Notebook
Baumann, Paul
NOTEBOOK FEAR OF FLYING UNRAVELING WITH MICHAEL & LIZ We went to Florida before Christmas to visit with my wife's parents. We flew. To be honest, I'm not wild about flying. Like anything...
...I mean, any thirty-five-year-old man who plays with children has got problems, right...
...Naturally, my thoughts turn morbid under such extreme conditions, especially when the passenger next to me can only offer the tight-lipped smile of someone about to undergo dental work...
...God and the judgment of individual souls may indeed be an absurdity, as a dear friend of mine observed when I made this point to him, but oblivion, not the afterlife, is the more comforting scenario...
...He could settle that case out of court...
...I'm not saying he's innocent...
...It's like ten bucks...
...But don't you think Elizabeth Taylor has been his friend...
...No, it doesn' t seem fair, does it," said the woman...
...Like anything else, the more unfamiliar you are with it the more forbidding it seems...
...This malapropism I judged to be a moment of poetic truth...
...That over there, that's going to be the new Bob Hope Museum," the driver said, pointing to some nondescript terrain...
...And everybody wants a piece of him...
...By the time we arrived at the terminal, I was eager to board the plane and face my fate...
...Yeah, you' d have to say that Elizabeth Taylor is just about the only person Michael can really sit down with and unravel with...
...You know what I mean...
...My last plane flight may have been ten years ago and I've repressed the details...
...Well, you got a point there," the driver agreed...
...You kinda understand why he prefers kids, you know...
...For example, being forced to think about Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, or Michael Jackson is a kind of annihilation 4 of the self...
...Yes, I get the jitters, and besides, the whole idea of jet propulsion unnerves me...
...A Bob Hope museum...
...Of course there are various forms of oblivion, perhaps the worst being the sort you actually have to live through...
...Just associates...
...I just hope he's innocent...
...He raised quite a lot of money with that 'We Are the World' song, didn't he...
...For the next ten minutes we were subjected to a lengthy tribute to "Michael," testimony to all the good he'd done for "kids," an explanation of Michael's own troubled childhood, and a skeptical view of the accusations of child molestation against him...
...What's a few million to him...
...I found this implausible, or if true a justifiable excuse, not a prophylactic, for drug use...
...First he explained why he had moved to Florida from Cleveland...
...Takes over the whole top floor up there," the driver said excitedly...
...I felt this acutely while taking a pre-dawn shuttle bus from our motel to the Orlando airport for the flight back to New York...
...Haven't regretted it for a minute," he boasted...
...As I obsessively contemplated the remote chance that we might at any moment simply drop out of the sky, I was convinced that the prospect of mere oblivion was much to be preferred to the possibility of judgment, whatever the possible reward...
...Now that's sad...
...From my perch 10,000 feet above the wintry Atlantic coast, it suddenly dawned on me that, contrary to the common assumption made about believers' "infantile" longings for heaven, it is the agnostic or the atheist who faces the cheerier prospect about death...
...I understand that...
...On the Florida flight we flew through a storm, or what the captain reassuringly called "a slight bit of turbulence...
...Neither my checkbook nor my professional or familial responsibilities have allowed me to do much jet setting...
...PAUL BAUMANN...
...There were only two other passengers in the small van, a couple from South Africa as it turned out...
...Apparently there was nothing for the kids to do in Cleveland...
...Hasn't he," the South African woman spoke up sympathetically...
...The driver fancied himself a kind of tour guide—even in the dark—and didn' t stop talking during the entire twenty-minute ride...
...I know the laws of physics explain how you can fire up one end of these patently flimsy "fuselages" and quite matter-of-factly negotiate the inexorable demands of gravity, but I still feel as though I'm being ushered into a kind of tin can to which some sadistic fiend has done little more than light a fuse...
...He's done a lot of good, you know...
...Whatever the future held in store, surely Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor would be but bit players...
...And that hotel, the one with the yellow lights, that's where Michael Jackson stays when he's in town...
...Being Michael, well it can't be easy," the driver said...
...Right next to Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Snow White...
...There's always something to do here," he said...
...I'm not kidding...
...Even his family...
...That's how kids get into trouble, especially drugs, he explained...
...In Orlando his kids avoid such temptations by regularly visiting the various Disney World attractions...
...What's it to him...
...I mean a million dollars for him is like ten dollars to us...
...That's what it's like...
...When you have that much money you don't have any friends, you got what are called associates...
...Another incentive for drug use, I surmised, and made a mental note not to move to the Greater Orlando area...
...I shuddered...
...To be honest, I'm not wild about flying...
...The image of Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor unraveling together put my apprehensions about flying and my expectations of the afterlife into perspective...
...Later, as I gazed down wistfully at the miniature but recognizable world below, I was struck by what I suppose is the mundane or adolescent realization that one's expectations about death matter...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 4
