Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Miles

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Miles, Jonathan.

  Dear American Airlines / Jonathan Miles.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-05401-8

  I. Air travel—Fiction. 2. Introspection—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.15322D43 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2007052150

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Excerpts from "Casida de la Mujer Tendida"/"Casida of the Reclining Woman" by Federico Garcia Lorca © Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca from Obras Completas (Galaxia/Gutenberg, 1996 edition). Translation by W.S. Merwin © W.S. Merwin and Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca. All rights reserved. For information regarding rights and permissions, please contact lorca@artslaw.co.uk or William Peter Kosmas, Esq., 8 Franklin Square, London W14 9UU.

  "Lost in Translation" by James Merrill, from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1976 by James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  "The Prelude" by Jacek Gutorow, translated by David Kennedy and Jacek Gutorow. From Lima Zycia, published by Wydawnictwo Znak. Copyright © 2006 by Jacek Gutorow. Used by permission of the author.

  in memoriam

  LARRY BROWN

  (1951–2004)

  bro

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dear American Airlines,

  Dear American Airlines,

  MY NAME IS BENJAMIN R. FORD and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68. But then, no, scratch that: Request is too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy, a word that walks along the page with the ramrod straightness of someone trying to balance a walnut on his upper ass cheeks. Yet what am I saying? Words don't have ass cheeks! Dear American Airlines, I am rather demanding a refund in the amount of $392.68. Demanding demanding demanding. In Italian, richiedere. Verlangen in German and in the Russia tongue but you doubtless catch my drift. Imagine, for illustrative purposes, that there's a table between us. Hear that sharp sound? That's me slapping the table. Me, Mr. Payable to Benjamin R. Ford, whapping the damn legs off it! Ideally you're also imagining concrete walls and a naked lightbulb dangling above us: Now picture me bursting to my feet and kicking the chair behind me, with my finger in your face and my eyes all red and squinty and frothy bittles of spittle freckling the edges of my mouth as I bellow, roar, yowl, as I blooooow like the almighty mother of all blowholes: Give me my goddamn money back! See? Little twee request doesn't quite capture it, does it? Nossir. This is a demand. This is fucking serious.

  Naturally I'm aware that ten zillion cranks per annum make such demands upon you. I suppose you little piglets are accustomed to being huffed upon and puffed upon. Even now, from my maldesigned seat in this maldesigned airport, I spy a middle-aged woman waving her arms at the ticket counter like a sprin-klerhead gone awry. Perhaps she is serious, too. Maybe, like me, even fucking serious. Yet the briefcase by the woman's feet and her pleated Talbots suit lead me to conclude that she's probably missing some terribly important meeting in Atlanta where she's slated to decide something along the lines of which carbonated beverage ten zillion galoots aged 18–34 will drink during a specified half-hour of television viewing in four to six midwestern markets and I'm sure the ticket agent is being sweetly sympathetic to the soda lady's problem but screw her anyway. So a half-zillion galoots drink Pepsi rather than Coke, so what? My entire being, on the other hand, is now dust on the carpet, ripe and ready to be vacuumed up by some immigrant in a jumpsuit.

  Please calm down sir, I can hear you saying. Might we recommend a healthy snack, perhaps some sudoku? Yes, sudoku: apparently the analgesic du jour of the traveling class. That little game is what appears to be getting my fellow citizens through these hours of strandedness, hours that seem to be coagulating, wound-like, rather than passing. They say a watched pot never boils but baby it's tough not to watch when you're neck-deep in the pot. Just how many hours so far, I can't say—not with any precision anyway. Why are there so few clocks in airports? You can't turn your head more than ten degrees in a train station without hitting another clock on the wall, the ceiling, the floor, etc. You'd think that the smartasses who design airports, taking a hint from their forebears, would think to hang a clock or two on the walls instead of leaving the time-telling to the digital footnotes at the bottom of the scattered schedule screens. I take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch since my thirteenth birthday when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it turned out). But then airports weren't designed for people like me, a fact becoming more and more obvious as I divide my present between smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk outside and drumming my fingers on the armrests of the chairs inside. But even more odious than the clocklessness, I might add, is replacing the beep-beep-beep of those passenger carts with digitized bird-song imitations. Birdsongs! I shouldn't have to tell you that being run down by a twelve-foot sparrow is little improvement over being run down by a militarized golfcart. But then that's a matter for the smartasses, not you, so mea culpa. We must be choosy with our battles, or so I've been told.

