Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  A field goal. Okay, we’ll take it. Who-dey! “Jungle Boogie.” Celebrate with the cheerleaders; watch them bounce like balls.

  It isn’t until three minutes, twenty-six seconds into the third quarter that Carson Palmer completes a forty-yard flea-flicker touchdown pass to T. J. Houshmandzadeh, but that is not even the point. The sky has done it, finally opened up—sheets of rain. The gals valiantly bump and grind to “Bang on the Drums,” the touchdown song, in the glimmery downpour. Forget hair spray, forget makeup. It is all washing off now, washing down, soaking them. Wet cheerleaders! The JumboTron appears itself to experience the orgasm. Exploding wet cheerleaders! The cameras are all over the cheerleaders. The gals are screaming, laughing, howling, forgetting everything. Forgetting the fucking construction site, the man who murdered your mother, the store calling for more Mountain Dew, the chemical-fume hoods and the smoke-particle-challenge method, the men who don’t call, and all those egg whites and protein shakes that have made this moment possible. Forget it all! This is it. This is a rain dance, a joy dance, a jet-propulsion explosion of cheerleader love, love to the crowd, love from the crowd, men in striped pajamas, wigs, tails, painted bellies washing clean, oh, those men are super, super-duper adorable. Who-dey drunk.

  In the stands cheering for Adrienne is Pam, the woman who hitchhiked decades ago to Florida to scoop her up. Also, Adrienne’s cousin Leslie, her aunt Nancy, her little aunt Sandy, and her regular aunt Sandy—the one who takes the picture. It is the first time they get a picture of Adrienne on the JumboTron. In the picture, Adrienne is smiling and looking up. It’s just her face next to her name and her hometown and her hobbies. In that moment, she doesn’t even know she is on the JumboTron. She is wet, out-of-her-mind joyful, free.

  Hours go by, hugs, happiness. At home she gets into her PJs, shares the couch with a bowl of popcorn. She holds the picture of herself on the JumboTron. She has to get up tomorrow at six, and it’s going to be cold out on the pad where she’ll be pouring. Cold. She looks at the picture. She thinks she looks awesome. Like a real girl. Happy. She tries to hold on to the feeling. Like, right now she still has the feeling of what it is to be Cheerleader of the Week. Warm, explosive, a volcano inside you. She looks at the picture again and recognizes perfection. She wonders what to do with it. She is not the type to put a picture like that on display. She has her collection of tiny ceramic angels on display. In a few days she puts the picture in a box in the closet of her spare bedroom, a space for love letters.

  TRAFFIC

  Air Traffic Control Tower

  LaGuardia Airport

  New York, New York

  To get to the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, you have to walk through Concourse D in the Central Terminal, past the shiny shops and fat pretzels and premium brews, into and back out of streams of travelers yammering wirelessly at wives, lovers, brokers. You come to a thick steel battleship-gray door, shove it open with your hip. Step inside. You are now in . . . Leningrad? Bucharest? Cinder-block walls washed in dingy fluorescent light, a cramped elevator, slow and rickety, up to the tenth floor—Sorry it’s so cold, but this thermostat hasn’t worked for shit in years—through another gray door, up a knee-creaking set of concrete stairs: Welcome to the LaGuardia tower cab. Would you like a doughnut? Check out the view! The skyline demands all of you first, Manhattan spreading unobstructed like a mural written on the bottom of the sky. Airplanes everywhere, white, silver, crawling. Rikers Island sits alone on the upwind leg of runway 31. Shea Stadium, on the opposite end, is mere skeleton and guts, just now on a crisp October 2009 morning coming undone. You don’t see a view like this every day. Never mind the furniture, the duct-taped Archie Bunker couches in the break room, the ragged fold-up tables and the ancient, empty vending machine advertising Mike and Ike for twenty-five cents. Never mind the missing ceiling tiles, the warped paneling, the chipped Formica, the spectacular curls of peeling paint. Taped to the handset of a red phone is a sign reading BLACK PHONE. Some of the computer equipment brings to mind Tandy and Heathkit hobby kits. Some sections of the control console bring to mind the golden age of telephone operators wearing pointy bras. For a long time the roof here leaked so badly, they had giant diapers hanging, tarps tacked from here to there to catch the water; a garden hose took the water down a flight of stairs to a janitor’s sink. Sometimes the bathroom plumbing goes, and when it goes it really goes: some controllers keep an extra shirt in their lockers in case of explosion. (Others have learned to flush with their foot and duck.) “But—check out the view!” people here say with pride intent or not intent on masking the obvious. Yeah, this place is a dump. This is the center of the universe, a tower serving 23 million passengers a year as they fly in and out of the most congested airspace in the world, and yeah, this tower, built in 1962, one of the oldest in America, is a dump.

