style="font-size:15px;"> You can move pretty fast when you’re desperate.
Of course, I told none of this to the woman on the plane. All I said was that I’d been doing a lot of different things, and now I was relocating to the East Coast to be close to my family.
Luckily for me she wanted to talk about herself. She was a corporate lawyer, and she looked as if she should have been sitting up in business class—good shoes, a smart black pantsuit, a brown leather briefcase that probably cost more than my one-way plane ticket.
I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. Her brow furrowed as she noticed something on my elbow.
“Hey, what’s that?”
I looked. It was a splotch of white. My heart jumped.
“It’s paint,” I said.
“Paint?”
I hesitated. The less I said about it, the better. On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem as if I were hiding something.
“I was painting a house earlier today,” I finally said.
She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it.
“Mickey DeFalco, a house painter?”
“I was doing a favor for a friend.”
She was stunned. She began shaking her head, a sad grin on her face.
“Man, if anybody had told me I’d be flying home with Mickey DeFalco, and he turned out to be a housepainter—”
“Hey! I said it was a favor for a friend!”
The woman was stunned by my tone, but I couldn’t help it. Pride dies hard. I was tired of strangers being disappointed by my life. Who the fuck were they to feel this way about me?
“Hey, man,” she said, “don’t get defensive.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
“All right, then.”
She called for the flight attendant. I figured she wanted to change her seat, and that would have been fine with me, but what she did instead was to order a bottle of champagne, as if it were the kind of thing she did every time she flew. The flight attendant went to get it and the woman turned to me.
“I’d like to apologize and I hope you’ll join me in a toast,” she said. “Your song meant a lot to me, back in the day. Will you clink glasses with me?”
I clinked glasses with her. The champagne tasted as good as airline champagne can taste at thirty thousand feet. We polished off the bottle as she talked about her business trip, how well it had gone, how impressed the L.A. office was with her work, how badly they wanted her to relocate to the West Coast. Ah, to be wanted…
It was the middle of the night, and we were somewhere over Kansas. Everybody else on the plane seemed to be asleep. She leaned close, not for a kiss but to whisper. Her breath was hot in my ear. It was the perfect time and place for a tightly wound person like her to become somebody else, a person she could forget all about when the plane landed.
“I’ll bet,” she began, and then she broke down giggling and had to begin again: “I’ll bet you’re in the Mile-High Club.”
Oh boy. This. I could almost see it coming. Once a groupie, always a groupie.
“Yeah, I’m a member.” I sighed. “But it’s been a long time,” I added truthfully. “A very long time.”
“Do you remember how it works?”
“There’s not much to remember.”
She stared at me seriously. “I’m not a member, Mickey, but I’d like to join.”
There was a crinkling sound from her hand. She was clutching a condom, a Trojan, the brand I’d always sworn by. Jesus Christ. Did she carry them around all the time, like breath mints?
I shut my eyes, thought about fame. Even faded fame counts for something, I realized. My name hadn’t meant a damn thing for twenty years, but here I was, being offered sex in the sky by a not-bad-looking woman who’d treated me to a bottle of champagne.
“Mickey?”
I opened my eyes. She was staring at me all doe-eyed, waiting for my reply. I was either going to make her a member of the Mile-High Club, or I wasn’t. She’d done her part, gotten herself drunk to have an excuse for such behavior, and now it was up to me.
I gestured toward the front of the plane. “Go to that bathroom up on the left,” I said. “Close the door, but don’t lock it. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
She did as she was told, drunkenly bumping seat backs as she walked. There were a few drops left in the champagne bottle. I brought it to my lips and downed them. Then I got up from my seat to make a thirty-something lawyer’s pop-star fantasy come true.
I didn’t even know her name. It was the eighties all over again.
The term “Mile-High Club” implies something merry and giddy, but the truth of it is, you’ve got your bare ass planted atop a chemical toilet with very little straddle room for the woman on your lap, especially if you’re flying coach.
She’d taken off her slacks and was reluctant to drop them on the floor, wet with the splashings of those who’d preceded us. I rolled up her slacks protectively inside my jeans and set the bundle down in the tiny bathroom’s driest corner. I set our shoes neatly beside the bundle, side by side. It was an oddly sad sight. You should never set your shoes beside those of anybody you don’t love.
She climbed aboard and seemed to be enjoying herself. She clung tightly and buried her nose in my neck, rocking to the sound of music only she could hear. She kept repeating my name, which might have been all right, except it was my full name she repeated.
“Mickey DeFalco…Mickey DeFalco…”
She had to justify this wild, wanton deed by telling herself that at least it was happening with somebody who used to be famous.
Unfortunately I was now old enough to think past the thrill of the hump. I looked into the future, to a girly night at this woman’s apartment six months, maybe a year from now. A room full of her female friends, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her living room floor, getting silly on white wine and chowing down on Cheetos and potato chips, the kind of stuff women like that never eat—and if they do, they double the workout at the gym the next day to sweat out those poisons….
But this isn’t the next day. This is tonight, a night for wild truths to be shared, things they’ve never told each other, and will she ever have a story to tell! Of course she’d let her friends go first—stories about one-night stands behind their boyfriends’ backs, the usual tennis pro or ski instructor boinks, and she’d wait until all these tales were told before casually dropping the bomb….
Be quiet, everybody, be quiet and listen to me!!…Do you remember Mickey DeFalco, the guy who sang “Sweet Days”?
Yeah,
