Table Of ContentCopyright © 2008 by Jonathan Miles ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miles, Jonathan.
Dear American Airlines / Jonathan Miles.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-05401-8
I. Air travel—Fiction. 2. Introspection—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.15322D43 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007052150
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Excerpts from "Casida de la Mujer Tendida"/"Casida of the Reclining Woman"
by Federico Garcia Lorca © Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca from Obras
Completas (Galaxia/Gutenberg, 1996 edition). Translation by W.S. Merwin ©
W.S. Merwin and Herederos de Federico Garcia Lorca. All rights reserved. For
information regarding rights and permissions, please contact
[email protected] or William Peter Kosmas, Esq., 8 Franklin Square, London
W14 9UU.
"Lost in Translation" by James Merrill, from Collected Poems. Copyright ©
1976 by James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc.
"The Prelude" by Jacek Gutorow, translated by David Kennedy and Jacek
Gutorow. From Lima Zycia, published by Wydawnictwo Znak. Copyright ©
2006 by Jacek Gutorow. Used by permission of the author.
in memoriam
LARRY BROWN
(1951–2004)
bro
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Dear American Airlines,
Dear American Airlines,
MY NAME IS BENJAMIN R. FORD and I am writing to request a refund in the amount
of $392.68. But then, no, scratch that: Request is too mincy & polite, I think, too
officious & Britishy, a word that walks along the page with the ramrod
straightness of someone trying to balance a walnut on his upper ass cheeks. Yet
what am I saying? Words don't have ass cheeks! Dear American Airlines, I am
rather demanding a refund in the amount of $392.68. Demanding demanding
demanding. In Italian, richiedere. Verlangen in German and in the
Russia tongue but you doubtless catch my drift. Imagine, for illustrative
purposes, that there's a table between us. Hear that sharp sound? That's me
slapping the table. Me, Mr. Payable to Benjamin R. Ford, whapping the damn
legs off it! Ideally you're also imagining concrete walls and a naked lightbulb
dangling above us: Now picture me bursting to my feet and kicking the chair
behind me, with my finger in your face and my eyes all red and squinty and
frothy bittles of spittle freckling the edges of my mouth as I bellow, roar, yowl,
as I blooooow like the almighty mother of all blowholes: Give me my goddamn
money back! See? Little twee request doesn't quite capture it, does it? Nossir.
This is a demand. This is fucking serious.
Naturally I'm aware that ten zillion cranks per annum make such
demands upon you. I suppose you little piglets are accustomed to being huffed
upon and puffed upon. Even now, from my maldesigned seat in this maldesigned
airport, I spy a middle-aged woman waving her arms at the ticket counter like a
sprin-klerhead gone awry. Perhaps she is serious, too. Maybe, like me, even
fucking serious. Yet the briefcase by the woman's feet and her pleated Talbots
suit lead me to conclude that she's probably missing some terribly important
meeting in Atlanta where she's slated to decide something along the lines of
which carbonated beverage ten zillion galoots aged 18–34 will drink during a
specified half-hour of television viewing in four to six midwestern markets and
I'm sure the ticket agent is being sweetly sympathetic to the soda lady's problem
but screw her anyway. So a half-zillion galoots drink Pepsi rather than Coke, so
what? My entire being, on the other hand, is now dust on the carpet, ripe and
ready to be vacuumed up by some immigrant in a jumpsuit.
Please calm down sir, I can hear you saying. Might we recommend
a healthy snack, perhaps some sudoku? Yes, sudoku: apparently the analgesic du
jour of the traveling class. That little game is what appears to be getting my
fellow citizens through these hours of strandedness, hours that seem to be
coagulating, wound-like, rather than passing. They say a watched pot never boils
but baby it's tough not to watch when you're neck-deep in the pot. Just how
many hours so far, I can't say—not with any precision anyway. Why are there so
few clocks in airports? You can't turn your head more than ten degrees in a train
station without hitting another clock on the wall, the ceiling, the floor, etc. You'd
think that the smartasses who design airports, taking a hint from their forebears,
would think to hang a clock or two on the walls instead of leaving the time-
telling to the digital footnotes at the bottom of the scattered schedule screens. I
take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch
since my thirteenth birthday when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it
with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it
turned out). But then airports weren't designed for people like me, a fact
becoming more and more obvious as I divide my present between smoking
cigarettes on the sidewalk outside and drumming my fingers on the armrests of
the chairs inside. But even more odious than the clocklessness, I might add, is
replacing the beep-beep-beep of those passenger carts with digitized birdsong
imitations. Birdsongs! I shouldn't have to tell you that being run down by a
twelve-foot sparrow is little improvement over being run down by a militarized
golfcart. But then that's a matter for the smartasses, not you, so mea culpa. We
must be choosy with our battles, or so I've been told.
