A piece of advice if you ever have a cavity:
Do not try to eat an empanada for lunch when you still have a little bit of Novocaine in your mouth because then you might think you have chewed up and swallowed all of your empanada when you really haven't and the empanada chunks will be just hanging out in your cheeks making you look like a squirrel.
--my friend Helen. Clearly the reason we are friends is obvious.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
How I toiled!
For three comments (besides my own)? Oh woe is me, woe is me.
I suspect this is payback for my not commenting on anyone else's blog in the past several weeks. Or else my therapist WAS right, and you all have better things to do than read my rambling non-sensical musings on air travel, virtual reality, and soup cans. Perhaps I should have appealed to the lowest common denominator in you, and written about sex instead. That would certainly keep my attention.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make an emergency appointment with my therapist. I hope she works Sundays.
I suspect this is payback for my not commenting on anyone else's blog in the past several weeks. Or else my therapist WAS right, and you all have better things to do than read my rambling non-sensical musings on air travel, virtual reality, and soup cans. Perhaps I should have appealed to the lowest common denominator in you, and written about sex instead. That would certainly keep my attention.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go make an emergency appointment with my therapist. I hope she works Sundays.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Hands Free
Dearest reader,
You might recognize a few pieces of this from my previous piece, Lend Me A Hand. This wasn't my attempt to cut corners by publishing regurgitated prose. I liked pieces of that story, but it wasn't working as a whole. But don't be surprised if you find a few pieces of that story in future stories as well. But since I'm cannabalizing my own work already, and it's only a few more steps to pure plagiarism, enjoy the originality while you can.
-JKH
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A few weekends ago, I spent the day at Reagan International Airport (or National Airport, depending on your political inclinations). I wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't meeting anyone there. When visitors fly into town, I graciously provide them with highly detailed public transportation directions. It's not like the trip will be faster if I'm there, and why should we both suffer when only one of us has to?
Alas, there wasn't going to be any great reunions with long-lost relatives that particular day at Reagan International, which was fine with me, as I'd rather any lost relatives remain lost. Instead, I trekked to the airport as part of a self-imposed mental health program. Granted, these days spending time at the airport causes more mental health problems than it cures, but the cause and the cure are one and the same when you have a flying phobia.
I haven’t flown in years. I hated flying before it was fashionable to hate flying, back in the days when stewardess was still a politically correct term, and a boarding pass didn't come with a cattle prod. I was, as usual, ahead of my time. These days, a fear of flying is one of those convenient personality quirks that you use to avoid family reunions, or trot out at dinner parties to fill the uncomfortable silences.
“I had the worst flight last week to Nashville,” you might say, to a sea of nodding heads. “I refused to buckle my seat belt, and the flight attendant actually slapped me!”
But for me, flying isn’t just a minor annoyance, like Kathie Lee Gifford, or those soup cans with the pull tab that always break off in your hand, thereby defeating their entire purpose. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, ear hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
In the beginning I tried to attack my fear with therapy, the first line of defense for both Jews and gentiles in Alcoholics Anonymous. One therapist tried to induce panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and panic.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. I didn't fully grasp the purpose of instigating panic attacks in someone with a panic disorder. Do therapists routinely treat violent sociopaths by handing them a meat cleaver and a puppy?
Luckily, an hour's worth of hyperventilating failed to trigger a panic attack, which was unsurprising since I usually spent half my day hyperventilating anyway. The only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
Next I tried virtual reality therapy, which had the added benefit of making me feel technologically advanced. The words "virtual therapy" conjured up images in my head of automatic can openers and flying cars that fold into your briefcase. As a child, I felt a special kinship with the hippest of cartoon families, the Jetsons, who seemed to live in a world of fantastic possibilities. Not like those backwoods, dinosaur-riding Flinstones. Seriously, what kind of psychopath wears a bone in her hair?
Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. I expected a high-tech, 21st century system operated by animatronic robots. Instead, a frumpy middle-aged therapist fit me with a pair of goggles, cranked up a machine bigger than a Yugo, and strapped me to an old airplane chair. As the machine whirred to life, a dull, lifeless two dimensional image of an airplane flickered into and out of view. My first generation Atari presented a more realistic image.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked, considering whether it was a good idea to mock someone who had tied you to a chair. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, making it particularly difficult for therapists to learn anything about me, other than that I use humor as a defense mechanism.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
Suddenly, the chair started rattling, apparently in an effort to simulate turbulence, but the feeling was closer to a vibrating washing machine (not altogether unpleasant, of course, but the goal was not to remind me of my last date). After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist came back in the room to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
Over time, I've learned to work around my fear. It's not all that difficult, really, especially these days, when even sane people avoid flying as often as possible. If I need to go somewhere far away for an important occasion, like a wedding, or Cher's fourteenth farewell tour, I take trains. I usually just meet my fellow travelers at our destination, though occasionally I try to get them to take the train with me. They rarely agree. When my friend Brandon and I were planning a trip to the West Coast, I suggested that we take the train from New York.
"You want to go to Los Angeles by train?" he asked in an offended tone, like I had just suggested that he voluntarily contract gonorrhea. "Yeah, it might be fun!" I replied, poorly feigning excitement. Insincerity is not one of my talents, an especially problematic characteristic during my brief stint as a Baby Gap sales associate. If your baby looks fat in horizontal stripes, I'm not going to tell you otherwise.
I showed him the brochure, featuring a happy puppy perched atop an upper berth holding an Amtrak ticket. I figured no one can resist a happy puppy brochure, but Brandon wasn't convinced. He flew to Los Angeles without me, and I decided not to spend three days alone on a train, which might have driven me more insane than I already was. While he was gone, I watched that movie where Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano. I didn't really want Brandon to be crushed by a lava flow, but I have a thing for poetic justice.
As a kid, I actually enjoyed flying, partly because of the in-flight peanuts -- we only had peanuts in butter form at home -- and partly because my usual destination was my grandparents' home in Florida, which meant Disneyworld, lox cream cheese, and a week away from my parents. It also meant a week with my cantankerous step-grandfather, who would probably force me to simonize his car and play shuffleboard, but that was a small price to pay for breakfast with Mickey.
But as my body aged, my mind became more anxious, as if baldness and bravery were inversely correlated. For every hair that I lost, a new fear emerged. Crowds, heights, eating at Olive Garden -- no activity was immune from obsession. I'm not sure if a receding hairline induces fear or vice versa, but the medical community should lace Propecia with Xanax. That pill would sell like hotcakes. Somewhere along the road, half-way between a Ceaser cut and a comb-over, flying went from exciting to unfathomable.
