by Andy Schell
“You’re sure?” she asks, coming back into the room. I nod affirmatively, and she grabs her purse. “OK then, Bubba, I’m going to take off. They say we can get you out of here in just a couple days. I promise to push things along.” She kisses me on the cheek and glides out of the room, singing over her shoulder, “See you tonight!”
“Man,” the guy behind the curtain says, “you sure do have one fine lady there. And she don’t even care about your sissy-boy cravings.”
Sissy-boy cravings? Interesting way to put it. I guess he heard the part about the lanky guy. Yet he’s still talking to me? Does this mean the banjo duet from Deliverance will start playing, and he’ll rip back the curtain and tell me I have a purdy little mouth? “What are you in for?” I ask as if we’re serving hard time.
“Swollen feet,” he answers. “Circulation problems. Can’t walk no more.” Cain’t woke no mower.
I relax somewhat, knowing that he can’t get to me and that he hasn’t had some kind of belly surgery that inspires him to rip back the curtain and lift up his gut and show me the scar. “That’s tough. A guy’s gotta be able to walk, huh?” I tell him, dipping a spoon into my fish broth.
“It ain’t so bad. I can eat lyin’ down and watch TV lyin’ down. Only thing tough is takin’ a shit.”
“I can imagine.” But I won’t. In fact, I think it’s time to think about little puppies and rainbows and unicorns and all things fresh and clean.
And about getting out of here.
THREE
he first week out of the hospital my mother insisted on putting me up in a suite at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. On her days off, Amity visited me, and I was embarrassed to have her see me there, cloaked in the opulence and abundance of Dallas’s finest hotel, but Amity loved it and delighted herself each visit by ordering various twenty-four-dollar room service items for me.
But the gravy train is over, I’m healed, as well as financially cut off again, and now I’m back at work for the first time since the surgery. Amity insists on flying with me. “With the stitches removed, I have to make sure your stomach doesn’t fly open when the plane de pressurizes she hoots. She has this off-the-wall way of making me feel wanted. How can I not like her? It’s as if she’s some character an actress would play only she’s more interesting. And Amity has met me at my weakest, most vulnerable, and insecure, yet easily looks beyond the maudlin sap who cried on the airplane and convalesced in the hospital. She sees the waggish devil from my college days who even I only hope still exists somewhere inside me.
We’re assigned to fly with one of my other two training class mates in Dallas. Bart is a god. He has the most incredible legs and ass I’ve ever seen. Out of uniform, he wears Wrangler jeans and
cowboy boots and shirts that show off his muscles. A former high school football jock from one of those interchangeable suburbs north of Dallas, he’s Texan to the bone. He loves to tell jokes that put down Yanks like me. All he has to do is shake a woman’s hand and look her in the eye, and she’ll want to fuck him. He rolls great joints.
This is the first time I’ve seen Bart since training, and we’re huddled with Amity in the front galley of the DC-9 on our way to St. Louis, our first destination of the day. Amity breaks in, “I want to tell a gay joke, but I’m sure Harry’s already heard it.” “Why?” Bart asks.
“Because he’s gay.” Guy, it sounds like.
Bart nearly shits a chicken-fried steak. “You are?”
“Of course he is,” Amity says. She looks at me. “You don’t mind me saying so, do you, Harry?”
“Not at all,” I answer nonchalantly. I want her to like me, to think I’m as comfortable as she is. But the truth is, while I’m a pretty candid guy myself, I’m stunned a little by her perpetually openhanded game. She’s just so unabashed. So casual with her candor. I half expect her to get on the PA. system and announce, “Ladies and Gentlemen, at this time, for your own comfort and safety, Harry Ford is gay.”
Bart is shocked because I hadn’t divulged my orientation to anyone in my training class. It’ sfunny what you learn about yourself when you change your surroundings. I always prided myself that I came out to my family at the age of seventeen and that I lived an open life in a family whose heraldic crest probably looked like one of those red-and-white CLOSED signs in the window of a dry cleaner. But my flight attendant classmates just seemed so much narrower than my college chums, and I knew my friendships with them were finite, so I kept my sexuality to myself.
