The Reluctant Receptionist

Reproduction

Alyson gave Amanda and I a sideways look and asked our cocktail waitress what virgin drinks they had on the menu. Alyson wasn’t a drunk, but it was unlike her to abstain from drinking at a bar, especially when the girls we were with—girls who were visiting New York with Alyson and were on a mission to live Sex and the City—had already polished off their first $14 house martinis and were ordering more. Our bored waitress offered her a list of cocktails that could be made without alcohol, margaritas and mojitos that the bartender at this expensive hotel bar would apparently deign to pour. Alyson ordered a virgin mojito—a relative bargain at only $11—and the waitress, thin to the point of looking hungry, tottered off in her stilettos.

“This isn’t how I wanted to tell you this,” Alyson said, aware that Amanda and I were looking at her quizzically, “but Max and I are going to have a baby.” We stared at her for just a moment, slack-jawed at this piece of unexpected news, as Alyson went on. “We didn’t really plan it, and we hadn’t really expected to have kids for at least another few years, but we’ve thought about it and it just seems like the time is right. So, yeah. We’re having a baby.”

Amanda and I got over our initial shock and did what any friends would do: we caused a scene in the middle of the Hudson Hotel bar, showing its posh customers on their hip acrylic banquettes more genuine excitement than they’d probably seen in a long time. The reason we were so excited, not to mention so surprised, is that our group of friends aren’t really the type who have children.

There were always two camps, it seemed. There were those who lived out their lives following the expected trajectory, people who got married after college and then had children and moved to the suburbs, and those who didn’t, the ones who might want children someday but not more than they wanted to live well in the city. As a bunch of gay people and musicians, we belonged to the second group. We weren’t all single but none of us would be reproducing any time soon.

I knew that Alyson was right, though, that this really was the perfect time for she and her husband to have a child. They might’ve been a little younger than they planned, but they both had steady jobs at which they were rapidly advancing and they’d been married for two years. When I thought about all of the children born into much worse circumstances, it was hard to deny that they already had a one-up on the competition.

More importantly, I knew that they’d be great parents in a way that had nothing to do with having enough money or a roof over their heads. I knew that their child would be smart and worldly, a child who would be deeply loved but not sheltered or spoiled. Basically, Alyson and her husband were the kind of people I was happy to see reproduce, parents who would raise their child to respect everyone and the choices they made, regardless of how different they were. Why should home-schooling right-wing Christian Missourians be the only ones to contribute to the population?

“Well that’s just wonderful,” I told Alyson. “But how does that explain why you aren’t drinking?”

Morning

Matt looked over at me sleepily, wiping his eyes. He smiled, his smile always crooked and a little apologetic, as if the sadness that was always boiling just under the surface could well up at any time. Eventually, I’d find out that he’d always battled depression, that he’d tried killing himself twice already, that, like me, he was always under the sway of teenage-level angst. When we woke up together that first morning, though, I didn’t know any of that. I only knew how much I’d wanted him in my bed the night before, how, the first time I saw him, I’d made up my mind to get him away from the boy he’d been dating, a guy who I knew was stringing him along. And there he was: tall and skinny, piercings in his ears and nipples, a 24-year-old waking up and looking at me with that sad smile.

He stretched and said, “I should probably tell you something.”

Here it comes, I thought. Here comes the part where he wakes up and realizes what he’s done, that this was all a drunken mistake, that the bartender at The Cock who’d slipped him his phone number was suddenly looking a lot more promising than I was. That leaving the bar with me instead of Jesse, the guy he didn’t know was screwing him over, wasn’t such a good idea after all. “Okay,” I said, “what?”

Matt fixed his eyes on one of my empty walls. That’s all my bedroom was, still, months after I’d moved to New York City: a place to do nothing more than sleep. He took in a breath, then exhaled and said, “I’m actually not 24.”

I didn’t move. Had I fallen into bed with one of New York’s legion of crazy people, another 35 year old who refused to let go of his college days and tried to pass himself off as 29? Or, worse, 24? “Okay,” I said slowly.

“I’m really 20,” he said.

