I lowered my camera, never saying anything. For a moment I almost completely forgot the fact that we were standing dangerously close to one of nature’s angriest expressions.
“I mean, I’d normally wonder about girls like that, you know, if they were hiding something about their bed habits, low sex drive, or something, but not Ava. She’s a fox and a true southern belle, a regular World War 2 pin-up girl. She could be painted on the sides of a B17. A girl with a body and face like that, you figure she’s got to be a wild one in bed, despite the fact that her theology tells her not to.” He paused to consider the possibilities. “She even let me reach up her shirt and feel her sweater stretchers once. That was nice. Quite the Jell-O molds.”
I considered saying something to ease the awkwardness and perhaps alter the course of our conversation when a limo finally pulled up, brakes screeching to a halt the very second that Chester pronounced Jell-O molds, as if swatting at his sexual advances on cue. Its driver didn’t bother opening the door for the bride. He just stood there on the driver’s side staring up at the waterspout in awe. I guess I couldn’t blame him. They didn’t make attractions like this at Walt Disney World.
Chester wasn’t kidding about the pin-up comparison. Tall, slender, and long curly charcoal hair; Ava was a thing of beauty. As she hurried around the limo in a sleek fitting twenties-revival gown to join her fiancée it occurred to me that I was standing in the presence of two phenomena’s of nature. Chester was practically half her size. He looked almost fat standing next to her, and his eyes leveled off somewhere around her breasts. With Ava and Chester, the phrase, Hey buddy, I’m up here, sort of beckoned a new meaning.
We didn’t waste any more of the waterspouts time. I fired my camera, and for the second time that day, staring through its lens at Ava, I found myself gasping for a breath. That’s the thing with pictures. So long as I had my camera, I could face a tornado or a tsunami…. or stand my ground with a beautiful woman. Take it away and my fingers trembled. How I ever managed to marry a woman on par with Helen of Troy is beyond me.
4
The little man in the gray suit asked his bride what’s the matter, but she wouldn’t answer him, so I continued exhausting one camera shot upon another from the backseat of their limo at such screaming speeds that I could have spliced together a movie reel of their footage when I was through. Animation; of the tall slender woman in her sleek twenties revival dress, eyes tightening, lips clamping, fingers strumming the handle to the door of their limo. You could simply see her soul capsizing through the pores of her milky flesh. It sunk lower with each spackle of flash work.
I just need to loosen the window, Ava said, for a fresh breath of air, though I imagined she might catapult through at any given moment.
Chester hawk-eyed her every move with the brightest no-vacancy sign that I’d ever captured to lens, never flinching. Hand glued to her knee, he repeated his question.
“What’s the matter?” I set my camera down.
“I don’t think we should go through with it,” she said.
Rather eerie that the limo should slide to a halt with the cold emotionless pronunciation of her words, as though again on cue. We heard the nail-on-board pitch of breaks screaming the Latin of her heart. I guessed there wouldn’t be any hot dogs handed out to Chester that night.
“We’ve arrived,” the limo driver said.
We glared out the window to the glimmering sands of the shore and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. The waterspout was long gone and even the sun had broken through a window of clouds. It looked to be a beautiful ceremony. A mob of invitation responders and several hovering seagulls had already gathered. They cheered for our arrival. The thunderous flogging of their fingers drowned out the waves of the sea.
5
I never once thought I’d end up as a wedding photographer. Aside from family photo albums, I don’t recall finding much fascination with cameras or the art of capturing special moments on film when I was a child. Growing up I wanted to be a writer and then in high school an actor thanks to the adolescent charms of a certain Leah Bishop. Women have a mysterious way of changing a man’s theology like that. By college I couldn’t decide on either, so settled for UCLA and a double major with hopes of breaking into the super-successful world of poetry, except nobody once mentioned that there was absolutely no money to be made in it. Two years into college I’d still never even seriously considered becoming a professional photographer, despite my grandfathers influences.
