Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  I see from the television hanging in the corner that the price of oil is skyrocketing and that the NASDAQ was down for the day. Poor NASDAQ. I may send it a get-well card—something cheery, of course, like a Snoopy card. But horrors! The British pound sterling dropped against the almighty U.S. greenback! But wait—what's this? Something called "Light Sweet Crude" was up .31! Dear American Airlines, I haven't the faintest idea what "Light Sweet Crude" is but what an irresistible heading for a personals ad, don't you think? Anyway I'm thrilled that it's up. I might also add that I hope your own stock is through the goddamn roof. Prosperity for all, la-ti-da, la-ti-da. Let's all dance the dollar dance with our fannies in the air.

  To be honest, this is the first bar I've set foot inside in five years, and, to be even more honest, I'm not entirely sure why I haven't ordered a drink. At this juncture, fighting the familiar old temptations of the bottle(s) would be like swatting away a wasp while being chewed by an alligator. What's the point?

  Eh, resolve. Resolve, right: the hayseed cousin of ambition. Doan wanna change the world, jes wanna get the crop in. Mind you, not resolve against the booze—I never stopped loving it, even when it was trying to kill me—but, instead, resolve for something else, a fixed set of chores yet to be crossed off my list. Look, with the way my brain is wired, it might take me ten years to finish that drink and dammit if I don't have things to do. Still, it's nice to see some old ex-pals. Mr. Galliano there in the back, that tall, lean, goosenecked wallflower. Gentleman Jack out front, that farm-muscled Tennessee bully. Ah, and Smirnoff, Smirnoff, my long-gone true love. We had us a time, didn we? (Cue the barroom piano.) But where the hell did all these other svelte-looking vodkas come from? There's a complete row of them here, out front, preening like pageant contestants in push-up bras. All foreign to me, they must be the new young things, eager and dewy. Anyway, this used to be my crowd. What can I say? I grew up in New Orleans, where cirrhosis of the liver is listed as "Natural Causes" on a death certificate. Was a flailing (flailed?) poet who, corrupted first by Keats and then by Freud, believed that truth was locked up in the attic of the subconscious, demanding blotto liberation. Developed a profound affinity for intoxicated women, not to mention targeted memory loss. My sweaters had holes. My dog died. I missed the bus, I hated the cold, was allergic to dust, can't dance worth a damn. She left me. I left her. Life went on too long. Or like Berryman wrote: "Man, I been thirsty."

  And now my eye catches sight of my face reflected in the mirror behind the bar. A raisin at rest. Hair gray, of course (it went gray at thirty), sprawling out from beneath the tweed driver's cap that I've managed to keep on my head since my teens despite all the things that head has done to itself. Face jowly, wrinkled in all the wrong places, the fishhook scar under my eye—this from where Stella cracked me in the face with that water glass—evident even from this distance. The eyes themselves gone increasingly small and crinkly, as if backped-aling their way into my head. According to my mother, I am overweight—one of my favorite of her Post-it notes: "How did you get so fat?"—but in this room, packed with midwesterners, I seem of median girth. If I suggested to the big-bellied fellow next to me, for instance, that his wiener was purple, he would not be able to dispute me without borrowing a makeup mirror; he has doubtlessly not seen his pecker in years.

  Oops, he caught me staring. (At his groin, no less.) Turns out his name is Bob, he's in the radon-removal business, he lives in Oshkosh which is where he's trying to return to after a "bullshit" meeting in Houston, thinks the Yankees don't have a prayer this year, and he opened the conversation, rather perceptively, by saying, "Whoa, you're really scribbling away there. Whaddaya, writing your will?" Hahaha, no, says I, an angry letter to American Airlines. "Well, hell, if you want me to sign it, you can make it a petition." (Dear American Airlines, this is actually not a bad idea. Neither is a full-blown riot. Keep me here past roughly eight tomorrow morning, my last shot at making the nuptials, and I'll be the one handing out torches and pitchforks.) "But they're all the same, you know," he said. "United, Delta, US Air. Pick your dick flavor." (Note: He could've said "dictator." His mouth was full of pretzels.) During the course of our exchange Bob rarely took his eyes off the televisions—there are four in range—and peppered his talk with screen-induced non sequiturs, e.g. "Geico. That little lizard is funny." Finally we exhausted our conversational topics and Bob said, "Don't let me keep you from your will. Feel free to leave me the bedroom set." I like Bob. A shame about his purple wiener.