I also hadn’t told anyone I was gay during flight attendant training class because I figured the airline could fire me if they wanted.
There aren’t any employment laws to protect me, and after all, it was obvious they were trying to hire “straight.” Out of the twelve guys in my class, I was the only gay one. Straight male flight attendant? I thought that was an oxymoron. Maybe at other airlines, but not at this one. For the first time since the age of seventeen, I strategically crawled into the closet. Fortunately, I only lasted two months inside before I came jumping out, figuring, “Fuck it. Let them fire me if they want.”
“How does a guy know when his roommate is gay?” Amity asks, launching into the joke. Pause, punch line. “When his dick tastes like shit!” I laugh, and Bart does too, but neither of us louder than Amity. “OK, y’all, time to feed and water the cattle,” she commands.
Amity works the first-class section, and the first few rows of coach, and Bart and I drive the cart in the back of the bus. Bart’s not really cut out for this work. He’s more accustomed to holding a football than a coffeepot, and he’s only truly comfortable when he has a can of beer in his hand, which is just long enough to hand it over to a passenger. But he’s so gorgeous that few people care that his thumb is in their drink or that he’s forgotten the cream for their coffee. Between my socially adept upbringing, and my subsequent poverty during the college years, I’m pretty well suited to the tasks at hand, and Bart often defers to me for help in the delicate operation of spearing a wedge of lime with a swizzle stick without touching it with your fingers or separating two napkins stuck together. When someone asks me for decaf, and I realize we’re out of the little instant packets, I traipse to the front galley to procure some from Amity. “You spear your limes ahead of time?” I ask, noticing her cupful of sticks stuck through lime wedges.
“It’s the only way. Whether you just picked your nose or not, you gotta take those things in your fingers and shove them on the
stick. I don’t have time to do all that ceremonial bullshit in the aisle with everyone watching.”
She’s the master. I’m the student. “We’re out of decaf,” I tell her.
“Why bother?” she says, grabbing a cup and pouring it full of regular coffee. “Give them this.”
“But they’ll be wired up for Jesus,” I laugh.
“No, they won’t. They’ll think it’s decaf and it won’t do a damn thing to them. Power of the mind, baby, power of the mind.”
When all the cattle have been fed and watered, and we’re all back in the galley, Bart gives me the old line. “I don’t think you’re really gay. You just haven’t had the kind of woman that would show you you’re not.”
Amity winks at me before taking a glass of water out to a passenger.
“That is such a crock of shit,” I tell him, smiling. “You straight people always think you’ve got it figured out. What if you’re gay and you don’t know it because you just haven’t found the right guy?”
“What if?” he says, his accent making magic of the question, his thumbs in the belt loops of his uniform pants, his fingers hanging down to the natural bulge of his crotch. He looks at me with a shit eating grin on his face.
I’d drink this guy’s bathwater and he knows it.
Of course we’re one big happy threesome by the third flight of the day. It truly is a bonding experience to serve little bags of peanuts to people sitting upright in rows of chairs. Amity breaks out the in-flight champagne in Styrofoam, and we
illegally indulge while she teaches us that if, ten napkins are stuck together, we should give the passenger ten napkins, because it isn’t worth your valuable time separating them. And even if you’re working a flight to Europe, when someone asks how long the flight is, we should
always say, “About an hour.” And if the captain asks for lemonade, we should tell him we’re out, because it isn’t worth the trouble to fix lemonade for a guy who (in her case) only wants to “stick his hand up my skirt and play grab ass.” And when I ask her what a woman captain wants, she says, “To stick her hand up my skirt and play grab ass.” So we learn that lemonade is out of the question. And finally: “Always have a stick of gum sitting out of the wrapper, close by, to take the champagne off your breath in a hurry.”
By the end of the day, as we approach Stapleton Airport in Denver, the captain tells us that we’ll be landing in a heavy snow storm, and that operations are limited to a single runway, where we’ll make an instrument approach for landing. We circle the city, and all we see out the window are what look like huge shreds of coconut cascading from heaven. “I love snow,” Amity says dreamily “If I ever have to be in a crash, I want to go down in snow.”
