Barf Bag

 

 

I never power down my cell phone on an airplane. Not once. I push it in my pocket flagrantly powered on and smile at the flight attendants who pass peering over into people’s laps. I’ve yet to be caught. I don’t understand why they need to be turned off but after being practically raped by TSA I feel that my refusal to comply empowers me. I also never latch my lap belt. What’s more, I have stolen sixty four life jackets from under my various seats of travel. I have them at my apartment in a large cardboard box marked “Life Jackets. Box One.” ready to be used when the Manhattan tsunami hits. I see myself clearly standing on top of my building like the street vendors once did on Broadway with umbrellas and ponchos every time it started to rain. I have a makeshift cart and hold them up for all my ill-prepared brethren to covet. I’ll only use one, of course, the other sixty three I will sell for good money when the shit hits the fan. It is funny to imagine those aggressive street vendors selling those ponchos and umbrellas for five dollars when the tsunami strikes. If there is a buck to be made there is no stopping them.

            My unscrupulousness doesn’t stop there. I have also stolen hundreds of inflight magazines and have them stacked in my apartment with all the magazines I’ve bought and the others I’ve stolen from the New York public library and those that I have fished from various dumpsters. I have fourteen six foot towers of magazines at my disposal in case of the apocalypse when there would be a shortage of entertainment and toilet paper. Most of the magazines really suck, with ads for various vacation locations and casinos which are not confined only to Las Vegas, but rather spread like a rash across the US. Who would have thought Native Americans would have been in the casino business when this continent opened her legs to the Europeans? But regardless of their lackluster content, when you’re desperate, you’re desperate. And in dire times you have to have something to sell or with which to barter. There may be only one thing I learned in life: People will be entertained at any cost. And only clever men will survive the apocalypse—namely, the guy with the foresight to save every pack of peanuts and who has asked for extras, which means at least three more packs per flight. I have an entire duffle bag of airplane peanuts, though I am deathly allergic.

            I am a movie extra, which doesn’t pay well but I supplement my income as a phone romance operator. I don’t like the word “sex” and I don’t use words I don’t like. On a website somewhere there is a picture of some hunky guy wearing nothing but a bowtie and a smile, holding a red rose in his teeth. But when people call (very rarely women), they get me. Of course, they don’t know the difference and that is all that matters. I am an average-looking guy of forty two years, but certainly not the twenty-something Brutus Beefcake the site advertises me to be. But whoever made this wretched species of ours blessed me with golden pipes which makes up for my homeliness. I have made people “happy” (another word substitution) simply by the sultry way I have said “hello.” The quicker the better, for it spares me from having to hear what dreadful things depraved people would do if I were there or they were here. My mother said I should be a radio DJ like Howard Stern but I hadn’t the desire to be labeled by anything that could be construed as a career. My job, seedy as it sounds, affords me the flexibility to fly to places I have never been whenever I want and see things and people I have never seen. Despite my abysmal view of mankind, I seek the one who can make life redeemable—the one who might appreciate my barf bag collection, or my twelve buckets of bank pens.

I have been in over seventy motion pictures, which is the metropolitan way to say movies, and about a dozen TV shows without speaking a word. It sounds more fantastic than what it is and people are generally impressed when the subject comes up and when I list off movies they have seen. But ultimately, their excitement fizzles when I try—usually unsuccessfully—to explain what split-second they might have seen me and in what scene. It is a frustrating conversation I usually seek to avoid for I become beleaguered and they often think I am a liar, as though extras don’t exist in real life. And for whatever reason, they are especially critical when I say that I have played three dead people in three different episodes of Law and Order. I am the person no one notices, the person who makes the scene more real like an autumn leaf, the blurry form out of focus eating in a restaurant behind Ben Affleck’s left shoulder. In the other job, the reverse—heard but not seen.

I have secretly wished every flight I’ve ever been on would crash, though I doubt that keeping my cell phone on during taking off and landing would do anything to hasten that wish. I sit in my seat and dream of engine failure, air masks dropping, and a rapid loss of cabin pressure—alarms wailing and people saying prayers or screaming as it goes down. I want something real and there is nothing in the world that would be more real than that. I wish for some mechanical defect that causes the plane to plummet into a cornfield, or better yet, into a Walmart. I know it isn’t right, and somehow TSA can tell that I have such terrible fantasies in my head for I seem to be scrutinized a little more stringently. I have been told by someone I used to know that there is something lacking in my eyes, but the thoughts wallow in my head like fat pigs in mud and nothing can make bacon out of them. Feelings cannot be suppressed and I do not have a psychotherapist to talk things through—some flabby fifty-something bald man in khakis, brown leather penny loafers with the tassels, and a sweater over his midlife bulge, pretending to be interested in my malady or in my kleptomania. The best fantasy I have conjured is some perforation in the wing or in the fuselage, a busted rivet or a broken seam that causes the plane to rip apart midair and those people who boarded in A-class business select with the choice up front seats are ripped out of the plane, arms flailing and legs kicking wildly still strapped to their precious seats into the cold black night. The city below, Dallas, Texas or maybe Seattle, Washington, is lit up like the scattered embers of a campfire waiting for bodies to drop and the broken pieces of the plane to land. Hundreds of life jackets and barf bags scattered among body parts, luggage and burning scraps of metal. Whoever lists the cause of death as gravity?

