captains (like the cool captains I had watched in all those airline movies) as they built up their flying hours and experience. I learned that pilots got to stay overnight in the cities they flew to, and that their airlines not only paid for their hotel stays, but also gave them an allowance, called a “per diem”, for food expenses. What a great deal! I thought.
I read that on domestic routes, they normally flew for three or four days in a row, overnighting in a different city each night and that on international routes, they sometimes got forty-eight hours or more in exotic locales like Asia or South America, again all paid for by the airline. I found out that most pilots started in smaller turboprop airliners as copilots, eventually working their way up the all-important seniority list to captain in those smaller aircraft before moving up the scale to larger airlines, bigger aircraft, and more exotic, further away destinations. The training was done in full-motion flight simulators (sims for short), in which all kinds of emergency procedures from engine failures to landing-gear malfunctions could be practiced and polished, all without ever leaving the ground. Only after demonstrating mastery of the aircraft in the sim would a pilot be allowed to fly with paying passengers. The initial flights would be under the supervision of airline flight instructors (known as Check Airmen) who would finish the training before releasing the new pilot to the flight line.
All airline pilots also had to undergo annual recurrent training and had to take so-called “checkrides” (simulator flying tests) to earn each required flying license. Thereafter, they had to take a sim checkride every six months if they were a captain and every year if they were a copilot. The career guides said that the FAA required all this ongoing training so that the pilots were able to keep their flying skills sharp and their aviation knowledge fresh. Many of those career reference guides had been written during the late 1970s, the heyday of airline flying, before the effects of deregulation hit the airlines with full force. Thus, the picture they painted in my mind was particularly rosy. I was also astonished to read that airline captains earned salaries in the six-figure range, right up there with doctors and lawyers. As the nature of the job became clearer to me, I became even more motivated to do well in school, so I could go to college to learn to fly and earn my airline wings.
No crowd to fit into
As I moved into my second year of junior high in the autumn of 1985, Betty joined me on our walk to school and the differing lives lead by the different crowds of students in I.S. 27 started to become increasingly apparent. Our little junior high school was literally halfway between two different socio-economic worlds.
Our school was located just to the south of Forest Avenue, which ran from east to west for most of the width of Staten Island and served as the proverbial train tracks that divided the “good” side of town from the “bad” side. To the north of Forest Avenue were numerous low-income housing projects, including the one my family lived in, along with many of the older neighborhoods on the island with names like West Brighton and Mariner’s Harbor. The south side of the avenue was home to the affluent neighborhoods on the island, with names like Todt Hill and Tottenville. I.S. 27 had a mixed student population, with roughly half of the students from the northern part of the island, with the other half from the southern part. As it turned out, most of the kids from the north side were either black or Hispanic, along with a smattering of white kids from relatively low-income families, while most of the kids from the south side were mainly white, along with a few Asian and East Indian kids. Being in the honors classes meant that most of my classmates were white, Asian, or Indian, with only a smattering of blacks and Hispanics.
I had always had an easy time making friends, and soon after starting at I.S. 27, I developed a crowd of friends consisting mainly of my classmates, with whom I would spend the majority of my time. My three best friends were my classmates Frank, Anthony, and Wilson, all of whom coincidently were from the affluent side of town. While Betty and I usually walked the twenty minutes from the projects to get to school, many of the other students would regularly be dropped off by their parents in their BMWs, Lincolns, and Cadillacs (like my friend Frank).
I would often be invited to Frank’s home, a very big house located near Clove Lakes Park, one of the nicer areas of the island, and I was amazed at how beautiful it was both inside and out. Frank’s dad was a computer engineer, and his mom was a housewife. Her only duty, as far as I could determine, was catering to Frank and his little brother. On one of my first visits to Frank’s house after school to play his new Nintendo entertainment system, I followed as he showed me room after room, each one more beautiful than the last and wondered what it must be like to live in such a house. They had cable television (MTV was all the rage at that time) and more videogames than I could count.
I also often visited Anthony’s house on the weekends to play basketball in his back yard and dreamt of having a yard of my own one day. Mom and Dad were working hard to save up enough money to put a down payment on a house of our own during my years in junior high and high school. For me, the day that we would have a home to call our own could not come fast enough.
While I was very thankful for all I had and for what my parents provided for us, I knew that life in the housing projects was not what I wanted. The elevators, hallways, and stairways frequently smelled of urine, and many people left their trash out in the hall near the trash incinerator instead of making the “effort” to put the trash into the incinerator, which often created quite a stench. I had always stood out from the other kids in the projects because it was obvious to them that I was not from around there. On more than one occasion, I was told that I looked foreign, and although my presence was tolerated, I was never fully accepted as one of them. I was frequently ridiculed for my “big head” and dark complexion. I was also often accused of “acting white” because I was in honors classes, spoke proper English (the Sesame Street kind, the only kind I knew) and because I did not stay out getting into trouble with them. Our parents frequently reminded Betty and me that we were not from there and did not have to follow what the kids around us were doing. They told us to remember that we were Haitian Americans. They often said that we had been given an opportunity to live in this great country, and must do well in school to take advantage of it and make something of ourselves. They reminded us that all the hard work they were doing was so that we could have better lives than they had. Therefore, the fact that I stood apart from the crowd in the projects was partly by design and partly by choice; because I realized at an early age that if you want to go somewhere in life, you need to surround yourself with other people who want to go somewhere. It was obvious to me that many of the kids living around me were going nowhere, and with the exception of a couple of friends with whom I would sometimes play baseball near our building, I generally stayed away from the other project kids.
At the same time, although I got along well with my classmates and did as well or better than most of them in school, I often felt a kind of envy for the lives that my friends like Frank and Anthony had. I too wanted to live on a quiet, tree-lined street in a big house with a manicured lawn and our own yard. All this left me with the feeling that I did not fit into any crowd. I could never see myself hanging out with the kids from the projects, who as they got older, seemed to care less and less about school and more and more about hanging out in the streets. At the same time, even though my friends from school welcomed me into their homes, I didn’t belong to their crowd either, because I didn’t live in their nice neighborhoods. At the end of the day, after Nintendo with Frank or basketball with Anthony, I always had to go back to the projects. All of this made me even more determined to become a pilot. I was intensely motivated from the inside; both by a passion for flying itself, and by the kind of lifestyle flying would afford me. I wanted it more than ever.
Paperboy
Certain events in life leave us so taken aback when they occur, that we scarcely know how to handle them and even thinking about them years later brings back some of the same emotions. One such event happened to me in the summer of 1986. While Mom and Dad took care of all my basic needs, a thirteen year old on summer vacation needs spending money for
