Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (9 page)

We were on our way to the insect zoo at the Natural History
Museum because my girl loves insects-the bigger the better-and
spiders, too. At home I'm forbidden from killing spiders, all of which she has named. She
can hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach
in her hand like it was a little pet. She'll
giggle about how all its hundred little
cockroach legs tickle, while I try to
muster the super strength to keep my
skeleton from ripping itself free from
my skin and scuttling into the corner
where it wants to cower in repulsion. But
Milly wants to be an entomologist, and when
your child, who is barely out of kindergarten, tells you she wants to be
something, especially if it's something you yourself have to look up in
the dictionary, then you better muster up some flight benefits and get
your insect-phobic ass on the ball to steer her where she needs to go.

The insect zoo was for my sake as well as hers, because she already
knows way more about them than I do, so I was hoping I could bone
up on insect awareness while the insect-zoo "handler" deposited all
these massive specimens into my child's hand. At one point I turned
to see her holding a grasshopper bigger than a bird and more colorful
than a tropical sunset. "It's luminescent," Milly said, and I thought, Jesus God! Where did she get that word? Then I remembered I'd used it
to describe to her a large opal ring in the display window of a jewelry
store once, and damn if that grasshopper didn't look exactly like it
had been painted with about a million miniscule opal stones. I almost
wanted to touch it myself after that.

Later, while walking back to the hotel, we stopped at the cafe in
the sculpture garden, and as I fortified myself with liquid for the trek
through desert heat, Milly passed her purple bunny around to the other
patrons, bestowing on them each their individual
super powers. She announced proudly that her
own super power was the ability to become
invisible, and to prove it she asked us to
close our eyes for a few seconds, which
we sort of did, and then when we opened
them she was gone. "Do you see me?" we
could hear her ask from behind the Lichtenstein, which prompted us to exclaim to
each other very loudly, "I hear her, but I don't
see her! How amazing!" And then she would ask
us to close our eyes again, and when we opened them, there she was
again. Amazing!

Later, when the other people had gone and it was just me and
my girl, she looked up at me and informed me that she was going to
demonstrate her super power right there in my lap. "Close your eyes
again," she said, and I did. "Now open them," she said, and I did.
"Am I fading?" she asked. "Am I disappearing?"

Just then-looking at her lovely face, at her eyes so large I could
see in them the life I almost had without her, how less luminescent
that life would have been, her eyes so big and beautiful and unbearable-all of a sudden I was desperate with hope that my super power
would come to me immediately. I need all the strength I can get.
Because she is right. She is disappearing. My little girl is disappearing
before my eyes.

I REMEMBER THE PRECISE MOMENT my father's heart stopped beating.
I was in a small aircraft over Orange County, a four-seater Cessna
that was getting tossed in a storm like a bathtub toy in a Jacuzzi. My
roommate John sat next to me, a pound of cocaine between us, and
he behaved surprisingly pussy-like for a pusher. He put his head in my
lap and cried the whole way, certain we were bound to die horribly.
I was certain we would not, but I didn't like him much so I let him
cry uncorrected. When the clouds cleared, I remember looking at the
lighted landscape below and thinking the formation reminded me of
a skull. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if that meant something?
Weeks earlier, on my academic calendar hanging on the wall at home,
I'd drawn the image of a skull on this very day, in anticipation for a
scheduled biology test I was certain I'd fail. In the end I skipped the
test and hopped that impromptu plane ride to Los Angeles with my
drug dealer roommate instead.

It hurts my heart to think about that, just like it does to think of
Daniel's heart hooked up to wires like a coma patient. Mind you, I
have no idea if coma patients are commonly hooked up to wires; it just
seems like they should be, you know, in case their heart stops beating
or something. I have actually been near someone whose heart stopped
beating once, someone who was not in a coma, someone who was just
standing there in the aisle of an aircraft, and you would not believe the
ruckus a person can make when that happens. They flail around and
flop on the ground and knock things over, and it's pretty obvious to everyone around them that something is wrong. They certainly don't
need a wire hooked up to them to alert others at that point, whereas if
they were in a coma, now, they would probably not flop very much at
all. Their heart could just stop with hardly anyone noticing.

Hence the necessity for wires. Ever since Daniel was diagnosed
with HIV a few years ago, I have been offering to fill his prescriptions
on my layovers in Peru and on my visits to my sister in Nicaragua. I
have also offered to go to support groups with him, but he walked out
halfway through the one and only session he ever attended and refuses
to go back. "Too negative," he'd said, which I found ironic, since the
point was to be positive about being positive. But in the end, whatever
Daniel is doing seems to be working, because to be with him you'd
think his condition wasn't an issue. But then there comes something
to make it crash to the forefront. Like his recently being hooked up
to wires.