  The FAA promises a new tower next year. You can see it emerging next to the parking garage. It’s right there. Is it fair to be skeptical? Some LaGuardia controllers remember hearing about a-new-tower-next-year as far back as 1984. “Next year.” “Next year.” “Why fix up the old tower when a new tower is coming next year?” A quarter of a century of no next-years is enough to make any worker with a spare shirt in his locker in case of toilet explosion feel . . . skeptical.

  Cali loves it here; it sounds crazy at first, but he does love it. (In fact, most LaGuardia controllers kiss the mud-colored carpet tile they walk on. They could tell you about the alternatives. Stick around and they’ll tell you about the alternatives.) At the moment, Cali is on Ground. It’s 8:20 a.m. on a Friday, rush hour, every forty-five seconds another airplane landing, then another launching, then another landing, relentless as throbs of a throbbing headache. Twenty-six departures wait in line, all stoked up, backed up on Bravo clear down to Foxtrot. Twelve controllers maneuver the chaos. Brian is on Local, clearing for takeoff and clearing for landing, while Cali, on Ground, is managing the taxiways—a constantly moving puzzle of airplanes loaded with thousands and thousands of souls. Of all the positions, almost everyone here loves Ground most, because it’s so fucking complicated. LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared with its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can’t launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will . . . collide. There’s also water on three sides to avoid falling into. There are also adjacent behemoths Newark and (especially) Kennedy airports, each launching and landing one plane every thirty-six seconds, constantly breathing down LaGuardia’s neck. Kennedy, just twelve miles south, is obnoxious. If Kennedy goes into delays, it’s LaGuardia that has to change its runway configuration to help Kennedy get out of delays. All in all, the complications make this place so much more awesome than a place like Atlanta or Denver. This, anyway, is the LaGuardia mystique. This-dump-rocks.

  Cali sends a Dash 8 into the departure lineup, feels the thunder of a launching 757 soaring past the tower windows. He’s keeping an eye on an Embraer jet and gate Charlie 9. He has a lot on his mind. His first name is Tom, but the guys call him Cali. He plays hockey. He used to be a short-order cook. He is proud of his gardens, especially his enormous orange canna lilies. His hair is buzzed, and his eyes are smart, and his nose is prominent, and his accent is Long Island. His movements are impatient gesticulation, yadda yadda yadda. His headset cord is long, enabling him to wander practically the full circle of the cramped tower cab. Like nearly everyone else here, he stands when he’s on position. It’s not a sit-down kind of job. “Swivelheads” is a nickname for tower controllers, because they’re constantly scanning in all directions, like owls.

  The 757 that just launched is headed to Chicago. That flight, like every commercial departure, has more to it than the commonly recognized components of pilot, flight plan, and fuel. Every
flight has people watching over it, guardian-angel style, every step of the way. For example, shortly after Brian launched the 757, he handed it off, via radio, to a controller fifteen miles away at the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) in Westbury, Long Island, where it showed up as a blip on a radarscope. The 757 now becomes the charge of the TRACON controller, who guides it as high as 17,000 feet. At that point, it is handed off to yet another controller, this one at the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Islip, New York, where it shows up as a green blip on that controller’s radarscope. Centers are spread out like a net across the United States, twenty-two in all, each filled with controllers watching, babysitting, passing off blips to one another. The New York Center controller, for example, will guide the 757 west and eventually pass it off to a controller at the Cleveland Center, who will guide it farther west and pass it off to the Indianapolis Center, who will likewise guide it and pass it off to the Chicago Center. As it nears its destination, the 757 will descend, get handed to the Chicago TRACON and then to a controller at the Chicago O’Hare tower, who will clear it for landing and steer it to its gate.

