The Rock Star in Seat 3A: A Novel

by Jill Kargman

  Trying to swallow hard as the plane jostled back and forth, up and down, with my free right hand I leafed past the magazines in the seat pocket in front of me and retrieved the dreaded barf bag. I’d never used one, except when I held it open for Kira on a flight to Colorado during one of her pregnancies. But from what I could hear around me—gagging sounds of upchucked chunder—I was not alone in my gut-gripping nausea.

  The next thing I knew, Finn had his hand on my rounded back, gently moving it up and down. “Just breathe,” he said in his trademark whisper. I could not fucking DEAL this was too insane. I felt the bottom half of my being melt into the cheesily upholstered taupe pleather airplane chair. Never had a body been through so much at the exact same moment—a tsunami of hormones for both sex and fear. Talk about Eros and Thanatos. During college I’d written a paper on sex and death enmeshed in paintings. Now I was coloring a canvas of my own as the man who personally brewed the potent teenage tea of my sexual fantasies had his hand on me when I was just seconds from my fate.

  “Oh my god, I am so sick. I—”

  Horrifyingly, an unstoppable wave of chunder was unleashed by my esophageal passageway and I hurled violently into the bag. Like, full-body racking with vom. Right there, with Spin magazine cover boy next to me. I envisioned a Stand by Me chain reaction barf-o-rama where the whole plane would deliver pavement pizzas because of a whiff of my toxic taco-tossage. I suddenly recalled, as my cool fourth-grade English teacher Miss Morse pointed out, you can always remember the word embarrassed is spelled with two s’s because when you feel embarrassed it’s as if your ass is hanging out. Okay, so my butt wasn’t exposed but my breakfast certainly was. And just when I was dying of mortification so intense I thought Brad Pitt-as-Death-personified-in-that-horrendous-movie would pluck me then and there before crashing our plane, I felt Finn’s fingers on my hair, delicately pulling it back into a ponytail, held together by his encircling hand. A hand that had held Grammy awards for chrissake.

  “I’m so sorry,” I managed to squeak out between pants of agony. “This is so gross I’m so horrified.”

  “Shhhh,” he soothed me, rubbing my back as it racked with a new wellspring of Au Bon Vomit. “It’s okay, little witch. Get it all out.”

  The plane took another massive plummet as voices from all thirty-seven rows let out screams and cries, with a rising tide of vocal whimpers filling the space.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Lord here again—”

  “I love it, his name is synonymous with God,” Finn said.

  “Looks like we are almost through the worst of it, another few minutes to go, hang in there. I must say, this is the worst turbulence I’ve seen in my career.”

  How comforting! Thanks, Cap’n.

  I shot Finn a look. “Yeah, his five-minute-long career.”

  “Stay put, I’m gonna get you some water.”

  “It’s okay, really, they’re gonna freak if you stand up—”

  He stood up. He gripped the tops of the seats and planted his legs as he stepped up the aisle of the plane. Trixie flight attendant was strapped into her gimp seat and began to shout at him. “SIR! SIT DOWN NOW!” she yelled, prompting every passenger within earshot to crane their necks.

  “She needs water. She’s really sick,” he said.

  Lancelot, thou art not armor-clad but in a steel-hued T-shirt. My stomach was in shambles as was my arrow-speared heart.

  “I SAID SIT DOWN!” she bellowed. “SIDDOWN!” Clearly the blond bouffanted Carrie Underwood–listening Georgia peach had no clue who the fuck she was talking to.

  Ignoring her, Finn reached into the galley and grabbed a bottle of Poland Spring and made his way back to row three, despite country-fair-style Pirate Ship rocking. He sat next to me, unscrewing the cap, and handed me the bottle. It was such relief to get the putrid taste from my mouth. Slowly, the pitch of the plane’s torturous free-fall descents decreased. I breathed as if breaking through the finish line of a marathon. Through the Alps.