It occurs to me that none of this will do me a bit of good unless I
state my particulars, to wit: My ticket—purchased for $392.68 as I've relevantly
aforementioned and will continue to mention, as frequently as a tapdancer's
clicks—is for round-trip passage from New York–LaGuardia to Los Angeles's
LAX (with a forty-five-minute layover at Chicago O'Hare; were there a clock
nearby, I'd divulge the truer length of my layover, but it's safe to say it's edging
toward eight hours, with no end in sight). In that eightish-hour period I've
smoked seventeen cigarettes which wouldn't be notable save for the fact that the
dandy Hudson News outlets here don't stock my brand so I'll soon be forced to
switch to another, and while that shouldn't upset me it does. In fact, it enrages
me. Here's my life in dangly tatters and I can't even enjoy this merest of my
pleasures. Several hours ago a kid in a Cubs windbreaker bummed one of mine
and I swear if I spy him again I'll smash him like a Timex. Cough it up, you turd.
But then all this talk of smoking is giving me the familiar itch, so if you'll excuse
me for a moment I'm off to the sidewalk, as required by law, to scratch it.
***
There now, all better. Oops, except that I'm not. Of late I've been suffering weird
pains in my lower back and these airport chairs with their gen-u-ine Corinthian
Naugahyde upholstery are only aggravating the pain. Throughout my life I
vowed I would never be the sort of geezer reduced to conversing about nothing
save his health maladies. This was until the day I developed maladies of my own
to converse about. Truly, they're endlessly fascinating and impossible to keep to
oneself! How can you talk about anything else when your physical being is
disintegrating, when you can feel everything below your neck going steadily
kaput? You certainly wouldn't think of discussing, say, Lacanian theory on a
jumbo jet spiraling earthward. Unless of course you were Lacan, but even then:
Jeez, Jacques, call the kiddos. Back when I was drinking I tended to ignore my
bodily malfunctions—full disclosure: During the later dark years of my drinking,
I tended to ignore even my bodily functions—but now they've become a kind of
hobby for me. I fill my private hours with tender proddings and pokings of my
interior organs, in the manner of old women in babushkas examining mushy
supermarket peaches. Plus there's the time I spend online Googling my various
symptoms. Do you know that the first diagnosis the internet will offer you for
any symptom is almost always a venereal disease? This must be causing acute
distress for those hypochondriacal members of our society allowing their
genitals to mingle. In the seventh grade the rumor was that your willy would
drop clean off if you tugged on it too much (or put it inside a black girl, an
indicia of the cultural clime of mid-'60s New Orleans) which caused me infinite
grief and worry. The thought of running to my mother with my unfastened
manhood in one hand was enough to put me off onanism for several years. The
horror! My mother was a crafty sort who doubtlessly would have tried to
reattach the poor thing via the aid of a hot glue gun, some sewing thread, glitter,
and cut-out photographs from National Geographic, making my private parts
look like an elementary school project about orangutans. "There now," she
would've said. "All better."
My mother will be seventy-three next month. I mention this fact
since it's not just me, Mr. Payable to Benjamin R. Ford, who is presently out that
$392.68 you charged us—due to the current configuration of my life, me and
Miss Willa are victims in this together. Mug me, you mug my ma. Ya dirty
mugs. Because she suffered a debilitating stroke three years ago, I take care of
Miss Willa with the aid of a twenty-seven-year-old dumpling of a girl from the
Polish countryside named Aneta who also from time to time assists me with my
translations. All this, mind you, within the confines of the 2BR, third-story apt.
in the West Village that I've called home since Bush the Elder was president.
Back then it provided me elbowroom galore. Now, with my mother shuffling
about and Aneta galumphing after her, my waking and sleeping hours are
