Gerardo Barberán Aquino
08/14/2020 - 22:00
- Clarín.com
- Society
Someone once told me that the world was going to pass over me, but this time the one who is passing over the world is me. In the past year, I have been on a plane about twenty-eight times. That number was going to repeat - or increase - in 2020, at least that was my work plan before COVID-19, one trip every three weeks. The number of flights was similar in the previous two years as well, about a hundred flights in just over three years. Quite a large number for a person who is terrified of flying.
I kept reading
That the irrational does not draw the map of your life
Society
The sweat on your hands, the ears that plug, feel the stomach where we should feel the heart beat, look at the city turned by the window left open by a woman who has been snoring since before the plane takes off. That same moment that seems to me to last for hours, in the movies they are summarized in five seconds of a distant plane of a plane taking off, but inside that plane I am with my world on fire , holding on to the armrest and praying all the prayers that I I agree that they taught me in elementary school.
In a plane. Gerardo Barberán Aquino and a face that reflects unease.
Over time I realized that my fear is not of flying in an airplane, what I have is the fear of dying and within that fear, dying in a plane crash represents the most terrible way to lose my life. To mitigate that fear, I could not think of a better idea than to find a job that brings me closer to thirty times a year to the worst kind of death that my unconscious could develop. Any accident can be fatal, but there is something about air travel that makes me think there is no plan B.
I knew a person with as much or more fear of death than me, my grandmother Titi. She passed away at 93 without knowing that this would be her last day ; death took her by surprise one morning while she was brewing a mate and reading the newspaper. In her almanac, she had penned the day of her next birthday, which, of course, she planned to arrive alive. Titi was the first to hear a raindrop hitting the tiles, which meant unplugging all the electrical appliances in the house in case lightning struck; She made rounds of all the doors of the house that led to the outside or to the patio to verify that they were closed before going to sleep, so that thieves did not enter; She prayed at siesta, sitting in the middle of the patio, never telling us what she was asking for.
Now I think that everything that Titi did, she did in order not to die and I notice that I do the same. When I look in the mirror and see a new gray hair, that silver hair for me is not a sign of experience, sophistication or elegance, as some people see it. For me it is a sign of near death, it shows me that I am not getting young. I never saw my grandmother with white hair, always rigorously dyed a coppery brown. I suppose that with her habits, she transmitted to me the meaning I give to gray hair today.
With her. To understand his problem, Gerardo Barberán Aquino thought a lot about his grandmother and how she influenced him.
The origin of this fear appeared as a child, long before I got on a plane for the first time, when I read that the vast majority of plane accidents happen at the time of takeoff. The article also pointed out that once that instance was overcome, there was no reason to fear; those data remained spinning in my head forever. When I told a flight attendant about my problem, she told me that on the contrary, the moment of takeoff is when the plane has all the power of the engines running and that the chances of something failing at that moment were nil . The other thing the stewardess did was ask me if I had heard of a plane that crashed today, yesterday or the day before yesterday. I answered no, "It's because they don't fall off," he said and managed to convince me.
After that talk with the stewardess, much calmer, I got on my thirty annual flights like someone who takes an uber. I even fell asleep before takeoff on several occasions. Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, New York, Mexico City, the Bahamas, they all went by without realizing it, until last year the fear returned without asking for permission. My arguments ran out, I had to do something.
When the plane takes off everything becomes suspicious to me. Everything is a sign that something is going to fail.
Why is the stewardess still sitting with her seat belt on? Why doesn't the pilot greet the passengers telling us how the weather is in the destination city? Why is the motor not making as much noise as it did 5 minutes ago? I started keeping track of everything that happens before the plane reaches ten thousand five hundred meters, the cruising altitude at which it stops climbing and remains stable. I mentally cross out the previous steps, the signs that light up, the tone with which they make the announcements, the faces of the hostesses walking through the aisles. I am my own version of Titi locking the doors.
The important thing for me is to get to those ten thousand meters as soon as possible, or at least find a way to shorten the path. Something that allows me to divert attention during those minutes since what I want is to pass that instance of possible flaws in the take-off that traumatized me as a child. Whether the data is true or false no longer matters, it has already had an effect on me.
Finally, last year I found the solution, an unorthodox formula but one that reassured me. I was on the route away from the Mexico City airport when I saw a plane take off. I decided to count how long it took to reach a height that was enough for me to believe I was safe. A height taken by eye until the plane was lost in the heavy clouds of Mexico City. Great was my surprise when I counted to thirty and could no longer see the plane.
