A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

  DS: With a blunt blade.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Okay. Maybe we can move on to the present revelations. What do you two think of the news of this German family?

  DS: Not entirely surprising.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Why?

  DS: Well, given the guy’s track record with deception.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Charles?

  CAL JR: Well, I’m a little less jaded than Donald, but then, it makes sense, because boys always idealize their fathers and don’t want to believe they’d do anything like that—fooling around on my mother and having three bastard children with this German lady. But I guess it technically makes sense, when you think of how he spent all those years of his life flying back and forth to Europe for long spells. No, no more! [Holds palm over coffee cup to indicate to waitress he doesn’t want a refill. Waitress turns on a heel and yells “Happy Hanukkah” to an elderly couple just about to leave through the jingling front door to the restaurant.]

  DS: It’s Hanukkah?

  CAL JR: It’s always Hanukkah around here. [Laughing.]

  DS: That David Hesshaimer, he’s a dead ringer for Lindbergh.

  CAL JR: Yeah, my brother David in Germany, he looks just like my father, same smile, same eyes. It’s uncanny.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Have you tried to contact the Hesshaimers since they announced the news?

  CAL JR: I’ve had a friend send a couple e-mails, a fax. I called a newspaper in Germany to try to reach them. But they haven’t responded. Why would it be any different? No Lindberghs want to know the truth about me. They can’t handle it.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: So you tried to contact Charles and Anne?

  CAL JR: You betcha. I spent the better part of my life trying. But nothing. They’d tell their guards to send me away.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Guards?

  CAL JR: One time I did go to the Lindbergh home in Connecticut. This was after my father had passed, and I thought maybe now that he was gone, my mother might feel some sense of regret and want to see her first-born son again. So I went with my wife to—

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: You’re married?

  CAL JR: I was—just for a year or two, and then we parted. I met her at the annual New England Lindbergh Society Luncheon in Hartford—you know, every year on May 21 they hold it. [Sighs, looks at hands and rubs them together.] I think she was just, well, taken by me as soon as she figured out who I was. Chasing a star, as they say.

  DS: That’s not exactly what they say.

  CAL JR: [Whispers.] He doesn’t like me talking about those years.

  DS: No, I just say, call a spade a spade. A star-f*cker a starf*cker.

  CAL JR: So Ann and I—my wife’s name was also coincidentally Ann, but without the e. Her mother supposedly was the lady who gave Lindbergh the mirror to put in the Spirit of St. Louis cockpit before he took off from Roosevelt Field. Anyway, so Ann and I go to Darien to try to see Anne Lindbergh, but the guards said they were expressly told not to allow us onto the property. Ann burst into tears.

  DS: She thought you were her ticket inside.

  CAL JR: She was just very worked up about the whole thing, like ladies get. She had also tried to make contact with Lindbergh after her mother died, but besides a couple local newspapers where she told her story of her mother giving him the makeup mirror and some gum to stick it onto the panel, there wasn’t much else.

  DS: You still don’t see how she used you?

  CAL JR: Not now, Donald.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Okay, can you guys tell me a little about your plane? I’m sure Gay Aviation Today readers will be interested in the specs.

  CAL JR: I don’t want to talk about the plane.

  DS: [Whispers.] It’s, you know, your typical nine-cylinder reciprocating radial—223 horsepower.

  CAL JR: Shut your hole. You’re not even blood. [Looks hurt.]

  DS: He’s still a little touchy about having his pilot’s license revoked. Aren’t you? [Pokes CAL JR. playfully. CAL JR. doesn’t respond.]

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: So, Donald, can you tell me a little about your past, and how you came to feel so connected to the Lindbergh saga?

  DS: Basically, on the morning of the third day after Charles was kidnapped, my mother went to the Western Union downtown and offered me to the Lindberghs as a replacement baby.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Really?

  DS: Yeah, yeah. I was about Charles’s age, blond-haired and blue-eyed. We lived outside Birmingham, and my folks had eleven kids; I was the last of the lot. I guess my ma figured one less wouldn’t kill anyone, but it might help the Lindberghs a whole bunch. So she sent a telegram expressing condolences for the loss and offered that if they didn’t find their baby, she would bring them me.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: That’s quite a story. Did she ever hear back from the Lindberghs?

