Medallion Status Page 3
Finally. I am alive again. For the first time since college, or maybe high school, I am freed from the drudgery of work and childcare and decent behavior that I use to distract myself from the grim drift of my body, my enflabbening into the picture of my own mom or dad. Suddenly I am not afraid of dying on this flight to Atlanta. Or ever. In fact, part of me hopes the plane does go down, because it will never, ever get better than this.
Once in a Sky Lounge, I noticed the self-serve bar had a bottle of Fernet-Branca, an esoteric Italian digestif that tastes like pine cones soaked in menthol and grave dirt that is favored by hipster chefs and weirdo booze completists like me who used to write about non-wine alcohol for magazines. I pitied the poor cocktail nerd who put it there. The Sky Lounge bar is no place for mixology. The Sky Lounge is not aspirational. It is desperational.
But the food is pretty good! There is usually a spread of bagels and crackers and hummus and other happy ballast. There are spicy snack mixes that you empty out of tall Lucite silos into little ramekins. There are broccoli florets and cherry tomatoes and shards of celery the temperature of the Arctic. There are tuna salads and chicken salads, which are dangerous and mayonnaise-y enough to leave lying around without their being fondled and breathed on by countless travelers and their global biome of bacteria and secretions. Still, I eat it all. Swine flu scares me, but there is a tray of cubed pepper Jack cheese that never runs out, and next to it is ranch dressing, and it is all for me.
There is also some truly-more-than-pretty-good food. I am always amazed that the Sky Lounge is able to pump out so many hard-boiled eggs that consistently do not have a green ring around the yolk. So many actual restaurants fail in this regard. I cannot help but take a picture of those beautiful chalky yellow yolks, and that is why my Instagram account is so unappealing.
I have discovered that the best jambalaya in the city of New Orleans comes out of the electric crock in the Sky Lounge in Louis Armstrong International Airport. This statement is not controversial, because it is true. Any soup or stew deepens in flavor the longer it simmers at a very low temperature, cools, reheats, and simmers again. And up in the Sky Lounge, this cycle happens for days. (This is not slander but hyperbole, Beloved Airlines. Legal hyperbole. Keep your Beloved Lawyers away from me.)
For a while the Sky Lounge offered a Thai-style chicken-and-rice soup. They called it “Wicked” Thai Chicken and Rice Soup, which is offensive in the context of the history of demonization of Asia by the West, but accurate in the context of how the bullies I knew in Boston talked, because it was goddamned delicious. Then they took it away, suddenly, and the Sky Lounge became my enemy. It was an uncomfortable time.
But eventually the Sky Lounge sensed my anger and started offering pho. This earned not only my forgiveness but my respect. I appreciate that pho is everywhere now and all of America is drenched in Sriracha. But please remember that I am elderly and recall a time when Vietnamese noodle soup was still esoteric and knowing where the best pho shop in Seattle was was the height of food snob cred on the Chowhound message boards.
But now the Sky Lounge was (and is still!) offering great urns of ginger-fragrant pho broth for you to customize with rice noodles, tofu, cilantro, and scallions, all sitting out in sneeze-guarded little bowls. No beef tendon, but still: respect. It is, in fact, wicked good. And more credit to Sky Lounge, they do not call it “Wicked” or “Crafty” or “Inscrutable Asian Soup.” They call it Sky Broth, which is problematic in its erasure of its history and origin, yes, but I say again: it is called Sky Broth. In this case, I am not changing the name, because it is one of the strangest and dumbest combination of words that I have ever encountered, and I love it.
Some of the Sky Lounges also have a patio where, in warmer months, travelers who have always wished to stand on the roof of an airport terminal and smell jet fuel can finally do so. They have scattered the deck with ottomans and chaise longues, and you can sit out there with your Diet Coke, and in between engine roars, you can hear the gentle bump-hiss of chill-out club music.
