You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  * * *

  –

  I opened the door of a moving car once when I was around eight. I was in the car with my dad, sitting in the back with my brother and his friend. We were just going around the corner from our house, so my dad wasn’t driving that fast. I simply opened the door, swung my feet out of the car, and held on to the handle, like I was water-skiing on the pavement. I don’t remember why I did it, but I remember thinking I could put a stop to whatever the stress or noise was if I just opened the door and stepped out. It didn’t last longer than a few seconds and Dad slowed the car down enough for me to coast. He was laughing when I got back in. “Why did you do that?!” I shrugged and looked down at the burned rubber on my sneakers. The tracks on the bottom of my shoes had worn down and I felt the loss of them with my fingers; the smoothness and heat of them made me smile. “And you hip-hop and you don’t stop.”

  * * *

  –

  I stood under a tree in the rain and thought about lightning striking me and fantasized about being kidnapped. Maybe it was just me or a child-of-the-seventies kind of thing, or the simple kid drama of wanting to be special. Patty Hearst was kidnapped and I was too young to be afraid or to see it as something real. To me, she was a woman in a car being whisked away. It must’ve resonated with that early Catholicism and her being a fabulous martyr cast out by her father and left alone to suffer in her outlaw state. She wore a beret.

  There was a pervert who had a kids’ show. His name was Mr. Wonder, of all things, and he molested kids. My parents rolled their eyes at his name while gritting their teeth in anger. And there was Mrs. Banks, some bat-shit day-care woman who chased kids around with flyswatters to whack ’em with, when they were just playing. She had some cultlike nap regimen where we’d drink red or purple Kool-Aid and go to our mats and nap, even if we weren’t tired. My brother told my mom about it and we didn’t go back; I think we were four or something. It was the beginning, I guess, of not liking banks or being good with money. A few years later, Jim Jones had Kool-Aid and people drank it and died.

  I had a crush on John McEnroe as a kid. When I saw him get so upset on the tennis court, it pulled my very heart. I wanted to make him laugh or bring him something I’d made, like a rock with the word “Jesus” painted on it. I prayed for him.

  My cousin Samantha and I would get out a sleeve of Ritz crackers and play Mass, getting all serious and somber while staring at each other, a Ritz cracker held up with our fingers: “Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body, which will be given up to you and to all men so that sins may be forgiven. Do this”—pause—“in memory of me.” And then we’d rock out playing the Jesus Christ Superstar album and singing and acting our hearts out. “My mind is clearer now. At last, all too well, I can see where we all soon will be . . .”

  * * *

  –

  When the locusts came and dried out on the trees, we’d unstick them to decorate our shirts and even our hair like crowns and jewelry; the roughness of their skeletons made it easier to stick to us—the legs were slimmer than a toothpick, a few strands thicker than a hair. We’d take the tails off fireflies and stick them to our fingers to make rings, marrying the fireflies. When it flooded, we played in the ditches. The boys rode bikes in the water and popped wheelies, or up and down the mounds, not ten feet above the bayou. And all this was ten minutes from our house. I’d sit on top of the mound to watch them ride while I dug in the dirt to find the clay, a patch or swirl of smooth in the dirt. If the locusts came again, I would still put them in my hair and on my clothes and say to passersby, “The end is nigh.”

  15

  Sacrifice

  I wouldn’t give my right arm to work with Woody Allen so I gave my right wrist. I broke it three weeks after being cast in Irrational Man. When the bone surgeon in the city came into the room I lifted my arm up like an opera diva, saying, “I got a big break being cast in the new Woody Allen film.” He didn’t think it was funny because he knew what was ahead. He would numb my arm out of existence in order to attach miniature door-hinge hardware with seven tiny screws to the tiny bones inside my wrist. This was two weeks before the camera tests and the pain was so severe that I stayed up through the night chomping the maximum number of Percocets prescribed and begged him for morphine the next morning. I told him I felt he betrayed me by not preparing me for the pain—that he tricked me. I asked him if he was sure he’d done it right because it felt like something was wrong.