At first, the developing phobia was frustrating, like I was voluntarily placing a 200-mile leash around my neck. There was still so much of the world I hadn't seen, at least, outside of the Epcot World Pavilion, which is a pale comparator. You can't fool me, Disney Corporation. The real Eiffel Tower is not made of cardboard.
But over the years, my disappointment in not being able to travel to exotic lands (sorry Canada, maple syrup and Mounties do not an exotic destination make) was steadily replaced with more pressing concerns, like whether plucking a nose hair will result in two growing back in its place, and any residual disappointment has been consciously repressed. The mind has an amazing capacity for rationalization and self-denial, a lesson that I learned years ago when my father found a charge to a gay phone sex line on the monthly long-distance bill.
"Must have been a wrong number," he said, quickly whipping out his checkbook and conveniently ignoring the fact that the call lasted sixteen minutes.
But coming from a family in which an emotion didn't exist unless it was communicated -- most often in screaming bloody murder form -- I was never quite able to completely repress this feeling that my life was missing something. Unlike the other missing elements in my life (functional parents, a full head of hair, a digestive system that can process corn), this one was entirely self-made. I couldn't blame anyone else for the leash I had put around my own neck. I had the time, the wherewithal (after several years of working at a corporate law firm, I had wherewithal coming out my ears), and the desire to travel. Still, I couldn't bring myself to face that big tin can in the sky.
Occasionally, the issue comes up at my weekly therapy session with my social worker, Nancy, most often when I come across a beautiful travel destination that is only accessible by air, thereby triggering my self-flagellation anew. Nancy has a last name, but I never learned it, choosing instead to remember her simply as Nancy. Something about a woman with just one name makes her seem powerful and dynamic, like Madonna, or Jackee, either of whom could successfully plum the depths of my psyche. The same theory doesn't apply to men with just one name. I don’t want Fabio asking me about my overbearing mother.
"So why do you hate flying?" Somehow Nancy had managed to actually learn something about me apart from my affection for knock-knock jokes.
"The people," I replied, fiddling with the expired passport I still carried around in my backpack. It hadn't been stamped since 1999, when I travelled Europe with my friend Beverly, in an attempt to become more worldly and sophisticated. It didn’t take. I still prefer non-carbonated water and good hygiene. "Being trapped in a tiny space with hundreds of people freaks me out."
"Why are you afraid of being trapped with people?" she asked, dabbing her eyes with lubricant drops. She claimed that she needed to constantly rewet her eyes because of her allergies, but I noticed that she usually took out the drops when our conversations veered towards disturbing territory. The day I told her about my Miss Piggy obsession, I thought she was going to drown in saline solution.
"Embarrassing myself." I glanced at a picture of her son in his college graduation gown -- or, someone I assumed was her son -- on the desk behind her. He was very attractive. Staring at his picture was probably the reason I had stuck around long enough to get past the knock-knock jokes. "Or worse. What if I freak out on the plane, and they think I'm a terrorist or something?"
Drop, drop.
"You don't look like a terrorist."
"That's very narrow-minded, isn't it?"
Drop, drop.
"So what would make you feel better about flying?"
"Well, maybe if I could fly by myself, in a small private room, so I couldn't panic and embarrass myself in front of people," I replied, simultaneously wondering if she would notice if I took her son's picture home. "Like a flying closet."
"A closet." Drop, drop. "You want to fly in a closet?"
"Yeah,” I said, planning my escape with picture in hand. “ Can I do that?"
Nancy had to cut our session short that day, having run out of eyedrops. But it's not as if we were getting anywhere anyway. I needed to try something other than just talking about it, something a little more proactive, something that stopped just short of actually getting on a plane. So I cleared my schedule for the following Saturday afternoon, packed a lunch, and made my way to the closest flying tin can death trap. Of course, I planned to eat the lunch before I actually arrived at the airport. I don't trust the security people who say those x-ray machines don't contaminate food that passes through them, and I want my cancer to come from cell phones, not tomatoes.
I arrived at the airport in the late afternoon, which fortunately was easily accessible by subway. I had already spent thousands of dollars as a test monkey for experimental therapeutic techniques, and was not keen on spending much more. Before I left, I thoroughly researched everything about the airport; most convenient restrooms, duty-free shopping possibilities, where I could get my hand on one of those wonderful Toblerone bars that they seem to only sell at airports, and of course, potential emergency exits. Most people find the airplane emergency exit speech an unnecessary irritation. Personally, I don't think it's long enough. I'd prefer much more detail. Optimally the flight crew would perform a lengthy demonstration of how the seat cushions actually transform into floatation devices, because frankly, I just don't see it.
"The flames were 30 feet high, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand. I thought it was the end. Then I remembered my ass -- which was on fire at the time -- was conveniently placed on one of those wonderful seat cushions. Thank you floating seat cushion!"
I quickly scarfed down my hastily-made tuna fish sandwich, which had grown warm in my bag, thereby adding suspicion to some already questionable mayonnaise. Fortunately I knew the precise location of all of the restrooms in the terminal. When I finally mustered up the courage to actually walk through the sliding glass doors, my stomach was already rumbling, either because I ate too much, or I hadn't eaten enough. My digestive system is never content. The colon doesn't fall far from the tree.
The terminal was busy, but eerily quiet. Though perhaps it wasn't so much eerily quiet as unexpectedly calm. Over the previous several years, I had concocted my own vision of a modern day, post-9/11 airport, which included, in no particular order, terrorists threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, business travelers shooting each other in the shins over the last first-class seat to Toledo, and elderly women being strip searched by security guards with a granny fetish. Add to that the very real threat of being molested by a horny politician in the next toilet stall, and even Charles Manson would find the scene disturbing.
But to my surprise, the airport was calm, efficient, and peaceful. Light streamed in through the high glass ceilings, and the immaculately clean floors -- cleaner than mine, even -- were covered with bright orange-yellow tiles. Passengers strolled slowly through the halls, stopping at various stores and eating establishments, several of which featured "patio" seating complete with faux palm trees and beach umbrellas. The terminal seem more like a fancy resort than a torture chamber, and I wondered if the whole flying is a nightmare these days rumor was just invented by airport maintenance crews in an attempt to reduce their workload.
