“I told you not to hop on that Harley,” the biker said smugly. I would have hated his flat daiquiri-drinking ass but I was too busy pretending the burn didn’t hurt, which was almost impossible because it was seriously the most painful injury this side of having Spanish inquisitors pour molten lead down your anal cavity. At the time it was all I could do to run to the restroom so I could scream and sob in relative solitude. Soon my lower shin blossomed with enough blisters and blood and general redness to merit amputation, if you ask me, but according to a bunch of idiot off-duty doctors in leather chaps, all I needed was an ice pack and more margaritas.
I had to fly to Berlin two days later and I completely forgot about my whole pants-only policy due to this major flesh-eating leprosy of a burn on my leg. The last thing I needed was friction on it, so I just sprang off to work in my skirt like I had no idea I was inviting Murphy’s Law to come shit on my head.
Once there I realized the plane home was bound to crash. How could it not? Here I was in a uniform skirt, breaking my own rule about being careful to make a benign corpse in the event of a crash so as not to attract media photographers, and I had to deal with the knowledge on the entire crew-bus ride back to the Berlin airport, that the cosmic crap shooter was gonna let the ball land on my number now that I was unprepared.
The plane, of course, was scheduled to be full. I don’t know about you, but that’s half my panic right there. I just want some privacy when I die. My father, as far as I know, died alone in an efficiency apartment across the street from the Los Angeles airport, where he’d moved after my mother left him and took us with her to San Diego. He sold used cars in a lot next to the tarmac, and I heard he’d been dating a stewardess. A nice old stewardess.
I hope that is true. I hope he was not totally alone when his heart gave out, because he did not die right away. His neighbors told us they could hear him crying, and I am guessing it was fear, because he must have known what was happening, and I’m hoping he had a nice old stewardess with him to hold his hand to help him face the fear. They are good at that. They hold my hand all the time.
They’re used to it, as there are plenty of us flight attendants who are nervous to fly, especially these days, what with 9/11 sucking all the fun out of everything. I know one who won’t take off without her jar of lucky plums right there with her in her jump seat, so it was nothing when I confessed to them my fear the plane was bound to crash because I forgot to wear pants. They didn’t ridicule me as you might expect; instead they just eyed me levelly, drew the curtain across the back cross aisle, and one of them traded her pants for my skirt right there.
They remind me of mothers, which makes sense, because when I applied for this job one of them advised me the best way to get hired was to fake every characteristic of a codependent. “You gotta know the right way to take the blame for everything and apologize,” she said. So sometimes I wonder if my own mother might have made a good flight attendant if her propensity for designing missiles hadn’t panned out. I was always falling, it seemed, and my mother was always catching me, or she tried to, until the day came when she couldn’t anymore. That’s what parents do. They catch their kids when they fall.
Or they try to. And now I wish I could keep from thinking about this, because it makes the images of the parents looking for their children in lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks even more unbearable. All those flyers they passed out, juxtaposed with the footage of the planes impacting the towers, then the towers burning and the people in them at first waving for rescue and then abandoning hope and falling. Falling. Their skirts billowing, their suit jackets flapping. A few were holding hands. Falling. I hope the parents didn’t look too closely at the news footage. I hope they didn’t recognize a dress or a shirt or something, recognize their child falling, falling like tears down the face of a great structure stripped of its might. As I watched them fall I wanted to catch them. I don’t think there’s a flight attendant alive who saw that and didn’t long to cup each one of those people in her hands and keep them safe. But all I could do was watch. I couldn’t do a thing to save them and, Christ, I am so sorry for that.
Abortions in Hell
IT’S A SHAME I am going to hell, because I think heaven can use someone like me. Heaven can definitely do with a little lightening up, I say. But, according to the pallid people in long sleeves who handed out pamphlets on the beach where I grew up, hell is where I’m headed.
I swear, I was just following my mother. She’d position herself in front of me with her arm out like a traffic cop every time the religious-pamphlet people came toward us. “Stay back,” she’d hiss, “this is my daughter.”