  He ignored my pitch of a morphine patch: “I’m sure they have one, right around the corner, at Bigelow pharmacy.” I tried not to sound like I was begging, but it didn’t help that I answered the phone with “I’m a basket case of pain.”

  “It was good we went in there,” he said with a bedside manner. “The break was a lot more complicated than we initially thought. An X-ray doesn’t show the individual cracking of the bones. A cast might not have set it properly, so it’s good we performed the surgery.”

  “Yeah, it’s good we went in there,” I said. I apologized for blaming him and he told me to take Aleve, along with the Percocets; we hung up and I ran to the bathroom to throw up.

  The night before, my right arm had been dead but had come alive in the sensory map of my brain and made a double of itself where I’d feel my fingers caress my face—like babies do when they’re sleepy and content. A soothing gesture that I’ve noticed my mother and I still make.

  * * *

  –

  I broke my wrist in the house upstate. I’d starred in a Pepsi commercial with Jimmy Fallon that paid enough to get the mortgage. It was an old farmhouse that had been a sheep farm during the Underground Railroad days and had disappeared off the market but came back after the buyer wasn’t able to sell his place in the Hamptons. I’d seen only two or three properties before it, none of which were right, and then I got a job I don’t remember, and when I returned to my search, that’s when I saw it. “I’ve seen this place before,” I said when I walked in. My friend Jim had forwarded me the listing, saying it looked just like me, around six months before. It was Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe’s house, and I’d run into her over the years socially and ran into her again just days after signing the ownership contracts for the property. We ran smack into each other at a dosa place in Soho. We were shocked and both stumbled back and hugged, and when we parted we were both crying. She’d spent some sweet years up there with her family and was sad to let it go but was happy I was the one who’d bought it since I’d made her family laugh with the Christopher Guest movies. I was crying because I was grateful and dreamed of a country house in nature.

  At the time I broke my wrist, the pipes had frozen and burst and flooded the first floor. It was one of those out-of-the-blue freezing nights and I didn’t have a Nest device yet to sync up the heat but I have one now. My neighbor across the street, Wes, saw smoke coming out of the chimney and came to the rescue. He knew I wasn’t home, that there was no one there. I don’t know how smoke was coming out of the chimney; I guess it was an electrical fire? I have no idea, but it signaled. He always helped me if I needed it, and he loved the house since it had belonged to his great-grandfather. He found Gracie when she ran away a few times, once clawing her way through a window screen when she heard a gunshot during hunting season. My sweet little lamb, my little sheep (she’s snoring now). So Wes brought a few of his contractor friends over to meet me. It was a true disaster, and I was in shock. I started to block out the things I’d miss, like my albums I’d had forever, now destroyed—especially the records that were probably impossible to find, like the Catholic folk parish band the Dameans. They were a band of five priests from New Orleans and they were really cute and their songs weren’t spooky because they didn’t use an organ. Their voices harmonized so well with one another. It was patriarchal good-dad, tree-hugger music because they’d include nature in the songs. The lyrics were something like “I know the Father loves me, for he told me in the
rising sun. I know the Father will care for me, for he told me in the smile of a certain someone.” There were holes in the house now, and a kitchen to be reconstructed, which broke my heart because I loved the one that was there already—hand-built by Bernard Springsteel, a previous owner before Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe’s family. He’d made it all in my bedroom, which was then his woodshop, with wood from the lumberyard just down the road. He made doors, cabinets, shelving—even the curtain-rod holders. His countertop would have to go and the cabinets were ruined, but the structure at least would remain intact. I left, leaving it up to the gods—and magically thinking the producers of this had a vision and supported the director and it would all work out. Contractors can be tricky, though, like actors. One simply bailed, but sent me a nice email saying, “I’m sure you’re gonna be angry with me . . . ,” but he had another job to do and was leaving for Vermont. I wasn’t angry, I was inspired that a line of work could actually include getting paid for doing nothing and then apologizing with an email. I loved his bit, though, in the beginning, of the sweet uncle good ol’ boy coming to the rescue. The other one had started hanging around but was unable to complete the simplest of tasks and was always complaining about other work that had caused him pain. He would ask things like, “You have anything stronger than Advil, like a Vicodin?” My friend noted that he went by three different aliases, which most likely meant shady business. At first I thought he was just so adored by three groups of friends that they all gave him special nicknames, but when I thought more deeply about it, having three names was probably a good idea for someone who needed people who didn’t exist to put the blame on.

