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

hundred feet
of the ground and then, rather than land, it takes off again, it upsets
the entire delicate ecosystem of comings and goings put into place by
the control tower, because suddenly a plane that's supposed to be on
the ground is thrust back into the rotation instead, which requires
tons of frantic repositioning of other planes up there to make room.
Every time I'm on a plane that aborts landing, it's all I can do to keep
from shrieking like a fishwife.

    "Shut up, bitch," Daniel tried to tell me. "Did you not hear me
say you're gonna be fine?"
    I did not hear him. I was too busy envisioning midair collisions
and my pancreas impaled on a patio umbrella. I was already mocking the God of crappy luck just by being on an AeroMexico flight to
begin with after I'd sworn to boycott them because of that crash in
Mexico City in the '70s. But then Daniel got sick and the crap-ass
place where he works won't provide him decent medical coverage and
AeroMexico has the unique quality of covering more Latin American
routes than my airline while honoring my pass-rider status. So I give
Daniel my buddy passes and we make these side trips together because
pharmaceuticals are so much cheaper down there, plus if you get the
right pharmacist he is not picky about prescriptions, which can be a
pesky detail.
    "You're gonna be fine," I keep telling him. "We should go to Peru
next, because you can buy bootleg movies there for a buck. And we
have not even begun to tap our Nicaragua connection yet."
    We finally got on the ground after the aborted landing that scared
the holy hell out of me, and Daniel was rubbing his fingers because I
had mutilated his hand by squeezing it so hard. "Look at this, I've got
a lobster claw," he complained.
    "Shut up, bitch," I said. "Did you not hear me say you're gonna
be fine?"
    I teased him that this is proof he'd do anything for attention.
"Always fucking grabbing the fucking spotlight, fucker." I said,
because I tend to spout profanities even more than usual when I am heartbroken. For example, the day my brother-in-law Eddie called to
tell me my little niece almost got crushed by a roll-away car, her little
liver lacerated by her own ribs, all I could do as I flew to the Phoenix hospital where she'd been airlifted was sit in my seat, clutch my
head, and whisper, "Shit. Shit. Shit." The other flight attendants patted me on the shoulder, insisted I drink some water, and told me my
"nephew" would be fine, that God would take care of him. Since all I
could do was cry and cuss, I never told them it was my niece, actually,
who was hurt and it was God, actually, I held to blame. Soothed by
their voices, though, I let them speak uncorrected.

    Regarding Daniel, I try not to act like it's any big deal, his condition, but sometimes it hits me all of a sudden, the probability, and I
am frozen for a bit. I swear my own heart stops when I think about it,
so I try not to too much. But when he is joking about his wires, like
how he's going to take them off himself and put them on his fat house
cat, jenny, and let the doctors decipher that, the panic creeps in and
I just can't bear it. "You goddamn pussy," I respond loudly, laughing
loudly. Everything loudly, as I have inner sounds of my own to drown
out, like the sound of that Cessna engine so long ago.
    "Doesn't that look like a skull to you?" I gleefully tormented
John, pointing out the window of the plane. "Look, the sign of death.
Could it be a bigger sign?" I smiled inwardly as John whimpered and
the plane continued to lurch. Since then I've been on over a thousand
flights, and this one still marks the most turbulent. It also marks the
last time I was unafraid to fly.

    The next morning I learned my father's heart had stopped the
night before and no one was there to hear the ruckus he made, no
wires attached to him to alert anybody. His heart just stopped with
hardly anyone noticing. For months afterward my freshman-year