  “It’s over now,” he said, taking the bottle from my shaking hand and putting the top on. He continued with his puke-ponytail to gather the hair from my quivering lips.

  “It’s okay. Looks like we made it.”

  Chapter 9

  In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

  —Nora Ephron

  After a few minutes of steadying my breath and decompressing, I exhaled a slow, long sigh and met Finn’s ice blue eyes.

  “Oh my god, thank you so much, you’re an angel.”

  “Nah, that I ain’t. I lost my halo a loooong time ago. I’ve had a lifetime of being less-than-good, and it’s disappeared and irreplaceable, I’m afraid. I filled out all the necessary paperwork and everything and they said it was gone for good.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re not so bad,” I said with a knowing smirk.

  “How do you know?” he asked with a sexily arched brow. As he leaned in, his motorcycle jacket made that delicious sound of grinding leather. I thought I would pass out.

  “I just know. From the music. You know, yes, there is this incredibly passionate violent side, but it’s infused with romanticism as well, the lyrics, the aesthetic of the videos. I have always loved things that are both romantic and violent at the same time,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I guess to me your albums pretty much embody that idea.”

  He sat, staring at me. Then the grinding leather again as he leaned back. He looked at me silently, as if his interest were suddenly piqued by something I said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Hazel.”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Lavery.”

  “How do you know so much, Miss Hazel Lavery?”

  “I don’t.” I shrugged. “I mean, I don’t know. I just know that when I was told under penalty of being Tasered upon arrival and shoved into Airport Jail by Trixie the once-perky flight attendant if I so much as attempted to hit the lavatory and was compelled to then vomit in front of a world-renowned rock star, well, I just know that you were . . . incredibly sweet about it all. I’m really grateful. I was bent over chundering and not only did you not freak, you helped me. I’m sure most girls around you are bending down for other reasons,” I said with a slight diss to his fellatrix groupies.

  He burst out laughing.

  “You have zero edit button and I fuckin’ dig it.” He smiled wickedly.

  We talked for the next few hours—skipping lunch and movies, just gabbing. About everything. EVERYTHING: childhood, music, movies, fears, foods. There was something so surreal yet also so comfortable and normal about it. There were some things I already knew (where he grew up, that he was orphaned at nine by a tragic car accident and raised by his great-aunt) and some unexpected revelations (“I’m a Tim Burton fanatic,” “I have an egg and cheese on toast for breakfast three hundred sixty-five days a year”), but the key was seeing the glint in his eyes as he told me aspects of his life and travels that one simply can’t pick up in The Rolling Stone Interview.

  “I used to live in Chicago,” he said. (Yeah, I know—he famously bought an old funeral home and made a studio downstairs where they had drained the bodies. Good times.) “That was the nadir of my life. I mean, aside from when my parents died, but I was into some dark shit there.”

  “What, like drugs?” I probed.

  “Like drugs, yeah, bad people, bad stuff.”

  I took that to mean whores but wasn’t quite sure.

  “I’m picturing full-raging bacchanalia of wine, women, and song, slash sadistic orgies,” I said.

  He smiled, and I detected a note of embarrassment. Bingo. “You’re not too far off.”

  The good thing about my Wylie is that I knew exactly where he’d been. He’d literally had enough sex partners to count on one hand, and this one clearly had en
ough notches on his headboard to render the whole bed sawdust.

  “Are we talking like full Pulp Fiction leather gimp outfit with zipper mouth?” I asked while casually sipping water.

  “No, actually. People always think I’m some masochist because of my videos, but that’s all my director’s vision. Romanek is amazing. The music has a tortured edge, I’ll admit. But that doesn’t mean I want to be tortured. Physically.”

  “Oh, good. You don’t want to end up like Michael Hutchence, dangling from a noose with your ween out. You can have a million Billboard hits but then people will just talk about how you croaked with your schwantz at large.”

  “I’ve actually never tried autoerotic asphyxiation,” he confessed. “I don’t think it’s for me.”