  I painted the walls myself after the countertops were in. I was furious that I’d gotten screwed over, and my adrenaline was pumping as I flew around my kitchen with a roll of blue painter’s tape on my arm, like a bangle bracelet. I’d whip the tape off the roll with my left hand and swiftly tear off a piece with my teeth, like a fruit bat, and place the length of it to its edge on the wall. Flying around like a maniac, I fell off the ladder while reaching for an edge.

  Thank God my friend Jim was there. We’d been close for more than twenty years, and met at Georgetown, where my brother went to college, and danced together at a place called the Tombs. And by “danced,” I mean silly dancing, dumb dancing—we really made each other laugh. Jim moved to New York in 2001, right after 9/11, thinking that life was too short not to fulfill that dream of living in a city he’d always wanted to live in. He had great luck finding an apartment right around the corner from me, in Chelsea. “I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie, with whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.”

  I loved his place. If you could have taken his ceiling off and looked at the apartment from above, it would’ve been a perfect square. It reminded me of those pink compact plastic homes I played with when I was little that you could shut and carry around, like a suitcase. The layout was a perfect circle: open the front door, the bathroom is directly in front of you, to the left is the living room, to the right is the bedroom; walk through the bedroom and go left through the kitchen, then you’re back in the living room.

  My place was a railroad flat, which was falling apart: the bathroom had a big hole in the ceiling that rained down plaster every now and then. I covered it with a garbage bag and duct tape because it was better than dealing with the super, who I’m not sure I ever met. (I probably did but my instincts told me it was best to just deal with stuff myself.) I put in a loft bed with Keene, a high school friend of Nadia’s. She has a good dad story, too. Nadia Dajani’s an actress and she never knew her father but grew up with older brothers who were baseball fans—they were all latchkey kids in the West Village and her brothers would pick her up from school and and she’d do her homework on the train to Yankee Stadium, which she called her “childhood living room.” She had a poster of the pitcher Ron Guidry in her bedroom growing up, and when she was around twelve, she wrote him fan letters and sent him birthday cards. At around fourteen, she got up the nerve to write to him, asking him to wait for her until she turned eighteen so they could get married. He sent her a small black-and-white photo, which in her mind meant yes. There was a bio released soon after, and she saved up her babysitting money to buy it and flipped to the pictures immediately at Barnes and Noble. She was crushed and started screaming, “No, no!” when she saw the pictures of him married and with a baby. She was madly in love and devastated. Anyway, her friend Liz invited her to a benefit gala for Camp Say, a summer program that raises money for kids who stutter, and it was there she met Brandon Guidry, who was on the board. She mentioned that it was funny that he had the surname of the man she was supposed to marry. “That’s my father,” he said.

  “He’s my password,” she told him. “Your father’s my password and when I travel I take a framed picture of him to put by my bed.”

  “Well, now I know your password, and he’s here.”