And most surprisingly, people were actually smiling. They were smiling on the security line, they were smiling while waiting for their pre-flight margarita, they were smiling while being herded onto the New York shuttle. Where was all the angst that I had read about? Where were the people beating each other with exploding shoes? Why was I the only one shaking uncontrollably? I wasn't relieved. I was angry at having been misled by the media, which was apparently in the pocket of the airport maintenance crew union. All those years spent dragging myself on the train to DisneyWorld, I could have just spent the weekend at Delta Terminal B.
Then, through one of the 50 foot windows, I caught a glimpse of an airplane. It was just idling on the tarmac, waiting for clearance of some kind, no more threatening than a stalled Greyhound bus. I could see passengers sitting inside, waiting patiently, eating their in-flight pretzels (which, to my disappointment, had apparently replaced the in-flight peanuts). It was the closest I'd been to an actual airplane in almost a decade.
Suddenly the idyllic world that I had entered minutes before transformed into a claustrophobic freak show. Every movement, every noise, every churn of the insta-daiquiri machine made my head swirl. Even the orange-yellow tiles mocked me with their institutional sterility. At any moment, killer clowns would invade the terminal and take us all hostage. And I would have been happy to go anywhere with them, as long as they didn't make me get on a plane.
The complacency surrounding me was astounding. Couldn't these people see that they were voluntarily placing themselves in extreme danger? Is a honeymoon in Bora-Bora really worth a funeral at sea? If I had been faced with a choice between bungee jumping off of the Empire State Building and getting on one of those metal-plastic amalgam contraptions, I would have strapped on a helmet and took the dive. At least a bungee jumper is supported by something other than air. It seemed entirely impossible that air could hold up a 100-ton behemoth like that. I knew there was some kind of scientific principle at work here, but I didn't trust science. Science couldn't even make hair grow back in my temples, how was it going to save me from hurtling to my death in an Idaho cornfield?
I found a quiet seat facing away from the windows, and tried to catch my breath and resolve the tingling sensation that had invaded every corner of my body. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that I had wandered into a corner of the terminal from which airplanes were visible on every side. The tingling was not subsiding, and I wondered if this was finally one panic attack too many. The human heart only has so many beats in it, and after my parents' divorce, three years of law school, and the time my mother caught me masturbating, mine couldn't have too many left.
In an attempt to distract myself from my impending doom, I began observing some of the goings-on around me. The only thing that can take my mind off of my own misery when I'm miserable is other people's misery. Most of the people sitting around me were painfully dull, at least to the naked eye. A businessman reading Newseek, an elderly woman knitting, a teenager playing with his iPod. They might all be interesting behind closed doors, but I didn't know one way or the other. I wished that the businessman would have an acid flashback from his hippie days, or the elderly woman would stab the teenager with her knitting needle. Anything to take my mind off of the panic that had gripped me.
Finally, like a gift from heaven, an intensely dysfunctional family of five or six -- two or three of the kids were running around in circles so quickly that they seemed to blend into one -- sat down next to me. The mother and father were arguing, but I couldn't hear most of what they were saying over the screams of their children, who clearly had terrorized several elementary school teachers in their day.
"Don't blame me! I didn't want to go to fucking Colonial Williamsburg," the father shouted, a small amount of spittle landing smack dab in the center of his wife's face. "This was your fucking idea!"
"Where the fuck did you want to go?" the wife screamed back, matching him spittle with spittle. "The fucking Playboy mansion?"
Monster #1, who appeared to be some version of female, started punching Monster #2, who responded in kind with several kicks to Monster #1's shins and some expletives that I didn't know until I was 23. I watched the scene for several minutes, as the burgeoning criminals in front of me battled for the title of most likely to need a public defender one day. Grateful that unplanned pregnancies were only a heterosexual plague, I wondered whether eugenics was really that bad of an idea.
"Flight 117, non-stop to Williamsburg, now boarding Gate 13."
While the mother tried to round up her children, I watched the father sneak over to the newsstand and peak at the magazines wrapped in plastic on the top shelf. Obviously his wife was correct -- he'd rather be going to the Playboy mansion. Then again, he'd probably rather be going to a Turkish prison than to Williamsburg with his family.
"Jerry, get the fuck back here!" The husband dutifully replaced whatever fantasy rag he was perusing, and made his way back to his wayward family, leaving a piece of himself on the top shelf with the dirty magazines. He probably left pieces of himself scattered across newsstands on the Northeast Corridor.
The mother grabbed a hold of Monster #1 and Monster #2, who struggled to break free.
"Let's go you little maniacs!" Maniacs are as maniacs do.
The father gathered up the luggage, glancing occasionally back to the newsstand with a longing that his wife likely hadn't seen in years. I was sad that I'd soon have to go back to focusing on my own life.
"Jason, come on!"
Jason -- an offspring who I hadn't previously noticed -- lay huddled under the chair across from me. He was clealry the youngest of the three, and while his siblings were well-built -- probably from years of beating each other senseless -- Jason was small, even for his age. I couldn't tell what that age was, but I knew he was small for it.
"I don't want to go," he said, meekly, clutching a stuffed Elmo. To my dismay, Elmo had apparently replaced Kermit and other more intelligent Muppets in the hearts of young children.
"I can't deal with this shit right now," the mother said, waving her hand dismissively at her child. "Jerry, you better deal with this."
Jerry's method of "dealing with it" was to grab Jason by the arm and drag him out with more force than should reasonably be applied to tiny bodies. But Jason didn't cry or make a noise, or even seem to notice the noise around him. He just went along, stumbling the entire way as his father led him by the arm through security. Years of invisibility had left Jason deaf, dumb, and blind.
Watching Jason huddle under the airport chair brought back memories of the crawlspace under my childhood home, where I often hid during my parents’ arguments. My parents didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.
During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain with Elvis. Each new sighting would give my parents renewed hope.
But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.
And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.
That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.
Jason et al made their way towards their gate, and I took a moment to say a prayer for the flight attendants on their plane. With their departure, I was left to resume my panicked state, which came back in full force and was made all the more intense by the memories that Jason and his family brought back.
I closed my eyes and clutched my hands together. When most people hold their hands together, they fold their fingers on top of each other, so that they are layered one above the other. When I do it, I hold my right hand in my left like I'm holding a stranger's hand. Somehow it feels more comforting, even though I've held my own hand far more times than anyone has held it for me. I always knew my hand would be there. I couldn't say the same about anyone else's.
