You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  * * *

  –

  I was walking down a main street called Main Street as I passed the bearded fellows, another easy walk from Chinatown. The tripping in my clogs made a sound as I stumbled and they turned around and we recognized each other from earlier. “This is so random!” one of them said. “I didn’t know who you were, but he told me, so I watched clips of your movies on YouTube.” It really should be called MeTube.

  “Thank you,” I said, despite its not exactly being flattery, and wondered if they’d laugh. They did. “You guys must play video games,” I said as a conversation starter, but it wasn’t. They were of another generation. “I bet money,” I went on, “that in our lifetime, it won’t be weird to dress up in costume when it’s not Halloween.” People want to escape their skins. Is that why Comic-Con is so popular? Enter anyone, role-playing anywhere. It was a random thought I wanted to throw out there, since when people say “This is so random” it’s usually not, and ends the better conversation people used to have before they’d say “This is so random.”

  I asked where they were going. To Boxcar, they told me—a place I knew about because one of my new friends, Ash, worked there. I’d met Ash at Mamie Taylor’s, a Southern soul food place, not five minutes from where I was living.

  * * *

  –

  Do you think that in another time, people enjoyed each other more? Maybe thought about death as more impending than we do now? That they realized that so much of everything is distraction, or a conspiracy, to keep us separate or guarded and locked up inside? Collectively, without realizing, we’ve let slack a present awareness. Maybe that’s the context for the animated show starring people’s tattoos.

  Another new friend, Kristian, had a conspiratorial idea of such conditioning, and this kind of talk had me feeling seduced, countercultured, and fifteen all over again. Of course, I agreed. He and I were at Tacofino together when the bearded fellows came in and ordered us into line. Kristian was a blue man in the Blue Man Group, and he always wears a black knit skullcap, which he adjusts as he talks, as if it were a haircut he was shifting—bangs for a Beatles cut, or a side part for Morrissey, or covering the ears for a James Taylor shag. He’s bald with a great-shaped head, and I loved this mannerism of his when he gave himself different hairstyles. I’d met him at OX, an oyster bar, across the street from Mamie’s. He was with his friend Gregory, who was working in the art department on a compassionate documentary about the Menendez brothers. They talked about “fluidity” in relationships and in gender and this next wave of free-love relationships, communal living, dating multiple people, or being in a throuple. That’s when a couple agrees to bring a third party into their union. I liked this talk, even if “throuple” to me sounded more like “trouble.”

  Gregory and Kristian invited me out for drinks, so we began walking, and Gregory admonished me for putting my cigarette out on the sidewalk. He was smoking a clove, like the cool kids did in college. Gregory was cute because he had freckles, but his facial features were angled and pointed, which matched his sharp and intense seriousness. “You know that goes into the ocean,” he said when I flicked my cigarette to the pavement.

  “I do stub them out and put them in my pack and in my bag mostly,” I said, ashamed and exposed and somewhat flattered. “And besides, I’m quitting.” He’d put me in line.

  “There’s so much antismoking these days,” he went on, “but then you think about the Indians and how tobacco was used as an offering when they offered their peace pipes to the colonials. And the gift turned into capitalist gain.”

  Yeah, that’s right, James Dean type, smoking is only as bad as you make it because we’re all going to die anyway. He put the half-smoked clove in his pack and talked more about his home, an hour away, which was a solar-powered storage container for the boat he was building with his father, so he could eventually live in ports around the world. “Wow, I’ve never met an unavailable man like this before,” I thought. He was interesting and authentic—in the fifties, they called them “loners” or “man’s men.” You know, that fifties mystique where real men are alone, or on an island—don’t bother.

  * * *

  –

  I had a brunch date with Ash on the following Sunday. He picked me up in his fashion-torn black jeans, a sleeveless Metallica T-shirt, and his motorcycle jacket (he rides, for real). His bright white Pumas with no socks were worn like a prized possession. I’d met him a few weeks earlier at Mamie’s when I stretched out my back on a barstool and my leg went into an arabesque and brushed his side. I was unaware of this, of course, but he followed me out and got my attention. He said I didn’t look like “someone from around here.” I told him I was shooting Lost in Space and had just landed in town.

