Scenes From A Plane Trip
24 November 2010: It’s the anniversary of Freddie Mercury’s death. I never met the guy but I miss him a lot anyway. It’s that time of year; to absent friends.
It’s a mystery, all the people who talk to me; I don’t have a friendly face. I don’t have an actively un-friendly face, but in pictures taken of me as a child, before I’d learned to affect a mid-joy rictus in anticipation of the flash, I look very serious, like I’m contemplating something complicated or depressing and can’t pretend otherwise. It’s not a hostile countenance, but it’s not welcoming either.
And yet, people talk to me, inevitably, and I wonder what it is about my face, what they see in my down-going brows that tells them, Whatever the story is you’ve got on that plate, I’ll take a piece.
Because I will take a piece. The drivers, I think, it’s boredom — sitting on the BQE, sitting on the QEW, listening to the radio or to the same side of the same dull-witted cell-phone conversation or to the fffssshhh of tires on snow for a hundred rush hours in a row, waiting for the light to change beside a Dunkin Donuts sign and how that sign against a cloudy dawn sky can make the happiest morning of your life look like Detroit with a hangover, and it’s like, the big brunette wants to talk about the merits of the Battery Tunnel shortcut, well, what the hell, it passes the time.
Or maybe it’s relief. I’ve had that job — not driving a cab, but that kind of job where the fact of the job itself, that it is that job you do, on purpose, is so alien to the people you come into contact with, and to their understanding of work as it relates to identity, that they absolutely can’t register you as a dimensional person. It doesn’t make them bad people; it’s not a conscious thought they have, that the delivery girl can’t have an opinion on French films. The job just makes you someone they would never know. And when one of them makes even a nominal effort — eye contact, a sympathetic comment about the rain, any acknowledgment that you exist as a sensate being — it’s a relief. Like, thank you, large mushroom and peppers, for not forcing me to participate in the fiction that I don’t speak English because I brought a pizza to your house.
Anyway, who knows. So, we talk, the drivers and I. Usually, Tel Aviv sends the same guy to my house to take me to the airport; he’s always early, and he’s always trying to get me to tell him something to tell his daughter to talk her out of becoming a writer, and I always tell him, Sasha, if writers would hear sense on that point, I’d have a thriving law practice by now. For my trip to Newark Airport last week, they sent someone else, a hunchy little man who didn’t seem inclined to talking, but then I asked how he planned to go — didn’t really care, just curious — and Hunchy went off on a symphonically constructed rant about Staten Island and the punitive Jersey-bound bridge tolls. It had subplots and tonic progression, that rant, features I noted when he’d finished, and the next thing I know, we’d gotten into a discussion about the resurgence of the Livingston Mall. Every one of them has a story, something to tell me. Every driver is a novel in a Town Car. Hunchy…maybe more of a novella. The guy who only drove part-time because he’d gotten too busy managing a strip club in Sunset Park, that guy is a novel. That guy is a trilogy, actually.
And I get in the car, and I say hey-howya-doin’, and I give them the destination, and then I guess my face gives them a sign: Tell it. Tell her about the gym you used to go to in the Bronx, about what Rocky Graziano said to you that time, that one time, back in the day. Tell her about Mexico, how you want to take your wife there. So they do, and I love to hear it. It’s the same way I feel when I see a sock on the sidewalk — what story brought that sock to my block? When I walk out tomorrow to go to the deli, where will it have gone? Why will it have gone?
I had a good feeling about last night’s driver immediately because he looked like Freddie Mercury. I have this thing about Freddie Mercury which is hard to explain, but the gist of it is that I miss him. I think the world is a lesser place because he’s not in it anymore; I think things would have turned out differently in certain ways if he’d lived longer. A guy who can wear a skin-tight satin jumpsuit with little wings on the arms and stand in front of forty thousand people all “yeah, that’s right” is a guy you want on your side, is what I guess I’m trying to say. Anyway, the positive mustache vibe was confirmed when the driver let me smoke in the car. We talked about the coffee wars and how we both hate cherry-flavored things because they taste like the plastic seventies furniture in a waiting room. He told me to hide out from winter in Egypt, it’s warm and dry and perfect for a writer. “You could have another life there,” he said, which could have meant a number of different things, and I kind of liked the sound of all of them.
*****
The boarding lounge is such an unsettled place: The Boulevard of Broken Concentration. I can never get dug into a book, or work, because I’ve got an ear on the announcements and an eye on the clock and something is continually happening in the edges of my field of vision. The boarding lounge is one of those public spaces where people behave as though they’re in private because they don’t know any of the other people there personally. Nose-picking and slurping, rampant.
