In Flight Blog

--This girl on the plane, she’s lived in LA, in the same place I lived, but a year after I left. Park Lebrea. Close to the Tar Pits and the Farmer’s Market and the Beverly Center.

Park Lebrea, a little east of Beverly Hills, a little south of Hollywood. That big and nearly empty apartment, me and J and A, two girls and a boy on their own in the big city, a place where we had much to learn and to lose and to gain.

And this girl on the plane, she makes the coincidence greater, telling you she lived on the same floor you did.

Big complex, small world.

Very pretty through the mouth, through the eyes, this girl. She looks like what she is, a professional dancer, part of a troupe, she and her traveling companion both; I could tell that about them before they squeezed past me, some specific about their builds, about the way they moved.

And I don’t like to talk to people beside me on airplanes. Conversation up close, with heads half turned, it’s awkward. You learn to hide in your lap top, in books, in sleep, behind a blanked face.

Three one word answers will stop just about anybody from trying you again.

And yet the coincidence of LA, of Park Lebrea, the ease with which she laughs, it makes it conversation not just possible, but desirable.

So you sit there head half cocked trying to put your features at ease.

--And it brings back memories of LA.

LA, that’s where you first begin to learn about women.
You were a novelty there, a pseudo country boy with cowboy boots and the pockets still sewn shut on your sport jacket because you didn’t know they could be open. You hadn’t learned to tie a tie.

This is the University of Southern California, all these rich kids, an Autumn when California was burning, but then again, it seems to every Autumn.

All these rich kids and those of you poor enough to qualify for loans it will take the next thirty years to repay.

And you were a kid from the country, and the girls that came at you, they were mostly wealthy girls.

This was graduate school but you’d hardly grown up.

You might have known something about who you were, but you didn’t know how it worked between a boy and a girl. The way you thought it worked, you saw a girl that was pretty, you wanted her, you sought her, every now and then you got her, whatever getting meant.

That was what you knew of girls before LA.

If anything, LA is where it became confusing. What you really wanted wasn’t as clear as you’d imagined it was before. And there you were in the chaos of it, hanging on to that relationship with that girl in Seattle where you’d spent the summer, that first real love, the last bit of real innocence.

That was you in LA, a late bloomer, if what you did there suggests blooming, if what happens to you there suggests the opening of a bud.

… The girls on the plane, dancers.
They travel around, performing.
They talk about Syracuse, Oregon, New York.
A kind of ease with travel I’ve never had, a kind of which I’m envious.

They call what they do tribal fusion; they call it modern bellydance fusion. You like these names, the way they say them, the way the girl beside you is lit up by them.

They tell you to visit the website Urbantribaldance.com and you make a note to plug it.

One of them, the one by the window, she’s reading a book off of which she’s taken the cover: He’s Not Really Into You.

M, I remember, she swears by that book.

And the close girl, you think she’s Irish, but she says Scottish, Scottish and other bloods, maybe a bit of Irish, this dancer with the pretty eyes and mouth, she has a pleasant laugh, a pleasant way of talking.

They play clips of their dances, this tribal fusion, this modern bellydance, on a laptop. There’s no audio, just them on the stage, moving with impossible grace, unnatural control of the body that does not look unnatural as you watch it.

For a moment, you think they must be lovers, because you can’t understand how they could dance that sensually that close to each other and not fall into semblance of love.

The way you sometimes can’t imagine why women don’t always fall in love with women. Or at least lust. There’s so much to lust after in a woman.

--I’m hypnotized, watching the videos.

Caught in the momentary false love of the fan.
The way a woman must feel when she watches a goalie stop a shot. A quarterback throw a ball. The way we admire with a sort of longing an act of skill and inspiration.

The way sometimes when you listen to Mama Cass, fuck it, whatever she looked like, you could kiss her hard and long.

--The girl beside you, you are watching her in a different than real world light, on a stage, in her most perfect element.

Captive audience. Perfect witness.

The way we get seduced by rare and beautiful things, the creators of creations we think no one else can make.

…And I think of LA.

That first fall, before Park Lebrea, the beginning of those girls, especially the wealthy ones that found you a novelty, different than the boys they’d grown up with, gotten undergraduate degrees with, boys as moneyed and certain of success as they were.

V, tall, Polynesian, a girl who had two BMW’s, identical except for the color, the color to fit the mood, she’s in your screenwriting class. And sitting on a bench beneath a palm on the campus with its tall walls, outside of which riots had recently marched and drug boys chase your car down the street begging a sale, she says to you, through her sunglasses, I want you to stop it.

And you said, What?

You were twenty three, but much younger. And so you said, What? and you meant it.

Stop relating to me sexually, she said. I live with my boyfriend.

--LA is where you learn that girls with boys are much more open than girls without them.

LA is where you learn a lot of things, though at the time you don’t know you learn them.

What you learn in LA, you learn in retrospect.