Apparently, Matt never had any trouble getting into gay bars in New York City, able to sail past any bouncer with a smile and a wink in a way that I’d never mastered. I had just that week, in fact, been refused entry into a gay bar in the East Village because I didn’t have my driver’s license with me. I had no problem believing that Matt was a young-looking 24.

The last time I’d been in a relationship with someone a different age, the roles had been reversed. I’d been newly 20; he was 26. We dated for a year and a half and the entire time I waited for things to even themselves out, for our disparate ages to stop being a problem. In the end, we couldn’t get past it: he was ready to settle down, ready to stop playing the field, and I wasn’t. I’d tried to convince myself, at 20, that I was at the same place he was; that I was mature for my age; that I was ready for everything that he offered: a life with a house and a dog. But I was none of those things.

And so I was faced with a decision. I could angrily push him out of my bed and hand him his shirt, sure that nothing could come of a one night stand with a 20-year-old kid. Or I could smile and act like it wasn’t a big deal, pretend that I didn’t feel lecherous and subversive laying in bed with someone so much younger than me.

I laid my head on his chest and looked at the spot on the wall where he’d been staring. “Oh,” I said. “That’s not so bad.”

i’ve realized that maybe all (3) of you don’t know what “dirty laundry is.” it’s the bi-weekly column that i write for baltimore gay life ( maryland gay life ) if you’re in rockville. there. mystery solved.

Madison and Haley

“Here, Madison,” the exasperated mother told her child, “do you want the iPod? Okay, there. How is the volume? Is the volume OK? Is it too loud? Madison?” Madison had already tuned her out, paying attention to whatever was playing instead of to her mother, a woman who had clearly decided to get a late start at motherhood. I saw these women a lot on the subway in New York, women who had spent their youths climbing up the corporate ladder and had then decided, at age 40, that it was finally time to start a family. They stood in sharp contrast to the people I’d grown up with in Oklahoma who had children right out of high school.

She couldn’t keep up with little Madison, a demanding four-year-old who was worldly enough to know not only what an iPod was, but how to work its little white buttons, shifting between, I could only assume, Barney and Dora. I’d always thought that there were certain names that children should never be given, if only because they smacked of conspicuous new wealth in the hands of white upper-middle-class suburbanites. Among them were Madison and, my personal least-favorite, Haley. I could hear it in my head as I watched the woman fiddle with Madison’s pink, child-sized backpack: “Madison, stop squirming while I try to get you into this car seat. I told you that you could only watch a DVD on the way to grandma’s house if you finished all of your after-pre-school head-start reading homework,” or “Haley, come pick up your electronic toys; they’re all over the plush carpet in the sunken living room!”

Madison settled into her listening, gazing intently at the imaginary fourth wall that all New Yorkers stare at on the subway. It was an art, really, learning how to look in the direction of someone across the aisle from you without actually seeing them. This child had learned it early, and her mother was obviously glad for the four minutes of newspaper reading she’d bought herself.

I got off the train at Lafayette and walked up the stairs. Is that the kind of parent I’m going to be? I thought. Isn’t it a little too 21st-century parent to plug your child into an iPod? And then something struck me: I wasn’t thinking, If I ever have kids…, I was thinking about my children, how I would raise them.

There had always been some doubt in my mind as to whether or not I actually wanted children, whether or not I felt like dealing with that kind of life change. It went beyond knowing that it would be the end of 4 a.m. nights at the gay bar, the end of packing up and going somewhere whenever the mood struck. I barely did those things anymore, anyway. It was about the absolute change that having a child would bring about: that I’d no longer be the center of my own life; that, for as long as I lived, I would be bound to and responsible for another human being; that my family, as I’d known it forever, would expand.

Up until that day on the subway, I didn’t think I was willing to do any of those things. I quite liked my life—I lived comfortably, and my boyfriend and I did whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. But there had been a slow shift in my thinking, a gradual decision that I would, someday, raise a child. Not any time soon, of course, but eventually.

Maybe when I was done climbing the corporate ladder.

