be a delightful fight, but it hadn’t even gotten started yet.
Before takeoff, she asked the flight attendant for two additional blankets in addition to the one we had been given; then she asked for a preflight drink, which wasn’t available to passengers in business class.
She received the blankets. She did not receive the drink.
She expressed her displeasure.
But things got even stranger when the meal was served, which was odd in itself. We left Atlanta at 11:55 PM, so why did we need dinner at 12:45 AM?
Apparently we did, so when the food cart arrived at our row, the flight attendant confirmed that she and I had both chosen chicken, which I had apparently selected when I booked the flight.
“But no mushrooms,” my seatmate said. “Right?”
“Oh, it’s chicken in a mushroom sauce,” the flight attendant said. “Are you allergic?”
She indicated she was allergic and had noted it when ordering her meal.
“I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said, “but all the chicken has mushroom. I can give you the salad option.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. I have an airborne mushroom allergy. I can’t be around mushrooms at all.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need to eat. I can just skip the meal.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t serve mushrooms on this plane at all. I could go into anaphylactic shock.”
An airborne mushroom allergy? From mushroom gravy? This was a new one to me, but it didn’t matter, because the flight attendant pointed out that half the plane had already been served chicken. It was already all over the plane.
“Why didn’t you read my request?” she demanded.
The flight attendant, with impressive calm, pointed out that he was just the deliverer of the food and menu choices, and passenger requests weren’t in his job description.
In other words:
Don’t kill the messenger, lady.
“I don’t even have my EpiPen!” she said. “You need to get those mushrooms off this plane.”
Things were getting weird now, so I jumped in and said, “I have an EpiPen. Two, actually. In case you need them.”
“Thank God,” she said. “Can you take them out just in case?”
I did. When she saw they weren’t actually EpiPens but AviQs, which dispense the exact same medicine, she had a fit. I explained to her that I was holding an EpiPen alternative, but it did the same job. Easier, even. We went back and forth quite a bit on the merits of the AviQ, and for a moment, she was yelling at me, but eventually she accepted them as alternatives to her EpiPen.
Then she turned her ire back on the flight attendant and the proliferation of mushrooms on the plane. The flight attendant consulted with two others and offered to move her to the back of the plane, where the last five or six rows were empty. This would get her as far away from the mushroom as possible.
She grudgingly agreed. “But keep those EpiPen things ready for me, just in case.”
I assured her I would.
I hoped I would never see her again, but she left her bag and some personal items behind, making it clear she was only moving for the duration of the dinner service so she could eat.
I then turned to the internet to see about this airborne mushroom allergy, which turns out to be real, but it only happens when you’re around mushroom cultivation, harvesting, nd composting, when mushrooms are still in their natural state.
Not in a creamy mushroom sauce.
She may have been allergic to mushrooms, but there were no airborne mushroom spores on that plane.
The flight attendant told me that after she finished eating, she sat inside the restroom for about 45 minutes until the dinner service was cleared. She then returned to her seat, still complaining about the mushrooms and the lack of the preflight drink and demanding two more blankets and another pillow.
Five blankets now in total.
We didn’t hear from her again until breakfast, about five hours later. The meal included blueberry yogurt. She asked for another flavor, but the flight attendant told her no other options were available. Then she threw another fit, asking, amongst other things, “How the hell you don’t plan for someone who doesn’t like blueberries?”
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep on the flight as planned. Instead, I watched a movie called “The Invite” and did some writing.
Not what I had planned, but I have the memory of an unforgettable flight instead.