  He started giving me the lowdown on Vancouver men, how their style is really important, that they spend hours in front of the mirror to get that casual look, and, a more heady esoteric toss-out, “In our lives, we meet the same four kinds of people . . .”

  “Sure,” I said. It made sense to me; I like the square of four. For me, it’s more secure than the three of a triangle. If we’re here to progress, let’s get all math-mystical about it. A rockabilly chick with dark hair and a ponytail swooped in off the street and gave Ash a whack on his butt before entering the place.

  He texted me that weekend about a drive he went on. I replied, “I don’t like texting,” and he texted back, “Me neither.” He texted me a week later to see if I wanted to go on that drive, to see the seals. We saw dolphins that day and he said, “This is not something that happens a lot.” I wish I could swim like dolphins swim. Ash got comfortable in his tight jeans and nice shoes as we sat on the incline of the cliff’s rocks. He took out a flask and offered me a sip of whiskey, like Joaquin Phoenix did when we shot Irrational Man.

  Staring out at the water, I pictured the decorative fluorescent gravel used in some aquariums. I’d had a vivid dream where I was swimming. There were two bodies of water: a swimming pool and the ocean. They were separated by a dividing rope with buoys—bobbing and bright enough to hold on to and close enough to let go of without going under and getting taken too far away by the current. I could, if I got up the nerve, let go of the rope to swim with the dolphins. The swimming pool was huge and the body of water calmer, but the ocean’s water got darker with choppier waves and went on forever. I was in the middle, calculating the different sides: if dolphins could swim on the ocean side, that meant it was safe. I pushed myself out—excited to break away from the rope to swim with them. One of them was smooth and gray; there were some gashes from his being attacked and I hugged and pet him. He had lived long and hard, I thought as I swam to another one. She was more pink, like the dolphins I saw in Brazil, and when I pulled away, one of her eyes was cloudy and I thought maybe she was sick. My concern for her woke me up.

  I showered and took a walk around Vancouver in the rain, and thought about what would happen if I joined Facebook. I was shooting Lost in Space now and more anonymous being out of America, so maybe this would be the best time to get in touch with all the people I’ve met and missed. I’ve met a lot of people, though. I’d met a woman in an airport between flights who’d said I’d worked with her father in Minnesota. I told her I’d never been there, but she assured me that I had. I couldn’t bring myself to look myself up on IMDb to check the facts. I’ve been to so many places and traveled so much, it’s best to keep up with today and tomorrow.

  * * *

  –

  Ash was a new friend and about to start design school after being in the bartending scene a little too long for his taste. He was congenial while welcoming a guest to his city-town, his country. It was a really good time to be away.

  He took me to brunch at a restaurant called Alibi, just a seven-minute drive from where I was living. The décor was Coen brothers, Barton Fink style. I curled up in a leather easy chair to release my lower lumbar, which was so
re from wearing my space suit all week. There were typewriters and scripts behind me on a shelf and large windowpanes to look out through, and an unfinished papier-mâché work of art up in the corner, not fully expressed, and left with no worries, “no problem.”

  I asked him about a dance club called Celebrities where there was a Carnival dance party happening that night. My costar Ignacio, from Argentina, was going and I’d been feeling the need to let loose and dance around. You know, let my spirit fly.

  Ash had been offered a job at Celebrities, for $500 a night, when he was in his twenties. He would have had to wear his underwear, cowboy or combat boots, and a tuxedo tie, and walk around with a tray of drinks. He put his hand up to mime this. “Think of all the gay uncles you’d have by now if you’d done that,” I said. “And the stories . . .” We both agreed that this was a “regret” and perused our menus.

