The Moth (43 page)

And traveling is hard. It’s stressful, and people get ugly. I tried really hard to keep that vision and to smile and be kind, even in the face of meanness.

But I hit bottom one day when I had a passenger who had a heart attack on my flight. He was lying in the aisle, and we had opened his shirt and had the pads of the defibrillator on him. I was holding an oxygen bottle.

And this woman in the row sitting next to me kept tugging on my blouse: “Excuse me. Excuse me!”

I was like, “Just a minute, please. We’re trying to save this guy’s life.”

She kept tugging and tugging, and I said, “Just a minute! JUST A MINUTE!”

And then I thought:
Wait a minute. Maybe
she
has an emergency, or maybe she knows something.

So I said, “What is it?”

And she held up her coffee cup and said, “This coffee is cold.”

And I learned that
people
can be cold.

There’s also something that happens to your psychology because you see the world from above when you fly a lot. And I saw a lot of really horrible things from the air, like devastating California forest fires, New Orleans under water, and most upsetting for me, lower Manhattan smoldering for weeks and weeks.

And in late September of 2001, I was working a flight, and a passenger came on with a garbage bag, which is kind of a flight attendant pet peeve, because, “Really, sir, a garbage bag? Fourteenth Street, $9.99. Get a roll-aboard.” You know? But you see that. Sometimes people just throw things in a garbage bag and bring it on.

So he goes to row two, which is where he was seated, and he opened the overhead bin and put the garbage bag in.

And my next thought was:
What’s in that garbage bag?
Because in late September of ’01, we were all still a little edgy and paranoid, so I was kind of keeping my eye on him and the bag. And he put it in the overhead bin and closed the bin and stood there with his hand on it, guarding it.

Which is another flight attendant pet peeve. The overhead bins are shared space, okay? And if you hog up all the space, somebody’s bag is gonna get checked. And by the way, if you’re in row twelve, please don’t leave your bag in row one.
It’s not nice.
You’re taking somebody’s space.

So my instinct was to go up to this man and say, “Sir, please sit down.”

But I thought:
Just let it go. Just smile and be kind, and if we need the space, I’ll deal with it later.
So I didn’t say anything.

I also didn’t say anything when he got up while the seat belt sign was on and came and stood, waiting for the bathroom. If the seat belt sign is on, it’s because the captain knows something we don’t know, okay? And it might not feel bumpy, but he’s
probably heard from an airplane further out that there’s turbulence ahead. I have a friend who broke his ankle on the ceiling on a smooth flight. So that’s another flight attendant pet peeve.

He stood there, waiting for the bathroom, and I said, “Sir, the seat belt sign is on.”

He said, “I know, I know, but I really need to go.”

And again I thought:
Let it go. Just let it go.

I was sitting on the jump seat, and it was kinda awkward because he was just standing there, and I felt like I should say something.

So I said, “Are you traveling for business or pleasure?”

And he said, “Neither. I live in California, but I came to New York because my son was a first responder at Ground Zero, and he died there. I came to pick up his uniform, which is all I have of him, and it’s in a bag in the overhead bin.”

And I remembered why I was there, and why I was hired and why I wanted that job. Because I remembered that everybody has a story, and I don’t know what that story is. People fly for a reason. Maybe they’re going to a funeral or to see someone who’s sick, or maybe it’s something joyful, like a wedding. I don’t know what their story is, but for that little piece of time, I’m a part of it, and I have an impact on their experience.

And what I love about performing is taking a group of individuals and, through a shared emotional experience, turning it into a collective. But my job as a flight attendant is to take a
collective
and to turn it
back
into a group of individuals.

Flight attendants talk about “crowds” sometimes, like, “Avoid the Fort Lauderdale crowd. They’re horrible,” or “Avoid the Long Beach crowd.”