Trojan Horse

I can’t remember now what Chris said, sitting next to me in the booth at the Trojan Horse, a restaurant that had become a Bloomington institution, the kind of restaurant every college town had, one that specialized in big Greek salads and deep-fried pickle spears, a hangout for college students or people who wished they were still in college. I can’t remember exactly what was said—it was something banal, something ordinary, about why I was wrong again—but I’ll never forget the way he said it: how he spit out at me like old milk then rolled his eyes, one of his signature moves. Nor will I forget my friends’ reaction, Drew awkwardly coughing and pretending to look for our waitress, Michael setting down half a deep-fried pickle, stopping mid-chew. I’d turned red with embarrassment, sad that for the first time my friends had witnessed the way that Chris, the man I’d started referring to as my partner, dressing him up to all my friends as someone deserving of that title, actually talked to me: like an imbecile, a stupid, spoiled brat who he’d grown tired of indulging. Seeing the way Michael and Drew looked at each other when Chris ground his jaw and looked down at his plate, having realized, perhaps, that he’d cracked the shiny veneer he knew our relationship had to its onlookers, I knew that I was in for a talking-to. And I wasn’t wrong.

After Michael and Drew filled the rest of lunch with nervous conversation, we went out to the car, Chris walking quickly ahead, lighting a cigarette. He smoked upwards of two packs a day, even though I’d been trying to quit. Quitting together had never been an option, he’d quickly shown me, as he had no desire to even attempt it. Yet he was always eager to reprimand me when I’d slip up and light one of the cigarettes he’d left on his coffee table, even as he lit one for himself.

“What the hell was that?” Michael asked, making sure to speak quietly so that Chris, already at the car, wouldn’t hear. “Does he always talk to you like that?”

“He’s just been really stressed out lately,” I said, making a transparent attempt to excuse my boyfriend’s behavior.

“I don’t care how stressed he is,” Drew said, “that was just crazy. You have to do something about this. Seriously.”

We dropped Michael and Drew off then went to Chris’s house, where I’d been squatting for the better part of a semester. We sat down on his couch, and when Chris reached over for another cigarette, lighting it with his right hand and turning on the television with his left, I took one and put it between my lips. He lit it for me with an exasperated look, once again rolling his eyes. He turned back toward the television and playfully thumped his golden retriever on the head, holding the lit cigarette between his lips and squinting. To him, it was back to business as usual: the two of us on his couch, co-existing, co-habitating. Not necessarily happy but at least not alone.

I looked over at him and realized that whatever I’d thought was love, be it infatuation or a strange, desperate need to settle down, wasn’t there anymore. Michael and Drew were right: I was going to have to do something. I didn’t know yet that it would mean moving boxes of my stuff out of Chris’s house, my best friend warning him not to say a single word to her or me. I didn’t know yet about the late-night, accusatory phone calls. All I knew was that it wasn’t going to be easy, but that something had to be done.

Being Pushed

“You can’t let things get to you like this, honey,” Paul said. “So you lost sixteen dollars. So the cab didn’t take you where it was supposed to. These things happen all the time.” He paused for a moment and then said, “Is this what New York has done to you?”

We were on our way home from a big evening out with our friends—me drunk, as usual, and him not, because he didn’t drink—and what had started as a fun evening had spiralled downward along with my mood. Nothing could go right, it seemed, as we’d looked in vain for somewhere to eat (apparently New York City is no longer the city that never sleeps), then settled on something that cost more than either of us wanted to pay. After dinner, we’d gotten into a taxi that circled around in traffic until the cab driver told us that it would be faster to take the subway.

This last complication—that we’d spent $16, no small sum when you’re living on a budget in New York, only to be relegated back to the subway—had sent me into a tailspin. As usual, Paul was taking it better than I was, always able to see a silver lining, always able to step back and take things for what they really were: no big deal.

“We’ve had a great day today,” he went on, “so don’t ruin it.” And I knew that he was right. I got like this sometimes—broody, blaming—but I hadn’t put someone else through it in a long time. Or, if someone witnessed it, they’d just roll their eyes. Paul wasn’t ever someone to spare me his opinion, though, which was one of the reasons our relationship worked. I needed someone to call me down, someone to tell me when I was being ridiculous or self-indulgent or bratty. The best relationships and friendships I’ve had, the most successful and longest, have been with people who weren’t afraid to tell me to shut the hell up.