  When the waitress came over, I asked for something sweet with brunch: “a waffle, a pancake, just something on the side, not a full order or anything.” I put my palms out like the peaceful and suffering statues of saints. She said she’d ask the kitchen. When she came back, she said they’d said no. But she felt bad and said, “We have fruit and whipped cream,” to which I replied, nodding, “Yes, it’s not the same thing as a piece of French toast with maple syrup, though.”

  When she asked if there was anything else she could do, I said, “Yes, you can bring me a piece of French toast.” Then I went into my mean-lady-at-the-country-club bit, uptight and jilted and patronizing: “I like something sweet with brunch. If I’m going to even have brunch, I’m going to go for it. Not a full order or anything, it’s only a piece of bread, soaked in a scrambled egg. It’s really the maple syrup I’d like, but I’d like some bread with it. If I’m going to eat brunch . . . ”

  I was flirting or entertaining her, as I do sometimes with waiters and waitresses, as it can be part of the exchange of going to a restaurant. Hey, if I wanted to eat alone, I’d have stayed inside and cooked something myself, to eat over the sink. And since it was brunch, which I think is weird in a city that’s missing a country club (What’s a provincial thing like brunch doing in cities? Are we living in the fifties?), I wanted a piece of French toast! If you’re going to be about brunch, be brunch. Maybe I was being more French.

  In Canada, they have these credit card machines that they give you after a meal, to pay for what you’ve just eaten. Don’t try to eat it like a mint. There’s no name for this gadget, this remote-control credit card machine thing that I begrudge every time a waiter or bartender hands it to me.

  One night with Kristian and his friends, I ran up to the bartender to pay for my food and drinks, so I could go home. He was shaking his martini shaker loud enough for it to sound like tap dancing, which made me wince. So I did an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” tap-dance shuffle so we’d dance together. He didn’t but handed me that thing to put my credit card in and I said, “This thing really gets in the way of a real exchange . . .”

  “The exchange rate to the dollar is good,” he said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I told him. “It gets in the way of the ‘exchange’ . . . This exchange . . .”

  He looked at me like I was speaking another language.

  * * *

  –

  Back at the Alibi, I followed the waitress to ask her where the bathroom was, and since she was standing by the open kitchen, next to the staff, I said, “Can you tell me where the French toast bathroom is?” and caught a few laughs. I got a bigger one when I shouted over my shoulder, “French toast forever!” as we left the place.

  11

  Louie

  I’d only seen a clip from one of his early episodes but not the full Louie show when I met him. It was the one where a musician is playing violin on a subway platform and Louie watches him while waiting for the train.

  The frame starts on four people standing and waiting for the train. Our eyes go to a blond woman in the shot, and then a few seconds later rack focus onto Louie walking down the stairs. The violin, the heart-stringed instrument, is being played by a professional concert musician. We’re in the subway station, the metaphor of the underworld—where dark secrets unfold and knights are slain by dragons—blood and guts kept hidden from the rest of us mortals.

  Louie walks past the musician and drops him a coin and then leans back on a column to watch. His face registers how odd it is to see this musician—young and wearing a tux and seemingly playing just for him. His cynicism (“What’s a guy like him doing in a place like this?”) turns into an appreciative beauty for a few seconds as he softens. Then a homeless man with something like twenty garbage bags around his feet barrels down the stairs like he’s the king of the place. He’s sloppy and crazy, and as the music starts a crescendo, he gets out a water bottle and starts to bathe himself with it. “Why is this homeless man ruining this music for me?” Louie’s wondering. You can see that he wants to watch the violinist but the homeless man is so disgustingly scrubbing himself and is such a spectacle that Louie can’t look away. The two characters start to meld as Louie watches and the music climaxes. When the shower is done, the crazy homeless man spits out the water like an ejaculation, and laughs—leaving Louie disturbed.

  Louis CK is all three of these characters: he’s Louie, the title character; he’s the accomplished artist, in the role of the musician; and he’s the homeless man, presenting no boundaries. He’s the frame itself, as the director who composed it all. An artist given free rein to create exercises and test his limits—and ours. The more an artist can create, though, the more solipsistic they can become.

