There was a time when he worked on planes. Even before they started offering wi-fi and electricity, he’d unfold the laptop and take advantage—of the time; of the inability to easily get out of his chair; of the white noise that many find irritating, but which actually helped him focus. He’d drink coffee and water and buy a salad ahead of time. He was that kind of flyer, and he felt—as he often felt in those days—superior to those who slept the flight away; or read gossip magazines and spy novels; or did puzzles; or brought on bags of fast food soaked through with grease; or talked loudly at their neighbor about what they did for work; or watched the poorly formatted movie on the teeny screen; or—and this was obvious—those who ordered bloody marys at 9 in the morning.

Plane travel exposed a person, he thought. It revealed just how that person handled dead time. It placed you in a situation where you aren’t forced to do anything and put your choices on show for everyone else. You can’t hide on a plane, either from others or from boredom and he used to be person who didn’t need to hide. Put him in a chair for two hours, don’t let him leave and unlike the woman doing Sudoku to his right, he would be proactive. He’d even get up periodically and stretch, show these bums that he also took care of his body.

Now, he pretty much drank from start to finish. He wasn’t sure when it started, but like most things in his life now, he suspected it started with a ‘what the hell’ moment which opened a door which wasn’t so much a door as it was a flood gate.

And now he had a headache. That was the worst part. The instant hangover. He suspected it was because plane travel dehydrated you to begin with. And then you add whiskey. And beer. And a gin and tonic.

“I’ll take a double Jack Daniel’s,” he told the flight attendant when they passed through with the second beverage service. He resisted saying, “another double Jack Daniel’s,” hoping that she would forget he had ordered the same thing the first time around (but with a beer chaser). She didn’t hesitate or seem to care, but she did drop three unsolicited packets of peanuts on his tray, an old bartenders trick he suspected she had deployed before with other drunks.

He was still getting used to referring to himself as a drunk. If he had anything going for him, it was that he was gonna ace that first step. He had very little denial about what was going on. The part of him that once judged the others on the plane hadn’t gone away; now it just included him in the judgement.

This surprised him. He assumed that if you made it out of your 20s with good habits and vegetarian diet intact, you could pretty much coast until serious aging set in. He assumed that the plane-sleepers and loud-talkers and bloody-mary-havers had always been that way. They’d never figured their shit out and so had no ability to stand up against the boredom of a plane ride with anything resembling the steely discipline and ambition he had. But maybe the woman killing time by filling in squares of a number puzzle, or the guy in front of him who had fallen asleep immediately upon takeoff, maybe they had been just like him and their resolve, their ability to be good had just plain worn down like his.

It was 10:30 in the morning. He was on his way to a funeral. He held whiskey in his left hand, lamely attempted to operate the trackpad of his computer with his right, and squeezed a cold can of beer between his thighs.

Maybe they will just think I have a fear of flying, he thought, though he wasn’t sure who they were.