The two loves of my young adult life went to completely different colleges. Elise attended USC and Leah Bishop NYU, but we took morning attendance at the same high school homeroom, Woodrow Wilson in Long Beach. I even tried snaking into both of their panties on all three campuses, just never at the same time and always in varying intervals, with a few other girls not worth mentioning strewn in-between, all to no avail. I wanted to make both of them the future Mrs. Chamberlain. Snaking into their panties and getting married, whichever order came first. By the age of twenty, in the summer of 2001, I was still a virgin, unmarried, a poet without a single dollar to claim in royalties, and absolutely no idea that history had other plans.
Speaking of those other plans, I have a confession to make. I was in the North Tower when Osama Bin Laden sent two commercial airliners spiraling into the World Trade Center, New York City. That was September Eleventh. You’re likely familiar with the date. I was just a California college kid visiting my Cousin Joe and not a New Yorker. You might want to make note of that. I wasn’t supposed to be there. That’s coincidently when my career began as a photographer. As happenstance would have it, I took a single picture of a firefighter ascending the staircase. ETIQUETTE Magazine first picked it up. I nonchalantly gave them my grandfather’s surname, Chamberlain (my mother married an Miller). The photograph won all sorts of recognitions and awards, and before I had time to contemplate the significance of it, my career in photography began. September Eleventh, it’s also when Leah Bishop lost romantic interest in me, seemingly forever, and Elise and I got back together. We hitched the marriage wagon soon thereafter. The adopted surname stuck. I now pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain. And then I wasn’t a virgin anymore, in that order.
As of 2008, where I pick up this narrative, my grandfather had been dead for precisely twenty years. That would be 1988. Ira Chamberlain is without a doubt the greatest war photographer of the twentieth century, and it’s difficult to imagine how anyone will top him in the remaining centuries to come. He was present with John Ford during the battle of Midway and he ran up the beaches of Normandy. His photos are everywhere, especially in history books. The guy lived a legendary life. I mean, he was friends with Hemmingway and Steinbeck, he went fishing with Eisenhower, smoked a cigar with Churchill, and accompanied countless other iconic names, Picasso, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Bill Mauldin, and a certain children’s author named Theodore Geisel.
Of course, like Matthew Brady and so many other photographers, he died practically penniless. He did however own a couple of back-to-back apartment fourplexes in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, which he lived in up until the time of his death, and brought my grandmother a comfortable delivery of income for the remaining decades of her life. Adele never remarried and she still lived on property. Not the upstairs unit where she and Ira had once shared. Elise and I lived there now. It doubled as my studio. Grandmother Chamberlain lived downstairs and across the courtyard in the second fourplex. Our room and board was free. It was a sweet deal really. All we had to do was collect rent and make sure the place was kept up, and just to make sure we were square I regularly took my grandmother out for pancakes and cinnamon rolls whenever I was home.
As I was saying, it was May of 2008. Several months later Senator Barrack Obama would beat Senator John McCain as our nations forty-fourth and first black president. In just a few weeks Harrison Ford would once again don the whip and hat for a fourth Indiana Jones film. Christopher Nolan would give July moviegoers the greatest co
mmentary on post 9-11 society ever produced on screen with The Dark Knight. Swimmer Michael Phelps would win a stunning eight consecutive gold’s at the Beijing Olympics. Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Arthur C. Clark, Heath Ledger and Bobby Fischer all died. Crocs were unfortunately still sold in malls across America, and Wall Street would collapse and springboard into the most outlandish and confusing bank bailout in world history.
That was 2008, my 2008, when the homeless man popped up seemingly wherever I went. I saw my first waterspout. But you already know about that. It was the year when I encountered the nightmarish gang known only to me as the Lost Boys, and my wife, the first of two loves in my adult life, left me for another man. Oh, and Leah Bishop, the girl from my high school homeroom, she suddenly showed up again, as if on cue.
My life would never be the same.
6
Outside motel curtains strange men in boxers and wife-beaters consorted along the railing of the second story floor. No, not consorted – conspired, sucking on bottles and more, slugging in and out of a door lit up by the glow of their television. I desperately needed to get out of my room and go for a walk, but I was afraid to leave. It was how they glared at me like some sort of sexual object. I preferred Josie’s company. And I had a feeling they weren’t watching Full House.