  Nearly 30,000 commercial flights thus zoom across America’s skies each day and never bash into each other. The “modern” air traffic control system, and the FAA itself, was created in the aftermath of one of the most dramatic commercial midair bashes, way back in 1956. On a warm summer morning, United Flight 718 from Los Angeles was headed to Chicago, and TWA Flight 2 from Los Angeles was headed to Kansas City. Over the Grand Canyon they met, at 21,000 feet, inside a cumulus cloud. After impact, both planes plunged into the canyon, taking 128 people to a most violent death.

  You don’t hear of accidents like that anymore. The FAA employs 15,000 controllers who make sure that midair collisions and a host of other horrible things don’t happen. Controllers are choreographers, deciders, big-picture people with a knack for making split-second decisions based on physics, geometry, aerodynamics, and God-given guts. They’re perched above runways in little glass rooms and hidden in radar rooms, physically cut off from us and yet completely connected, or so we hope. We’d know them better if they did a bad job. The better they are, the more invisible they become.

  Hidden, too, is the cloud of anguish under which they work. There is bitterness and resentment, feuding and infighting. Here is a workforce in a festering standoff with management, again and again, and now again. The story of air traffic in America today is one of growing pockets of exhausted controllers working with ancient equipment in understaffed facilities. The stakes go well beyond the inconvenience of airport delays, which are getting famously worse. The stakes are millions of passengers going from here to there: the safe handling of an utterly vulnerable public.

  At the moment, Cali is plugged-in. He’s on his tiptoes, getting a better view. Plugged-in is what a controller calls it when he’s on position. Plugging in means plugging out of the rest of your problems, or those of your union, or of a bunch of blabbermouth politicians in Washington, D.C. Plugged-in is its own dimension, hypertime and hyperthought and hyperawareness of airplanes loaded with people and all their problems. Cali glances down Zulu taxiway. Is it clear? He’s probably going to need it. He’s seeing four or five or twelve steps ahead.

  What happens out on the tarmac is everybody wants to be first. Everybody wants to be next. Everybody wants to go. A 737 has just landed, touching down on runway 31. Destination! Destination, to a passenger, means I’m done. Get-off-the-plane. Shake the wrinkles off your overcoat and march on bloated feet into the next fragment of your day. Mentally, all the passengers on the 737 play out the scenario even as they sit obediently with their seat belts still buckled, tapping their tappy fingers while the plane taxis toward its assigned gate, Charlie 9.

  But Charlie 9 is occupied, an Airbus taking forever to board. A whole different horde of passengers who want to be first, next, go. Shifting, settling in, folding overcoats, claiming elbow room, all the passengers on the Airbus play out a scenario of getting somewhere on time, or late.

  Move! thinks the pilot of the 737.

  Hurry! thinks the pilot of the Airbus.

  Get me out of here! thinks everybody all at once.

  Cali knows the story, over and over again the same me-first story no matter whose head he gets inside. Me first! There is only so much a controller working Ground can do. Cali shoots the 737 down toward Zulu. “Bravoshordazulu” he says, machine-gun fast, into his headset. Not “Taxi by Bravo and hold short of Zulu” but “Bravoshordazulu.” The pilot hears Cali’s command, thinks Fuck. Zulu is nowhere near Charlie 9. Is this dipshit going to hold us all the way down there by Shea Stadium until our gate is cleared? No, Cali’s just moving the 737 out of the way. He’s got a departing Dash 8 he’s rolling up Alpha (Me first!), and he’s got another arrival, an MD-80 to roll Bravoshordamike (Me first!), and he needs to do what he can to help Brian, next to him on Local, launch a twofer (two departures for one arrival) if LaGuardia has any hope of getting out of delays. Cali is seeing all of this at once, a matrix of decisions hurling without apology toward the threshold of another matrix of decisions and another and in an instant another. It’s overdrive for even the most practiced brain, all those variables, all those planes, all those souls, all that responsibility, no chance of saying Fuck it! and walking away, no ghost of a chance at all of that until, finally, after about an hour, a replacement controller steps in and you plug out, go downstairs for about thirty minutes to the break room for some crackers or an egg sandwich from the concourse, give the brain a chance to empty, exhale, recharge.