But every crowd is a group of individuals, and every individual has a story. And yeah, I saw a lot of horrible things from
the air. But I’ve also seen a lot of amazing, beautiful things from the air, like the Grand Canyon, the Northern Lights, fireworks
from above
.

And now when I go through the cabin with my garbage bag, saying “thank you” and smiling, I mean it, because I’m making a gratitude list in my head. And every time I say, “thank you,” I think of something I’m grateful for:

“Thank you” (for my job). “Thank you” (for these comfy shoes). “Thank you” (for my life). Because my job enables me to be part of something bigger than me, and to be connected to other people, like this. So thank you.

Faye Lane
is a writer and performer whose unique blending of story and song moved
New York Magazine
to gush, “She had them gobbling from the palm of her hand. They were howling, crying, falling in love with her.” Her critically acclaimed solo show,
Faye Lane’s Beauty Shop Stories
, a chronicle of her childhood in a Texas beauty salon, was born on the Moth stage and was the recipient of the 2010 Overall Excellence Award from the New York International Fringe Festival, the 2011 Bistro Award for Best Musical Comedy, and the 2011 MAC Award for Outstanding Special Production. The show has an ongoing residency at the legendary SoHo Playhouse in New York and has touched audiences across the country and around the world. Winner of The Moth StorySLAM in both New York and Los Angeles, Faye is a frequent contributor to
The Moth Radio Hour
and Mainstage. In addition to touring with her solo show, Faye uses storytelling as the basis for corporate motivational presentations and writing and performing workshops. For more information, please visit www.FayeLane.com.

MIKE DESTEFANO

W
hen I was a kid, I wanted to get a Harley really bad. I was about seven, and I was in my dad’s car in the back, and these dudes were driving by on these Harleys.

I remember looking at them, and thinking,
I want to do that, man, you know? I want to be free like those guys.

And I then started doing heroin a few years later, so I couldn’t really get a bike. I couldn’t get toothpaste and shit, you know, let alone a $15,000 motorcycle.

When I was eighteen my parents found me in the house, overdosed, almost dead. They took me to a hospital, and then they took me to a detox, and then to a rehab.

When I was in the rehab, I met Fran. She was a beautiful, beautiful girl. The first time I saw her, I was just, like, wow—amazed. And we became really close, and we went through the rehab. She had been there a long time before me, and she was finishing up, and then I finished, and we started dating.

And life was pretty good, you know? It was hard to get off of heroin, but I was able to do it. I went to college, and Franny and I were together and dating and just having a good time.

One day she had a really bad fever. I took her to the hospital, and twelve hours later they said that she had pneumocystic pneumonia. I didn’t know what it was. They said it was from AIDS. I didn’t know what to do. I loved her, and I wanted to be with her.

New York got her sick a lot. She’d cough a lot and had bronchitis all the time, so we moved to Florida. Like when old people move down there. We went down to retire. I figured that we would live as much as we could. I just wanted to make her life the greatest life.

We got married. We used to go out for dinners and stuff. She wanted to go out, I would take her out. She’d have her oxygen tank with her, and I’d take her to a restaurant, and I’d look around and I’d see another couple with the husband taking care of the wife. But they were eighty, you know? We were twenty.

I thought the warm air down there would help her heal and feel better, but it didn’t. She went into the hospital one night, and the next morning the doctor told me that she had pneumonia again, they couldn’t really cure it, and she might have a few weeks to live.

I was devastated, and she was devastated. They put her in hospice. But two weeks later, they sent her out of the hospice because she started to get better.

She was thrown out of hospice for not dying.

Only she could have pulled that off. She was a young Italian girl, and she was not interested in suffering and dying. Like, who is? But she was extra not fucking into it.

A few weeks later, she got sick again. I took her back to the hospital. They put her in.

Doctor told me the same thing: “A few weeks, and she’s gonna be gone.”

So they put her back in hospice. A month and a half later, they sent her home again. Our families—my parents, her parents—were happy about it.
Oh, she’s gonna be better.