She announced that last part like it was some kind of universal call for propriety, and it worked. They stayed back, their pamphlets quivering in their pasty palms. But often they hollered at us as we passed: “You’re both going straight to hell. Did you know that?”
I didn’t think it was very fair that I should have to go to hell, too, but this was my mother here, and I couldn’t go taking pamphlets from people she just finished hissing at. From the little I knew about hell, it sounded super uncomfortable. To avoid going there, I certainly would have accepted a pamphlet—even after the awful Roe v. Wade incident in Washington, D.C., the year before, when I accidentally accepted a pamphlet advocating legal abortions. My father snatched it out of my hand and slapped the shit out of me with it right there on the steps to the Lincoln Memorial.
I didn’t think that was very fair, either. I did not even know what an abortion was, so of course I had to look it up when I got home. The only definition our dictionary offered was “of or pertaining to the act of stopping suddenly” or something like that. So I wondered why I got the crap slapped out of me because of a paper promoting the act of stopping suddenly, because what the hell is wrong with stopping suddenly? My own mother had done it in the car earlier that day. I practically still had a bruise from that braking-mom maneuver of hers in which she slung her arm out and slammed it against me in order to keep my unseatbelted ass from embedding itself into the dashboard. So I figured I learned a new word if nothing else, and then I got the crap kicked out of me all over again when my father found out I’d been telling people my mother had an abortion in the car.
Still nobody explained to me what was so bad about abortions. I had to find out for myself at the county fair, where an antiabortion group rented a booth and displayed a succession of plastic pink fetuses. They were arranged in ascending order according to age and size, and a fetus at four weeks looked like a pollywog to me, and I wondered why anyone would want one inside them.
My Life Sciences teacher had taught us about tapeworms the week before, and I wanted to know the difference between a fetus and a tapeworm. I mean, they both feed off you, don’t they? And we kill tapeworms, don’t we? In fact, that was the beginning of my tapeworm phobia, and I was pretty sure I even had a tapeworm living in me right then, as I always affected the symptoms of the disease of the week from my Life Sciences class. Earlier my teacher had taught us about arteriosclerosis and held up a big picture of a bisected clogged artery and told us the coroner could take this dead man’s veins and snap them in half like raw spaghetti. After that I went a whole week without eating my customary truckload of Halloween candy for breakfast before someone finally informed me that candy doesn’t contain a lot of cholesterol.
But tapeworms—now that’s a whole different story. I was in the process of wondering if tapeworms were such bad things after all, since I was such a failure at being a bulimic. (I swear, you had to get up from the table right after you ate every single time in order to have a successful hurling. Otherwise, your stomach, which is your enemy, went on and digested everything.) I just couldn’t muster the commitment it took, so it seemed to me a tapeworm was the ideal solution. All you had to do was sit there and let it leach up all your vitamins and minerals, and before you know it you’re emaciated and on the cover of Cosmopolitan.
So I asked the man at the
booth to explain the difference between a fetus and a tapeworm, and he told me people who have tapeworms go to the doctor, and people who have abortions go to hell. He was about to hand me a pamphlet when my mother jumped in and did the braking-mom maneuver right there, and we weren’t even in a car. “Stay back,” she hissed at the man, “this is my daughter.”
So of course I was really embarrassed, because there I was, having been put to a sudden stop, which means my mother just gave me an abortion right there in front of the antiabortion guy. And here I was hell-bound because of it. I felt really bad about it until my mother told me what she always told me when I was afraid of going to hell. “Jesus Christ, Hollis,” she said, “what bigger hell is there than a heaven full of people like that?”
A Rightful Nightmare
THE HEAD SURVIVED but the body didn’t, and without a body it’s hard to have a bobble-headed Chihuahua on your dashboard. Otherwise you’ve just got this plastic dog head on a spike, kinda, which normally you wouldn’t think was such a tragedy, but it turns out I was really attached to the plastic Chihuahua.
