Editors’ note: The opinions and ideas expressed in The Accidental Gentrifist are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook and belief of anyone else in the Ist network.

In 2002 I was a bartender downtown. I started out working slower shifts, and the bar was within walking distance from a handful of hotels. So I’d usually end up serving at least a few new faces.

Four or five Sundays in a row, I noticed the same gentleman sitting by himself, always in the same seat at the end of the bar. He was perfectly average: white male, early middle-age, polite, about six feet tall with a little paunch. Unobtrusive. In fact, the only odd thing about him was the heroic amount of whiskey the man could put down without staggering out the front door wearing his own vomit. Each Sunday, he easily threw back seven or eight double Bushmills on the rocks. Every time. Then waltzed out like he was going to testify before Congress. He was an absolute champ.

Remember your uncle Marvin? Your mom’s unmarried brother who drank a half case of Hamm’s and two-fifths of Beam every day of his life, and never showed a sign of it affecting him until that time he sobbingly tried to blow his brains out with a Daisy air rifle behind the garage? This guy could drink like that.

I know, I know, but don’t get me wrong—I was never one to over-serve. This guy could just put it down. Plus, of the little I knew about him, I knew he was from out of town, married, and I could rest assured he was only going to stroll three blocks to a hotel bed. Unless of course he was just killing time until his escort showed up.

Anyway, on the fifth (and what proved to be the last) night, I offered to buy him a shot as he paid his tab and got ready to take off. He looked at his wristwatch and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I just passed my deadline.”

Confused, I asked him if he had to get up early in the morning. If he was some kind of salesman or something.

“No,” he said, laughing. “I’m a pilot.”

I glanced down at his tab. With tip, there was a small chance he’d just spent more cash on whiskey than I was going to take home. “Oh. Like a …commercial pilot?”

“Yep,” he said, telling me the name of the major airline he flew for.

“Okay,” I said noncommittally, making a mental note. “So I take it there’s a time you can’t drink after?”

“Yeah. No booze eight hours before takeoff and no ‘heavy’ drinking 24 hours prior.” He hooked his fingers to make “air quotes” around the word heavy.

I didn’t ask him what time his flight was. Because I didn’t want to know. But to make conversation, I mentioned the seemingly unrelated factoid that two pilots had very recently been arrested for trying to fly their plane while obviously drunk.

I was speaking, of course, about two America West pilots who ended up getting sentenced to prison for trying to fly while still intoxicated from a late night/early morning bender in which they split 14 beers at a Miami sports bar until almost 5 a.m.—less than six hours before their scheduled takeoff. (One of the pilots was from Leander—Go Lions!)

“That’s not the best part,” my new friend offered. “When the cops looked at the hotel surveillance tapes and passkey records—you know those magnetic room keys keep track every time you come or go—they saw that the guys went out again, after that. Probably to buy more booze, but of course they’re not saying where they went.”

I don’t know what I said. Maybe I just nodded and smiled. Then I realized my friend was beginning to lilt to one side. Not unlike a large aircraft with a slightly malfunctioning rudder.

He went on: “What you won’t read in the paper, is that they totally could have gotten away with it. They only got caught because they acted like assholes to security and refused to go through the metal detectors or let the TSA X-ray their coffee cups. Basically, they just made a big scene and pissed off the security guards. That’s how they had time to notice the alcohol smell. So they just let the pilots pass through and called the airport cops. As the pilots tried to taxi, the cops actually blocked the plane with their cruisers.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, if the pilots would have just been cool to security, they would have breezed right through. Then all they had to do was get through the takeoff and punch in the autopilot. Then they could have kicked back. They would have had hours to sober up before it was time to land.”

“So… it sounds like that kinda stuff happens all the time.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, getting up from his stool, staggering only slightly. “For sure.”

“…Would you like a glass of water or something?”

“Nah, I’m cool.”

And then he was gone forever.

In the years since, he’s come back to mind whenever I settle in for a long flight, or when I read of yet another smashed pilot getting yanked from his own cockpit. Like the American Airlines pilot who apparently showed up at the Manchester airport, drunk, to co-pilot a flight to Chicago with 181 trusting souls on board. A breathalyser pegged him at nearly eight times the legal limit of blood-alcohol. At his subsequent trial, he claimed he was nabbed by security en route to inform his captain that he was feeling ‘sick’ and thus couldn’t fly. Prosecutors didn’t buy it, but a jury of his peers found him not guilty after he admitted he consumed 1/3 of a bottle of Jameson… in his sleep. Talk about autopilot.

Maybe that was my friend, and he thought I was just a good dream. Maybe. My only question about the trial was, where’d they find 12 more drunk pilots?

Maybe at Heathrow. Last April, a Virgin Atlantic pilot was suspected of being tanked and subsequently led off his Airbus. His breathalyser hit a figure over six times above legal. Not that the budget airlines maintain a higher ground, so to speak: Last year EasyJet suspended a female pilot for allegedly being drunk as she was about to take the controls of a weekender from Berlin to Basel. And then there was the Finnair pilot who was jailed for six months after a 2004 attempt to fly a packed passenger jet while over twice the legal limit of blood alcohol content.

Next question: What’s the legal limit of blood alcohol to fly a passenger plane? Actually, belay that order. I’m not sure what’s more disturbing—that so many pilots are pre-flight drunk, or that there is an established legal allowance for booze in the system of a pilot seated at the helm of a passenger plane. I mean, is that in their union contract? Did they win it by giving up a superior 401k? According to Times Online, it’s “nine micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath.” (Keep in mind, now that U.S. math scores are finally on the mend, ignorance of standard/metric conversion formulas is no longer a viable defense. Or, ‘defence.’)

I feel for these guys, I really do. I don’t think I’ve been sober on a Transatlantic flight since I was 14. There’s just something about being in a 15-year-old, 220,000lb metal tube held aloft by little more than burning petroleum and theoretical physics. Actually, it kind of typifies the nature of realizations that, at least to me, translate into the imperative Drink. Combine it with the responsibility of hundreds of lives, unexpected turbulence, lightning, Wahhabi jihadis wielding box-cutters and more than three ounces of mouthwash, the Bermuda Triangle, and being forced to pay airport prices for a bottle of water—why, I suppose it may just be enough to thrust you into the wild blue yonder with your tie a bit loosely knotted, your captain’s cap at an especially jaunty angle, and your pockets clinking with the music of little bottles of Skyy.