The Sky Lounges used to be hidden behind barely marked doors like secret societies. They were for high-level initiates only. But now that airlines understand that they are profit centers, this is no longer true. They are easy to find. Just look for the signs that lead you to the sliding doors that open upon an aspirin-white parlor full of older businessmen who are SO ANGRY that their particular boarding zone does not allow them free access to the lounge. These guys are always there, fuming. Even though I have that deal with my credit card, I would still pay a lot to get to walk past these mad business dads on my way into the Sky Lounge. How much? Roughly all of my money. That may seem like bad math to a business dad. But I was a liberal arts major who never managed to balance my checkbook: I was never supposed to have status over these guys.
The first time I flew first class was when I was twenty-one. I was flying to Buenos Aires, ostensibly to do research on the author Jorge Luis Borges. If that sounds pretentious, it’s because I was. I was also a newly minted con artist, having scammed $1,000 off the Yale Spanish Department to underwrite my trip, money that had been earmarked for actual Latin American Studies students who wanted to do more than stroll around a beautiful fake Paris, visiting a few of the places where their favorite authors had worked, but otherwise staying up all night with other Americans, eating steaks and smoking and buying European comic books at the all-night newsstands at four in the morning. But too bad for those Latin American Studies students, because I decided I wanted their money and I took it.
I booked my flight on United. Sorry, Beloved. I was younger then, and also United played “Rhapsody in Blue” on their television ads, and I had that Gershwin cassette on heavy rotation in my bathroom boom box. I listened to that big clarinet glissando that opens “Rhapsody in Blue” every morning before school. I was a clarinetist myself, after all, and also an incredibly cool person.
The night flight from Miami had been delayed several hours. A lot of passengers had given up and made other arrangements, so as we boarded, the plane was almost empty. People were opening blankets and laying across whole rows of economy seats, and I could have done the same. But as I found my crummy seat, I realized I had just walked through a completely empty first class cabin. I was curious, privileged, dumb, and emboldened by my recent heist of Spanish Department funds. I turned around. It was time to see what this cool, Gershwin-loving dude was capable of.
I approached the first class flight attendant standing by the flimsy curtain that separated our worlds. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can I sit in there?”
She did not say yes. But to my surprise, she did not say no.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I actually don’t think I can let you, because I don’t think we have an extra first class meal to serve you.”
I told her I didn’t care about the meal. Not at all. I just wanted to sit in the nice seat.
But as I explained this, I was confused. The first class flight attendant didn’t need to give me a reason for saying no. Even then I understood I was not entitled to a reason. Or more accurately, saying no was the reason, the whole reason this flimsy curtain was here. People don’t pay for first class to get nicer seats and legroom and ramekins of warm nuts. Those are the perks (except for the nuts, which are gross). The service they are paying for is to be in a place where others cannot be. What’s more, status doesn’t count unless other people see you having it. That is why the coach passengers are boarded last and marched past the first class passengers as they are receiving their preflight drinks. That is why, even when the curtain is drawn, you can see right through it. That is why when a white, able-bodied twenty-one-year-old man asks, “Can I sit in there,” you tell him no, loudly. You don’t go back and rummage around until you find an extra first class meal for him, and then apologetically offer him a nice seat and warm nuts.
But that is what she did.
I sat down. A man ushered a whi
skey into my hand. It was in an actual glass. I drank it. I felt my brain change shape the way everyone’s does when they first sit in first class. First there is disbelief and euphoria. You touch all the little seat-adjustment buttons and the sleeping masks and cozy socks and want to cry. You feel so lucky. Then they bring the meal for you, the one they found for you, the one that probably the flight attendant was going to eat herself. It is served on a real plate with real flatware and cloth napkins, and as you fall asleep, you will think to yourself, You know, it’s a good thing she did find that extra meal for me. It would have been bullshit if she hadn’t. She’s lucky I don’t complain.