I knew that if I kept being pessimistic or overly critical I’d chase Paul off, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. There were only so many times that I could be forgiven my sometimes-nihilistic outlook, only so many things that Paul would overlook.

The reason that I took Paul’s admonishment so hard, the reason it hit me so searingly, was that, whether he’d have believed it or not, I really had been trying to be nicer. Not necessarily nicer to him—that wasn’t often a problem, really, because he was my boyfriend—but nicer in general. Nicer to people on the subway who shoved me out of the way to get onto a train before me, or quicker with a smile and a kind word to a coworker. I’d been working on seeing everyone, from my roommate to my mailman, as a person who deserved respect and patience, which wasn’t always an easy task in New York City, where you were either pushing or being pushed.

A major part of this, my attempt to be a kinder, more patient person, was learning how to let go of things over which I had no control. Things like taxi rides that got us nowhere, for example. When Paul pointed out, annoyed, how much I was letting stupid little problems bother me, how I was turning a good day sour for really no reason at all, he had no idea how much he was saying.

“This is how I like you,” he told me later that night, after I’d calmed down, after I’d sobered up. “Happy.”

It was how I liked me, too. I just had to learn how to hold on to that feeling, and to let the other go. And to let Paul show me the difference.

He’ll Do

When Drew and I broke up, there were no fireworks, no slammed doors, no grand proclamations of love lost. I didn’t shed a tear, though I tried to stir some up as I walked back to my house from his, the night unseasonably warm and damp. Indiana was like that sometimes, too warm or cool, and it had made me sweat through the jacket that I’d brought, expecting a long walk with my boyfriend, certain that the end was near but not quite sure how it was actually going to come about. And, when it had, finally, in the dark on Drew’s front steps, it seemed like it almost didn’t mean anything at all.

“This isn’t really working,” I started, knowing that he was thinking the same thing but was unwilling to bring it up. “Am I completely wrong in feeling like our relationship isn’t going anywhere?”

“No,” he calmly said, “you’re right.”

And that was that. We’d started dating almost by default, two of the only available gay guys at a small, conservative college in Indiana. It was as if we’d looked around, spotted each other, and thought, Eh, he’ll do. It’s not that Drew wasn’t good looking or smart or funny or talented—he was all of those things—but there was no spark between us, even at the start. No butterflies leading up to our first kiss, none of the usual dance that accompanies the beginning of a relationship. We’d fallen into bed together one night and before either of us knew it we’d been dating for three months. We spent the weekends together, cooking each other breakfast, looking into each others’ eyes, pretending, hoping, I guess, that there was something more there than there was. We were suddenly a couple, even though neither of us had asked for the title.

I’d known several people who were perfectly happy being in holding-pattern relationships, content to have nothing at all in common with whomever they were dating. Having a relationship that moved forward wasn’t the end goal; it was having someone that mattered, not feeling a connection to them. I, on the other hand, had a tendency to throw myself into relationships head-on, making them, for better or worse, fiery, tumultuous, passionate. Never before had I been in a situation like the one with Drew. I was no stranger to jealousy or lust or want or rage, so my first beige, utterly blasé relationship came as something of a surprise.

When I thought about graduation, which was rapidly approaching, and leaving college, leaving Drew behind, I wasn’t sad; I didn’t think I’d even particularly miss him. And I knew that he felt the same way. Our relationship was comfortable, easy, no-stress. And there was absolutely nothing there.

The last time I saw Drew was a year after graduation, at a mall in St. Louis, a neutral and anonymous building downtown. We laughed a little bit about college, talked about his new relationship and my complete absence of one. Drew made a joke and looked across the table at me, striking his signature self-pleased flirty pout, looking for approval. He was a great guy, I had to admit, and would make somebody really happy someday.

Just not me.

