Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  As to Miss Willa, and the above: These are the facts as I know them, but since the source for them is my mother, pass the salt. Though there's a certain logic to the story. How else could a rawboned & half-mute Polish refugee/exterminator have seduced my mother? Frankly if he hadn't been such a gentle man I might speculate I was born of rape. But then of course, dear American Airlines, you don't give a possum's pink ass as to how or why I was conceived. At this point you're doubtless wishing that I'd never been conceived, and I'd be lying if I denied being on your side on that one. Add Stella to the bleachers and we could all do a wave. Anyway, I apologize for that sideways waltz into the story of my beginnings. It's clear I should've been a Russian novelist: I can't even write a fucking refund request without detailing my lineage.

  Not that this is any fucking refund request, mind you. I'm not sure it's clear just yet but there was a lot more than $392.68 riding on this flight.

  ***

  Maybe I should explain.

  In the winter of 1978 I became a new father. This wasn't, I should note, by design: As I was an accident of conception, so too was my daughter. An accident begat an accident. In our case, it was a night spent atop a patchwork of blankets on a second-story porch that led to the startlement of unexpected parenthood. I'd just moved in with Stella after a delirious three-month courtship, lugging mostly books—in fact, I don't think I contributed anything but books—into her upstairs apartment in a double gallery house in the Irish Channel. A typical grad-student rental place, slummy and peeling but charming in that bohemian way. Since this was the first night in our home we celebrated by cooking something oystery out of my dead grandmother's copy of the Picayune's Creole Cookbook and opening a jug of Gallo Rhine wine which at the time we thought was something special. It was a warm spring night, the blooming magnolias infusing the whole Channel with a lemonade smell, so we moved outside to the gallery. Stella lit candles and we smoked a joint and told stories that made us both laugh beyond the brink of tears and, at some point, while we were making love—and however distasteful I find that euphemism, that's precisely what we were doing—with her atop me, I spelled out I LOVE YOU with a fingertip on the wet skin of her back. We stayed out there all night, circled at dawn by bright puddles of melted candlewax.

  In those months we were the planet's happiest residents. If I was no longer the poète maudit, well, pbbbbbt, I didn't give a damn. I stopped drinking alone and suicide was as improbable a concept for me as joining a Kiwanis Club. On the hi-fi, the morose West Coast blues pianists I specialized in listening to were replaced by mindless rock. For silly kicks we put ABBA on the turntable. I wrote nothing but reveled in my giddy muteness. I chopped vegetables and paid bills. I delivered hot tea to Stella when she was studying and read aloud to her while she soaked in our rust-stained tub. The salad days, they're called, though I've no clue why.

  It took her a while to tell me she was pregnant. Stella claims she wanted to wring as much happiness out of the unclouded present as she could—and that if perhaps she didn't say it aloud, didn't grant it that oral credence, it might pass like a fever. That conversation, when it finally came, was pocked with terrible long silences. I told her it was up to her, what to do, though I was hoping she'd abort the pregnancy. We were young, rootless, intent on scouring the ends of the earth. And I doubted—correctly, as it turned out—my potential as a father. The next day she made an appointment at a clinic in Gentilly and for the next two weeks we drifted in slow awful orbit around the unspoken. I had nightmares I didn't reveal to her; or rather, not nightmares, but oblique dreams about losing things. One in which Charles's prized guitar was stolen from my car, another about my share of the rent money disappearing from my desk drawer. On the couch one night we watched a movie, a late-night replaying of Brian's Song, and at the end, when James Caan's character died, I noticed she was crying—sobbing. I put my arms around her and said, "I forgot how sad the ending to this movie was," and she replied, quickly, "I'm not crying because James Caan is dead." Just as quickly I said, "I know," but that was a lie. For all I knew she could have been mourning James Caan; the truth was, I didn't know what she was feeling. When we went to bed that night I lay there holding her in my arms, spooning, until the typical sprouting of a hard-on prompted me to shimmy backwards beneath the sheets, to skitter as far away as I could get from her. I didn't want her to feel it. She'll realize it was me, I thought dumbly. Me that did it to her, me that's making her cry.

