My seatmate on a five-hour flight home from Hawaii was perhaps the most extreme person I have ever met: a porn producer covered head to toe in tattoos and with a serious addiction to drugs.
Yes, you read that correctly. As the influx of passengers slowed to a trickle, I coveted the empty middle seat beside my aisle position, and my heart sank as the plane’s final passenger chose to sit next to me: per the facial tattoos, I was scared of him.
As soon as this man sat down, he began speaking with me, a frenetic energy governing his confession. When asked what he did for a profession, he smirked and, with accompanying air-quotes, called himself a “content producer,” and only after fleshing out some details involving multiple “girls” did I catch the drift.
The man also has a girlfriend, twenty-four years old to his thirty-one, but his profession necessitates that they both sleep with other people. He also acknowledged that he is addicted to many substances and partially feared returning to his home for the unhealthful encouragements it provides, verifying this assertion by downing four vodka cranberries during the course of our flight; as he did this, his anxious energy became concealed by glassy eyes, and he fell asleep atop his tray table for much of the flight.
Upon awakening and as our plane taxied, the man asked me a question: “What is that word for when you don’t feel anything anymore?”
“Desensitized,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he responded, “I’m desensitized to everything. Desensitized to drugs, sex, all of it.”
“Well, what are you going to do with that?” I inquired.
“Just go harder, I guess,” he said, and he followed up this intention by hitting an airport bar as soon as we reached the mainland.
My encounter with this man affected me deeply. For one, his was the first presence in some time in which I genuinely sensed no hope. Perhaps in my seatmate’s disclosing his lifestyle to me in the first place, I can infer a rising discomfort and a wondering whether things might be different, but at this time the man did not seem open to alternatives; furthermore, from his description it seemed his entire family and community were as lost as he, and I doubted wisdom would penetrate this sphere. If I had to guess, I would say the man would be dead before sixty.
I’ve also thought a lot about what his trajectory reflects about our culture as a whole. Vaguely, there are prohibitions against the kind of life my seatmate is leading, and he announced to me that he was considering forming a second career merely so he would have something innocuous to tell family members he did for a living. At the same time, by most American metrics my seatmate is a “successful” man: he earns ample money, he is an entrepreneur, and per masculine dictates, he sleeps with many women and exercises his freedom. What can we say of a culture in which this kind of outcome is venerated?
Finally, the interaction made it impossible for me to ever watch porn again. For some time now I have wondered what sorts of lives might exist on the other side of that camera, in particular where couples were involved; how did the pressures of publicity impact their relationship? As my seatmate revealed, most people who enter pornography as couples, soon break up; the loss of privacy, desensitization, and corruption of true love turn them against one another, and they are left with no lover but the abstract eye. Moreover, even for people like my seatmate—who maintains his primary relationship—the shame of a verboten profession must be constant, hence the drinking, drug use, and general agitation.
Though I did not see immediate hope in the situation, I did submit a prayer for my seatmate during that portion of the flight when he slept on his tray table. I imagined him as a little boy, his face free from tattoos, his body as yet unmarred by substances. I felt the goodness and curiosity of that little boy, and I wished him aliveness within the frame of this older man; I wished for some sort of epiphany or grace by which he—they—might discern a way out from his private hell.
As a friend of mine reflected upon this story, such miracles are possible and often occur. A situation can look entirely hopeless, and yet something can happen that transforms it from within, and years or decades later a person can gaze on their own past as though that of a stranger. May it be so for my seatmate; may he one day look upon his cryptic, addled life as preparation for awakening, as lostness in order that he might be found.
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 