FREE FALL
The world I live in isn’t real. The outside real might be real but my version of it isn’t real. This terminal is real but the life I see within it isn’t. The boredom I live in isn’t terminal but endlessly imagining my death is terminal. I’ve been in too many airline terminals before, nearly all like this one, some more, some less. The passengers sit or stand on edge and wait incessantly for flights that take them away but they never really leave. They only end up in another terminal, where they mingle about waiting for their flight. My flight is late, much too late. It’s too late for flight, for escape. My seventeen year old wisdom gives me insight that offers no consolation.
The runway (or is it a runaway?) angles and disappears out of sight, as the jetliner climbs and banks hard over the diminishing city below. The stewardess sits next to me, small but not quite petite, brunette, fair-skinned with a faint mustache above her thin lips. She makes thin conversation with me, mumbling a bit about chores she must complete on this relatively short flight. The seat belt warning light dings and goes off. She gets up and leaves. Weaving in and out of groggy awareness, I decide that I know the meaning of dreaming while I drift into a dream. Somewhere over Bakersfield, the jet lurches violently, and the fuselage splits apart and falls open like an unsprung oven door, spilling its flailing passengers across the not-so-friendly skies. Business men and working girls tumble aimlessly towards their doom, triggering a domino sequence of images that leads to ever expansive visual metaphors of bright, sharp, vivid depression. My chin falls off my hand and I snap awake.
“You OK?” the stewardess asks from the aisle. “You look a bit uneasy. Maybe you’re just tired. I’ll get you a pillow.” She walks away. The pall of summer brushfires spreads across the valley floor as the orange hue of sunset tint the hillsides that disappear to the north. Dancing lines of flame mark the fires that wind across the ridges. I drift off to sleep again.
The engines change pitch, downshifting into the apocalyptic metropolis. It’s getting dark and shafts of light shoot from angry intersections, where twisted fenders throw beacons of chaos between the boils of smoke that roll across the sprawling streets. Between the hills, across the streets, the folded landscape takes on the shapes of a human body and the peculiar angle makes a dizzy hallucination of open doors between here and there, then and now and I see my mother’s body, naked and pregnant, lying of the floor of the kitchen, in yet another of her haphazard suicide attempts, the gas from the open oven door hissing like the jets of air from the overhead console in the aircraft cabin. The trauma lives on in thin layers of tears that build up into a wall, focusing my concentration into desperate escape. In the kitchen screaming or in the plane brooding, it’s all the same fear, dread and resentment.
On my thirteenth birthday, my father would rescue me from all this sadness and madness (for his own purposes, I found out later, none of which I understood or found agreeable).
I know it’s stupid for a seventeen year-old girl to run away by trying to hitch-hike down the interstate but when you suffer and think too much, forms of death become inter-changeable and the hope of life turns more powerful than all the world’s good sense.
“Ya ever sucked a guy off, sweetie?” the driver says after picking me up on the cold December morning, using that question to conclude his epic story of traveling the country. I respond with a long, disjointed diatribe about venereal disease, open sores, pregnancy and abortion clinics in Berkeley. My adolescent meanderings don’t really make much sense but, by the time I’m finished, the horny motorist steers to an off-ramp, with me preparing for a violent crisis. He thinks fellatio. I think murder. I clutch the paring knife hidden in my purse. The atmosphere of tension stretched thin, its premature climax explodes with the flashing red lights behind us and the short warning wail of the trailing Highway Patrol car.
The patrolman looks familiar, the aviator shades similar to those worn by the Homeric horny toad behind the wheel. But the officer looks like father, the tight collar, the surreal smooth skin with no trace of stubble, the clean, even rows of teeth, so even they must be filed every morning. “Are you here by your own volition?” he asks me.
The last time I see the deviant dim-wit is through the back window of the departing highway cruiser, with him standing alongside his car, surrounded by three patrolman, two with notebooks as he gets questioned.
I ride the black and white back to the farm-town dispatch station, my runaway bio repeated across the radio in an officious mixture of clipped law-enforcement officialese and country boy drawl.
Fittingly, father shows up at midnight, taking fourteen hours for the three hour drive. He probably needed to sober up. On the way back to his house, I suffer through an incessant lecture, broken only by glares from his reddened eyes. He tells me he was crying. Maybe so but I think he was drunk.
“Do me a favor, I ask sarcastically. “Don’t confuse drinking with crying or getting drunk with feeling love.” The poisoned barbs fly back and forth and after the hours and miles roll by, we reach an uneasy and silent truce.
Within the month, I’m on this plane back to the questionable safety of my mother, my mother who showed her love by leaving my father, my father who screwed her by going to bed with another. Was it a man or a woman?
His Casanova camouflage carried him through three marriages and three divorces until his final coupling with a stepmother whose hatred of him is only exceeded by her hatred of all men. The ending begins the morning he walks naked into my room and sits on my bed, talking softly, stinking of last night’s whiskey as it creeps through his pores. The memory mixes with the moment and I remember his weird, almost alien voice when I was small, his hands on my belly and… …by the time I’m awake, awake and screaming, he’s left, hiding in the bathroom. By the time my stepmother’s at the door, he’s behind her, with his robe on. She ridicules. He denies.
I get away that day but I’m already gone, in some ways, never to return. I spend my days in some kind of numb zombie state, waiting for my next chance at escape. While there, I’m standing aloof at one of his patio cocktail parties, more cock-tale parties than anything else. After listening to my father loudly recount one of his stories about his fictional football exploits in high school, I let him have the pay-off.
“Here I am, number eighty-eight,” he says, “ twenty yards past the last defender. Nothing but grass between me and the end zone and I’m bobbling the ball like a hot potato.” He and his sodden friends all laugh. “The coach is yelling at me, ‘Grab the handle!’ And the other team’s coach is yelling, ‘Drop it! Drop it!’”
By now, they’re all laughing, sloshing booze on their polyester shirts, pants, ties and souls.
“Yeah, right!” I say from just over his shoulder, loud enough for all his waxen, alcoholic friends to hear, “You who didn’t even play football because his drunken mother wouldn’t let him try out for the team.” He didn’t know I was there. The perfect attack. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the bitter confrontation that followed.
As the plane touches down. I enter a world that I will shape for myself, by my rules, rules no longer written by keepers who are their own captives. My mother will wait at the gate for hours before she realizes I’m gone.