I read the first three chapters of Genesis in the Bible, how God created man and then woman as an equal at his side, how the creator read them their wedding vows and then flipped the lights off to conjugate those vows in bed, their first task as husband and wife (it’s there if you read between the lines). Then the forbidden cantaloupe happens. Man and woman are cast from their desert oasis into the primitive world of thistles, sand dunes and sunburns. The rest of the Bible follows. I flipped through Leviticus, read a section on the punishments for sin and cleanliness of priests, and then closed its leather binding, returning it henceforth to my suitcase.
Another commercial break ended and Tom Hank’s chocolate loving turn in Forrest Gump commenced on the box shaped television (it was the part where Forrest beats on Jenny’s boyfriend after he slaps her). I increased the volume in hopes of plugging the sound of slamming doors. Lovers, man and wife perhaps, though hardly suitors, from the words employed I deduced they were both hateful of the other. As I lay there considering the men in wife beaters conspiring beyond the cavity in my window, I couldn’t help but question the history of gentlemen and chivalry, if it ever was as some books declare.
7
Logistically speaking, I’ve only stepped into the seventy-fourth floor elevator once in my life. Almost seven years had passed and I’d already lost track of the number of times I’d since re-entered, begging for my life. The elevators of September Eleventh were by far one of the worst tragedies of that horrific day. When American Airlines Flight 11 rocketed through the North Tower, cables were cut, and elevators immediately plummeted thousands of feet below to their doom. Columns of smoke and jet fuel poured down its shafts all the way to the World Trade Center Mall. Some suffocated and others were cooked alive. An estimated two hundred people died in those elevators with little over twenty identified survivors.
I never told anyone that I was in the elevators if it could be helped, but sometimes people found out. If they asked, I told. And it’s cliché but never-the-less true that a part of me died on that day. The thing that I can’t wrap my head around is why I was ever involved to begin with. I wasn’t a New Yorker. I shouldn’t have been there. And I’d asked God to grant me solace. I sure hadn’t found a single dosage of meaning in it.
And then there’s the blowjob. As I cracked the door of my motel open and peered around the corner at the strange men in wife-beaters coming in and out of their room, sucking on beer bottles, I tried not to think about it. Much like the meteor that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of this earth, that’s how her fingers felt across my face, with a comic book SLAP for full effect, just as the WHAM filled the frame when the cruel artist drew the meteors impact and smirked. I closed the door behind me and tucked ten fingers into my pocket to hug my keys and wallet as a humid summer breeze fanned the pages of yesterday’s newspaper back and forth through the parking lot.
When it came to the slap heard around the world, Leah Bishop was the culprit. She was the girl from my homeroom (and sixth period drama class), and like the moist summer breeze or my junior year calculus final, I was trying to forget about her also, pulling a hoodie over my ears then slugging ten fingers back into pants pockets as another sexual glare inserted its knife into my groin, courtesy of the men in wife-beaters. She may have been out of my life, but memories are like ghosts. They have a way of haunting you like that, especially at night. It’s always easier to dismiss them in the daylight.
I was twenty years old when it happened and you must understand, I flew all the way to New York (it was my very first flight anywhere) simply to see her in person, Leah Bishop, which made our kiss unbearable. The sensual assembly of two sets of lips in the backstage of her NYU theater, fingers rising under her shirt, trickling over her naval with a courageous sweep for her fleshy breasts to follow, much like the volcanic bulge in my pants and it’s accruing stain of secretion, the entire situation was outright intolerable. All those accumulating years lying in the dark of my pubescent room with masturbatory apparitions, Leah Bishop taking the helm of them, like an illuminating goddess who hovered over my teenage bed. And now there we were alone at last. I was twenty years old. I was a virgin. And I was kissing her. It was really happening. If I played my cards right, I was about to have sex… with a woman.