  She didn't ask me to go with her but I did. The clinic occupied a house on a residential street, with only a vague insignia on the exterior—some archetypal female figure, in a robe, raising her hands to the sky—to distinguish it from its neighbors. There was a guard outside, too, a fat chainsmoking black guy who avoided eye contact. Inside, a waiting room evoked a struggling inner-city dental office, with magazines enfolded in those SUBSCRIPTION EXPIRING! THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE! wrappers and Gordon Lightfoot's "Rainy Day People" being piped from ceiling speakers. I held her hand until her name was called. I hadn't brought anything to read, as that seemed inappropriate, so mostly I stayed outside and smoked cigarettes, uncomfortably sharing an ashtray with the guard. But I had time for only one or two cigarettes, because within fifteen minutes Stella appeared on the porch. Her cheeks were red and blistered with tears and she was clutching her thin sweater-coat to her as if stricken with a paralyzing chill. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't go through with it. Bennie, I'm sorry but I can't." I moved to embrace her but she stepped back. "No," she said. "No, let's go. Let's please please get out of here."

  The best that I can say about the next eight months is that we tried. We cleared out the second bedroom, which had just been transformed into my writing room, and installed a crib and a changing table. We bought Goodnight Moon and Bedtime for Frances at the Maple Street Book Shop and, from a French Quarter shop, some souvenir voodoo dolls we thought would be kooky/funny to stock in the crib. Because we needed money, I jumped to the other side of the bar at the Exchange, switching from barfly to bartender; Felix the Fat even put a plastic jar with a sign that read bennie's baby fund on the bar, though that disappeared as soon as Stella heard about it. At night I put my ear to her belly and tried to listen and feel but always there was nothing. "You don't feel that?" she would say. "There. That one. That was a kick." I didn't. Often I was aimlessly angry and sometimes I was thrilled but mostly I was terrified. One night, after closing the bar, I drank myself unconscious, and the next morning Felix called an ambulance because he couldn't rouse me from the floor. He later told me he even tried kicking me in the nuts. As you'd expect, Stella wasn't pleased. A few nights later the sounds of something shattering woke me around three A.M. Stella's side of the bed was empty so I called out her name. More crashes & shatters. I ran to the kitchen and found her standing over the sink, sobbing while throwing our dishes and glasses in one at a time. Shards were everywhere. I held her and let her cry and then led her back to bed before cleaning up the sharp mess. We never spoke of it again despite the conspicuous barrenness of our cupboards.

  Stella Clarinda Ford was born in January: The name Stella was for her mother, of course, and Clarinda we cribbed from Robert Burns ("Fair Empress of the Poet's Soul, and Queen of Poetesses..."). It occurs to me that I should also clarify the surname, i.e. Ford and not Gniech. That was my father's doing in the months before I was born. Miss Willa, bound by propriety to marry the Polish exterminator who'd impregnated her, nonetheless refused to become Willa Gniech. ("A Willa Gniech sounds like a troll from Norse mythology," she told Henryk. "Or an epic sneeze.") So without consulting her he went down to the courthouse and changed his name to the most American one he could conjure: Henry Ford. (His ignorance of his chosen namesake's anti-Semitism, considering what he'd been through during the war, added another layer of ridiculousness to it. Yet he was devoutly loyal ever after to Ford vehicles and when he later became a mechanic he would joke that he preferred working on Fords because it was a "family bizz-a-ness.") There was loose talk betw
een Stella and me, prior to Stella Jr.'s birth, about dropping the Ford surname for the authentic Gniech, partly to horrify my mother, but Stella Sr. couldn't help agreeing about the epic sneeze. ("Or an obscene Russian drinking toast," she added. "Stella Gniech!")