Intervention

“I’m worried about how much Gavin’s been drinking,” my friend Peter said, being sure to choose his words wisely. It was the first time that we’d talked like this, the first time that we’d spoken as friends instead of people who knew each other through someone else. There was a guardedness about the way he spoke, as if he were testing the waters, making sure that I knew that he wasn’t just badmouthing Gavin. “He’s always been a drinker,” he went on, “but I’ve started to think that maybe it’s just a little much. Like maybe it’s started to negatively affect him.” But he’d been having a lot of stress at work and drinking—for better or worse—was his way of unwinding.

“What are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Stage an intervention? I really do think he’s fine.”

The funny thing about the conversation with Peter, though, was that Gavin had initiated the same one just a week before, having approached me to say that he’d noticed how much Peter had been drinking. That he was doing a lot more drinking by himself. That he was worried. And, of course, I said to Gavin just what I had to Peter. Because, really, I didn’t want to admit that any of my friends might have a problem with alcohol. If they had a problem, I knew that I certainly did.

When I was 18, I got drunk with my mother for the first time, downing countless glasses of wine at a cabaret in Paris where Trafalgar Tours had dropped us off. The next day, during our complimentary continental breakfast, my mother sat me down and told me about my family’s history of alcoholism, about the battles that members of my family had waged against abuse and addiction. She told me, in all seriousness, that I should only have one glass of wine a week until I was 40. After I turned 40, I guess it was assumed that I’d either have taught myself how to drink responsibly or I’d be so far gone that getting drunk would be the least of my worries. Of course, the advice she was giving me fell on deaf ears: not only was I a freshman at a school notorious for binge drinking (no, really: we’d been on 20/20.), I was gay. Destined, as I saw it, to a lifetime spent propped up in gay bars. One drink a week indeed.

Nine years later, when Peter approached me about Gavin’s drinking, I’d gone way beyond my drink-a-week limit. I was, in fact, drinking nearly every day, getting drunk every weekend. And I had been, I realized, since I was in college. There were plenty of reasons for me to start monitoring how much I drank: I no longer threw up when I drank too much, I simply blacked out; hangovers had become a regular part of my life; and all of the work I was putting in at the gym was nearly negated by all the booze.

Why, then, did I continue to drink to excess so often? I wasn’t drinking as an escape; I wasn’t drinking because of stress or unhappiness. I drank so much because, well, I always had. When my friends talked to me about each other’s drinking, they did something that they hadn’t meant to: they made me check up on my own drinking and decide to cut back just a little bit.

I’d never be someone who went to a bar and ordered soda water with lime. I’d never turn down a glass of wine or a beer at a party. But I’d decided that ten years of binge drinking was enough. It wasn’t the end of the party, I knew, but the beginning of a different one.

Cross Country

Whenever I thought of a long distance relationship, a few very specific images inevitably sprung to mind, none of them flattering, none of them anything I ever wanted to be associated with: the teenage girl who runs to the mailbox every day, desperate for a bit of correspondence from her boyfriend in Canada, the boy she’d met at camp the summer before; the man who refuses to go out with his friends lest he miss a phone call. There seemed something so desperate about being in a long distance relationship, as if it were some sort of sign that one couldn’t find a relationship in his or her own town. Like it was somebody’s last chance for love so they happily put in so much more effort than those of us who dated people in our own zip codes. Each night, I smugly bedded down with my boyfriend, not waiting for phone calls or letters or emails from across the country, feeling him right there next to me.

Then, of course, fate stepped in, and my boyfriend Paul and I found out that we’d both be moving, him to San Francisco and me to New York City. Paul felt the same way I did about long distance relationships and was just as wary of everything they implied: being chained to his cell phone or long, late-night conversations declaring how much we missed each other. And so we did what seemed like the only logical thing. We decided to be friends instead of boyfriends, certain that we could switch off the romantic aspect of our relationship but still have something worthwhile.

After trying for a few months to stay broken up, though, we decided that it just wasn’t going to work. We were more than friends. I didn’t want to hear about the guys that Paul was dating any more than he wanted to hear about mine. When he found out that he’d gotten a job in New York, there wasn’t really anything to do but admit defeat. We were boyfriends, whether or not we’d chosen the title. And long distance ones at that.