I brought The American Prospect with me to read on Sunday — stupidly, because I actually need to read that mag closely like it’s a homework assignment. It’s not airport reading, really. So I was facing the magazine, but really just listening to what was going on around me, and a family of four tromped up and flopped down across from me: burly dad, two teenagers both at that rubbery-faced age, and a seven-year-old. I could tell he was seven not because of his size, although it’s indicated, but because a seven-year-old has a painful sweetness to him, like a super-sour sourball, his haircut is inevitably this poorly shaped molting-duck affair and he’s always both swimming in his turtleneck and gorilla-ing out of it at the elbows at the same time, he’s not little enough to say the dumb shit and have it come off clever, not big enough to ride bikes without a grownup, clingy and stompy both — seven-year-olds don’t fit, quite, and nothing quite fits them, they can’t do anything and they have to do everything and it’s the foremost aspect of their existence, before what their parents say and where they go to school and whether they like Spongebob, it’s I Am Seven, Send Help. Seven years old is like a bloody car crash of all the shittiest parts of childhood, like, fairies, math, confusion, I can’t stop whining, and this kid is like all the rest of them, all the rest of us, a hit-nerve pile-up with sweaty palms. I annoyed myself at that age, like, when did I turn into this asshole who is afraid of random stuff like…I don’t even know. Dishes. The color pink. And then watching Mr. S go through it, argh, because you want to ask them, hey, could we maybe not do this, the meltdown at Baskin Robbins over jimmies that nobody understands, including you, but — you know it’s inescapable. He’s seven. He’s going to flail until he turns eight.
Damnedest thing, too, because they turn eight, and they come back. They’re bigger, and a little snotty about it, but they’re themselves again. I don’t get it. It’s like a warm-up for adolescence or something, but that, you know it’s coming and you can take safety measures. I could go through fourteen again. Seven, no way.
When his dad didn’t even look away from the TV to flick the kid’s thumb out of his mouth, I had to get up and sit somewhere else. My parents broke me of the thumb at seven. I couldn’t watch.
By the time the plane, delayed three times, finally boarded, I was officially In A Mood, and if ever I’ve had a friendly face, I did not have one yesterday afternoon — and yet, my seatmate talked to me. Why, I don’t know. I’d actually seen her in the jetway queue and thought to myself that I would like to have her hair; she had great hair, wavy but not fake and curlers-y, really natural-looking highlights that suggested significant expense. Famous-person hair. I will never have hair like that in my life, even if I rob a bank, and maybe I looked like I was fixing to rip it straight out of her head, because she popped right up and helped me find a spot for my laptop, which she didn’t have to do, and that took me out of it somehow, that little gesture. “You’re feeling seven right now, I get it — put that down, have a seat, let’s laugh about whether we can open the exit door.” Thanks, 16D. If I come to Victoria, B.C. (yeah, did I mention her hair looked like an ad and she’d spent all day on another plane? Because it did), pints are on me.
December 6, 2005
Tags: Freddie Mercury travel
Another wonderful essay of loveliness floating over the banal.
I was never a big Mercury fan–nothing against him, I was just too young to appreciate him much when he and Queen were the huge meganovas of glam rock–but I agree, the man had a certain rarity that you had to acknowledge every time you watched him perform, and you had this sense that for once in this lousy, messed-up rathole of a universe, here was someone who managed to get all those ducks in just the right row–his gifts, his talents, his personality all arose at the right time and place for the music he loved to perform to take off. Genres of music certainly come and go, and can be appreciated at any time, but not replicated, and Glam Rock, as the decadent, velvety larger than all your lives blowout thing that it was, could only have occured when and where it did, with its precise channellers in their exact positions.
You hardly ever get to see someone in their exact, perfect, no adjustments needed place, where he can be happy and bring happiness to others, and Mercury really was that.
This is lovely. I have the same thing – people just want to talk to me all the time. And ever since I quit my job and had the kid, thus cutting myself off from other adults for most of the day, I love to talk to folks. About everything. About why I’ve lived in Jersey for 11 years and still sound like small-town Ohio (conscious choice!). Why I’m 36 and I have bright [fake] red hair and I wear a Yo Gabba Gabba shirt and Chuck Ts and how people should just be who they are… it goes on.
Everyone has a story. Everyone is a story.
As for Freddie, oh man. I was 16 when he died and I remember it being just this Huge Thing, but I can’t remember why it was such a huge thing. Queen was pretty much over anyway, but I think that was around the time that VH1 was just getting going and they showed a couple of Queen documentaries sort of incessantly. At the same time, MTV was starting to suck hardcore so we watched more of one, less of the other. Oh, Freddie. The guy wore *wristbands*, totally unapologetically. The jumpsuits. The capes. The satin! The teeth! The mustache! The voice.
I miss him, too.
I think I feel the same way about Jim Henson that you do about Freddie Mercury. I have this irrational swell of sadness when I think about Jim Henson, all young and vivacious and dying of something as incredibly banal and treatable as PNEUMONIA, MY GOD. It doesn’t seem fair, really, and I say the same things about Henson (in my brain, at least, because it seems a little weird to wax poetic about famous people dead for, what, two decades?) you wrote about Mercury… that the world would have turned out differently if he’d lived longer and his kid hadn’t had to step in an be Muppet godfather to us all…
My boyfriend (big Mercury fan) just put on some of his work with Montserrat Caballé and… wow. If you hate opera, go check it out anyway, you won’t regret it. He could probably have had an outstanding career in that genre too. What an enormous loss, I miss him too.