  DS: No, but my ma sent a total of something like ten telegrams and letters. And we didn’t have that kind of money for postage and stuff like that. When my pa found out, well, let’s just say Ma wasn’t cooking the meat for a few days—she was putting it on her face.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Did anything else ever come of this?

  DS: Just that as I grew up, all my siblings always teased me that I was the kid our ma wanted to get rid of. It happened, well, anytime Lindy was in the news—which was all the time up to the beginning of the war. So it was kind of like Charles—I grew up always knowing something was wrong. I guess you could say I wasn’t really loved. But who am I to complain? Everyone had it hard then. You know, that’s why it was such a brilliant scheme, with the kidnapping and ransom and stuff. Kidnappings happened all the damn time then—everyone was so desperate.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: What was it like growing up in the shadow of the Lindbergh kidnapping?

  DS: I don’t really know. My ma shot herself through the jaw when I was about thirteen, and she died. Then I left town when Pa had to move out of the house and didn’t let me come with him. I’d always felt like New York was calling, so off I went with the money I earned working on a neighbor’s farm. I guess I started drinking like Pa … You know how it is, just a bunch of years go all hazy. Then you look up and you’re an old man, and you don’t know where it all went, all that sweat spent just trying to stay alive.

  CAL JR: You got yourself into some trouble there, didn’t you? [DS doesn’t respond.]

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Care to explain?

  DS: Naw.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: Sure?

  DS: Just a little trouble with the law, is all. I was, well, you know—getting money any way I could.

  CAL JR: Till he finally figured out he never quite got over the thing with his mom.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: You sort of hit rock bottom? [DS doesn’t respond.]

  CAL JR: And then he met me at that fifty-year reunion, and all of it started making a little more sense, both of us being kind of, you know, orphaned because of the Lindberghs. It seemed at first like it was just me helping him. But he helps me too. He helped me.

  DS: I would be dead if it wasn’t for this man. [Turns to face out the window, looking up at lights in palm trees.]

  CAL JR: I don’t know where I’d be without him either.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: So you’ve been lovers ever since, what, 1977?

  CAL JR: I didn’t say that.

  DS: No, no, no. Nobody said anything about that.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: I’m sorry, I—

  DS: We agreed to do this interview for the sake of aviation, for Lindy, but you can’t say that. Don’t say that. We’re not fairies.

  GAY AVIATION TODAY: My editor—I thought … I’m sorry. Well, so you just live together there at “Above the Clouds,” and share the replica plane and—

  CAL JR: We live in condos, next door to each other.

  DS: They’re adjoining, we got a double door put in between them. But it’s two entirely different, totally separate places.

  CAL JR: Yeah, you should see this guy’s housekeeping. Are you kidding me? [Jabs
thumb toward DS, laughing heartily. Summons the waitress with the universal gesture for “Check, please.”] Sometimes I go into his condo and I think to myself, was this guy raised by wolves, or what? And then I remember, yeah, you know what? He kind of was.

  T COOPER is a writer and aviation enthusiast who has a private pilot license with a single-engine rating. Cooper’s last interview for Gay Aviation Today was with Linda St. John, President of GLBTIBHUNA, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Intersexed Baggage-Handlers Union of North America.

  1937

  FIVE AND DIME VALENTINE

  BY FELICIA LUNA LEMUS

  FIVE AND DIME VALENTINE

  Patti lured me in with promises of a little extra something if I called her in the next three minutes. “A special surprise just for you,” she whispered, and caressed the heart locket Angela wore strung on a gold chain around her failed-swan, too-long neck. The camera zoomed in extra tight as Patti’s long manicured fingernails grazed Angela’s flesh. Nestled right above Angela’s pert tits, the gold locket caught light and glistened. I shivered.