How can 30 seconds feel like half an hour when I'm in the booth?
I tried counting to thirty on the next flight and was met with another surprise; the plane continues to climb once it has passed through the clouds. At 30 seconds after takeoff, the plane is about three thousand meters high , there is still a long way to go for ten thousand five hundred. He needed at least 12 more minutes of distraction until the seatbelt lights went out.
You could never face a takeoff without music on your headphones. And 12 minutes is approximately three or four songs, there had to be the key: finding a handful of songs that would save my life. First of all, I ruled out putting a playlist on shuffle, there are too many things out of my control at the moment to add another. An album that I like? Dismissed, I don't want to associate something I love with death. I had to find a way before my next trip, which was to the city of Charlotte to cover the All Star Game of the NBA .
In those previous weeks, I necessarily had to think a lot about the event and after repeating those two words, All-Star, the song “All Star” by Smash Mouth, a band from the late nineties that nobody ever felt, appeared like a flash. proud to have it in your record collection or among your favorites on Spotify, even though it has more than six million monthly listeners on the platform. A kind of La Mosca yanqui, a type of music that no one listens to but that everyone knows and no one bothers when it sounds at a wedding.
So after thinking so much about the NBA All-Star Game, I decided to give Smash Mouth's “All Star” a guilty play, and at that moment, as the song says: all that glittered was gold . That was the band I was waiting for, a band I couldn't understand; whose success had no answers but whose songs were absurdly catchy. My head could be distracted for hours trying to decipher that formula. So I downloaded the four most stupidly humble songs from his discography. Those were the songs that were going to take me to ten thousand meters high.
"All Star" starts with its singer facing a white flow , sweet and pink cheeks. The song is never formally rapping, but it's on the brink. Steven Harwell does it well, he's a singer by trade, not a rocker. The band, true to its time, has a crystal clear sound, all the instruments are heard with perfect definition, you can hear the last vibrating of a string or distinguish even the cheap keyboard pretending to be a Hammond. In short, a powerful sound and a voice that hypnotizes you over a letter that stretches and contracts with the insistence of a bubble gum.
And I mention all this because it is what I review in my mind every time I hear the song above the plane. My brain starts to spark as the bass, heavy and circular, sets the beat . It is what I was looking for all this time, to put my head to work on a question that has no solution but that at the same time I cannot stop looking for it: “How can a song as cloying and pre-made as this one that is so irresistible? I have in my ears right now? "
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play.
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid.
If I put play at the exact moment the plane starts to pick up speed before takeoff - and with thirty test trips now I do it almost without thinking - the song explodes in the chorus just as the ship leaves the ground and that harangue in which Smash Mouth makes you feel like an all-star and pushes you to go out to eat the court begins to do all the work.
At the end of the chorus the regulatory 30 seconds passed, we are in the clouds. The song ends at 5,000 meters high, so I added his other hits to the list: “Walking on the sun” and “Can't get enough of you, baby” . They are exactly the same song recorded twice and with different lyrics! My brain keeps burning trying to identify which is one and which is the other and why the pattern repeats over and over again. Always with perspiring hands, gripping the armrests, and eyes closed. Now I know that when “I'm a believer” ends , the cover they make of Neil Diamond, the plane will be sailing at cruising altitude at ten thousand five hundred meters above sea level, the hostesses will be using the highway corridor, the most uncomfortable passengers will try to go to the bathroom and I will be able to choose without fear a John Hughes movie to shorten the trip.
Of course, this method does not guarantee that I will arrive alive to my next destination, but it helps to stop seeing suspicious movements, noises that do not exist, monsters on the wing, as in that old episode of the Unknown Dimension . It's playing a trick on the mind before it does the trick on you. A shortcut that takes you straight to a blue screen but silly enough to restart with all the saved files.
With thirty trips a year I am still more exposed than those who travel less to die in a plane crash. If it happens, there may be no traces of my body or the plane, but within all the questions about what happened there will be a certainty: I was listening to Smash Mouth.
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Gerardo Barberán Aquino . This is the name of this author born in Corrientes, but his father, grandfather and some other relative are also called that way. That is why he received the nickname "Cococho" from his mother, minutes after he was born, so that he can be identified more quickly since he does not like to waste time. He is a TV author. He wrote for ten seasons on Disney Channel and, for five years, has been in charge of the development, production and production of audiovisual content for NBA for Latin America. He covered four NBA Finals, five All Star Games and greeted LeBron James with a fist bump the last year he was champion. He has been writing about music and television for fifteen years and his first book is called "Ramones in Argentina".