Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (37 page)

Later, in the parking lot before driving to our appointment at
the Warner Bros. lot, I paused. All of a sudden it hit me, what we had
accomplished so far. I turned to Grant and beamed. "Here we are," I
squealed. "Here we are, here we are, here we are!"

"Calm down," Grant soothed me. "Look at me."

He took my hand and commanded my gaze with those blue eyes
like two turquoise medallions in the middle of his big, freckly-assed
face. We were in a rented PT Cruiser again, which turned out to be
the sole model available at the cheapest rental-car company in LAX,
which I thought was hilarious because Grant famously loathes my PT
Cruiser back home. Yet here he was holding my hand in one right
outside our motel as we were about to head to our most-important
meeting so far.

So I was looking at him like he told me to, and I was expecting
him to say something. But he didn't. He just kept holding my hand
and looking back at me with that expression he has-the one that
says, "I got no job, no dreams, no aspirations; I'm the happiest man
alive"-until all of a sudden it hit me: the line that separates the essential from the nonessential. Right then I could see it as clear as day.
Television series or no, my life was well packed.

ON THE WAY HOME IT OCCURRED TO ME that if my plane crashed into
the ocean, I doubt my seat cushion would save me, but you never
know. I'm not that picky or proud about things that might save me or
my daughter. I'll grab at anything.

I know this after having watched the movie Titanic twenty-four
times, all without sound, since it was playing on a movie screen of
an L-1011 during international flights, and as an international flight
attendant, I was frowned upon if I plugged my earphones into the
armrest to hear it. Believe me, I tried.

I watched it, though, over and over and over again, while serving Cokes and overcooked meat, and I always wondered why the hell
didn't those people-the ones who drowned-why the hell didn't
they grab onto something? Jesus God, in the time it took that giant
ship to sink, those people could have dismantled the paneling in the
mezzanine level and built their own damn boat. Just the lid on the
grand piano in the dining room alone would have floated a whole
family, probably. Make something, do something! I kept imploring the
poor idiots who were left to die like flies after the ineffectual lifeboats
launched without them. What are you doing standing in line to get on a
lifeboat? Look around! Build your own damn boat!

Milly and I travel a lot together now that I'm a writer and no
longer a flight attendant, the difference being-and it's an important
difference-that my girl can now come with me on the plane while I
work. My new company, which I founded, takes me to tons of places a little girl would love to visit, mostly because I am my own boss and
I make sure it does.

On the plane, when we take our assigned seats, the safety placard
is usually the first thing Milly reaches for, and I tell her the difference between the oxygen system on this plane as opposed to the last
plane we were on. "These masks, we have to yank on 'em a little, see?
Because there's that pin-see the pin?-you have to yank that pin
loose to activate the oxygen. Don't forget that."

And we count the rows to her closest exits, too. It took her a few
times to get that down, because sometimes the closest exits are behind
you, and I learned in evacuation training that people tend to run forward in a panic. They don't think to look behind them. Just like with
those passengers on the Titanic. First they wasted critical time denying the severity of the impact, and then once the crisis was evident,
they were so busy crowding forward toward the few lifeboats that they
didn't look behind them, where tons of wooden things were begging
to be made into makeshift flotation devices. "Look behind you, look
to the side of you," I tell Milly. "Don't just be looking where everyone
else is looking."

Christ, I hope she'll never have to use this information, but I
can't help but think it might come in handy, regardless. Back when
I first got hired at the airlines, for example, I figured I'd be working there until they pried the peanuts from my cold, dead fingers. I
had no plans to leave. Ever. I wanted to hang on until I was nothing
but a withered bit of beef jerky in a work smock, cracking wise with
the passengers, ignoring call bells and belting fine wine on European layovers. It was a great job up until the precise moment the first 757
crashed into the World Trade Center. Even before the second plane
hit, I knew it was over.

My job didn't sink right away. In fact, it stayed afloat, though
crippled, for a deceptively long while after that, long enough to keep
my fellow blue-collar coworkers hoping the blow wasn't that catastrophic, long enough to allow first class to board the lifeboats all by
themselves. But our jobs were sinking, that's the truth, listing this way
and that, and when it finally became evident the ship was going down,
that in fact the officers had spent the entire time building a whole
other ship for themselves, one that would replace the one that was
already lost, that's when the mad dash for the emergency exits began.