--And V, you’re sitting in the sun before or after class, on a bench, the palm tree above, and she says for you to stop relating to her sexually.

You were young, and we could say naïve, and if we’re being kind, we could say innocent.

And you don’t know what she’s talking about. You don’t remember relating to her sexually. You’re not even sure what that means.

She wears sunglasses, peers through them. Her hair, it is perfect. Her makeup and every outfit she’s ever worn.

You say, Ok. I’ll stop.

--And in your cheap downtown housing, that place you lived before the earthquake freed you from its contract, this one room apartment, with its baby fridge and your thirteen inch television screen, you and V fuck. Her ass is hard, the thing you remember most about the physicality of it, her body with its elongated muscles.

And she tells you to come inside of her and when you do, she says, Why did you do that?

In retrospect, you know that you learned then that she was a little unstable.

You’ve got a girlfriend in Seattle. You’re 23, but younger than that.

And V, she starts to bring you things.
Exotic foods.
Wall hangings.
A sport jacket.

Making you and your place poverty chic.

--Seattle, that Christmas break, you and the Seattle girl, that first love, you travel south, rent a cabin on a beach, make love at the edge of a cliff just beyond a lighthouse, thinking it would be good to die now, the water so gray, the sky so gray, everything so lovely.

(How it bothers you now to not know where that girl is.)

--And back in LA, V has left her boyfriend.
This confuses and frightens you.
But you try not to look confused or frightened.
You try not to seem like a person who has always been in over his head.

Eventually, as she tries to grow on you, you find a way to say no more.
And she immediately finds a way to say she hates you.

--That nightmare that you’ve had of women scorned.
Of the first girl who ever said love and showed you hate.
Crazymad in that dream, in a van with the doors locked, running a chain saw, two children, a boy and a girl, trying to get away from her, and you trying to get in, and the woman screaming at you: You see what you’ve done.

The door won’t open. The children won’t quit screaming. The chainsaw buzzes.

--V hating you.
The way a few before had.
The way others will.
But at a time when you were too young to understand hate, or that type of it.

And then the earthquake. Everything either comes together or goes to pieces then, depending on how you look at it.

--A year later, you see V again, a few times, in her West LA apartment, her hate having subsided, the pretense of love completely replaced by the scab of lust; the hottub on the roof, a place you could fuck beneath the stars and against the fear and anticipation of being accidentally witnessed.

By that time, everything is different. You’ve torn Seattle off your map.
You’ve gotten rid of all the cds that you associate with that Seattle girl, that first real love.

You spend nights in bars, where the novelty is wearing off of you as you’re learning how to tie ties, to cut open your sewn sport jacket pockets, to get rid of your cowboy boots; where you are leaning to be just like everybody else.

You spend your nights in bars where the LA boys, having been sent to gyms by their agents and managers now have muscles they don’t know what to do with and try to come off hard; these bars where you find out how easy it is to get in trouble there, fucking and fighting.

There are girlfriends and wives of boys you’ll not meet, and what you begin to think is that if you had to choose the life of the wolf or of the sheep, you’d take the wolf.

You would make that choice if it were yours to make.
But between the heart and the mind most choices slip into something that resembles both the possibilities and replicates neither of them.

L Cohen write:You who must leave everything you cannot control,
It begins with your family but soon it moves round to your soul.

--Your two years in LA, this is where you learn to relate to women. It’s where you learn a way, anyway, to relate to them. And you learn all kinds of things about yourself.

This is where you learn what the set of the Price is Right looks like, how everything is more flimsy than it seems on tv.
This is where you learn to really drink.
This is where you learn the limits of your writing, and the limits of yourself in general.
Where you quit your CBS job on a lunchhour two brandy decision.

And you believe as you begin to make it in almost every connection you make.

And this is where you first begin to believe in the illusion of the power of being wanted.
As if when someone thinks she wants you her desire will keep her from turning on you.
Finding ways to try to harm.
Her confusion between desire and care is mirrored by your own.

--And, LA, incidentally, this is where you met your wife, the first one, the good one.
This is the city you ran away from together.
And the city, when you were afraid of the closeness with her, to which you ran back.
Only to see it differently, more clearly, LA, yourself in it, the context of liquor and bars and your bed.

On your return there, with eyes clear enough to recognize something like disillusionment, you bought that first ring at the Beverly Center.

Your fist wife.

--You’d met her in a bar, Tom Bergen’s, the name of which brings a smile to the face of the urban fusion dance girl beside you. She knows that bar.

--And this flight, for all it’s memories, none of them truly bad, or at least far enough away to bring about more nostalgia than regret, it’s a pleasant flight.

The girl beside you telling you about what it means to be a dancer.
Telling you about her life in San Diego, her life on the road, her month in Mexico.
These girls at ease with strangers on planes.

--This good flight.
They all are, bringing me toward my son, a trip on which I don’t need to bring sunglasses, for when I return, it will not be alone, but with him, no reason yet to cry.