“The head was supposed to go on the dashboard,” I lamented to Daniel, “on top of a body.”
I was gonna name the bobble-doll “Buford,” and I was gonna be like an old person in a motor home driving around pointing at things, stopping at bowling-alley bars for a beer and stuff. It was a sweet dream now dead because I failed to bring the bobble-headed Chihuahua safely back from Tijuana, which is where I bought it. So here I am with only the head, and the torso is still in the belly of the plane somewhere, lurking in the shadows like a miniature murder victim.
God, I do not need to be thinking about this right now, because it brings to mind the notorious missing torsos of my neighborhood. I know I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the fact that the day before I closed on my house here in Capitol View the police found a severed human head in a sack on my street, but you have to admit the subject is pretty interesting. Especially when you factor in the detail that, strewn about, they later found six bags of other body parts all chopped up like Cobb salad. And here’s the kicker, the bags of body parts didn’t match the bag of head parts, and I don’t think they ever uncovered the missing pieces to match the found pieces, let alone who the pieces once belonged to, or for that matter—and probably most important—who was responsible for separating the pieces from their main parts to begin with. So by my count there are at least two torsos still out there, headless and/or limbless, waiting to be stumbled over in the dark.
That’s daunting, because stumbling in the dark is how I spend most of my life. Everything that’s ever happened to me has been a misinterpretation of what I meant to happen. For example, I bought this house as an investment, figuring I’d turn it over after a year like the rightful nightmare most investors are to in-town communities. But instead I’ve lost work due to airline industry cutbacks, and I’ve had to reside here since, biding time. The house has more than doubled in value, something else I stumbled into, because if it were up to me alone, faced daily as I am with the drug addicts, whores, and crack dealers, I would have left this neighborhood long before that happened.
At least I am not alone anymore. My friends Honnie and Todd have moved into the neighborhood, and other creative-but-poor people who probably never smoked crack or sucked dick to get crack or killed anybody are moving here as well. It’s a slow seepage, and it’s nice and all, but Honnie and Todd in particular aren’t faring well. They knew there was a crack house across the street when they moved in, but they didn’t know there was a dealer living right next door. I also have a crack dealer living across the street from me, but the only bother he causes is the occasional traffic jam, seeing as how he provides a drive-by service. Honnie and Todd’s drug-dealing neighbor, though, is very aggressive. He has already taken a baseball bat and smashed every single window in their house while they were out buying calk at Home Depot. There were plenty of witnesses, too, but all were too afraid to finger the guy to the police.
I go over there sometimes just to sit on their porch with them, so there will be a witness in case the drug dealer comes over with a bat again or something. But even if he did, the police would not be that helpful, not if their past lack of intervention is any indication. The gang fights and gunfights go on outside our doors all night. Occasionally I work an overnight flight and drive home in the early morning, which seems to be crack-whore happy hour in these parts, but at least there are fewer guns going off then. Three children have been killed in our neighborhood since I bought my house. Lary, who lives nearby, points out that one wasn’t really a kid, but a big teenager who was killed by the police in the process of committing a crime, so he doesn’t think that killing counts. I don’t see why it shouldn’t.
“Don’t you see?” I ask. “He was just a kid.”
He doesn’t see. I can’t believe he doesn’t see. “What I see,” he says, “is your mortgage, which is only four hundred and fifty dollars a month.”
Standing By
I’M AMAZED THEY LET Lary on the plane. I always am, not just because he looks like a curly-headed crocodile—and all wide-eyed, too, like he’s half a second away from taking hostages—but because he was flying standby using one of my airline-employee buddy passes, and everybody knows traveling under those circumstances is iffy at best.
He was flying to Cancun, Mexico, but only to pass through on his way to Isla Mujeres, a tiny island off the coast, where he expects to wallow in margaritas and the saliva of young Mexican maidens. Grant was with him, with much the same agenda, though Grant doesn’t much care from what gender the saliva is generated. Grant cut off half his hair recently, which means his hairdo has been reduced to the size of your basic bushy shrub, as opposed to an entire tree, which always makes me think they’re gonna make him purchase an extra seat to accommodate his head mass, but the agents let him on the plane, too, fantastically. Even so, it doesn’t amaze me as much that Grant made it on the plane flying standby as the fact that there was Lary, sitting right there on the aircraft, passengerlike, as if all his nut-ball molecules were not eminating a visible aura at all.