Now I've made a lot of mistakes in my life: I married the wrong
man. I've turned down perfectly good, guilt-free sex with B-list celebrities. I wasn't at my father's side, where I rightfully should have been,
when he died without warning one night. But once you become a
mother, you have to figure it out. It's not as though you can no longer
afford to make mistakes; it's just that you can no longer afford not to
learn from them.

So when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I wasn't going
to make the mistake of denying the severity of the impact. I immediately started looking around for things that could keep me afloat. I
looked beside me, I looked behind me, I especially looked where others weren't looking. I didn't find any one thing that would work on its
own, but I'm not that picky or proud about things that might save me
or my daughter. I grabbed at anything-freelance assignments, my humor column in the local weekly-and found a lot I could cobble
together, so that by the time others were mobbing the ineffectual lifeboats, I had already built, rickety as it was, my own makeshift flotation device.

LARY IS THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD BE HERE. I need help, I tell
you. Help. I need someone to hold me back, not someone to back me
up, because right now, as I speak, there is already, erected in my backyard, a haunted house that is bigger than the house I actually live in.
That right there is evidence I have a problem. Last year I was able to
rein it in a little, even though I built a canopy to cover my front yard
in case it rained-which of course it so totally did-so thank God for
that, but my snack selection was so huge I might as well have set the
kids loose in the candy aisle at Wal-Mart. By the time they got home,
they were probably so coked up they could set off seismic monitors
stationed in the arctic. (You're welcome, parents.)

This year is already amounting to the mother of all Halloween parties. I have all this time on my hands seeing as how, two days after we
closed that television rights deal, a writer's strike shut down Hollywood.
To distract myself I paid five guys to clear the giant morass of thorn
bushes that formerly made up my backyard so that now there is actually room to walk back there, though it is still not accessible by trailer,
so mine still sit in my driveway out front, festooned with giant spiders
and other Halloween essentials. Clearing the backyard is a good first
step toward eventually moving them back there, though, but it was like
excavating, I swear. I actually uncovered a windmill, for chrissakes, and
a frame for a swing set. Who knew? I was half relieved we didn't find a
set of little mummified tykes to go with it, still sitting in the swings.

"That would have been cool," said Lary.

Like I said, Lary is the last person who should be here. After all,
Lary is a rigger for large-scale events. People actually pay him to take
their crazy-assed party ideas and make them a reality. This explains
why, a few years ago, when I asked him to help me decorate Milly's
fourth-birthday party, the theme for which was "Castle Princess," he
showed up with a rented bulldozer to dig a moat.

Lary is hanging outdoor speakers so the sounds of tortured groans
can be carried throughout my backyard. "If you don't want to kill any
kids," he says, "you should use the heavier wire." I would very much
like not to electrocute my guests, no matter how much Lary insists
that fried people would provide cool Halloween props, so I opted for
the heavier wire. Earlier I'd had him on the phone at Home Depot,
trying to collect all the spooled coils and clip sockets and other electrical components he said were essential to activate the animatrons set
up in one of my trailers, which had been converted into a haunted
autopsy morgue, when all of a sudden it occurred to me what the hell
it was, exactly, that Lary was aiming to get me to make.

"This sounds like an extension cord. Are we making an extension
cord?" I hissed. "You retard! I can buy them for a buck a piece at Family Dollar!"

"Sure," he said, "but what's the fun in that?"

Lord, I do not have time to build my own extension cords. I
have important things to do. I have a checklist. Do I have enough
fake blood? Check. Did I remember to buy the foam board for the
fake tombstones? Check. Did I borrow the rubber carcass from my
neighbor? Check.

Before Milly, all this energy used to go into my own costume,
which often included blinking lights and battery packs. One year I was
so exhausted after getting into costume that I sat down to rest before
hitting the parties, only to awaken on my couch four hours later with
the illuminated skull on the end of my scepter barely still glowing.

Now I let Milly pick our costumes. She's old enough now to ask
for less bizarre stuff, like this year she simply asked that I be a witch
like her. I expected to feel more relieved than I was, but instead the
feeling was clouded by an odd melancholy. "I still have the doublebutted baboon costume from last year," I offered meekly, but she
demurred, even going so far as to suggest that the baboon butts were
not National Geographic grade.