  It occurs to me that none of this will do me a bit of good unless I state my particulars, to wit: My ticket—purchased for $392.68 as I've relevantly aforementioned and will continue to mention, as frequently as a tapdancer's clicks—is for round-trip passage from New York–LaGuardia to Los Angeles's LAX (with a forty-five-minute layover at Chicago O'Hare; were there a clock nearby, I'd divulge the truer length of my layover, but it's safe to say it's edging toward eight hours, with no end in sight). In that eightish-hour period I've smoked seventeen cigarettes which wouldn't be notable save for the fact that the dandy Hudson News outlets here don't stock my brand so I'll soon be forced to switch to another, and while that shouldn't upset me it does. In fact, it enrages me. Here's my life in dangly tatters and I can't even enjoy this merest of my pleasures. Several hours ago a kid in a Cubs windbreaker bummed one of mine and I swear if I spy him again I'll smash him like a Timex. Cough it up, you turd. But then all this talk of smoking is giving me the familiar itch, so if you'll excuse me for a moment I'm off to the sidewalk, as required by law, to scratch it.

  ***

  There now, all better. Oops, except that I'm not. Of late I've been suffering weird pains in my lower back and these airport chairs with their gen-u-ine Corinthian Naugahyde upholstery are only aggravating the pain. Throughout my life I vowed I would never be the sort of geezer reduced to conversing about nothing save his health maladies. This was until the day I developed maladies of my own to converse about. Truly, they're endlessly fascinating and impossible to keep to oneself! How can you talk about anything else when your physical being is disintegrating, when you can feel everything below your neck going steadily kaput? You certainly wouldn't think of discussing, say, Lacanian theory on a jumbo jet spiraling earthward. Unless of course you were Lacan, but even then: Jeez, Jacques, call the kiddos. Back when I was drinking I tended to ignore my bodily malfunctions—full disclosure: During the later dark years of my drinking, I tended to ignore even my bodily functions—but now they've become a kind of hobby for me. I fill my private hours with tender pr
oddings and pokings of my interior organs, in the manner of old women in babushkas examining mushy supermarket peaches. Plus there's the time I spend online Googling my various symptoms. Do you know that the first diagnosis the internet will offer you for any symptom is almost always a venereal disease? This must be causing acute distress for those hypochondriacal members of our society allowing their genitals to mingle. In the seventh grade the rumor was that your willy would drop clean off if you tugged on it too much (or put it inside a black girl, an indicia of the cultural clime of mid-'60s New Orleans) which caused me infinite grief and worry. The thought of running to my mother with my unfastened manhood in one hand was enough to put me off onanism for several years. The horror! My mother was a crafty sort who doubtlessly would have tried to reattach the poor thing via the aid of a hot glue gun, some sewing thread, glitter, and cut-out photographs from National Geographic, making my private parts look like an elementary school project about orangutans. "There now," she would've said. "All better."

  My mother will be seventy-three next month. I mention this fact since it's not just me, Mr. Payable to Benjamin R. Ford, who is presently out that $392.68 you charged us—due to the current configuration of my life, me and Miss Willa are victims in this together. Mug me, you mug my ma. Ya dirty mugs. Because she suffered a debilitating stroke three years ago, I take care of Miss Willa with the aid of a twenty-seven-year-old dumpling of a girl from the Polish countryside named Aneta who also from time to time assists me with my translations. All this, mind you, within the confines of the 2BR, third-story apt. in the West Village that I've called home since Bush the Elder was president. Back then it provided me elbowroom galore. Now, with my mother shuffling about and Aneta galumphing after her, my waking and sleeping hours are primarily squashed together into one room—a Balzacian garret fitted with a desk, books, and a sofa that folds out into a bed but only if you push the desk against the wall each night. It ain't pretty but we manage.