Thinking about courageous little Jason boarding his flight, I questioned my own lack of will power. Here was this five year old boy, scared to death, clutching his Elmo (I still disapproved of his Muppet selection, but attributed this minor transgression to his tender age), being dragged onto the plane by his tremendously insensitive parents who would surely completely fail to comfort him when he needed comforting the most. But Jason had likely gotten accustomed to hiding under airport chairs. He felt safe under the chair, because there was no where else for him to hide.
And here I was, twenty-eight years old, still hiding. Sure, I hid on top of the chair instead of underneath it, but I was still hiding. There was no one to hide from anymore, but they were still chasing me. My father was still watching pornography behind my mother's back, and my mother was still shouting expletives at my father about the vacuum cleaner. The sound of the airplane engines couldn't drown out their voices. Their voices roared even louder than my fear. I had to get away from the fear and the voices, to save myself that very moment, or there would be nothing left to save.
I got up from the seat and made my way back to the exit, walking quickly but not too quickly, as I wasn't too keen on being stopped by some paranoid security guards who thought some malicious motive lay behind my brisk pace. As I left the terminal, I tried to forgive myself for not getting further along in my treatment that day. I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, I had hoped that once I went back to an airport, all my fears would suddenly dissipate, and I'd be on a plane to Hawaii by the end of the day. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen, at least, not today. But I was still a few subway stops closer than I had been the day before.
I boarded the train back to my home, breathing a sigh of relief as I sat myself down on the orange padded cushion. Subways usually trigger a slight panic reaction, but after facing my ultimate transportation demons, this subway was warm and welcoming. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. Grateful that I had survived the trip, I settled into my seat with a little after-panic muzak courtesy of my "Relaxation Playlist," which was just enough to relax me but would put most people into a coma.
Then the subway came to a sudden stop in between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West.
"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by."
The announcement was not comforting. Usually when the subway comes to a sudden stop, the announcer says something like, there's a train in front of us, we'll be moving shortly. But apparently we were stopped due to "technical difficulties," with no estimate for the amount of time that we'd be stuck here, fifty feet below ground. And unless my body developed a liquid-like consistency by which I could pour myself out of the subway car through a crack in the doors -- a remote possibility, at best -- there was nowhere to go.
I felt the panic begin to rise again, and my hands instinctively grabbed hold of each other. My extremeties began shaking -- well, most of my extremeties -- transforming my fingers from useful tools into useless appendages. I thought about trying to read the National Enquirer magazine I had bought on impulse at the airport (ok, I was planning to buy it, but it sounds less pathetic when I claim otherwise), but figured it was pointless, as I couldn't hold anything in my hands. And besides, I couldn't concentrate on a magazine, not even one with Jacko on the cover. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Not over the roar of the voices.
I began searching again for someone more miserable than myself to take my mind off of my quickening heart rate. To my disappointment, the only other people in my car were an elderly couple sitting across the aisle. I figured they wouldn't provide much entertainment, as elderly people are generally not phased by trivialities like being trapped on a stalled subway. I found myself longing for the dysfunctional family circus, who would soon be met at their arrival gate by a throng of FBI agents and a tranquilizer gun.
But while the man was calmly reading a newspaper, the woman was clearly disturbed by our situation. She wasn't saying anything, and didn't move a muscle, but I could tell. It was in the squint of her eyes. They pleaded for freedom, even as her body remained completely still. Esperanto may be the language of love, but fear is the universal language.
Her husband -- at least I assumed he was her husband, though he could have been anything to her, a lover, a friend, a chauffeur with a Driving Miss Daisy obsession -- looked over at his quietly panicking companion. Without a word, he put down the paper, and took her hand and placed it in his. And almost instantly, her eyes widened slightly, her breathing became less shallow, and a slight smile appeared on her face. The freedom she sought was still fifty feet away, but that didn't matter. All because he offered his hand, and she took it.
I closed my eyes, and gripped my hands even tighter, which by now were slippery with cold sweat. I thought about little Jason, huddled under his airplane chair, still clutching his stuffed Elmo, separated from oblivion by a few inches of metal and plastic. How little it would take to bring him out from under the chair. Just a hand. Not gripped tightly around his arm, but lightly around his own, squeezing in just the right places, telling him that he didn't have to hold his own hand to survive. And even if that hand didn't come today, or for the foreseeable future, somewhere, someday, someone would offer it, and someday, he would take it. As long as he could let go of his own.
I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and let go of my hands. For Jason, and for myself.
You might recognize a few pieces of this from my previous piece, Lend Me A Hand. This wasn't my attempt to cut corners by publishing regurgitated prose. I liked pieces of that story, but it wasn't working as a whole. But don't be surprised if you find a few pieces of that story in future stories as well. But since I'm cannabalizing my own work already, and it's only a few more steps to pure plagiarism, enjoy the originality while you can.
-JKH
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A few weekends ago, I spent the day at Reagan International Airport (or National Airport, depending on your political inclinations). I wasn't going anywhere, and I wasn't meeting anyone there. When visitors fly into town, I graciously provide them with highly detailed public transportation directions. It's not like the trip will be faster if I'm there, and why should we both suffer when only one of us has to?
Alas, there wasn't going to be any great reunions with long-lost relatives that particular day at Reagan International, which was fine with me, as I'd rather any lost relatives remain lost. Instead, I trekked to the airport as part of a self-imposed mental health program. Granted, these days spending time at the airport causes more mental health problems than it cures, but the cause and the cure are one and the same when you have a flying phobia.
I haven’t flown in years. I hated flying before it was fashionable to hate flying, back in the days when stewardess was still a politically correct term, and a boarding pass didn't come with a cattle prod. I was, as usual, ahead of my time. These days, a fear of flying is one of those convenient personality quirks that you use to avoid family reunions, or trot out at dinner parties to fill the uncomfortable silences.
“I had the worst flight last week to Nashville,” you might say, to a sea of nodding heads. “I refused to buckle my seat belt, and the flight attendant actually slapped me!”
But for me, flying isn’t just a minor annoyance, like Kathie Lee Gifford, or those soup cans with the pull tab that always break off in your hand, thereby defeating their entire purpose. Of all my irrational fears -- spiders, heights, ear hair -- flying is the most intense. Just hearing the words “frequent flyer” or “Mile High Club” is enough to give me the shakes. Although joining the latter is a slight incentive to getting over my fear. Sex in a Greyhound bus bathroom isn't nearly as classy.
In the beginning I tried to attack my fear with therapy, the first line of defense for both Jews and gentiles in Alcoholics Anonymous. One therapist tried to induce panic attacks to help me desensitize to the feeling of anxiety.