  I was never a belligerent drunk, you know. Not a bad one, in that sense. Never a fighter, if you discount that one incident with the lawyers which doesn't really qualify as a fight since the lawyers effortlessly squashed me. No, I was at first always a happy drunk, giddy and giggly, in love with whatever or whomever was near me, and then, at some point, a sad drunk, a quiet snuffler, mulling my dumpy ball of wax. It's all cyclical, is what they said at the meetings (which I mostly stopped attending a year ago, though every now and then, when the going gets iffy, I pop in with some donuts): The booze makes you happy but then it makes you sad but you want to be happy again so you drink more, repeat ad infinitum. Or in my case for about thirty years, give or take a bender. If it wasn't for the alcoholic coma I dropped into five years ago (not fun), and the forced rehab that ensued (ditto), I've no reason to think I wouldn't still be drunk, and that this letter would have already spiraled into even more blathersome blather. Part of the "recovery process" requires apologizing to all those wounded by your drinking, and, for me, Stella Senior got the inaugural call. "What am I supposed to say, Bennie?" she said. Silence on the line. "What do you want to say?" was what I finally croaked out. "Thanks but no thanks," she said. I felt like a rejected telephone solicitor. Click.

  I'm reminded now, amidst this beery hubbub, watching a web of conversations spin itself through the room (they're all talking about you, dear American Airlines, and I'm afraid your name is mud), from Oshkosh Bob to the babyfat coed in the UMASS t-shirt doing Cuervo shots with her boyfriend (wheee!), on down the bar to the apparent honeymooners who unsuccessfully ordered champagne, to the mustachioed guy telling the unamused bartender, "Know what TSA stands for? Thousands Standing Around, get it?" and then me, here at the corner, nursing my gone-flat club soda while bobbing atop this frothy sea of chatter: The worst part of sobriety is the silence. The lonesome, pressurized silence. Like the way sound falls away when you're choking. Even when I drank alone, the vodka provided me with a kind of soundtrack—a rhythm, channeled voices, a brain crowded with noise and streaming color, the rackety blurred clutter of my decrepitude. At the meetings everyone talks about how much more vivid life is without the booze, but I think, though I never say, that vivid is the wrong word. Life is rather more clear. I'm supposed to be thankful for that clarity, I know, for being freed from that dissonant interior music, from all those flatulent trumpets in my brain, and for finally being able to see life as it is, me as I am. Lookit the world and its blinding rays of light, feel the warmth on my new skin. I'm supposed to be thankful, I know, for being finally shucked down to the core of me. But forgive me, I can't help it: Thanks but no thanks.

  I've got to get out of here.

  ***

  How banefully perfect. I huffed my way back to K8 where I settled myself safely into one of these torturous gray chairs only to discover, upon cracking Alojzy's book, that Walenty is getting sauced with some new friends. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

  The men were drinking German beer and were welcoming to the point of suspicion. They were already drunk, at lunchtime, and many spoke in slurred, Serb-inflected accents which were difficult for Walenty to understand.

  (He'd secured a grip on Italian during his long recovery at the Allied hospital in Rome, when the doctors kept operating and reoperating on his brain, but it was a loose grip.)

  Others were foreign sailors whose Italian was more halting than his, but the sailors kept to the café's edges, focusing on their drinking with the seriousness of great
athletes. Unfamiliar words whirred past Walenty but the warm beer was like nectar and the men were grinning and slapping their legs and falling from their chairs so Walenty nodded and smiled and when the men raised their glasses, which was often, he raised his as well, toasting indecipherable causes. To peace or more slaughter, to beer or death, to what is past or to come, he was never quite certain. Alla Salute.

