The Most Interesting Man in the World….

This man has inspired me to grow a beard.

We have all seen those Dos Equis’ commercials with “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” If for some reason you’ve been living on another planet, here is a quick compilation to bring you up to speed:

One of my personal favorite lines is, “If he punched you in the face, you’d have to fight the urge to thank him.” That pretty much sums it up. The commercials are a fantastic joke machine and the people who write for them are truly the interesting people. The guy who plays “The Most Interesting Man” is an actor and it’s all fictitious. Or is it? I actually had the privilege of recently flying with the REAL “Most Interesting Man in the World.” His name is Sergey.

As an airline pilot, I rarely fly with the same person twice. So my first interaction with the guy I am flying with is usually rife with small talk, “Where are you from?”; “Are you married?”; “How many kids do you have?”; etc. To be honest, a lot of people don’t like talking about themselves; the stories are not that interesting; the talk dies out quick and we go to reading our books or looking at our iPads (that’s right, we don’t always have our eyes on the controls.) This week was different though. From the moment I heard the Captain say, “I’m Sergey, nice to meet you,” in a thick Russian accent, I knew this man would have a different story.

Jack Kerouac and Sergey look a lot a like and would have a lot to talk about.

First off I am going to admit I have a little bit of a man-crush on Sergey. He’s ruggedly handsome, tall, salt and pepper hair and he constantly has to take smoke breaks. In a world where grown men dress up as comic book characters and stand in line for video game releases, Sergey is a throwback to black and white movie stars from the fifties. While you are excited about getting your Grand Theft Auto free poster, he’s swirling whisky on the rocks in a highball glass, smoking a cigar and relishing the beautiful naked women (intentionally plural) on his massive velvety bed.

The worst part about being a Russian mobster? Speedo not optional.

That’s more fantasy, the real Sergey was so much more interesting than a cartoonish image. When I asked, “Where are you from?” He explained that he lived in San Francisco but was originally from Moscow. When I probed a little bit further, I found out that he wasn’t just from Moscow. He came here as an illegal immigrant. in 1992. “Socialist Russia had fallen and the country was in chaos. Everyone was grabbing what they could. I could see that if I stayed, I could join the mafia, become rich but be dead in ten years or make a move.”

He didn’t speak English. He had only a suitcase in his hand, the clothes on his back and $300 dollars in his wallet. He bought a roundtrip ticket from Moscow and when the time came to get back on the plane from JFK to Moscow, “I told them I needed to go to the bathroom during boarding. Instead I just walked out of the terminal and paid for a cab from JFK to Brooklyn.”

A reenactment of Sergey’s first night in New York and my last night in New York.

The first two nights he slept on a park bench in the middle of Brooklyn until he found some fellow Russian speakers to help him out. The idea fascinated me. I rolled up in a ball and cried like a baby when I wandered into a small village in Costa Rica where nobody spoke English. I can’t imagine going to the biggest city in the U.S. (or some other country), not speaking the language, not having any money, not knowing anybody and just being, “I’ll figure it out.”?

So my big question for Sergey was how do you go from being an illegal immigrant that doesn’t speak English to being an airline Captain? He learned English from the streets. He worked random odd jobs until he got hooked up with a major mortuary in New York as a janitor. He ended up learning to embalm bodies by watching the licensed morticians at work. So he started making good money as a free-lance, illegal mortician. “I once had to totally reconstruct a man’s face after he jumped from a building and landed on his FACE.” Sergey matter-of-factly described the process, “I think I did a pretty good job.”

That’s right. Keep playing your video games and living in your parent’s basement…

The mortuary got him his green card and he used his dough to take flying lessons. Eventually he decided he wanted to see the west coast. So he hopped in his car, packing only a suitcase, leaving a jilted lover behind and headed to San Fran. Here he again knew no one and had no place to stay.

He got a job as a waiter on Fisherman’s Wharf and used all of his tip money to continue to take flying lessons until he had all of his ratings. He instructed other people how to fly to build up his hours, then flew cargo for a little while, got sick of it and then went back to instructing before coming to my company.

A guy who goes from sleeping on a park bench in New York and not knowing any English, to an airline captain is a pretty interesting story. But I left out my favorite part. Somewhere in the discussion, my Air Force experience came up and I talked a little bit about flying over Afghanistan. Sergey went on tell about his own mandatory military service in Afghanistan as part of Soviet Russia. “Yeah we were on the ground there for ten years. Then we got out but the Americans didn’t learn!”

(All you need to know about the Russian/Afghanistan conflict is right here in Rambo III)

http://youtu.be/3Am9urqTeuw

Everything Sergey says is incredible, but he says it very matter of fact and without embellishment. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I asked if he had been shot and his answer was, “They would shoot at us all the time, but they were afraid to get close, so normally it wasn’t a big deal. We would grab our machine guns and shoot back. I was actually shot though.”

Fifty Cent has nothing on Sergey.

What? Sergey went on to explain about being under fire and everyone ducking down for a two-minute volley. When he got up he thought he had landed on a rock because his back hurt, but then he noticed a massive blood stain flowing from his gut. “I lifted up my shirt and there was a perfect hole in my side. I stuck my finger in and could feel the bullet, so I pulled it out.” Apparently it was a ricocheted shot that missed all of his organs and just landed in muscle tissue. Still the man took a bullet and lived to tell about it. Fifty Cent brags about that all the time. Sergey just mentions it in passing if you happen to ask.

I miss the 80’s. The best thing to come out of the Cold War were the movies.

I finished the trip with Sergey in awe of the man. Here was someone of legend, someone of TV commercials: Here was an Afghanistan war veteran, a man who experienced the fall of communist Russia, someone who showed up in this country with nothing and didn’t care, “It was survival instinct, I would eat sandwich out of garbage. It was an adventure.” Someone who lived through fearful times without being afraid, learned English from the streets and now captains jets for a living. I had to resist the urge to ask him to punch me in the face before I left.