  The stroke may have been the best thing that could have happened to my mother. No doubt this sounds beastly, especially considering that she cannot move the right side of her body and must communicate by scrawling pithy comments on one of the multicolored Post-it pads she keeps piled on her lap, but my mother used to be crazy and now she is not. I don't mean crazy like your old Aunt Edna who's still dancing the tango at eighty and makes uncomfortably blue comments at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I mean manic-depressive schizophrenic crazy, the hard stuff. During a stroke, parts of the brain are starved of oxygen and die, and in the case of my mother, apparently the crazy parts got starved. The stroke cleaved her in two but, hooray and I mean it, left the good half functioning. This isn't to suggest that things are hunky-dory at home but rather to say that things were once worse. To be honest things were once terrible but then that's another story and you're probably skimming already.

  Dear American Airlines, do you even read all these letters you must receive? I imagine them tunneling into a giant bin in a sorting room in some warehouse set out in a dancefloor-flat stretch of Texas plain, mounds and mounds of stamped envelopes from all corners of this vast republic, handwritten and typewritten and some scribbled in Crayola crayon, questions and pleas and suggestions and rants and maybe even mash notes from easily sated dinkums who lurved the Cincinnati travel tips in the in-flight magazine. Or maybe they're all emails now, unpunctuated, misspelled, flecked with emoticons, sizzling through a grand nest of wires before landing, with a digital ping, inside some doublewide trailer-sized mainframe computer. Back in my very early twenties I actually wrote a thank-you note to the Swisher Cigar Co. of Jacksonville, Fla., to express my gratitude for the sublime if stinky cheer its flagship brand then provided me. I spent an inordinate amount of time crafting that letter and went so far as to cite for particular praise the Swisher Sweet's "cognac-and-campfire aroma." That I'd never caught so much as a whiff of cognac by that time mattered little; it was alliterative, and alliteration bewitched me to such an extent that in my undergraduate years I romanced, in succession, a Mary Mattingly, a Karen Carpenter (not the singer), a Patricia Powell, and a Laura Lockwood, as if culling my dates straight from the pages of a comic book. I remember being bitterly disappointed by the Swisher Cigar Co.'s response to my letter: A coupon for a free box that arrived without even the merest personal acknowledgment of my note. Sure, the coupon came in handy, but really. You have to be careful about trying to make connections in this world, or so I learned.

  Aneta helped me pick out the necktie for my trip west. Why I would trust an Eastern European girl whose wardrobe is founded primarily on Mickey Mouse t-shirts in varying colors including poop brown is beyond me, except that I think I liked having a female opinion on the matter, since the reasons for my trip—the trip you are currently thwarting, fuck you very much—are entirely female. And I do mean entirely. My daughter is getting married tomorrow, though I'm not sure "married" is the correct & legal term since she's quote-unquote marrying another woman. This came as quite the surprise to me though I confess that, at the time I learned of it, any news from my daughter would have been classified as surprising. She's engaged to a woman named Sylvana, meaning my future daughter-in-law is one letter away from being kin to my television set. I don't know if Stella—that's my daughter, named after her mother—will be the bride or the groom and I suspect it's poor form for me to inquire. And how does a father assess his daughter's choice of spouse when it's another girl? I generally know a beer-guzzling, wife-beating, underbathed, unemployable lout when I see one, unless she's wearing a dress in which case it's damnably hard to tell. Sylvana is a lawyer which should be a comfort—oh goody, my daughter's marrying a lawyer!—but that's about as much as I know about her. Of course, I don't know much about Stella, either. Her mother and I split up a long time ago and for complicated or possibly uncomplicated reasons I faded almost completely out of her life: an old story, right, the father as vanishing taillight. The last photograph I have of her is from her high school graduation, and came to me not from either of my Stellas but directly from the Sears Portrait Studio, as if they (the Stellas, maybe Sears) were legally obligated to send me a print. The photograph shook in my hands when I received it because Stella's resemblance to her mother was total and precise, and the venom of that union's crash still lingers in my arteries, still buzzes my tongue with a chemical aftertaste. Staring at my daughter's portrait was like viewing the evidence of a long-ago crime. Look: I don't deny I was once an ogre. What's harder and more painful for me to gauge is if I'm still one. Yet, humbly, I consider the necktie in my luggage a hopeful sign. That is, if you nitwits haven't gone and lost it.