“Breathe with me,” she instructed. “We’ll breathe slow at first, and then speed up, and after a minute or two you will hyperventilate and panic.”
It seemed to me we were drawing close to the boundaries of legitimate therapy here. I didn't fully grasp the purpose of instigating panic attacks in someone with a panic disorder. Do therapists routinely treat violent sociopaths by handing them a meat cleaver and a puppy?
Luckily, an hour's worth of hyperventilating failed to trigger a panic attack, which was unsurprising since I usually spent half my day hyperventilating anyway. The only consolation was that I got to watch the therapist turn blue. I refused to pay her for wasting my time with that nonsense. She referred me to a collection agency, which, ironically, gave me a panic attack.
Next I tried virtual reality therapy, which had the added benefit of making me feel technologically advanced. The words "virtual therapy" conjured up images in my head of automatic can openers and flying cars that fold into your briefcase. As a child, I felt a special kinship with the hippest of cartoon families, the Jetsons, who seemed to live in a world of fantastic possibilities. Not like those backwoods, dinosaur-riding Flinstones. Seriously, what kind of psychopath wears a bone in her hair?
Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disappointed with the experience. I expected a high-tech, 21st century system operated by animatronic robots. Instead, a frumpy middle-aged therapist fit me with a pair of goggles, cranked up a machine bigger than a Yugo, and strapped me to an old airplane chair. As the machine whirred to life, a dull, lifeless two dimensional image of an airplane flickered into and out of view. My first generation Atari presented a more realistic image.
“Do I get a bag of peanuts with this?” I asked, considering whether it was a good idea to mock someone who had tied you to a chair. I have a tendency to annoy therapists. I use humor as a defense mechanism, making it particularly difficult for therapists to learn anything about me, other than that I use humor as a defense mechanism.
“So your mother would chase you around the house with scissors. How did that make you feel?”
“Knock knock.”
Suddenly, the chair started rattling, apparently in an effort to simulate turbulence, but the feeling was closer to a vibrating washing machine (not altogether unpleasant, of course, but the goal was not to remind me of my last date). After a few minutes I got bored. The therapist came back in the room to check on me.
“So tell me, what’s your anxiety level at now?”
“Zero.”
“Zero? But you’re on an airplane!”
“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in your office. The graphics on this thing are horrible. I can hear your secretary talking about American Idol. This chair smells. And where are my peanuts?”
Fortunately insurance paid for these sessions. Otherwise I’d have another collection agency after me.
Over time, I've learned to work around my fear. It's not all that difficult, really, especially these days, when even sane people avoid flying as often as possible. If I need to go somewhere far away for an important occasion, like a wedding, or Cher's fourteenth farewell tour, I take trains. I usually just meet my fellow travelers at our destination, though occasionally I try to get them to take the train with me. They rarely agree. When my friend Brandon and I were planning a trip to the West Coast, I suggested that we take the train from New York.
"You want to go to Los Angeles by train?" he asked in an offended tone, like I had just suggested that he voluntarily contract gonorrhea. "Yeah, it might be fun!" I replied, poorly feigning excitement. Insincerity is not one of my talents, an especially problematic characteristic during my brief stint as a Baby Gap sales associate. If your baby looks fat in horizontal stripes, I'm not going to tell you otherwise.
I showed him the brochure, featuring a happy puppy perched atop an upper berth holding an Amtrak ticket. I figured no one can resist a happy puppy brochure, but Brandon wasn't convinced. He flew to Los Angeles without me, and I decided not to spend three days alone on a train, which might have driven me more insane than I already was. While he was gone, I watched that movie where Los Angeles is destroyed by a volcano. I didn't really want Brandon to be crushed by a lava flow, but I have a thing for poetic justice.
As a kid, I actually enjoyed flying, partly because of the in-flight peanuts -- we only had peanuts in butter form at home -- and partly because my usual destination was my grandparents' home in Florida, which meant Disneyworld, lox cream cheese, and a week away from my parents. It also meant a week with my cantankerous step-grandfather, who would probably force me to simonize his car and play shuffleboard, but that was a small price to pay for breakfast with Mickey.
But as my body aged, my mind became more anxious, as if baldness and bravery were inversely correlated. For every hair that I lost, a new fear emerged. Crowds, heights, eating at Olive Garden -- no activity was immune from obsession. I'm not sure if a receding hairline induces fear or vice versa, but the medical community should lace Propecia with Xanax. That pill would sell like hotcakes. Somewhere along the road, half-way between a Ceaser cut and a comb-over, flying went from exciting to unfathomable.
At first, the developing phobia was frustrating, like I was voluntarily placing a 200-mile leash around my neck. There was still so much of the world I hadn't seen, at least, outside of the Epcot World Pavilion, which is a pale comparator. You can't fool me, Disney Corporation. The real Eiffel Tower is not made of cardboard.
But over the years, my disappointment in not being able to travel to exotic lands (sorry Canada, maple syrup and Mounties do not an exotic destination make) was steadily replaced with more pressing concerns, like whether plucking a nose hair will result in two growing back in its place, and any residual disappointment has been consciously repressed. The mind has an amazing capacity for rationalization and self-denial, a lesson that I learned years ago when my father found a charge to a gay phone sex line on the monthly long-distance bill.
"Must have been a wrong number," he said, quickly whipping out his checkbook and conveniently ignoring the fact that the call lasted sixteen minutes.
But coming from a family in which an emotion didn't exist unless it was communicated -- most often in screaming bloody murder form -- I was never quite able to completely repress this feeling that my life was missing something. Unlike the other missing elements in my life (functional parents, a full head of hair, a digestive system that can process corn), this one was entirely self-made. I couldn't blame anyone else for the leash I had put around my own neck. I had the time, the wherewithal (after several years of working at a corporate law firm, I had wherewithal coming out my ears), and the desire to travel. Still, I couldn't bring myself to face that big tin can in the sky.
Occasionally, the issue comes up at my weekly therapy session with my social worker, Nancy, most often when I come across a beautiful travel destination that is only accessible by air, thereby triggering my self-flagellation anew. Nancy has a last name, but I never learned it, choosing instead to remember her simply as Nancy. Something about a woman with just one name makes her seem powerful and dynamic, like Madonna, or Jackee, either of whom could successfully plum the depths of my psyche. The same theory doesn't apply to men with just one name. I don’t want Fabio asking me about my overbearing mother.
"So why do you hate flying?" Somehow Nancy had managed to actually learn something about me apart from my affection for knock-knock jokes.