  “Really?!” I hammed it up. “No strangling mid-’gasm! Boo! You big bore. What kind of fucking rock star are you?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not that innocent.”

  “Okay, Britney.”

  He smiled and looked at me. “I’m serious. I may be too old to plunge on the dark side for too long like I used to, but I . . . I’m still no angel, let’s put it that way.”

  “You know what I think?” I asked.

  “What’s that.”

  “You know on the SATs that comparisons section? Dog is to Puppy as Cat is to Kitten?” Wait, why the fuck did I mention SATs? It’s not like he took them or anything. Right?

  “Sure.”

  Weird, as I couldn’t picture him filling in those torturous bubbles.

  “They do those on Conan,” he added. Ah-ha.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, I think that the Tin Man is to a heart as you are to a halo.”

  “Oh yeah?” he scoffed.

  “Yeah. It was there all along. You think it’s so MIA, but maybe you just didn’t see it, with your whole badass tough cookie schtick. But I say it’s there.”

  His eyes flashed as he looked down at his lap.

  “Interesting,” he said to me curiously. “You’re a perceptive girl.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed. But also as if to say, hellz, yeah.

  Not to be cocky, I mean, I wasn’t better than anyone, and I certainly was outdone in smarts and looks by a myriad of women, but not the women he probably hung with. In fact I suspected I was the first non-G-string wearer in his presence in years. I may not be nearly as smokin’ as them, but I most certainly was with-it, probably more than most girls he spent time beside. Or on.

  “I’m special, special, so special, special!” I Chrissie Hynde-ed, mocking my props from my idol, which I couldn’t accept gracefully.

  “You are.” He laughed.

  “At least there’s no one I know who’d barf inches from a rock star and then talk to him. Most people would pretend there’s something really interesting about those cloud formations and keep their neck permanently turned to the window until disembarking before flopping dead of humiliation on the baggage carousel. Just you wait, I’ll be in a chalk outline going around and around next to the Rollaboard explosion.”

  “You’re definitely different,” he mused. “Why do you think?”

  I felt myself perspire a bit.

  “I don’t know. Planes are weird. It’s like this passing intersection of people. You climb on this machine together and float up above the earth, above your real life and the people that make it what it is,” I said. “We’re in this metal pod and so I guess I leave all my issues, including intimidation by major celebs, on the ground. I never would have started talking to you at a party or in the stool next to me at a bar, I guess. Basically my vomit broke the ice.”

  He held up his juice to my water bottle.

  “To your vomit.”

  I laughed and clinked plastic. “And to your breaking FAA laws by procuring water to rinse said vomit.”

  “Where did you come from?” he asked, almost rhetorically, like perhaps I hailed from Mars.

  “Sixty-first Street.”

  He ran a hand through his hair.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Lord from the flight deck and it looks like we are getting clearance to land, and we should be on the ground in about fifteen minutes. In my many years in the cockpit, I must say this was the worst weather I’ve endured, and the whole crew and I are very grateful for your patience and bravery during that turbulence. We truly appreciate it. Flight attendants please prepare for landing.”

  As we put our seatbacks up, we were reminded the contents of the overheads may have shifted during takeoff and landing . . . and, ahem, during the flight, given the tornadolike salad tossing in which we felt about as weighty as a crouton. Finn continued to look my way as I zipped my belongings up and braced for landing, which was smooth in comparison to our death-grazing free fall over John Cougar Mellencamp–land.

  “We did it,” Finn said, smiling.

  “Would it be bizarre if I kissed the floor at LAX?”

  “The tarmac might be cleaner.” He smiled.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if I survived this and then died on the freeway?”

  “God forbid!” he said, alarmed.

  “I thought you sang ‘God Is Dead’?”

  “How the fuck do I know? I make this shit up as I go along.” He laughed. “Just don’t joke about biting it, Hazel Lavery. The world needs you to stick around a while longer, K?”