  It’s sad to think about how many men watch more porn on their phones than talk on them these days. These are not erotic times, to say the least.

  We met at a reading of a play called Beyond Therapy by Christopher Durang. Frank Whaley, an actor I’d known for years, got this benefit reading together to keep the Cherry Lane Theatre open. It’s a tiny theater and needed some TLC. It holds not even two hundred seats and the seats themselves must’ve been two hundred years old. The place was a silo at first and then a brewery in the 1800s; Edna St. Vincent Millay and her friends turned it into a theater in the 1920s. Playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter—many of them writers of the Theater of the Absurd—housed their plays there. The Theater of the Absurd plays shared a point of view that life is absurd, pointless, meaningless—that words can’t help us, and the afterlife won’t help either, so live now and find something funny because it’s a waste of time trying to figure anything out since we’re all going to die anyway. You can go to Cherry Lane when we land and there will be a dramaturg to explain it much better than I could. The theater got a face-lift since the Beyond Therapy reading, with a new sign outside even.

  Louie’s kids went to the same school as Frank Whaley’s, which is how he got involved. And then other terrific actors like Nathan Lane, Marisa Tomei, and Mario Cantone (you may have seen some of their work) played other characters. Mike Daisey was the narrator, the wonderful monologist who just may have something up at the Public Theater now, which you could check out. You could walk from there to the Cherry Lane Theatre in twenty minutes. It’s in the epicenter of the West Village, which branches short streets like a heart’s arteries. I always think about that when I invariably get lost, despite having been to that corner many times.

  A composer who worked on a Brecht play I did in college lived in the top apartment at Commerce and Barrow. He took me to see my first opera, Don Giovanni. Afterward, he showed me his one-bedroom apartment and made me tea and we listened to bits of the opera again on his record player. The cup was a hand-thrown piece of pottery, I remember—a large cylindrical triangle and glazed cream with patches of colored brushstrokes—late eighties New York style. Coffee cups were bigger back then.

  I stood on the corner and looked up to the window and
thought about his kindness, what a gentleman he was. I was bundled in Mildred’s handwoven throw from Ireland that she’d given me one session when I was underdressed—it was wool, black mainly, woven with dark jewel tones and slit up the middle to be worn like a poncho.

  It was on that corner and looking up at that apartment where I first met Louie and we shook hands, smiling and introducing ourselves. He was warm and bold and we walked into the tiny theater to rehearse. The reading was fantastic, as you can imagine with that cast.

  Afterward, Louie said I was really good and should come do his show and play his therapist. I loved that idea. We had dinner at what used to be Grange Hall, with one of his comedy buddies, and put our numbers in each other’s phones. We were both excited by the prospect of working together.

  * * *

  –

  There was a place I liked to eat called Piadina, which was around the corner from where I used to live. It was a rustic place on Tenth Street, a neighborhood joint, not a “foodie” one, just west of Sixth Avenue. After 9/11, the business there improved as the locals wanted to feel grounded and unified, familiar. They were almost all Italian in there, and the owner always greeted me with a kiss on both cheeks, as is the custom. For the longest time the décor had warm exposed bricks and wooden spoons and forks and garlic hanging by string from the ceiling. An abstract painting of a naked woman, in oranges and reds, greeted you as you entered. They redid the restaurant and added a bar in the back and the brick was painted cream, but that’s all gone now because it closed—due to rent prices.

  I was eating there when Louie texted me and then joined me for several hours. We connected over our love of cinema. I observed him alternating his projections of me—between being engaged with me, Parker, and looking at me as if I were a character. “I know what I want to do with you,” he said. Then he shared three stories of characters he’d wanted to amalgamate for a long time: one was an artist; another was a woman he’d met at an airport, who told him a story of her cancer and how she had to take care of her mother, who was freaking out over her sickness; the other was an alcoholic. He mentioned a homeless man, too, I remember.