I was an extra in an airplane scene of a movie a few years ago. It wasn’t an operable airplane. It was a retired stripped-down 737 on a Long Island scrapyard. We were shuttled to it through winding mountains of junk and scraps of things that used to be useful instruments of civilization. The sadness of things forgotten struck me on that shuttle. Junkyards make me cry like a baby but cemeteries do nothing for me. It didn’t have wings but the inside was refurbished and it sat on a makeshift platform like a metal dildo with windows. Usually I am taciturn towards life but dejected junk does wicked things to me. Beneath the seats on the prop plane there were no life jackets or barf bags and magazines in the chair pockets to steal. But my character, who I always give identity to, was a forty-six year old school teacher named Howard who wouldn’t steal anything. And he always powered down his cell phone before the flight attendants told anyone to do so. While the camera focused on the actor, we were told to make conversation with the person beside of us. Usually, it is meaningless talk about where we are from or what we do for a living, besides act, and sometimes it is nothing at all—just moving lips and smiling for nothing will be heard. The Asian girl next to me named Gigi and I discussed how airports are like vaginas. My heart wasn’t in the scene I admit. Not after seeing all that junk. There wasn’t even a pretend plane crash in the movie. It was just a scene with a dejected lover who goes back home to Ohio with a broken heart.

I can sympathize, but when the director got enough he yelled “cut” and that was it. That phony, that “broken hearted” ham, smiled, stood up and walked out of the plane and into a ritzy trailer which had air conditioning, a latte machine and a Jacuzzi. The rest of us stood around outside the plane waiting for the shuttle to take us to where we parked. If only there was a director in life to yell cut. If only we were all actors.

I don’t know why I like to fly. Sometimes I take trips to cities I have no interest in seeing and I never leave the airport—Birmingham, for instance, or Kansas City. I sit in the airport and watch the faces of people coming and going. I watch the hellos and goodbyes and am envious, even when it has clearly become routine. I watch the pilots walk aboard like robots, bags under their eyes, their sleek leather jackets and perfect hair. Perhaps, I fly in hopes of finding someone who was never born, or maybe I believe I can find myself in some airport in some city waiting to be found. I am sitting there at Boston Logan, stirring a Dewar’s on the rocks with a martini sword, my mind blurred from the drink, looking at the beautiful women who pass in such a rush. I am an extra in life, or a lost wanderer without a destination. I overlook him as I am supposed to overlook him. He is a leaf in an autumn tree. Airports are like vaginas, he is thinking, smiling. He looks around but there is no one to tell, no one to listen. Everyone is in a hurry, or too bitter or afraid to say hello to anyone.

My phone rings and I take the call walking in to O’Hare. Mid-30 something guy who likes to be cuckolded, straight, he says. I find a secluded spot and do the job I am paid to do. He tells me he loves my pictures. “Is that really you?” he asks eagerly. He is panting like a dog.

“Yeah, stud. That’s me.” I lie. My stomach turns. He convulses in happiness (word substitution) and hangs up. Dial tone. I am twenty dollars richer and a little further gone. There is no one to greet me at the airport upon my arrival and there will be no one to say goodbye upon my departure. It is a lonely world for some of us and there is no director to yell “cut.” The phone rings again. It is myself calling from Boston Logan, still at the bar twirling ice cubes in a deluded plastic cup of Dewar’s. The amber glow of the whisky is fading.

“How much do I have to pay per minute, Beefcake?” I laugh jokingly. A martini sword is in my teeth. Two more are on the table.

“To talk to yourself?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Nothing.”

“Why do you steal barf bags?”

“Nuclear war bomb shelter,” I reply. “Toilets in a bag.”

“Oh. Airports are like vaginas,” I say, “Think of it.”

“I already know,” I reply.

“Meet me in St. Louis?”

“I owe you a drink.”

“Yes. I told you she wouldn’t work out. And we have a lot of catching up to do,” I say.

“Yes. I know. Forty some years,” I agree.  

“So are you coming?” I ask.

“No. Goodbye, Beefcake.” There is a long silence. I wait for myself to hang up on myself. Dial tone. I will probably drink myself to death in that airport with Dewar’s and dozens of tiny martini swords crossed on the table. In the meantime, I hang up the phone and get on another plane to Vegas without powering down. There are more life jackets to steal, more barf bags, magazines, peanuts, and another fantastic plane crash to envision in the pig pen of my mind. Then there is a tsunami to wait for, an apocalypse, and a girl never to find. She has never existed. They will be waiting at the baggage terminal, but not for me. “There is something lacking in your eyes,” she said. She was right.