I felt the warmth of her inner thigh as it began to moisten her pants. I reached up her shirt and touched her bra. She granted me the courtesy of four or five seconds before pushing my hands away. Of course, I granted her the courtesy of twice as much time before elevating them right back up, hoping for the fatty skin bulging from the top of it. I contemplated what her boyfriend was doing, right then, as I asked her to continue her splurge of confusing contradictions with the immutable question on every fantasizing boys mind. Would you do me the honors of giving me my very first blowjob? Yes, that question. Then the slap happened. I deserved it too. We never spoke again.
Another troubling thought was the homeless man with the grizzly-gray beard that I passed on the corner. I recognized him immediately. He wore the same plaid coat with a hole where the elbow is usually hidden and filthy pair of slacks that I saw not only the previous evening in the parking lot of my motel, but countless other cities. And he knew something about me.
It’s not that he was overtly hawk-eyeing me, but he knew information about me, particularly my memory of Bishop in the back of her NYU theater and the failed blowjob question. He had intimate information about the slap that followed too. It wasn’t only an imaginative thought, but a feeling, almost like he was a mind reader or something, and no doubt why Leah Bishop was in my skull again. I thought about that for a few seconds, if it was at all possible that he calculatedly planted the memory on my brain, but that was too outrageously silly or science fiction to be true. I washed the thought of him away the best I could and walked on. I wondered if he was still watching me…. or if he even existed at all.
And since I was involuntarily revisiting the memory of Leah Bishop behind the NYU Theater, construing the courage to ask her the question, with a dinosaur killing slap only seconds away, I would have rather settled for my plight down nearly eighty zigzagging stairs on the tragic day to follow. I wondered if the homeless guy knew anything about my participation in that account of US history also (I was rather certain he did), and how both of them were like two neighboring dominoes that inadvertently pounced on each other in the tumble.
8
The homeless man was camped out below the street lamp, where I’d seen him two nights earlier, when I left Budget Motel at five in the morning for the long drive up the Floridian peninsula, stopping only for gas and breakfast at PANCAKE HOUSE. The pancakes were awful but the coffee was good. I continued the final leg of
my journey westbound on the I-10 through Alabama and Mississippi, and finally to New Orleans in Louisiana. Leaving the homeless man behind, I didn’t stop to say hello.
“See you in New Orleans,” I spoke mostly to myself through the rearview mirror.
The sleeping traveler didn’t answer me back. Of course, if he was in New Orleans, I never once saw him. I looked for him though. Unfortunately the person I did end up encountering would prove to be far more enigmatic and menacing in the oncoming maze of my life.
9
The first time I encountered the nameless leader of a mysterious gang I’d soon come to know as The Lost Boys, I was strolling lazily down Bourbon Street, New Orleans, with a glass of whiskey and a cigar hung from my fingertips. I called him EMINOR, the Latin for Menace (I looked it up), because of the italic words tattooed in bold print across the underside of his wrist all the way up to his elbow. Much like the nameless traveler, I don’t know why he came into the story of my life when he did or what purpose he ultimately sought to serve, except I speculate his sole mission was merely to destroy it.
It was a Saturday, the evening before my next wedding, and he was straddling an iron post outside of Bourbon Street’s Green Apple strip joint staring me down like a droog from that Anthony Burgess novel. He was fashioned in a white button-up pajama-like shirt, sleeves rolled high, with equally white pants, red suspenders, leather gloves, steel-toed Caterpillar boots, and a black bowlers cap to top off his pale flesh and scruffy head of sandy hair. He carried a cane.
When I turned around, he was thirty yards away and still looking at me. I tried not to think about it as I wandered all the way down to Governor Nicholls Street, circling around Royal Street and back up to Bourbon. I stole small sips of whiskey and slow drags of my cigar before returning the same route, only now I was on his side of the street. The stranger in the bowling cap was still leaning against an iron post shamelessly staring at me. I pretended not to notice. I even considered walking to the other side of the road until he lifted his cane to stop me in my tracks or trip me if I continued on.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 3