@Adrienne: Shortly after Jim Henson’s death, all the Muppets sang “Rainbow Connection” in tribute and it still chokes me up.
Whoa. Just before reading this, I was saying to my husband how awful and un-understandable our daughter, now eight, was at seven. I’ve observed and mentioned this before about her–like immediately after she stopped being seven. “Holy shit,” I thought, “I actually do like this kid.”
The jimmies at Baskin Robbins. Yes. God, in so many iterations.
I was going to write, “This was really transporting…” then realized the horrible pun (unintended) so I didn’t … but I did! But, truly, it captures that feeling I so often get in the boarding area: can’t really concentrate deeply on whatever I’ve brought to read (yes, I once almost missed boarding a flight because I was absorbed in some page-turner), so I end up doing some surreptitious people watching. I, too, have a face that makes people want to talk to me. They usually they think they recognize me, that they know me (or sometimes that I’m some famous Hey It’s That Guy, which gets things started once they realize that Hey, I’m Not.)
In one of my first cab rides in New York, when I was still radiating Fresh-Off-The-Turnip-Truck-Ness, the driver told me I should join the Magician’s Club if I wanted to get girls. Girls love magic, he said. You can bring them down there, show them some tricks, have a little something to eat. They love that. I never wrote down where it was, but I always wish I’d gone there. (I’d told him that I had no business being there, since the last time I performed a magic trick had to be around age nine with my Presto! magic kit ordered from the back of a comic book. But apparently that didn’t matter. I didn’t bother to tell him that I was pretty sure I wasn’t interested in getting girls, but that would have interrupted his momentum.)
To anyone who loves Jim Henson, find the song “A Boy and His Frog” and listen (if you dare.) My sister, on a long drive through Wisconsin headed to the U.P., casually said, “I have a tape of this song: The Saddest Song In the Universe.” I didn’t believe her… until she played it. She was right.
@Rachel, one reason Freddie Mercury’s death was so huge is because he announced the day before his death that he was gay. The next day, he died from AIDS. Back then, that was a huge thing.
I loved Freddie because he had the MOST unique and beautiful voice and you could tell he LOVED to sing. He just put all of himself into producing the most wonderful vocals ever. He could be strong and forceful and soft and gentle within the same song. He was fantastic.
@Adrienne, ME TOO!! I cried for three days when Jim Henson died and still miss him, and Freddie, to this day.
@Profreader, *sniff* I never heard that before, thank you; that was beautiful and touching. Also, d*** you! I’m sobbing like Jim just died yesterday! ;)
My older boy turned eight this past Saturday, and while I am short (5’3″) he is only half a head shorter than me, and somehow that makes me cry sometimes because while he is growing up entirely too fast, he’s still a baby in so many ways. Still cries over sad stuff, still gets frustrated when nobody else wants to Wii bowl as much as he does. Still likes Thomas the Tank Engine a great deal more than I thought he would at this age.
Boy has AWESOME hair, though.
@Cyntada, @Profreader, @McTwin: THANK YOU. Okay, I feel like less of a crazy person now.
For serious schmaltz? The footage of all the muppets/actors singing “Just One Person” at Henson’s memorial will make anybody cry. It’s clear just how many people who worked with him loved him- that he apparently WAS a good person on top of creating something people are so emotionally attached to. Gah! Gets me every time!
I wish I had this-I just can’t do small talk. Someone talks to me, I freeze up, can’t think of a thing to say.
So weird–I came here looking for this essay, prepared to hunt through the archive. You originally posted this when my eldest son had just turned seven and burst into tears, howling, “…being seven is SO MUCH HARDER than being six!” Reading your take on the age clicked then and has stayed with me. I wanted to re-read this and pass it on to a couple friends who have been blindsided by the transition to seven as well. (Said son has moved on to non-surprising pre-teen issues, middle son has made it to ten without obvious issues and youngest is six, heading full speed toward seven.)
Yes to Freddie and Jim. I hated that Sammy Davis Jr. got the press when, to me, Jim Henson was the greater loss. (I understood, but still hated it.)
Anyway–thank you.
I’ve gotten a cabbie’s life story a few times. Once in England when I was trying to get across the country on Christmas eve and the train company had sold me tickets for two trains that didn’t exist and then ended up sending me and two strangers to our destinations by cab. I got the driver’s whole life story on that journey. Twice. He was a nice guy, though. Taking care of his sick wife during the day and driving a taxi at night.
Another time, in Morocco, a taxi driver taking me to the Jewish museum got into this whole philosophical discussion about religion and then told me all about his kids and finished by saying he would pray for me. Really nice guy. And we were both functioning in a second language at that point, French – the only language we had in common. It was amazing.