  Brandon brought her over and Ron called her darlin’ when they met. She told him they were supposed to be married and his wife laughed. Brandon became like another one of Nadia’s surrogate siblings and invited her down to Lafayette, Louisiana, for New Year’s, where Mr. Ron would say, “Make yourself comfortable here, eat what you want, there’s food in the fridge and make yourself at home.” She’d be floating in the uncanny realness of the events that brought her to Ron’s home, and when she was asleep in one of his huge guest rooms it would only dawn on her after he knocked on her door in the morning, saying, “You have a thirty-minute warning to get ready for brunch,” that it was all real. She’d hear his heavy footsteps walk down the plush carpet of the hall, away from her, and take that mystical moment to her heart. Nadia lived close to me in Chelsea, in the West Village, in a building she called a “witch’s hat” because of the pointed cone on top.

  I was living on the second floor with a fire escape railing outside my bedroom/living room not twenty feet off the ground. I could easily ask one of the guys in the McManus bar to boost me up if I’d locked myself out, which I’d done a few times. I was so close to the sidewalk that I’d wake up thinking I had guests in my apartment, but it would just be people talking on the bench of the beauty shop directly below. Every few years a neighbor would play “Red Red Wine” on her boom box repeatedly for hours. It wasn’t a conventional home and felt more like a sleeve or a place I could be tiny in. A friend said my paint choices were tonally “Easter egg”—light blue and yellow walls, lavender trim, and a cream line for the molding.

  I hover around the idea of a conventional home and I think that’s why I fell.

  * * *

  –

  I knew my wrist was broken because it looked like an upside-down ankle and because it hurt. I was a brave and calm soldier, like Brody in Homeland, who came to mind immediately since I’d been binge-watching the show. “Jim, there is a Vicodin stash in the first-aid kit in the downstairs bathroom,” I said. “Get me one and take one if you want.” I squeezed and carried my wrist to my truck, yelling back at him, “My iPhone, my purse and keys are on the table. Shut the doors, so Gracie won’t get out, and the windows.”

  We both remained calm and alert, like I’d imagine people in a war zone to be. I sat in the passenger seat and dissociation started to kick in, like a drug. And then Jim told me that he wasn’t comfortable driving because of his recent eye surgery. Jim has nystagmus, which is a vision condition causing his pupils to flutter involuntarily, affecting his vision.

  He was working at Google then, and I’d joined him there for lunch the day before he was to leave for surgery. We sat outside and he grieved the old sight he would lose: the floating garbage bags in his peripheral vision that looked like “fluffy bunnies,” the fading degradation in color of the fuzz around objects. All that cozy haze could become sharpened and cruel. What could this new way of seeing stir up and bring back?

  He came over after the operation. We had both moved since our Chelsea days but wer
e neighbors again on lower Fifth Avenue, under a ten-minute walk from each other. He’d called before he came and was groggy from the pain meds but wanted to see me.

  When I opened the door, I saw that the area under his eyes was bruised to his cheekbones; the whites of his eyes were red with blood. We hugged and he walked slowly through my door, as if landing on another planet. He said, “It looks so clean in here,” and looked around my apartment. He gazed at me, his pupils no longer shaking or shimmering and his shoulders no longer hunched with the strain it took to look so closely at things. “You’re so pretty,” he said, crying, wiping his tears with his shirtsleeve. He was trying to catch his breath. “It took me longer to walk here. I kept stopping at the newsstands to look at the papers.” He was viscerally shaken by the newness of it all, the edges now distinct for him, and what I imagined to be a release of the unrealized burden he was born with.

  * * *

  –

  The day that Jim stood outside my truck, I was in the passenger’s seat and slumped over in teeth-chattering pain, taking his hands to touch my head to console myself out of this and making his hands my own, alternately squeezing my wrist. “Hold my head tight with both of your hands,” I said. He did. “Now pet my head.” He did that, too. “Now hold my head with both your hands, please . . .” Which he did. I started talking about Homeland and evoking Brody to come rescue me. “Soldiers feel this pain and it’s so much worse.”

  “You’re gonna be okay, punkin,” he said.

  I said, “I’m not dying,” and we laughed a little. I said many “oh my Gods,” swaying to rock myself. The minutes in pain go by so slowly and so fast at the same time, but according to the clock, we waited half an hour for the ambulance to arrive.