  To bring you up to speed, as they say, Walenty has been roaming Trieste since his morning coffee, overwhelmed by sunlit thoughts of the girl from the train station café. (Cartwheels across his heart, that's what she's doing.) He presumes this is owing to the kindness she showed him that morning, something unseen by him for many years. In 1939, when the Soviets invaded, he watched an old man in his village interrupt the beating of a twelve-year-old boy by shooting one of the boy's Russian assailants in the back with an antique hunting rifle. The old man was immediately killed, of course, machine-gunned into two equal pieces, and when the remaining soldier shouted for four men to come out to remove the old man's body, at least forty villagers trickled out from the doorways. That, Walenty thinks, was the last genuine moment of kindness he could recall. On a boxcar headed to a gulag in northern Kazakhstan, he watched a pregnant woman suckle a starving and half-frozen man at her breast but he would not classify this as kind since the man forced himself upon the woman. She was too weary to resist and after a while closed her eyes and absently stroked his hair. In any case, Walenty now finds himself, lightheaded, in this seaside bar across from a wooden pier in Trieste they call the Molo Audace:

  One of the men, bearish and otherwise fierce-looking, with a black mustache draping his mouth almost completely, began to dance, a solitary Šetnja

  (I haven't the foggiest what a Šetnja is; some type of dance, obviously.)

  that took him around and around the room. When he would encounter chairs or tables he would kick them away with comic aggravation, and everyone howled in delight save the pale she-dwarf who ran the café and whose squeaky protests were swiftly shouted down by demands for more beer.

  (Ayyy ... Alojzy is not this clunkish a writer. "She-dwarf "? Jesus. His translator is merely verklempt. Possibly incompetent, too. Traduttore, traditore, as the Italian pun goes: translator, traitor. Or rather, in this case [no pun extended]: traduttore, minchione: translator, dumbass.)

  Soon he came to Walenty and offered his arm. His intent seemed anything but insulting yet still Walenty hesitated. This bear had earned stout laughter for kicking away chairs and tables and, overencouraged, might be seeking to sustain the laughter by dropping the crippled newcomer to the floor. The bear would appear generous but clumsy while Walenty thrashed dumbly on the floorboards. Yet the bear was gently insistent and the other men were clapping and nodding yes so Walenty hooked his arm into the bear's and away they went, dancing grand circles amidst the disheveled barroom. There was no music save the bear's murmury singing, so it was difficult to keep time, but around and around they went until they had exhausted the confines of the little café and they spilled onto the stones outside. All the men and even the blond dwarf followed them out into the sunlight and were soon clapping a rhythm. Startled children ran to watch them and fishermen stared blankly from the pier. The bear was smiling as he sang, closing his eyes as if to recall, with great force of will, something intensely private and peaceful, and Walenty, inspired, did the same. He scoured his mind but it dispensed him only a single image: the girl from the train station café bending to set down his coffee, the cup trembling musically on the saucer. It was not merely the freshest vision in his head, sprung to the forefront by virtue of its newness, or the most beautiful, or the most vivid, but rather the only vision in his head, like a night sky lit by just a single white star. His mind's near-emptiness made him dizzy, and twice he almost fell, but the bear held him tight by the arm and, with his giant head thrown back and his eyes clamped shut still, sang unknown words that filled the hollows of Walenty's mind as food fills a starving man's belly.

  Which reminds me, I'm hungry.

  ***

  If I'm calculating the time difference correctly, the rehearsal dinner is about to begin in L.A. The table is set with one chair—mine—having been removed, the place settings tightened to conceal an absence going now on twenty-eight years. Though, as Stella Jr. told me, it's technically not a rehearsal dinner: "More like a pre-ceremony get-together" at a "little Alice Waters-y place" on Melrose, is what she said. Well, Stella Jr. always was a good eater. We considered her a prodigy for never spitting out mashed avocado and I swear to God she once ate an anchovy. My presence there tonight was her idea—a way to reacquaint ourselves, so to speak, before the hoopla of the "wedding." (Those damn quotation marks I keep horseshoeing around that word would probably offend her but I don't know what else to do. Their invitation deemed it a "commitment ceremony" but I can't bring myself to ape that hollowed-out language which smacks of a neutered Spivak pronoun or somesuch.) Tonight was her compromise, her way of sorta-maybe agreeing to allow me to walk her down the aisle. "Why don't you come Friday, Bennie?" she asked me on the phone. "Can you? It's just a little too weird for me to say yes now and then have you show up fifteen minutes before the ceremony. It's been a long time, y'know? I won't be auditioning you—nothing like that. It's just that I'd prefer to have a real face-to-face conversation with you before you trot me down the aisle. That's fair, right? I mean ... what if you're a Republican?" We laughed together at that one, which felt good—a squirt of oil in the decayed & rusted joints of our bond.