  When I held my daughter in my arms for the first time, naturally I broke down crying. She was so beautiful and small—a gorgeous pink speck of life. But I should also confess that I was drunk almost beyond recognition. I was working when Stella's water broke but she said it was okay, her mother was there, and since the labor would no doubt be long I could join her as soon as my shift was over. But the labor wasn't long and not two hours later her mother called the bar to announce the birth. Of course everybody bought me shots and there was a grand brouhaha with many more rounds of congratulatory shots and, as sometimes happens when you're drinking, time slipped away. All the regulars stayed past closing and Felix locked the doors and brought out some champagne, and Crazy Jane, slapping the bar, called for cognac which she pronounced "COG-nack." When I finally got to the hospital I was so brazenly sloshed that a policeman tried to stop me from entering but I said my new baby daughter was in there so he accompanied me up to the maternity ward. He was standing right beside me when I lifted Stella Jr. from the hospital crib, tears dribbling from my eyes, along with a nurse who hovered nearby with her hands splayed out to catch the baby if I dropped her. "Go home, Bennie," Stella's mother told me. A London-born professor of British lit at Pepperdine, she had this crisp way of speaking that made her every utterance sound like an arch dismissal; when she was truly dismissing you, it struck like lightning. "For God's sake take yourself home." Stella was asleep the whole time and I lightly kissed her forehead before the policeman escorted me outside. As I staggered off into the dark he advised me to put some sausage-biscuits in my belly, adding a shout of congratulations when I was almost too far away to hear.

  ***

  Dear American Airlines, enclosed please find my sciatic nerve. Due to the wear and tear on it from hours upon hours in this miserable fucking O'Hare seating—these patent-pending O'Chairs—I am sending it to you for speedy repair. A return envelope is also enclosed, which you may address to me care of the wheelchair bank across from Gate K8, Chicago, Ill.

  I'm not kidding about the wheelchairs. In fact, I'm planted in one right now. They're unattended and apparently freerange and since I saw some young buck lounging in another one, I figured what the hell. Obviously I promise to jump out at the first sight of a struggling cripple. They're actually the most comfortable spots in the airport save for the "Sleep Number" bed on display in the alleyway between the K and H concourses, which the young buck informs me is currently under siege. "Some dude offered the salesguy, like, two hundred bucks to let him sleep on it tonight," he told me. "Then some other dude anted up five hundred. There's, like, no hotel rooms in the whole freakin' city. They're totally gonna be fighting over that bed by midnight. God, that'd be awesome. The sales-guy looks freaked." I suggested that I might wheel myself over there and try to con some Samaritans into lifting me onto the bed, and then wait to see who'd actually try to evict a napping cripple. The kid loved this idea. "Dude," he said respectfully, "you're sick."

  I realize that the preceding explained almost nothing about my current predicament—nix that; our current predicament—and for that I apologize. "I'm getting there," as I sometimes tell editors inquiring about the pace of my translations. And I hope I'm not laying too much on you but for the first time in my life I'm trying to be honest, trying to set the record straight. You must understand that, at this point, running my life through the spin cycle isn't liable to do me any good. Self-mythologizing, like drinking for fourteen hours a day, will eventually grind you into residue. You look in the mirror one morning and realize: That face, this life, these weren't my intention. Who's that baggy-eyed motherfucker and how'd he get into my mirror? That said, I would've no doubt saved us both a lot of grief had I just claimed up front to be on my way to L.A. to donate my left kidney to a bedridden orphan named Tiny something-or-other. We could have bidden each other hello and farewell in the space of a single heartwarming page. Yeah, well. Yet another opportunity that I've pissed away with words.

  From my vantage in this wheelchair I can see the sunset through the windows. It's a brilliant, operatic one, flame-colored, with the planes cooking on the tarmac luminescent with orange glints. A postcard of hell as seen from purgatory. Or heaven, it's so hard to tell from here.

  ***

  But let's return to '79. I'll shoot for brevity, but as should be clear it's not my strong suit.

