The day the music (amost) died

And by music, I mean the Nagoogin family name. If you know my family at all, you would think that this is a preposterous proposition—I have a huge family, one on a scale I don’t think you can fathom. You see, by grandfather and my grandmother must have enjoyed a prodigious sex drive, as unsavory a thought as that may be. Perhaps there was nothing to do in the old county aside from growing rice and fucking each other’s brains out. Gramps, being a traditionalist, hailed from the rhythm birth control school of thought, it was just too bad the man had no gift for timing since they ended up with seven kids. (At this time I should point out that grandpa had an additional two kids from his other wife. The other wife he was still married to while he was screwing my grandmother. To answer your questions: 1. No, we aren’t Mormon and 2. yes, being a playa does indeed run in the family.) With my father being only one of seven siblings I have a lot of cousins, so many in fact that I cannot remember all thirty of their names despite seeing them multiple times a year for the last twenty-two years of my life.
Of roughly thirty cousins, there are only four of us that enjoy the rights and privileges of having a penis: Smilie, Tigger, Phileas, and myself . Since there are only a few lads we all enjoy some measure of special treatment that’s helped shape me into the narcissist asshole I am today, but we’ll touch on those fine points later. This is the story of how the four uniquely equipped members of the Nagoogin clan almost ended the bloodline forever.
One of my cousins, Smilie, just got his private pilot’s license and his own Cessna as an accessory to go with the fabulous card that gives him the right take to the skies like Iceman. Over dinner Smilie casually suggests that we take a short trip out to the Long Beach Airport and take his plane out for a ride and enjoy the Southern California sunset (SMOG does have its virtues). We all pile in to the car and make for the airport, half way there Smilie casually asks us how much we think we weight—and that the plane might have a weight limit.
Me: I don’t know, last I checked I was about 140
Tigger: I’m 143, haven’t gained a pound since high school!
Phileas: Oh, about 165—why, what is the plane’s limit?
Smilie: [period of tensioned silence while he crunches the numbers] Oh fuck it, we can just dump some shit out if we have trouble lifting off
Any other group would say “wait, maybe we should hop on the scale at the airport and figure this one out before we taxi out to our deaths”—us, not so much. Life’s not worth living it you aren’t willing to take risks, right? Fuck it, we all declare with machismo—after all we aren’t a bunch of limp dicks; and I'm certainly not going to be the pussy that questions the group plan.
We head out to the plane and go through the battery of checks an aircraft goes through before it is clear for take off. Everything goes off without a hitch, we are a go for launch. We pile into the tiny cockpit and hook in our individual headphone/mics that make us look like a legit crew. After some witty bantering (and by that I mean regurgitating some sweet lines from TOP GUN a la ‘I got a need’… ‘A need for speed’ followed by the obligatory high five) a nervous calm settles in the cabin as the plane makes its run for the skies.
About two minutes into the flight, Phileas nonchalantly declares “Do you realize all the males in the family are on this plane?”, bollocks I think to myself—there aren’t any god damned peaces of wood on this titanium coffin of a plane to knock on. We’re all fucked, destined to die in a huge ball of flame hurtling across the sky, the only remnants of our charred corpses at the bottom of the impact crater. I can already hear the news forecast that would air that night, my father shouting “DON” just like Ritchie Valen’s mom in the movie. Next, Don McLean is going to redo the verse to American Pie. Bye, bye Ms. American pie; I am going to miss you.