  Dear American Airlines, you should've seen me when the invitation arrived. My original thought was that it was some kind of cruel joke from Stella Sr.—her poisonous & long-simmered response to my attempt to make amends of five years ago. I was so obviously dumbfounded—turning the invitation over in my hands as if it would make more sense upside-down , checking and rechecking the envelope's address—that my dumpling Aneta, who delivered the mail to me at my desk, asked if a letter had been misdelivered. There was a bubble of hope in her voice because a misdelivered letter meant that she might have cause to knock at the door of our downstairs neighbor, a heavy-metal guitarist I call Minideth because, when I met him, he was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word Megadeth and because he was then, as now, no more than five feet tall. Aneta is rip-roaringly fond of Minideth despite the callous heartbreak he delivered her when he failed to acknowledge the plate of pierogies she once left, tremblingly, outside his door. I tried explaining to her that in New York no one trusts gifts and/or unattended food and that anyway she doesn't want to get tangled up with a rock 'n' roller, even a profoundly small one. (They're not like dogs, I explained. The bite of a small dog is the same as the bite of a big one.) A displaced farmgirl, Aneta has yet to develop the hard outer shell of cynicism that urban life demands—she is pure, exposed nougat. When the Times Square handbillers force a flyer into her hands she stops and reads it in toto and then hands it back with a sincere "thank you" which sometimes elicits an equally sincere "fuck you" from the handbillers. My mother and I used to bang the floor with the butt end of a broomstick whenever Minideth cranked up the amp volume while practicing—bruisy, barely muffled ch-ch-chunk-chunk riffs followed by orgasmically shrieksome solos—until one day Aneta scolded us. A painter! A poet! she said. Complaining about another artist! We relented without argument—less ashamed than flattered, I think, to be called artists, considering that both our creative spigots went dry years ago. I might add that it's truly difficult not to be heartplucked at seeing Aneta go dreamy & gooey at the sound of Minideth practicing—not to want Minideth to be telegraphing his unspoken, fuzzboxed love from one floor below. In those moments Aneta clicks off the television and, clutching a pillow to her chest, sits in reverent silence on the couch beside my mother, whose sour expression evidences a kind of aural indigestion but who puts up with it anyway. A couple weeks back I asked Miss Willa why. LOVE IS LOVE, she wrote on a Post-it. I scoffed, and told her that was a meaningless tautology. She shrugged. />
  "No, the letter is for me," I told Aneta, rereading the invitation. Still puzzling over my demeanor, she asked if it was bad news. "No," I said, "the opposite—I think." For the rest of the day I was unable to work or concentrate on anything, even dinner which I typically prepare for Miss Willa and myself. (I picked up some frozen Salisbury steaks from Gristede's which my mother refused to acknowledge until I transferred her dinner from the compartmentalized plastic tray, but even then she just picked limply at the mushrooms.) My emotions kept seesawing: For a while I would feel anguished and stung, as if an old wound had been reopened, a scab scraped from my flesh, after which I'd feel elated and hope-swollen, as if I'd found the first pale crumb of a trail leading back to my life. Mostly, though, I was terrified. For decades I'd kept the sorrows & joys of that ex-life locked safely away, first by drinking, mixing passive self-pity with ice and vodka, and then later by the daily labor of not drinking. I don't mean to suggest, melodramatically, that I ceased to function because of it all—over the years I wrote & published & held jobs & maintained a dwindling number of friendships & even tucked into those years a laughably brief and impetuous marriage that isn't worth discussing. But a part of me had been amputated by what transpired between me and my Stellas—if I may continue, haplessly, in my fumbling for metaphors. And now here, courtesy of an embossed envelope, was my severed limb come back to me, the shredded ligaments still curling outward from its raw and oozing red core, the arteries still faintly pulsing.