When you get away with something brash and ridiculous and unfair, it is natural for you to feel that it is perfectly natural. You comfort yourself with free whiskey and say it is right that this whiskey is free, that the nuts are warm, and it’s not at all unfair, because those unhumans behind me weren’t smart or talented or hardworking enough to take advantage of a flight attendant who obviously had eaten a bunch of drugs or something. Like all status, if you get into first class, you have to believe you deserve it. And for that reason, once you leave a firstclass cabin, you feel robbed, wronged, and unnatural, and so you spend your life anxiously, always trying to get back in.
Later that year, I was flying with my mom and dad from Boston to some other city. There was a delay, and I said this was great news. I told my dad: Now is your chance. Go tell them that we all want to sit in first class now. It works. They do this all the time! He didn’t do it. And I am ashamed to recall that I thought in that moment that my dad’s decision was not based on experience, decency, and non-assholism, but cowardice. I’m sorry, Dad.
But that was long ago. Now I was Gold, and everyone was thanking me for it. And not long after I went Gold, I was offered a spot in the cast of a television show that was shooting in Los Angeles. I knew it would mean a lot of travel and being apart from my wife and our children. It didn’t pay a lot. But the production would pay for my flights to and from Los Angeles, and they would be contractually obliged to fly me first class, back and forth across the country, over and over. I knew I would log a lot of Sky Lounge time. I knew I would rack up a lot of MQMs.
“Would they fly me on Beloved Airlines?” I asked my agent.
“Sure, I guess,” my agent said.
I took the job. And very quickly, I went Platinum.
“Thank you for being Platinum” does not sound as good as “Thank you for being Gold.” But I had drunk the Sky Broth, and I was not going back.
Chapter Four
SECRET FAMILY
Most of my previous acting roles had been limited, and they didn’t last long. Usually either my character was killed, or the show would be canceled. I would warn showrunners of this trend early on after they hired me. Kill me quick, I would tell them. Either my character dies, or the show does.
The exception, for a while, was this new job in Los Angeles. It was a comedy about a married couple who were having trouble adjusting to middle age. They had wacky best friends, and I played the third best friend of the male lead. The first and second best friends were a man and a woman, both much better actors than I was. They played college pals of Leading Best Friend. My character was initially Leading Best Friend’s accountant, and then his employer, and then his employee. I suppose he needed me in his life in case something happened to the other friends, like the president pro tempore of the Senate of Best Friendship.
Sometimes I would forget I was on this television show. It shot only a few months a year, and I was not on it very much. I would be biding my time at home when suddenly a call would come in, and I would remember: Oh, right. I’m still on TV. On the other end of the call, a voice would tell me I was needed for a scene in which I had to encourage my Leading Best Friend to hire a prostitute, or to harass my coworkers by walking around the office with fake gray pubic hair hanging out of my pants. (I was your basic John Hodgman–type character.) Then I would fly out for two nights, come home for three days, and then back out for four nights, and so on. At least once I flew overnight to LA, picked up my rental car, drove to the office space where we were shooting, immediately got into wardrobe, said my words and made my faces (this is called acting), drove back to the airport, and flew home again.
The television show offered a modest lodging stipend, and at first I stayed in a hotel. The Hotel was a very fancy and historic Hollywood hotel that looks like a French castle. The stipend did not even come close to covering the cost of the Hotel, but I had stayed there during fancier times in my career and I loved it. The first time I ever walked into the lobby, before I even checked in, the woman at the host stand said my favorite words: “It’s John Hodgman!” Later I would ask the manager of the Hotel if the woman at the host stand had been coached to say those words. He said no. He thought she was just a fan. This was a lie that I accepted for many years. And through this bond, the manager of the Hotel and I gradually became friends. His name is Phil.