But I knew how the story was gonna end.

A few weeks later, she ends up back in the hospital. And on Thursday of that week, my motorcycle—my Harley-Davidson—was ready to be picked up. So I went that Thursday to get the bike. And it was beautiful. She was in the hospital, and I got a call that she went back to hospice. So I drove the bike over to the hospice, and I didn’t know what to do. Should I show her the bike? What the fuck do you do?

I brought the bike out front, and I went into the room, and I said, “Franny, I want to show you something,” and I brought her outside and showed her the bike.

And she was mad.

She was like, “What the fuck is that?” I brought it to her ’cause it was our dream together, and she was still very important to me, and I just thought that would make her happy. But it didn’t.

So the social worker came over to me and said, “Mike, people are never dying. They
live
and then they
die
. And dying is in a moment. She feels that you’re treating her as if she’s dying, and you don’t need her anymore. You don’t love her anymore.”

That wasn’t the truth. I told her every day. But I went home, and I came back to the hospice, and I brought a few of my work shirts with me because she loved ironing for me.

I came back a couple hours later, and my shirts were all ironed, and she was walking around the hospice, dusting, like she would clean the place up. She was on a lot of morphine and—some of you that never did it—it’s wonderful. It makes you feel excited about things.

So she saw me, and she’s like, “Where’s the bike?” Everything I wanted her to feel in the beginning, she now felt. Because I asked her to iron my clothes.

And I said, “It’s outside. Let’s go see,” and I took her out.

She said, “Let me sit on it.” So I put her on it.

And then she said, “Can you start it up?”

So I start the bike up, and it’s rumbling. It was a loud bike. It was gorgeous.

And then she says, “Well, can you just take me for a little ride? Just around the parking lot here?”

And I’m like,
Fuck.

I’m thinking she’s gonna fall off the back, and I’m gonna have to tell her family,
Yeah, she almost died of AIDS. But then I killed her on my bike.

So now we’re riding around the hospice, and she’s got the morphine pole dragging next to her.

And we’re junkies, you know? We were different. We were fucking freaks. People crossed the street when they saw me. And her. She was a
prostitute
. She was a fucking drug addict. I mean all the shit that—you know what I’m talking about, some of you—I can tell.

So this was amazing, you know? We’re riding around this hospice with this morphine pole fucking dangling. And all the staff comes out, and they’re watching us, and they’re cheering us on.

And then I hear the pole fall. And I think she fell off the back, but, no, she unhooked the morphine bag, which means, “I want to go out on the street a little bit.”

So I take her out on the street a little bit. And then she just put her arm around my belly and started rubbing, and she said, “Can we go on the highway?”

And I thought of all that we’d been through and all the suffering.

And I said, “Yeah, we could do that.”

So we got on I-95. And I had it up to eighty. And she was just screaming with happiness. Morphine bag was flapping over her head.

And that wind—I always imagined the wind on a bike making you feel free, you know? It’s so powerful. And for ten minutes we were normal, and that wind just blew all the death off of us.

I promised her when she died that for the rest of my life I was gonna live for her. I mean,
really live
.

But nothing I’ll ever do will ever be that grand again.

Mike DeStefano
was a stand-up comic who overcame personal torment and drug addiction to become a regular at all the top clubs in New York City. He could be heard on Sirius Satellite Radio, and appeared on numerous television networks including Comedy Central, Showtime, and NBC. He was a featured comic at both HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal.
Time Out New York
called him a “Must-see… gruff, candid, and unflinching.” His one-man show,
A Cherry Tree in the Bronx
, opened to critical acclaim. Mike died of a heart attack on May 6, 2011, at the age of forty-four. A documentary celebrating his life is in the works—about how Mike found the ability to rise from addiction, look himself in the mirror, and laugh at his pain in front of the whole world, and show those who are still suffering that they can always recover, and when they do, they can do great things. Learn more at www.mikedestefanomovie.com.