  “Okay,” I said, getting up to begin filing to the plane’s exit. “Well, thanks again. I really think you are the reason I survived and didn’t have a complete coronary.” Little did he know his presence also spiked my blood pressure, but that was beside the point.

  “Nonsense, Lioness. You had the courage all along.”

  Touché.

  Fuck, he was so gorgeous I wanted to touché him. As I felt my heart and libido tug, I shook my head like a cartoon trying to shake that water mirage in the desert. Boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend. Amazing one whom you adore.

  “How’re you feeling now?” he asked, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “Uh, so-so.” Lies. I was electrified. There must’ve been a hand-shaped sunburn mark where his paw touched.

  “Feel better.” He smiled. “Here we go.”

  Trixie opened the cabin door, and as first classers we were off before the hordes of socks- and sandal-wearing plebeians, i.e., me usually. We walked off the jetway, me right behind him. Finn was pulling a small suitcase on wheels, and I just had my tote, as my duffel was checked through. As I saw him head to the departures door, where he obviously had someone waiting for him, circumventing the conveyor belt–seeking drones, he quickly turned around to look for me.

  “I’m headed this way,” he said. “Bye, Hazel,”

  “Bye! Sorry we didn’t meet under less vomitorious circumstances.”

  “No problem, really.”

  And that was that.

  I exhaled, and seven hours of stress, emotion, and shock wheezed their way through my weary lungs. I reached into my pocket to turn on my cell and found not one not two but seven texts from Kira freaking about Finn, and one from Wylie asking me to text him when I landed and sending me xoxos. I quickly texted him back I was safe ’n’ sound on terra firma in California and then clicked to dial Kira.

  “Holy shit,” she answered, clearly seeing my digits on caller ID. “TALK!”

  “I know. Ki, I’m dying. DYING! We literally gabbed for five hours. I barfed in front of him, he patted my back and moved my hair—”

  “Wait, WHAT?! You puked?”

  “It was the worst flight in the pilot’s history and everyone was screaming and chundering. It was the apocalypse. You don’t understand, he—”

  “Hazel!” I heard yelled from behind me. I turned around.

  It was HIM, calling me from across the baggage claim carousel.

  “Oh my god, is that him?” Kira gasped on the phone. “H
oly fucking fuck—”

  “I’ll call you back.” I hung up the phone and swiveled, as if on air.

  “Hi,” I said, walking over. The carousel beeped, alerting us it was going to start barfing out our bags. Finn met me halfway.

  “Hazel, I have a car here and some lunch. You’ve had a long morning. Why don’t you let me take you to your hotel.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Just say yes.”

  “Yes . . .” I looked at the belt, not wanting to keep a huge fucking world-renowned rock star waiting. “Oh, here’s my bag!” Great. “Benefits of a first-class ticket.”

  Without a word, a tall guy in jeans and a white tee, covered in tattoos, reached over me and grabbed my fabulous vintage army duffel. To me it was chicer than any logo or zippered bells and whistles. The faded gray LAVERY was the only name I needed.

  “It was my grandfather’s,” I said to Finn.

  “It’s amazing.” He nodded. “This is Sly. Sly, Hazel.”

  “Hey,” he replied. He shook my hand with his left hand as he slung my enormous bag over his shoulder as if it were stuffed with feathers. He walked ahead of us.

  “The car’s out this way.” Finn smiled as I looked up at him. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 10

  I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long.

  If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.

  —Calvin and Hobbes

  Aside from our flight, there is little that is more nauseating than the hyperbola-shaped rocky waters of guilt. I was lilting over each booming crest as if I might capsize, but the elation of my ride with Finn got me past the fact that I was emotionally cheating on Wylie by suppressing every desire to dive across the armrest and rape Finn like those shameless midwestern teens shrieking for the Jonas Brothers to deflower them. Okay . . . this was normal. Healthy, even? Maybe? After all it was my fantasy come to life. And hey, it was all good fun, a pity ride for the poor pukey beeyotch he’d bonded with on the flight, and I’d never see him again, anyway.