  ***

  Dear American Airlines, permit me to introduce Walenty Mozelewski, who, by dint of dark coincidence, is having transportation snarls of his own. Walenty should be on his way home to Poland (via England, for his discharge) from the war, having fought with the Polish II Corps at the Battle of Monte Cassino (Italy), where he lost his left leg to the combined efforts of a mortar shell and an overworked Swiss combat surgeon. Quite the ordeal, and I'm afraid the shellshock has muddied his brain. He boarded the wrong train and is now on his way to Trieste. This should be a mere inconvenience but Walenty cannot help wondering what would happen if he stepped off the train in Trieste and never in all his life boarded another. It would be like death without the dying, is what he's thinking: the loss of everything—his wife, his two children, his home, his former job as a factory clerk in a factory that makes parts for other factories—the loss of it all, save his breath and his memories. Poor Walenty! He's staring through the window at the winter outside, fogging the glass with his exhalations. Listen:

  Every few minutes or so there appeared a house or houses outside, most at the ends of narrow, lonely, low-walled roads, some of the houses half-ruined and ice-chinked but others with gray tendrils of smoke rising from their stone chimneys and a faint yellow glow visible from inside them. Walenty wondered who lived in those houses, and what they would do if a one-legged s
oldier came to their door and asked if he could stay for the night and, if that was fine, then perhaps forever. Or how the soldier would be able to tell which house might be Heaven and which might be Hell, if either they were.

  Those last sentences are awkward, I know. But here's the caveat: I haven't actually started translating yet—this is my initial read-through, and since you'll recall that I'm presently stranded in an airport without access to (a) my reference books, and (b) my beloved Lucky Strikes, I hope I'll be excused for flying by the seat of my pants here. (Flying! What a concept. I'd like to do more of it.)

  The author's name is Alojzy Wojtkiewicz, and the title is The Free State of Trieste. This is the third novel of Alojzy's I've translated, and he's likely to provide me as much help on this one as he has all the others: by which I mean, not squat. He tends to treat me (as he apparently does all his translators) like the new husband of a wife he's ditched: Yes, he'll field a few questions, and perhaps mutter some wan advice, but really: She's your problem now, kumpel. Not that I'm bellyaching, mind you. We translators must be realistic. To translate a literary work is to make love to a woman who will always be in love with someone else. You can ravish her, worship her, even ruin her; but she'll never be yours to possess. Less romantically, I've sometimes thought of translation as being akin to cooking. At your disposal is the meat of an animal, and it's up to you to create dishes from it, to make it digestible. But the novelist or poet has the more Godly job. He gets to create the animal.

  I met Alojzy twenty years ago when we shared a duplex studio at an artists' colony up in Idaho, back when I was scam-ming delicious fellowships for the third-rate poems I was writing. (You would be appalled at the amount of state & federal taxpayer money—i.e. grants, fellowships, other assorted poet subsidies—that went into my pockets over the years, especially if you did a cost-benefit analysis of the poetry it yielded. Though, wait: Aren't you the proud recipient of something like ten kazillion dollars in federal bailout funds? Well then, lookee here at us. Flightless birds of a feather.) Every day at noon the colony's cook would deliver us lunches, and Alojzy and I would sit out on the deck and eat our turkey sandwiches and apples while staring at the Boulder Mountains and then we would chainsmoke and talk about women before retreating back into our studios, where Alojzy finished his second novel and where I took vodka-fueled "naps" between bouts of additional chainsmoking. Back then he was swarthy and thick-muscled, with a square head and torso that made him resemble a piece of Mission furniture; going by his more recent author photos, the last two decades have seen Alojzy progressively swaddling himself in fat, a hard square gone soft and circular. From a distance you might mistake him for a honeybun. This is to be expected, however. When I met him he had just ended a several-year stint as a bricklayer; these days, his primary physical activity seems to be signing his name to leftist petitions with one hand while gripping a half-gnawed sparerib in the other.