Still, I avoided talking about it much with my friends. I’d become one of them, one of the people who talk about some abstract, mysterious boyfriend that no one’s ever met. Finally, it got too confusing trying to explain to people who Paul was. Instead of the rigmarole I started out telling people, that he was my ex-boyfriend but that we were in the process of getting back together because he was moving to New York, and that we’d tried not dating each other, and that if he was in New York I couldn’t imagine myself not dating him, I just started calling him what he was: my boyfriend.

I startled more than a few people with the change in labels.

“Boyfriend?” an acquaintance asked. “Since when do you have a boyfriend? You were certainly single last time we hung out, or I wouldn’t have been hitting on you.”

“Oh, um, we’ve actually just recently gotten back together,” I said, letting the story of Paul and I roll out the way I’d told it so many times in the few months since we’d decided to get back together, telling him that I’d tried to avoid it at first because I didn’t like long distance relationships.

But that well-rehearsed story didn’t tell the whole truth, being tailored as it was to reveal as little of my actual feelings as possible. The truth was that as soon as I found out that Paul was moving to New York City, I knew that we’d be getting back together. I was excited and nervous and hopeful. And, for the time being, I was in a long-distance relationship.

Susan

“I’m calling because I’m worried about Susan,” I finally got the nerve to say to her mother. We’d talked about how college was going, what the weather was like up in Indiana (much colder, it turns out, than home in Oklahoma), how my mother and father and sister were doing. It was obvious to her, though, that I wasn’t calling just to say hello. We’d never had one of those relationships that some people do with their best friend’s parents, the kind where you sit around chatting. Ours was a relationship that consisted of “Good afternoon, Mrs. Parker” before I ran back to Susan’s room. I was the harmless, goofy, gay best friend.

My hand shook as I went on, barrelling through the silence on her end of the line. “I don’t know if you know this,” I said, “but Susan’s dropped out of school. And she’s taken a job at Pizza Hut. And she’s doing a lot of drugs.” I thought that with each statement, piled like bricks, one on top of another, a litany of wrong turns, bad choices, I could draw a reaction out of Susan’s mother. I was wrong.

“Oh, okay, Robert,” she said calmly, absently, in that lilting way in which she always spoke, “her father and I are going up there in a few weeks anyway. We’ll just check on her to make sure everything’s okay.”

“Alright,” I said, “I just wanted you to know.” Clearly, whatever response I thought I’d get from Susan’s mother—dropping the phone, running into the next room where her husband sat, insisting that they get in the car that very afternoon to look after the welfare of their 20-year-old daughter—wasn’t the one I got. And as soon as I’d hung up the phone, I knew what was going to happen. Instead of going to check on her daughter, Susan’s mom was going to call her. She was going to tell her about the accusations I’d levelled against her, certain that I was mistaken or exaggerating.

It was the last time I spoke to Susan’s mother. It was, in fact, the last time I talked to Susan. As the months passed, I’d try to call her, only to be thwarted by her roommate: she was working or in the bath or at the store. And with every unreturned phone call, one thing became clearer: not only had I failed in pulling off the intervention that I thought Susan needed, she’d found out about it and had decided to cut me from her life.

Everyone had always told me that if I was concerned for the well-being of a friend, if they were threatening harm to themselves, or if they were excessively using drugs, or if they had dropped out of school and were working at Pizza Hut, that I should do whatever I could to help. Why, then, did I feel like such a rat? Why did I feel like, no matter what friends would tell me, I’d done nothing but sell Susan out to her family, prove to them that she was no more than I knew they feared she’d become, a directionless wanderer, a hippie, a drug user?

Beyond all that, who the hell was I to be blowing the whistle on anyone’s behavior? Sure, I hadn’t dropped out of college, but I drank, I smoked, I was no stranger to illicit substances. If Susan wanted to split hairs, I was the one who peer pressed her into smoking in the first place, the one who helped romanticize it, the one who got her to pull the car over on that dirt road in Oklahoma so that we could stand facing each other, teaching ourselves how to inhale.