  Cali is the sort of person to constantly ask himself, Well, how would I feel? It guides him through his decisions. The last thing a passenger wants to feel after landing in an airplane, he knows, is the feeling of sitting on the tarmac. But I have arrived at my destination. Why am I not moving on with my day? How long are we going to sit here? So Cali won’t just park the 737 down at Zulu while it waits for its gate. If at all possible, he’ll keep the plane moving on the tarmac. He will pause it at Juliet, inch along, then hold for a moment at Lima. “Give the passengers the illusion of progress.” That’s his motto. It gives the people hope.

  He turns the 737 up Alpha, tries to swing it so it arrives at Charlie 9 the second the gate becomes available. He nails it, thinks, Yessss.

  Another controller might not have bothered with all that. Another controller might have just dumped the 737 down at Zulu, just left all those passengers stranded down there, hopeless and forlorn. To do it better doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, doesn’t get anyone anywhere any faster, does nothing to help LaGuardia’s reputation as one of the world’s most delayed airports. It’s not heroic. It’s not avoiding a midair collision. It’s certainly not landing an Airbus A320 on the Hudson. It’s just 120 passengers feeling slightly less awful about being stuck in an airplane. A little bit of humanity. A little bit of love. What of it?

  —

  EARLY ONE SUMMER, when I first visited the people at the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) union offices in Washington, D.C., to inquire about meeting some controllers, they assumed I was there to talk about misery. Did I want to understand why controllers were so miserable? In fact, my driving curiosity was about the work and not the mood of controllers. They said it would be difficult to separate the two.

  They whispered a strategy for dealing with the FAA, which they spoke of as if it were shrouded in Kremlin-style inscrutability. Say this and don’t say that. I would have to go through the FAA if I wanted to get access to a facility, and I would have to be very careful about how I asked. The FAA had a reputation for granting precious few such requests, and it probably wouldn’t grant this one. Try this and don’t try that.

  When I went down Fourteenth Street and talked to the people at the FAA about meeting some controllers, they assumed I was there to talk about misery. Had I spoken to anyone at NATCA? “What did they say?” They wanted to sq
uelch rumors. They spoke of the union as if it were a bunch of bratty little girls throwing fits for a candy fix. They handed me a handsome four-color glossy report proving that controllers were happy, or if they weren’t, they should be. Everything is fine. Don’t panic. Everything is under control.

  NATCA was a bunch of crybabies. The FAA was a big fat bully. Spoiled brats! Meanies! When moving between the union and the FAA, it is easy to feel like the only grown-up in the neighborhood.

  At issue is a labor shortage. Air traffic controllers are retiring at a rate of nearly one thousand a year. A shriveling workforce, ever-increasing air traffic—somebody has to guide all those airplanes. You guys have to suck it up, the FAA says to the controllers. Work more hours, take fewer breaks—work six-day weeks if you have to. Yeah, you have to. Six-day workweeks are now the norm at the nation’s busiest radar facilities, which are notoriously hard to staff. The fact that everyone saw this crunch coming long ago—and had been warning about it for years—makes the union nuts. Do the math. Controllers have to retire at fifty-six. Most experienced controllers were hired in the early 1980s after the then union went on strike and President Reagan famously fired their asses. Most of the people brought aboard back then are now in their fifties and being booted out the door. And so there’s been a surge in controller retirements: nearly half the workforce will become eligible for retirement in the next three years. We need more controllers! The union has been saying it for years. Our guys are falling apart here! They’re gonna start making mistakes if you don’t give them a break! Why won’t you hire more controllers? It’s not a simple task. Training takes years. We need more controllers in the pipeline!

  The FAA acted, finally, in 2006. This was in the wake of failed contract negotiations. Forget it, they said. Here’s your new contract. Take it or leave it. The union took it, sort of. The union refuses to use the word “contract” when referring to the “imposed work rules” controllers now work under. Among the 2006 changes: a salary freeze and a two-band pay scale. All new controllers would be brought in at as much as 30 percent less than those hired before the imposed work rules. A certified controller just starting out at LaGuardia tower now, for example, makes about $63,000; under the old rules, he would have started at around $93,000.