"The people," I replied, fiddling with the expired passport I still carried around in my backpack. It hadn't been stamped since 1999, when I travelled Europe with my friend Beverly, in an attempt to become more worldly and sophisticated. It didn’t take. I still prefer non-carbonated water and good hygiene. "Being trapped in a tiny space with hundreds of people freaks me out."
"Why are you afraid of being trapped with people?" she asked, dabbing her eyes with lubricant drops. She claimed that she needed to constantly rewet her eyes because of her allergies, but I noticed that she usually took out the drops when our conversations veered towards disturbing territory. The day I told her about my Miss Piggy obsession, I thought she was going to drown in saline solution.
"Embarrassing myself." I glanced at a picture of her son in his college graduation gown -- or, someone I assumed was her son -- on the desk behind her. He was very attractive. Staring at his picture was probably the reason I had stuck around long enough to get past the knock-knock jokes. "Or worse. What if I freak out on the plane, and they think I'm a terrorist or something?"
Drop, drop.
"You don't look like a terrorist."
"That's very narrow-minded, isn't it?"
Drop, drop.
"So what would make you feel better about flying?"
"Well, maybe if I could fly by myself, in a small private room, so I couldn't panic and embarrass myself in front of people," I replied, simultaneously wondering if she would notice if I took her son's picture home. "Like a flying closet."
"A closet." Drop, drop. "You want to fly in a closet?"
"Yeah,” I said, planning my escape with picture in hand. “ Can I do that?"
Nancy had to cut our session short that day, having run out of eyedrops. But it's not as if we were getting anywhere anyway. I needed to try something other than just talking about it, something a little more proactive, something that stopped just short of actually getting on a plane. So I cleared my schedule for the following Saturday afternoon, packed a lunch, and made my way to the closest flying tin can death trap. Of course, I planned to eat the lunch before I actually arrived at the airport. I don't trust the security people who say those x-ray machines don't contaminate food that passes through them, and I want my cancer to come from cell phones, not tomatoes.
I arrived at the airport in the late afternoon, which fortunately was easily accessible by subway. I had already spent thousands of dollars as a test monkey for experimental therapeutic techniques, and was not keen on spending much more. Before I left, I thoroughly researched everything about the airport; most convenient restrooms, duty-free shopping possibilities, where I could get my hand on one of those wonderful Toblerone bars that they seem to only sell at airports, and of course, potential emergency exits. Most people find the airplane emergency exit speech an unnecessary irritation. Personally, I don't think it's long enough. I'd prefer much more detail. Optimally the flight crew would perform a lengthy demonstration of how the seat cushions actually transform into floatation devices, because frankly, I just don't see it.
"The flames were 30 feet high, and the smoke was so thick I couldn't see my own hand. I thought it was the end. Then I remembered my ass -- which was on fire at the time -- was conveniently placed on one of those wonderful seat cushions. Thank you floating seat cushion!"
I quickly scarfed down my hastily-made tuna fish sandwich, which had grown warm in my bag, thereby adding suspicion to some already questionable mayonnaise. Fortunately I knew the precise location of all of the restrooms in the terminal. When I finally mustered up the courage to actually walk through the sliding glass doors, my stomach was already rumbling, either because I ate too much, or I hadn't eaten enough. My digestive system is never content. The colon doesn't fall far from the tree.
The terminal was busy, but eerily quiet. Though perhaps it wasn't so much eerily quiet as unexpectedly calm. Over the previous several years, I had concocted my own vision of a modern day, post-9/11 airport, which included, in no particular order, terrorists threatening to blow up the Washington Monument, business travelers shooting each other in the shins over the last first-class seat to Toledo, and elderly women being strip searched by security guards with a granny fetish. Add to that the very real threat of being molested by a horny politician in the next toilet stall, and even Charles Manson would find the scene disturbing.
But to my surprise, the airport was calm, efficient, and peaceful. Light streamed in through the high glass ceilings, and the immaculately clean floors -- cleaner than mine, even -- were covered with bright orange-yellow tiles. Passengers strolled slowly through the halls, stopping at various stores and eating establishments, several of which featured "patio" seating complete with faux palm trees and beach umbrellas. The terminal seem more like a fancy resort than a torture chamber, and I wondered if the whole flying is a nightmare these days rumor was just invented by airport maintenance crews in an attempt to reduce their workload.
And most surprisingly, people were actually smiling. They were smiling on the security line, they were smiling while waiting for their pre-flight margarita, they were smiling while being herded onto the New York shuttle. Where was all the angst that I had read about? Where were the people beating each other with exploding shoes? Why was I the only one shaking uncontrollably? I wasn't relieved. I was angry at having been misled by the media, which was apparently in the pocket of the airport maintenance crew union. All those years spent dragging myself on the train to DisneyWorld, I could have just spent the weekend at Delta Terminal B.
Then, through one of the 50 foot windows, I caught a glimpse of an airplane. It was just idling on the tarmac, waiting for clearance of some kind, no more threatening than a stalled Greyhound bus. I could see passengers sitting inside, waiting patiently, eating their in-flight pretzels (which, to my disappointment, had apparently replaced the in-flight peanuts). It was the closest I'd been to an actual airplane in almost a decade.
Suddenly the idyllic world that I had entered minutes before transformed into a claustrophobic freak show. Every movement, every noise, every churn of the insta-daiquiri machine made my head swirl. Even the orange-yellow tiles mocked me with their institutional sterility. At any moment, killer clowns would invade the terminal and take us all hostage. And I would have been happy to go anywhere with them, as long as they didn't make me get on a plane.
The complacency surrounding me was astounding. Couldn't these people see that they were voluntarily placing themselves in extreme danger? Is a honeymoon in Bora-Bora really worth a funeral at sea? If I had been faced with a choice between bungee jumping off of the Empire State Building and getting on one of those metal-plastic amalgam contraptions, I would have strapped on a helmet and took the dive. At least a bungee jumper is supported by something other than air. It seemed entirely impossible that air could hold up a 100-ton behemoth like that. I knew there was some kind of scientific principle at work here, but I didn't trust science. Science couldn't even make hair grow back in my temples, how was it going to save me from hurtling to my death in an Idaho cornfield?
I found a quiet seat facing away from the windows, and tried to catch my breath and resolve the tingling sensation that had invaded every corner of my body. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that I had wandered into a corner of the terminal from which airplanes were visible on every side. The tingling was not subsiding, and I wondered if this was finally one panic attack too many. The human heart only has so many beats in it, and after my parents' divorce, three years of law school, and the time my mother caught me masturbating, mine couldn't have too many left.