I suppose that I’d given in and called Susan’s mother because it seemed like things had gotten out of hand. Because she’d been erratic and I was five hundred miles away from her and there was nothing I could do. I knew that if anything happened to her I’d never forgive myself for not at least attempting to help. It was easy to say, at the time, that Susan would be mad at me for a while but would understand in the long run. We didn’t talk again for five years.

Every few months, I’d search MySpace or Friendster for her name, for some sign that she was around somewhere, some sort of information on her. Then, out of nowhere, she appeared. I looked at her pictures, astounded at the woman she’d grown into, how happy she looked. Still fiercely creative, still obsessed with David Lynch, still deconstructing pop culture, ferreting out its hidden meanings.

I sent her a message, not expecting her to respond. But she did. She wrote that she missed me, that she was sorry she’d fallen out of touch. That she was so happy I’d found her. As for me, I just hoped that she was done being mad, that she could forgive me for doing something that I thought I needed to do.

Fiery Crash

When I was 24 years old, I had a panic attack in an airplane on the way to Las Vegas. I was with my friend Peter, a man who was much more prone to things like panic attacks than I was. Sure, I had the average neurotic grab-bag of insecurities and strange obsessive compulsive behaviors, like feeling the need to adjust a rug so that it aligned exactly with the television, but panic attacks were Peter’s territory. And here he was attempting to be my rock as I looked out the airplane window, absolutely certain with every jolt that our plane would plummet to the earth, ejecting my seat, with me still in it, into the side of a mountain.

This had never happened to me before. I’d flown since I was five years old, when my parents had taken me on my first of many trips to Walt Disney World. Back then, I’d loved everything about flying: seeing the ground retreat from the plane, marveling at how different everything looked from so high up. Even in high school and college I’d enjoyed flying, though more for the reason that I could pretend, just for a day, to be an international jet-setter. None of the people in the airport or on the plane knew that I usually just flew from Oklahoma City to Indianapolis, two cities that are both perfectly nice but don’t carry any real cache.

Why, then, 19 years into my flying career—or, at least, my career of being flown—did I completely lose it? While Peter fed me liquor, speaking to me soothingly and casting apologetic glances to the people unfortunate enough to have been seated near me, I tried to rationally explain what was happening. For the first time, I told him, I’d realized just how cheated I’d feel if I were to die in a plane crash. I’d quit smoking, I was living with a man I loved. Things were coming together. What cruel irony, I told him between sips of beer, it would be if all of that were lost in some stupid plane crash on the way to Vegas. On top of that, for all we knew our plane was being flown by a new pilot, someone who’d just graduated from a Delta Airlines program in which they took high school dropouts and pregnant teenagers and taught them how to fly planes in a last-ditch effort to keep them from a life on welfare. They were probably so nervous at the idea of flying their first real mission (Did they call them missions? Flights, I think, is the right term.) that they’d had to drink four scotch and sodas in the pilot’s lounge just to get on the plane. And here they were, flying us to Las Vegas.

I’d like to say that when we landed safely that day I was forever cured of my fear of flying. That when we touched down and I was finally able to breathe again, I realized what a silly, unfounded fear it really was. But I still desperately dread having to get on a plane. I still have sweaty palms during takeoff and descent, and I still make that secret little deal with God that we all make sometimes, whether we admit to it or not.

Something about hurtling through the air in a steel tube at 500 miles an hour seems, I don’t know, wrong. Nowadays, I have ways to talk myself down from the state I’d gotten into with Peter a few years ago. We’re not riding on nothing, I’ll tell myself, because air is actually something. So turbulence is a good thing. Or, my personal favorite, and one that I never tire of hearing, Flying is the safest mode of transportation.

The truth is that the safest mode of transportation is walking from my bedroom to my living room, at least until my roommates finish installing that Raiders of the Lost Ark-style boobie trap. But I can’t have a classical singing career in my living room, and if I don’t at least pursue it I’ll have wasted a lot of money on a Masters degree. And so I reluctantly ride in planes, a beer or a Valium or both never out of reach. Flying is, after all, the safest mode of transportation.