  Same as the endless call girls pictured on glossy little square advertisement flyers—their outsized curves and skinny shaved bodies strategically blacked out with jagged Sharpie pen lines in accordance with some newly enforced and entirely misplaced Pilgrim ordinance—just like the lassies littered on the sidewalks outside our casino, Patti was pretty, but not exceptionally beautiful. And even better than those interchangeable disposable girls, Patti was an excellent whore— more geisha than streetwalker. One look and I was hooked so hard I was certain whatever she could offer would actually edify me.

  I was depleted. I’d already spent the twenty dollars of gambling money credited on the plastic card all the other tour folk wore looped around their necks, but that I insisted on clipping to the inside of my jacket. Half an hour at a dollar slot machine, bored out of my skull, I’d given my two free drink coupons away and headed up to my cruddy economy room. I’d only agreed to come to Vegas because Marjorie had begged. She said it’d be fun, that it’d take us out of our normal routine. I liked our normal routine. Always had. But even more than our routine, I liked making Marjorie happy.

  So there I sat, alone on the north end of the Vegas strip in a third-floor room with no view, in a horrid crumbling hotel that boasted of having a roller coaster inside, and that employed tired clowns with dirty shoes. Quarter of a peanut butter sandwich lunch wrapped back up in its wax paper wrapper (hell would turn icy before I’d shell out for snacks between the three buffet meals a day included on our tour), I wiped my hands on the edge of the bed, glad the crumbs disappeared, lost evidence, into the scratch-ugly polyester comforter.

  Patti on the TV screen winked at me. She said I’d better call real soon, that she had something very exciting just for me. Still seated at the edge of the bed, I surveyed the hotel room. Marjorie’s bottles of arthritis and heart medicine sat in neat rows on the crummy nightstand. Her clothes hung in the closet, organized by type and color. Marjorie was a tidy girl. Me, coated with a slight layer of crumbs, I stood and sat at the little round table next to our room’s one smudged dark window and picked up the phone. The call alone was going to cost more than I’d allotted myself in spending money for the entire trip. No matter, I dialed 9 for an outside line and called the number listed on the lower left corner of the television screen.

  The operator who answered my call asked for my credit card number. I’d gotten so goddamned caught up in Patti and her come-on hustle that I’d forgotten I would need to pay for more than just the call itself. And pay I would. Gladly. She kept smiling at me from the screen. I swear I saw the pink tip of her tongue flick Angela’s neck. Was that possible? Would she really do that? For free? By the time I retrieved my credit card from my wallet, any price would have been fine by me. I’d never given the number out over the phone before; the situation seemed fraught with potential for fraud, but this was different. This was urgent. I gave the operator my credit card number and expiration date.

  “Would you like to talk to Patti?” he asked.

  How stupid was the kid? Of course I wanted to talk to Patti. Why else would I be calling? I told him as much. He asked my name. I gave him my full name. I thought it was for the credit card.

  “Please decrease the audio volume of your television,” he said in an awkward monotone from what seemed to be a very poorly written script. “There is a delay on the broadcast. It will only confuse you if you hear yourself on the television, ma’am.”

  Ma’am. That’s when you know you’re closer to the grave than the cradle, when absolute strangers with no need or desire to be respectful call you ma’am. He already had my money. He didn’t have to be polite. And he wasn’t. In fact, he was almost rude the way he said ma’am in acknowledgement of the way my voice shook old-woman-tired vocal chords. To hell with him. I was old. I’d be eighty-five in June. So what? It frustrated me beyond explanation how young people assumed I was easily confused.

  “I’ll mute the television, son,” I said, over-enunciating the word “mute” so he’d know I wasn’t a complete techno-imbecile. I surfed the Internet, for Pete’s sake. I had CD music at home. I owned a digital camera. One thing I didn’t have was any children, thank God. Milking the patronizing saccharine potential of the word son was a skill I’d perfected long ago. I used my power sparingly, but without hesitation.

  “Please stay on hold, ma’am. Patti will be with you momentarily.”

  Muzak played. I didn’t recognize the song. But it was too jazzy and loud. My mouth was dry. Why hadn’t I gotten a glass of water before calling? All that peanut butter and now I was going to try to charm Patti? I stared at the vanity counter near the bathroom. Two plastic-wrapped plastic tumblers sat next to a padded ice bucket no one in their right mind would ever trust. I knew if I put down the phone to get a glass of water, the music would stop and Patti would pick up the line, and by the time I’d make my way to the vanity and actually manage to unwrap one of those damned flimsy cups, let alone fill it with disgusting rusted tap water from the bathroom sink—in the time it would take me to do all that, Patti would have come and gone off to the next admirer.