Bart and I look at each other uncomfortably. “Could you be in that crash some other time, Amity?” I ask her.
“Yeah, let’s just land and get to the hotel,” Bart adds.
By that evening, on the ground, the three of us are practically best friends, smoking pot in the hotel room, watching HBO. Bart takes the joint, places it between his lips, and asks if I want a shotgun. I nod, bring my mouth to his until our lips barely touch, and he blows the smoke into me while Amity watches; it’s all I can do not to kiss him full on. As I pull my lips away from his, I look over at Amity, who gives me the slightest smile, and I know she’s reading my mind. I’d kill for this guy.
After trudging down the snowy street for a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes, which Amity washes down with champagne, we return to Amity’s hotel room, crank the heater, and settle on the bed, all three of us. We smoke more pot and listen to the Eurythmics on the little radio at the side of the bed.
Sweet dreams are made of this …. Somehow this is all less innocent, more dangerous, than my college cavorting which was solely limited to men. This is the real world, and we all have jobs, and Bart is a straight guy from Texas who played high school football, and I’m a Yankee who doesn’t really understand him or Amity or their intentions at the moment. Bart takes his hand, slides it behind Amity’s neck and pulls her mouth to his. While he kisses her, he slowly places his other hand on my thigh. He doesn’t move it. He just keeps it there while he gently eats Amity’s face. I follow the veins in his hands down to his long, sexy fingers. Should I reach out, take his hand, and move it to where I want it to be? Before I make a move, Bart pulls back from Amity. Turns to me. “Now you,” he says.
I can’t believe I’m going to kiss a real live straight cowboy. And by the way he kissed Amity, I know he’s talented. “OK,” I answer, my voice nervous. I reach my hand toward his shoulder to hang on, but he intercepts it and steers it toward Amity. He leans forward, twists, and pulls Amity to me. “You kiss her,” he says.
Fuck. He’s toying with me, setting me up, trying to see if I can get it going with a girl. I’ve never done it with a girl, and the only time I even came close, my dick made it clear it wasn’t going to cooperate, so I made some lame excuse about not having a condom and bailed out.
“Come on, buddy,” he says, coaxing me.
Shit. If he’s trying to hand me the “right girl” so I can straighten out, I’m not into this. I should get up and go. But what if this is the beginning of all three of us together? If he sees me with Amity, will he join in? Maybe it can work. It would be worth it, seeing him naked, watching him make love. I lean over and place my lips against hers. I haven’t kissed a girl since high school; it feels strange and even abnormal to have contact with such soft pink lips. The lack of beard or whisker stubble on her face makes her alien to me. She’s soft and perfumed, and I try to stay tender with her. She
starts moaning and kissing me harder, her tongue moving freely inside my mouth. I feel the bed move and realize that Bart is rising off the mattress. I continue to kiss Amity, but turn my head, to watch him undress. Instead, he tucks his shirt in. He’s leaving. “Where are you going?” I ask, breaking from Amity. “You don’t need me now, cowboy,” he says slyly.
If he only knew. My dick is softer than a warm stick of butter, and unless he stays and rolls his piece of corn on it, it’s going to stay that way. Why hasn’t Amity said anything? And why did she go along with this whole setup? Did they plan this together on the airplane today? My uneasy eyes slide their gaze to Amity, and she understands. “I think you’d better stay, Bart,” she says breathlessly.
Bart stands there, doesn’t move. He closes his eyes, rubs his eyebrow, looks uncomfortable. For all his swagger and tease earlier, I can tell it’s something he can’t do. “Yes, I think you’d better stay, Bart,” I echo, rolling off the mattress. “And I’ll be taking my leave.”
I walk past Bart, who gives me a single sexy nod of his gorgeous jock-boy head. “You sure?” he asks.
“I’m sure.”
Amity jumps up and walks me to the door, then opens it. “Are you OK, Harry?” she whispers. “I had nothing to do with this.”