All I can do is ask him if he needs anything, and it's rare when he
says he does. Lately I've been swapping my trips to Frankfurt in order to
work the flight to Peru instead, where the pharmacy is right next door
to our layover hotel. Normally, as a German interpreter, I would never
work a flight to Central America. But things change. For one, these days
the airplane nightmares hardly bother me at all anymore. I started having the dreams years before the airlines hired me, which is a fact I never
really calculated until I was sitting there in the job interview. "Do you
suffer from recurring dreams?" the interviewer asked me.

"None whatsoever," I said, realizing it had been eight years since
I'd slept soundly without the aid of alcohol, sex, and/or narcotics. But I comforted myself with the realization that technically the dreams
weren't really recurring-were they?-as the dreams were always different; it was just their theme that was the same, the general topic
being a plane falling from the sky with me either in it or on it or under
it. That's all.

"That is what we'd call `recurring,"' said Daniel.

Thanks to an industry perk called buddy passes, Daniel sometimes gets to go with me on my drug-running exertions. He was with
me that time the pilots aborted landing while we were flying home
and I practically cut off his air supply, I was clinging to him so tight.
Screaming, too, and you'd be surprised at how people just take screaming in stride on an aircraft. I personally think it ought to draw more
attention, but I'm glad it didn't in this case. I might have been recognized later while in my uniform serving some of these same people on
their connecting flights.

"You're gonna be fine," Daniel kept telling me, but not loud
enough for me to really hear him over the loss of my own sanity. I
seriously hate aborted landings more than almost any other cockpit
mess-up I can think of. When your plane is within a few hundred feet
of the ground and then, rather than land, it takes off again, it upsets
the entire delicate ecosystem of comings and goings put into place by
the control tower, because suddenly a plane that's supposed to be on
the ground is thrust back into the rotation instead, which requires
tons of frantic repositioning of other planes up there to make room.
Every time I'm on a plane that aborts landing, it's all I can do to keep
from shrieking like a fishwife.

"Shut up, bitch," Daniel tried to tell me. "Did you not hear me
say you're gonna be fine?"

I did not hear him. I was too busy envisioning midair collisions
and my pancreas impaled on a patio umbrella. I was already mocking the God of crappy luck just by being on an AeroMexico flight to
begin with after I'd sworn to boycott them because of that crash in
Mexico City in the '70s. But then Daniel got sick and the crap-ass
place where he works won't provide him decent medical coverage and
AeroMexico has the unique quality of covering more Latin American
routes than my airline while honoring my pass-rider status. So I give
Daniel my buddy passes and we make these side trips together because
pharmaceuticals are so much cheaper down there, plus if you get the
right pharmacist he is not picky about prescriptions, which can be a
pesky detail.

"You're gonna be fine," I keep telling him. "We should go to Peru
next, because you can buy bootleg movies there for a buck. And we
have not even begun to tap our Nicaragua connection yet."

We finally got on the ground after the aborted landing that scared
the holy hell out of me, and Daniel was rubbing his fingers because I
had mutilated his hand by squeezing it so hard. "Look at this, I've got
a lobster claw," he complained.

"Shut up, bitch," I said. "Did you not hear me say you're gonna
be fine?"

I teased him that this is proof he'd do anything for attention.
"Always fucking grabbing the fucking spotlight, fucker." I said,
because I tend to spout profanities even more than usual when I am heartbroken. For example, the day my brother-in-law Eddie called to
tell me my little niece almost got crushed by a roll-away car, her little
liver lacerated by her own ribs, all I could do as I flew to the Phoenix hospital where she'd been airlifted was sit in my seat, clutch my
head, and whisper, "Shit. Shit. Shit." The other flight attendants patted me on the shoulder, insisted I drink some water, and told me my
"nephew" would be fine, that God would take care of him. Since all I
could do was cry and cuss, I never told them it was my niece, actually,
who was hurt and it was God, actually, I held to blame. Soothed by
their voices, though, I let them speak uncorrected.

Regarding Daniel, I try not to act like it's any big deal, his condition, but sometimes it hits me all of a sudden, the probability, and I
am frozen for a bit. I swear my own heart stops when I think about it,
so I try not to too much. But when he is joking about his wires, like
how he's going to take them off himself and put them on his fat house
cat, jenny, and let the doctors decipher that, the panic creeps in and
I just can't bear it. "You goddamn pussy," I respond loudly, laughing
loudly. Everything loudly, as I have inner sounds of my own to drown
out, like the sound of that Cessna engine so long ago.

"Doesn't that look like a skull to you?" I gleefully tormented
John, pointing out the window of the plane. "Look, the sign of death.
Could it be a bigger sign?" I smiled inwardly as John whimpered and
the plane continued to lurch. Since then I've been on over a thousand
flights, and this one still marks the most turbulent. It also marks the
last time I was unafraid to fly.