My family was with me on that first trip, but not this time. The morning before I began work on the first episode of the television show, I left my wife and children at the breakfast table in Maine. They were smiling but sad to see me go, and bathed in cool Maine summer sunshine. I entered a long, gross hallway of cars and airports and planes and airports and cars, and by evening I was sitting in the wobbly yellow candlelight on the Hotel patio, eating dinner at a table for one. Jessica Lange was at the next table. Jessica Lange, of course, is most famous for being my imaginary girlfriend whom I met while watching the movie Tootsie. Now Jessica Lange was telling her dinner partner that with her and Kathy Bates on the show this season, it should really be called American Horror Story: Menopause. I texted this to all my friends. The Hotel is very secretive, and it frowns on people reporting what happens there, but I feel Jessica Lange deserves that the world know: she is very funny.
The next day I went in to work on the television show. We mostly shot on location in actual homes and restaurants and karaoke bars in the San Fernando Valley. I always stopped for breakfast at the craft services table before I did my acting. There is little I like more than a steam tray full of breakfast sausages—ask anyone—and craft services is very good on this account.
On my first day of work, I had to drive a car into a strip mall parking lot to meet my Leading Best Friend. They showed me the very small piece of tape on the ground where I had to stop the car in order to be framed correctly in camera. I hit my mark perfectly almost every take. The camera man complimented me, and it is hard to overstate how proud I was.
It all went so smoothly that I had completed my work for the day and was back at the Hotel by mid-afternoon. I sat by the pool and watched a bunch of wealthy, idle Europeans suck the sun into their weirdly shaped and wholly bared bodies. They did not care about their pouches and curves and ripples and folds and moles and hairs. I was in the shade and wondered what it would be like to feel that way. Near me, a young woman in a bathing suit was drinking champagne with two suitors. She had a number of tattoos on her legs and one of her suitors asked what a certain tattoo meant, and she couldn’t remember. They laughed and laughed. Then I went up to my room for a nap. It was an incredible afternoon. Wasn’t this worth leaving my family for?
But it turns out, making the television show was not all fun and breakfast sausages and poolside naps and forgotten tattoos. Because it turns out that as good as my car acting was, my regular acting was not so good. I learned this the next time I went in to work. It was a new episode. I was driven to a new location in the Valley, a print shop where my character was a manager, and I met this episode’s director. I liked her very much, but once I started saying my words and making my faces, she kept stopping me.
“Stop making those faces,” she would say. She told me that I was mugging. She needed me to stop making the jokes sound like jokes. She needed me to be natural.
“Be smaller,” she told me.
 
; I didn’t know what to say. Actually, that’s not true. I knew what I had to say was “Got it. Thank you,” and so I did. The truth was, I didn’t know what to do.
This was outside of my experience in two ways. First, what passed for my acting on The Daily Show and elsewhere had always been about landing jokes in the biggest, fakest way possible (this is apart from my car acting, though, which everyone agrees is powerful and subtle). Second, I had long ago learned that when you are shooting a television show, time is more important than any one performance. If you are doing a bad job at acting, I had learned, they will not bother to tell you. That would be a waste of time, and it might put you into an emotional hole that would also waste time. And by the same token, I had learned that when they say you have done a good job at acting, they are probably lying.
But now here was the Director, breaking that rule. I felt bad and also bad for her. She didn’t have the time to take me aside and discreetly give me years of training and experience in acting. So she ended up having to trick me. She gave me chores to do in my fake office. Folders to pick up and forms to sign and papers to drop off as I walked my circuit, talking over my shoulder to my Leading Best Friend. All so I would not turn the jokes into jokes. So that I would seem like a natural human being, as if that had ever been an option for me.
“Be smaller,” she would still say. “Smaller, smaller.”
Later that season, the Director and I worked together again at an old three-story mansion in Jefferson Park. The house was pillared and decayed and used frequently as a setting for scary movies. Wandering it between takes I found a pentagram painted in blood red on the floor in the basement, and a second-floor bedroom that was empty except for dozens of creepy dolls, scattered on the floor. Why hadn’t anyone cleaned up the dolls after the last shoot? Or were the dolls permanent, just held here in reserve should a future movie need a creepy doll scene? Maybe it was a selling point. Or maybe I was the only one who could see the dolls. I spent a lot of time up in that room contemplating this mystery. (Check my Instagram.)