I’m embarrassed. I feel clumsy. “I’m fine,” I tell her. “He’s a stud. Go for it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll do you proud. He’ll be limping home to his stall, darling’.”
I smile, step out into the hall.
“You’re a good kisser, Harry. Are we still friends?”
I nod yes.
She kisses me again, this time on the cheek, and I head into the hall.
I enter my room next door and fall onto the bed, full of conflict and question. The question isn’t whether I’m gay. I am. The question
is whether I could have done it without Bart somehow ” and I think the answer is no. Minutes pass, but I can’t get thought of him out of my head. His thick wrists, the veins in neck, his tongue lapping at Amity’s face. What would his ass look like out of those Wrangler jeans? Do his feet really those big, wide cowboy boots? I’m aroused again, and soon erection is spurred on by the sounds coming from the other side the wall.
I’ve got to hear them. I rip off my clothes and throw them the floor. Then I run to the bathroom, grab an empty water and return to the bed with it. I stand on the bed and place the on the wall, just to the edge of the huge framed knockoff of Gogh’s water lilies, and press my ear to the cold glass, absorbi the echo of Bart and Amity making love.
“Ah, ah, ah,” he moans as if his horse is cantering on the lead over pavement. It’s a rough ride, but he’s thoroughly it.
Amity breaks in, “Oh, baby, you drive me wild!”
The bed creaks and crunches, and I hear one of their moving against the wall.
“Yee haw, baby, Yee haw!” Amity whoops.
Yee haw? Is he tiding on top of her like a horse? Is he on to her hair like reins, his big, sexy forearms flexing as he her right, then left, then pulls back on her? Is she some Trigger, rearing up into his big, sexy chest while he takes her behind? No, wait: She said he’d go to his stall limping, so is she on top? Is he stretched out below her, his muscled legs reachin for miles, his big arms holding her shoulders while she rides him: to the edge of the cliff in a full gallop?
In my excitement, the glass slips from my hand, and as it falls toward the end table, I try to catch it, but in my haste I knock monstrous van Gogh off the wall, and it comes crashing down onto the headboard like thunder and flies sideways onto the end table,
breaking the water glass and smashing into the phone, which flies off the table with a booming ring. I turn to jump off the bed and catch myself in the mirror, naked, horrified, my stick of butter frozen hard.
I carefully step around the broken glass and grab the painting, lifting it away. As I set it on
the other bed, I realize the rodeo on the other side of the wall has shut down. Ceased all events. There’s not a sound from the riders. Shit. I can only imagine what it must have sounded like to them. I gingerly place the receiver back on the hook and lift the phone to the table. As I’m setting it down, it
rings.
I let it ring. Four times. Then slowly lift the handset. “Yes?” “You all right over there, big guy?” Bart asks. “Yes.”
“Anything broken, Bubba?”
I look at my penis. “No.”
“Well …” he says. I hear Amity giggle in the background. “I’m going to take a shower now,” I tell him. “Keep the water cold, buddy. Keep the water cold.”
The next three days of the trip, Bart holds Amity’s hand when she steps out of the crew van, carries her luggage through the airport, opens any doors for her, orders her champagne at dinner, and fucks her as if she’s a sheep from Kansas.
And the two of them adopt me as their favorite son. We’re one little happy airline family. Our failed attempt at sex hasn’t hurt Amity’ sand my relationship in the least. Nor mine and Bart’ s. On the contrary, we have something to bind us and also make us laugh. And that’s how it is in the airline business, I’m told. People get incredibly close for a few days, and then they don’t see each other for maybe another year or two or five.
But I have a feeling that, if I stick with Amity, I’ll have some kind of a family here in Texas. And that’s what I intend to do.
The night of our arrival back in Dallas, Amity suggests Bart come to her house for a drink. She also enthusiastically invites me to come along, but I decline, since I get the feeling that Bart wants another rodeo ride, and I don’t want to be the clown who the bull this time. Amity and I agree to get together as soon as our days off coincide, and I bid her and Bart good night.