In an attempt to distract myself from my impending doom, I began observing some of the goings-on around me. The only thing that can take my mind off of my own misery when I'm miserable is other people's misery. Most of the people sitting around me were painfully dull, at least to the naked eye. A businessman reading Newseek, an elderly woman knitting, a teenager playing with his iPod. They might all be interesting behind closed doors, but I didn't know one way or the other. I wished that the businessman would have an acid flashback from his hippie days, or the elderly woman would stab the teenager with her knitting needle. Anything to take my mind off of the panic that had gripped me.
Finally, like a gift from heaven, an intensely dysfunctional family of five or six -- two or three of the kids were running around in circles so quickly that they seemed to blend into one -- sat down next to me. The mother and father were arguing, but I couldn't hear most of what they were saying over the screams of their children, who clearly had terrorized several elementary school teachers in their day.
"Don't blame me! I didn't want to go to fucking Colonial Williamsburg," the father shouted, a small amount of spittle landing smack dab in the center of his wife's face. "This was your fucking idea!"
"Where the fuck did you want to go?" the wife screamed back, matching him spittle with spittle. "The fucking Playboy mansion?"
Monster #1, who appeared to be some version of female, started punching Monster #2, who responded in kind with several kicks to Monster #1's shins and some expletives that I didn't know until I was 23. I watched the scene for several minutes, as the burgeoning criminals in front of me battled for the title of most likely to need a public defender one day. Grateful that unplanned pregnancies were only a heterosexual plague, I wondered whether eugenics was really that bad of an idea.
"Flight 117, non-stop to Williamsburg, now boarding Gate 13."
While the mother tried to round up her children, I watched the father sneak over to the newsstand and peak at the magazines wrapped in plastic on the top shelf. Obviously his wife was correct -- he'd rather be going to the Playboy mansion. Then again, he'd probably rather be going to a Turkish prison than to Williamsburg with his family.
"Jerry, get the fuck back here!" The husband dutifully replaced whatever fantasy rag he was perusing, and made his way back to his wayward family, leaving a piece of himself on the top shelf with the dirty magazines. He probably left pieces of himself scattered across newsstands on the Northeast Corridor.
The mother grabbed a hold of Monster #1 and Monster #2, who struggled to break free.
"Let's go you little maniacs!" Maniacs are as maniacs do.
The father gathered up the luggage, glancing occasionally back to the newsstand with a longing that his wife likely hadn't seen in years. I was sad that I'd soon have to go back to focusing on my own life.
"Jason, come on!"
Jason -- an offspring who I hadn't previously noticed -- lay huddled under the chair across from me. He was clealry the youngest of the three, and while his siblings were well-built -- probably from years of beating each other senseless -- Jason was small, even for his age. I couldn't tell what that age was, but I knew he was small for it.
"I don't want to go," he said, meekly, clutching a stuffed Elmo. To my dismay, Elmo had apparently replaced Kermit and other more intelligent Muppets in the hearts of young children.
"I can't deal with this shit right now," the mother said, waving her hand dismissively at her child. "Jerry, you better deal with this."
Jerry's method of "dealing with it" was to grab Jason by the arm and drag him out with more force than should reasonably be applied to tiny bodies. But Jason didn't cry or make a noise, or even seem to notice the noise around him. He just went along, stumbling the entire way as his father led him by the arm through security. Years of invisibility had left Jason deaf, dumb, and blind.
Watching Jason huddle under the airport chair brought back memories of the crawlspace under my childhood home, where I often hid during my parents’ arguments. My parents didn’t relegate themselves to one room to fight. They traveled from room to room, chasing each other out of one and into another, round and round until they tired themselves out, or one of them left the house, or someone called the police. But if I crammed myself into the furthest corner of the crawlspace and stuck my fingers in my ears, I could only barely hear them. I would leave the basement light on so I could see, and I put a stuffed animal in there to keep me company, a giraffe my grandmother had bought me during our last trip to DisneyWorld. I also put some chocolate chip cookies in the crawlspace for sustenance. Sometimes the fights were pretty long, and I got hungry.
During one particularly nasty fight – I think it was about the vacuum cleaner, something about which required my father to go to hell and my mother to save him a seat on the way – I fell asleep in the crawlspace. When I woke up, it was pitch black. Someone must have turned the basement light off while I was asleep, likely my mother, who regularly went around the house turning off lights to conserve electricity, even if you had only walked out of the room seconds before. In the dark, I couldn’t tell which way I was facing. I couldn’t see the opening to the crawlspace. I started to cry, but I didn’t call for help, because that would start another fight, which would necessitate my returning to the crawlspace. I muffled my crying with the stuffed giraffe so no one could hear.
And suddenly, it occurred to me that I might not ever leave that crawlspace. I could die in the crawlspace. No one would think to look for me in there. I didn’t think an adult could have even fit in there. Everyone would think I ran away, or was kidnapped. I’d be on the side of a milk carton within a month. There’d be a manhunt for my captor. People would see me at the supermarket, or in a clothing store, or riding Space Mountain with Elvis. Each new sighting would give my parents renewed hope.
But in a year or two, maybe less, depending on whether the tabloids picked up the story, everyone would just give up. I’m sorry, ma’am, the chances of us finding your son now are slim to nil. Just another missing child in America. My mom would grieve for a while, maybe forever. She’d rip out her hair and tear her clothes and blame my dad and my sister and God and everyone else she set her eyes on. My dad would grieve too. He’d buy himself lots of CD players and television sets and other gadgets to ease the pain. Everyone copes in their own way. But the world would continue to spin without me. It had to. I wasn’t that important.
And in a hundred years, when they bulldozed the house, they would find my corpse, still clutching the stuffed giraffe. By then my whole family would be gone, and no one would ever know who I was or why I had laid under a house for a hundred years holding a stuffed giraffe.
That was the last time I ever hid in the crawlspace. Before my mom sold the house, I ventured in one last time to retrieve the stuffed giraffe. It was still there. It still smelled like tears and chocolate chip cookies.
Jason et al made their way towards their gate, and I took a moment to say a prayer for the flight attendants on their plane. With their departure, I was left to resume my panicked state, which came back in full force and was made all the more intense by the memories that Jason and his family brought back.
I closed my eyes and clutched my hands together. When most people hold their hands together, they fold their fingers on top of each other, so that they are layered one above the other. When I do it, I hold my right hand in my left like I'm holding a stranger's hand. Somehow it feels more comforting, even though I've held my own hand far more times than anyone has held it for me. I always knew my hand would be there. I couldn't say the same about anyone else's.