  My Stella was never the reckless sort—a birth-control pill snafu, rather than unguarded passion, had brought us to the present—but I was nonetheless surprised, once we were all home, by the degree of her protectiveness with Stella Jr., whom I called "Speck." Stella claimed I held her wrong, scolded me for tickling her because I might "upset her organs," asked me not to change her diapers anymore because I wasn't thorough enough with the wiping and sometimes forgot to dash her bottom with powder. Once I tried dancing with Speck—a clumsy little father-daughter two-step through the living room—and Stella leapt off the couch as if I'd been winding up my arm to toss Speck out the window. "You're going to hurt her," she said, stealing her away with an ironic roughness. She'd get the baby to sleep every night in the crib but after a few hours Speck would cry and Stella would carry her to our bed. At this point I would have to leave because Stella was worried I'd roll over and smother the baby, so after a few weeks I gave up trying and started making myself a bed on the couch on my nights off from the bar. It was lonely out in the living room, so I reverted to old habits by mixing consolatory batches of vodka-tonics. Because I knew Stella would be disturbed by the sight of empty Smirnoff fifths, I hid my empties behind the books in the bookcase and sneaked them out en masse when the Stellas were out walking or "making groceries" as we said in New Orleans.

  As to those groceries: Stella's parents were helping us financially and my own mother was intermittently generous (she thought it was poor taste to give money so she peppered the nursery with Steiff teddy bears and pewter rattles from Maison Blanche; all this while our television sat atop salvaged cinder blocks and we shared a single water glass). But money was still tight, so I picked up an extra shift at the Exchange after Bobby, who worked the choice Friday and Ladies' Night shifts, got pissed at Felix in the wee hours and knocked him to the floor with a fifth of Cluny Scotch.

  Which brings me to my own issue with violence at the bar. Some lawyers came in one evening—the neighborhood was changing, its fixer-upper houses and vegetarian, drum-circle vibe attracting what would later come to be called yuppies—and were sitting at the corner by the door getting rip-roaring drunk on gin martinis, which were then and there so unfashionable that I actually had to look up how to make one. Bona fide asshole types—the kind of guys still wearing their college ring at forty and telling you what channel they "need" the TV over the bar to be on. One of them was talking about a paralegal he'd recently "knocked up" and chortling about it, which elicited a caustic brag from another that he'd been to the abortion clinic so many times they'd given him a "Buy Ten, Get the Next One Free" card.

  I'd been drinking pretty hard—standard protocol behind the bar at the Exchange—and, to boot, a day earlier I'd had a rough row with Charles who'd called me a "washout" who should "stick to breeding" since that's where my true talents seemed to lie. All of which, I'm sure, colored my subsequent actions.

  I mixed the Buy-Ten-Get-One-Free guy what's known in the trade as a "cement mixer": a jigger of Bailey's Irish Cream paired with a jigger of lime juice. This combination produces a curdling-type reaction in the mouth, instantly transforming the liquids into a cheesy, semisolid wad. It's a folkloric cocktail for wreaking vengeance, not for drinking. Because they were all wearing swell neckties I even carefully layered it like a pousse café.

  "Compliments of the house, and appreciate y'all stopping in," I said, sliding it in fron
t of Buy-Ten then turning my back to him. I heard Buy-Ten say thanks and imagined him puffing up ever so slightly: Dig this, boys, I'm a hero of the loafing class. B. B. Mike was sitting down near that end of the bar and had witnessed the making of the drink with the quizzical, head-cocked look of a bewildered but ugly puppy. From his expression alone, as he watched Buy-Ten throw it back, I rightly determined the impact of my cement mixer, but the sound effects were equally suggestive: a gurgling-gargling, a gasping for air, followed by a resounding and spitty What the fuck?!? When I turned around, Buy-Ten's tongue was hanging limply from his mouth and his tie was marbled with cum-like streaks of curdled Irish liqueur. I could probably have weaseled my way out of the situation at that point—truth be told, I was feeling almost sorry for the guy—had B. B. Mike, a short, stout cigar-chomper who was a dead ringer for Paulie in the Rocky movies, not launched into the largest, longest laugh of his life. His cap tipped backwards off his head and I believe he even held his chest with one hand while pointing with the other. I had no idea that shrieks such as those could emanate from a man such as that. Nor had I any idea that a trio of Uptown lawyers would scramble over a bar to kick the living shit out of an errant bartender. (At the time, I suppose I thought they took priest-like vows.)