Gosh, I’m almost proud. I remember the first time these freaks flew standby with me. We three plus Daniel were on our way to Prague, because Daniel had picked it out on a map of the world painted on the wall of a restaurant the week before, and we all had airline buddy passes provided by me or friends of mine, which meant we were just above deep-sea bottom feeders on the list of priority to get on the plane. I’d warned them that they needed to dress nice, as back then a jacket and tie were required for airline nonrevenue travel, and I was not at all confident they could pull it off. I know Daniel, for one, didn’t even own a tie, and the only suit jacket he had was made of blemished suede, which I myself had bought for a buck at a yard sale and had given him.
As for Lary, even though I was accustomed to his daily uniform of T-shirts stained with old egg yolks and whatnot, I’d remembered that the day I met him, which was outside a church minutes before his ex-girlfriend was about to marry another man, he’d been wearing what could pass for a presentable ensemble, with a tie that wasn’t really a tie but one of those black leather twisty things knotted in the middle by an ornate clasp, which made it look like he’d barely escaped a lynching at the hands of evil fairies. So I knew Lary was capable of passing muster as far as dress is concerned, I just worried about that look he has. Seriously, from the neck up he looks exactly like Einstein’s insane bastard son.
Grant was practically shaved bald back then, with none of the visible body piercings he has now, but until then all I’d ever seen him wear were faded overalls that were rolled at the cuffs and hung off him like loose hide on a diseased moose. It must have been a phase he went through, because today he is always downright dapper, even though it’s not always a given he’ll get on the plane when he flies standby on an airline buddy pass. Take the time when, even though he tried hard to keep the side of his head with all the metal impaled on it away
from the gate agent, she spotted it anyway and wouldn’t let him board until Grant talked her into letting an actual aircraft mechanic show up with a toolbox to unpierce him.
But that day years ago when we left for Prague, the three of them knocked on my door in the morning before our flight, and I opened it to find quite a presentable passel of gents, I must say. We left for the airport not knowing whether we’d make it, but knowing if we didn’t we’d just choose a different route or destination, or both, it didn’t matter. They stood by with me that day and they have ever since.
Really, like anyone, there have been hundreds of people who provided passing blips on the lifelong radar of my acquaintance, like sugar through a kitchen colander they were, but for some reason these three are among the lumps that stuck with me and always will. They are like boogers that can’t quite be flicked free from the finger of my heart, because I have tried, believe me.
Over the years I have tried to run them off. Take the time I broke into Daniel’s house and stole all his tequila, or the time I broke into Lary’s house and stole all his hair products, or the time I broke into Grant’s house and didn’t steal anything, but I did rearrange all his furniture, which to him is worse. After that they hated me for exactly as long as it took for them to love me again, which was about five minutes. And vice versa. They’re not angels, either, believe me. Take the fax campaign Lary waged on me in my home eight years ago, page after page of just two words: “You Cunt!” But I forgave him and he me and eventually I stopped asking why these three wouldn’t leave like everyone else and simply started being thankful they were always there, standing by.
Get It Up
THIS PLACE IS SO nice I normally could not afford it even if I back-charged for all those gratuitous blowjobs I gave in college, but here I am all bundled under the down comforter even though the weather is really mild outside. I’m on a layover at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville goddam Tennessee, and I have the room service menu in my hand, I swear. I’m gonna order something even though I’m secretly afraid that as I try to sneak out tomorrow I’ll get pounced on by the cordial people in the reception area, who will remind me, cordially, that I can’t leave until I fork over the five hundred dollars extra I owe for in-room chicken fingers complete with miniature bottles of individual catsup.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 2