Thinking about courageous little Jason boarding his flight, I questioned my own lack of will power. Here was this five year old boy, scared to death, clutching his Elmo (I still disapproved of his Muppet selection, but attributed this minor transgression to his tender age), being dragged onto the plane by his tremendously insensitive parents who would surely completely fail to comfort him when he needed comforting the most. But Jason had likely gotten accustomed to hiding under airport chairs. He felt safe under the chair, because there was no where else for him to hide.
And here I was, twenty-eight years old, still hiding. Sure, I hid on top of the chair instead of underneath it, but I was still hiding. There was no one to hide from anymore, but they were still chasing me. My father was still watching pornography behind my mother's back, and my mother was still shouting expletives at my father about the vacuum cleaner. The sound of the airplane engines couldn't drown out their voices. Their voices roared even louder than my fear. I had to get away from the fear and the voices, to save myself that very moment, or there would be nothing left to save.
I got up from the seat and made my way back to the exit, walking quickly but not too quickly, as I wasn't too keen on being stopped by some paranoid security guards who thought some malicious motive lay behind my brisk pace. As I left the terminal, I tried to forgive myself for not getting further along in my treatment that day. I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, I had hoped that once I went back to an airport, all my fears would suddenly dissipate, and I'd be on a plane to Hawaii by the end of the day. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen, at least, not today. But I was still a few subway stops closer than I had been the day before.
I boarded the train back to my home, breathing a sigh of relief as I sat myself down on the orange padded cushion. Subways usually trigger a slight panic reaction, but after facing my ultimate transportation demons, this subway was warm and welcoming. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. Grateful that I had survived the trip, I settled into my seat with a little after-panic muzak courtesy of my "Relaxation Playlist," which was just enough to relax me but would put most people into a coma.
Then the subway came to a sudden stop in between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West.
"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We are experiencing some technical difficulties. Please stand by."
The announcement was not comforting. Usually when the subway comes to a sudden stop, the announcer says something like, there's a train in front of us, we'll be moving shortly. But apparently we were stopped due to "technical difficulties," with no estimate for the amount of time that we'd be stuck here, fifty feet below ground. And unless my body developed a liquid-like consistency by which I could pour myself out of the subway car through a crack in the doors -- a remote possibility, at best -- there was nowhere to go.
I felt the panic begin to rise again, and my hands instinctively grabbed hold of each other. My extremeties began shaking -- well, most of my extremeties -- transforming my fingers from useful tools into useless appendages. I thought about trying to read the National Enquirer magazine I had bought on impulse at the airport (ok, I was planning to buy it, but it sounds less pathetic when I claim otherwise), but figured it was pointless, as I couldn't hold anything in my hands. And besides, I couldn't concentrate on a magazine, not even one with Jacko on the cover. I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. Not over the roar of the voices.
I began searching again for someone more miserable than myself to take my mind off of my quickening heart rate. To my disappointment, the only other people in my car were an elderly couple sitting across the aisle. I figured they wouldn't provide much entertainment, as elderly people are generally not phased by trivialities like being trapped on a stalled subway. I found myself longing for the dysfunctional family circus, who would soon be met at their arrival gate by a throng of FBI agents and a tranquilizer gun.
But while the man was calmly reading a newspaper, the woman was clearly disturbed by our situation. She wasn't saying anything, and didn't move a muscle, but I could tell. It was in the squint of her eyes. They pleaded for freedom, even as her body remained completely still. Esperanto may be the language of love, but fear is the universal language.
Her husband -- at least I assumed he was her husband, though he could have been anything to her, a lover, a friend, a chauffeur with a Driving Miss Daisy obsession -- looked over at his quietly panicking companion. Without a word, he put down the paper, and took her hand and placed it in his. And almost instantly, her eyes widened slightly, her breathing became less shallow, and a slight smile appeared on her face. The freedom she sought was still fifty feet away, but that didn't matter. All because he offered his hand, and she took it.
I closed my eyes, and gripped my hands even tighter, which by now were slippery with cold sweat. I thought about little Jason, huddled under his airplane chair, still clutching his stuffed Elmo, separated from oblivion by a few inches of metal and plastic. How little it would take to bring him out from under the chair. Just a hand. Not gripped tightly around his arm, but lightly around his own, squeezing in just the right places, telling him that he didn't have to hold his own hand to survive. And even if that hand didn't come today, or for the foreseeable future, somewhere, someday, someone would offer it, and someday, he would take it. As long as he could let go of his own.
I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and let go of my hands. For Jason, and for myself.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Remiss, me?
I told my therapist the other day that I was feeling guilty that I hadn't posted to my blog in a month.
"Why do you feel guilty?" she asked. "I'm sure your readers have other things to do."
Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled by this bold and disappointing declaration. Other things to do? Other than obsess about the life of this odd, once-and-hopefully-not-future attorney with more emotional problems than Suri Cruise? Say it ain't so, readers!
But on the off-chance that my therapist is incorrect, here's the straight dope (side-note -- is there a gay dope? and if there is, can someone please send it to Jake Gyllenhall along with my address (that is, assuming he hasn't smoked it already)). I haven't stopped writing, I've just stopped writing so quickly. Reviewing some of my old stories, I saw a lot of room for improvement. Of course, as a die-hard perfectionist, I can find room for improvement in most anything I do. Wait a second, I think I can write that sentence better...
So don't despair, gentle reader. A new story will appear soon, and I promise it won't disappoint. And if it does, well, my therapist is accepting new patients.
"Why do you feel guilty?" she asked. "I'm sure your readers have other things to do."
Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled by this bold and disappointing declaration. Other things to do? Other than obsess about the life of this odd, once-and-hopefully-not-future attorney with more emotional problems than Suri Cruise? Say it ain't so, readers!
But on the off-chance that my therapist is incorrect, here's the straight dope (side-note -- is there a gay dope? and if there is, can someone please send it to Jake Gyllenhall along with my address (that is, assuming he hasn't smoked it already)). I haven't stopped writing, I've just stopped writing so quickly. Reviewing some of my old stories, I saw a lot of room for improvement. Of course, as a die-hard perfectionist, I can find room for improvement in most anything I do. Wait a second, I think I can write that sentence better...
So don't despair, gentle reader. A new story will appear soon, and I promise it won't disappoint. And if it does, well, my therapist is accepting new patients.
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