  “Hello, Luisa.” An overly cheery female voice intruded on my wandering thoughts.

  I jumped, startled, and almost dropped the telephone. Three-second-delay, a muted Patti on the television mouthed, Hello, Luisa.

  “Oh, hello,” I said with a clumsy parched tongue.

  “Very good to meet you, Luisa,” Patti said, the static nature of her enormous lovely smile hinting at impatience.

  I liked that she knew my name, and I liked how she said it. She took her time with each syllable and sang the final letter slightly. She smiled bright for me. Her cardigan hugged her pretty curves and showed off her slim shoulders. I took in every detail and noticed she kept her left ring finger folded back as it grazed Angela’s neck. There was a cut on the middle joint of Patti’s finger. Nothing more than a paper cut or maybe a nick from shaving those pretty little hands of hers, nothing dire, but she had to hide the cut. Patti wasn’t allowed human flaws.

  “Are you buying this lovely heart locket for someone special, Luisa?” Patti asked.

  “No, dear, just for myself,” I lied.

  “Isn’t that wonderful? Good for you, getting yourself a little Valentine’s treat. We should all do that, get ourselves a little Valentine’s treat, don’t you think?”

  Patti could pitch with the best of them. As much as I wanted to like her, as much as I did like her, there were no two ways about it—the heart locket Patti hawked was only part of why I was calling. Sterling silver. Or white gold. Didn’t matter if that heart had been solid platinum, I knew it wouldn’t be as elegant as she promised when it arrived in the mail. Not even for three easy payments of $35.75 each. But that barely mattered. Light bounced off Patti’s bleached teeth. Angela’s heart locket sparkled.

  I said: “Once, I shoplifted a locket just like yours for a girl I wanted to b
e my sweetheart. That was during the Woolworth’s sit-down strike. We had a committee that was supposed to keep track of what girls ‘shopped’ during the strike, but it was too easy to pocket things. No security cameras or any of those little magnetic strips back then, not in 1937. That’s long before your time, Patti, but have you heard of that strike, dear?”

  Okay, so I didn’t tell Patti any such thing. But did I wish I could confess that and so much more to her. Maybe she would have been impressed how we made it into the papers and even Life Magazine when we shut down all of Woolworth’s five floors, lunch counter and all, for more than a week. Great Depression to the birds (what was so fucking great about depression, economic or otherwise, I’d never understood), we didn’t give an inch until the owners met each and every one of our demands. I wanted to tell Patti how splendid those days we lived in the store had been. I wanted her to look at me with her big brown eyes while I told her about Marjorie. Mercy, Marjorie’s eyes had been an even bigger and prettier brown than Patti’s.

  “Marjorie sold candy upstairs. The cutest girls always got the sales jobs. Long legs and penciled eyebrows and glossy lipstick made for the best money,” I wanted to say.

  Patti beamed those perfect teeth at me and I wondered if she liked peanut butter sandwiches with thin-sliced bananas layered inside. Bread cut into triangles. Crusts sliced off.

  Peanut butter with banana on white. Brown pasty stuff smeared on squares of bleached wheat was foreign to me, but I played like it was my very favorite. I packed three extra sandwiches the morning of the strike because I knew Marjorie would be hungry. She always was. Voracious kitten, she had hollow cheekbones and skinny wrists. She spent all her money on store-bought clothes and fancy perfume. She never ate lunch. No one had enough money back then, especially us on Woolworth’s payroll. Marjorie sorted and sold Necco Wafers, Kits Taffy, and Choward’s Violet Mints, but, damn, did she ever look elegant as she did just that. We all had our priorities. Hers included sheer silk stockings with cocoa-brown seams up the back to emphasize slim calves Betty Grable would have envied. Yes, we all had our priorities. Mine was packing sandwiches to share with Marjorie.