Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility by Hollis Gillespie Page A

thinking the formation reminded me of
a skull. Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if that meant something?
Weeks earlier, on my academic calendar hanging on the wall at home,
I'd drawn the image of a skull on this very day, in anticipation for a
scheduled biology test I was certain I'd fail. In the end I skipped the
test and hopped that impromptu plane ride to Los Angeles with my
drug dealer roommate instead.
    It hurts my heart to think about that, just like it does to think of
Daniel's heart hooked up to wires like a coma patient. Mind you, I
have no idea if coma patients are commonly hooked up to wires; it just
seems like they should be, you know, in case their heart stops beating
or something. I have actually been near someone whose heart stopped
beating once, someone who was not in a coma, someone who was just
standing there in the aisle of an aircraft, and you would not believe the
ruckus a person can make when that happens. They flail around and
flop on the ground and knock things over, and it's pretty obvious to everyone around them that something is wrong. They certainly don't
need a wire hooked up to them to alert others at that point, whereas if
they were in a coma, now, they would probably not flop very much at
all. Their heart could just stop with hardly anyone noticing.

    Hence the necessity for wires. Ever since Daniel was diagnosed
with HIV a few years ago, I have been offering to fill his prescriptions
on my layovers in Peru and on my visits to my sister in Nicaragua. I
have also offered to go to support groups with him, but he walked out
halfway through the one and only session he ever attended and refuses
to go back. "Too negative," he'd said, which I found ironic, since the
point was to be positive about being positive. But in the end, whatever
Daniel is doing seems to be working, because to be with him you'd
think his condition wasn't an issue. But then there comes something
to make it crash to the forefront. Like his recently being hooked up
to wires.
    All I can do is ask him if he needs anything, and it's rare when he
says he does. Lately I've been swapping my trips to Frankfurt in order to
work the flight to Peru instead, where the pharmacy is right next door
to our layover hotel. Normally, as a German interpreter, I would never
work a flight to Central America. But things change. For one, these days
the airplane nightmares hardly bother me at all anymore. I started having the dreams years before the airlines hired me, which is a fact I never
really calculated until I was sitting there in the job interview. "Do you
suffer from recurring dreams?" the interviewer asked me.
    "None whatsoever," I said, realizing it had been eight years since
I'd slept soundly without the aid of alcohol, sex, and/or narcotics. But I comforted myself with the realization that technically the dreams
weren't really recurring-were they?-as the dreams were always different; it was just their theme that was the same, the general topic
being a plane falling from the sky with me either in it or on it or under
it. That's all.

    "That is what we'd call `recurring,"' said Daniel.
    Thanks to an industry perk called buddy passes, Daniel sometimes gets to go with me on my drug-running exertions. He was with
me that time the pilots aborted landing while we were flying home
and I practically cut off his air supply, I was clinging to him so tight.
Screaming, too, and you'd be surprised at how people just take screaming in stride on an aircraft. I personally think it ought to draw more
attention, but I'm glad it didn't in this case. I might have been recognized later while in my uniform serving some of these same people on
their connecting flights.
    "You're gonna be fine," Daniel kept telling me, but not loud
enough for me to really hear him over the loss of my own sanity. I
seriously hate aborted landings more than almost any other cockpit
mess-up I can think of. When your plane is within a few