Rocket Man

Ears absorbing: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. There’s a sizable contingent of musicologists who would say that this is the greatest piece of music yet written. Like, we’re talking the entire Western musical tradition. Not wanting to incur the anger of any rabid musicologist by agreeing or disagreeing, I’ll simply say that the music’s beauty is making it difficult for me to concentrate on the writing. Not unlike when I drink Viennese coffee—sometimes I forget as I savor bitter perfection in my cup that I’m required to breathe in order to stay alive (and enjoy more coffee).

Today was spent in Café Prückel (perhaps my favorite café so far) and strolling through the Prater with my friend Jimmy. The Prater is a boardwalk-style amusement area, complete with Ferris wheel, pouty children, vomit-paved pathways stemming from the more heinous attractions, and shooting games that are about as honest as a Stalinist state-run newspaper. I laughed out loud when I saw the game named “Gangster Alley” and the American flag flying underneath its flashing letters. These were bootleggers, though, not Crips, and a poorly disguised Austrian-as-New-Yorker voice invited us to “pick up a [tommy] gun and get the varmints.” Not wanting to split hairs, I let go the fact that varmints aren’t native to 1920s Chicago.

At nearly 100 years old, the Ferris wheel (known as the “Riesenrad”) is the main attraction. Passengers are transported around the wheel by ancient boxes that are reminiscent of the San Francisco trolley cars, in that they’re outrageously expensive and don’t really take you anywhere.

Jimmy and I however, were not to be deterred. We wanted to treat ourselves to what we’ve been told is a magnificent view of Vienna and the entire Danube Valley: the best way to glimpse this jewel of Central Europe, so we’ve heard. It was one of those truly beautiful Autumnal afternoons, where the sunlight is magnified in brilliant colors as it passes through the frail leaves and is shot all over the city as beautifully nostalgic echoes of morning radiance. The breeze danced playfully with women’s scarves and tickled the cheeks of the children they carried. There seemed never to have been such a day for Ferris wheeling as this particularly breathtaking day. We wouldn’t have dreamed of abandoning this celestial beauty to the annals of Yesterday without a ride in the Riesenrad.

“Fuck this shit,” we said when we saw the price of €7.50, and we left.



After a lengthy courtship, my brother Ted finally married the lovely Amy Means (now Amy Sparks) in a touching ceremony in Malibu. [Amy has chosen not to hyphenate her name, because as Ted explains, she doesn’t want to become a sentence {Amy Means-Sparks}]. Yes, I came home for the wedding, but I consider it more than a fringe benefit that I was able to spend time on a Virgin Atlantic flight.

My flights on Virgin Atlantic are perhaps the closest I’ve come to feeling as though all the world is perfect and that strife is merely a word that applies to people who aren’t as deserving of the VIP treatment as my marvelous self. I mean, it just cannot be that everyone is entitled to being fed 5 times and watching 6 movies (started and stopped at one’s own discretion) in a single transatlantic flight. Nevermind that the upper class passengers have beds, massages, and free-flowing champagne served with foie gras and limitless caviar on diamond-encrusted plates of white gold to the live violinistic stylings of Jascha Heifetz. I got a bag with a sleeping mask and a portable toothbrush. The bag had tassels. Tassels!

The flight was not uneventful, however. As a British firm, Virgin Atlantic makes it a point of hiring British flight attendants. These gorgeous ladies (all of whom were under 35) cater to you as the pharaohs were once catered to, but they do so through the varied and immeasurably complex accents of the English Isles. I had a couple embarrassing episodes while trying to understand my comfort crew.

After meal #4, roast beef au jus with Caesar salad, an adorable biscuit (read: cookie) and two éclairs, I had a decent amount of trash. Never missing a step, the marvelous flight attendants knew exactly what I needed. As if on cue, down walked a petite British Pakistani, casually carrying her stunning beauty through the aircraft.

“Have you got any rubbish?” she asked. I was sitting over one of the engines, so I figured I just couldn’t hear her. “Excuse me?” I tried.

“Rubbish?” this time I distinctly heard English sounds. Almost there. “So sorry. One more time?” I begged.

She rolled her eyes and held up a handful of garbage. “Rubbish,” she said firmly. I had caused her to break the seal of nicety, and she was not happy about it.

Feeling sheepish at this point, I gathered all my rubbish together as quickly as I could onto my tray, and then—perhaps too quickly—thrust the tray at the poor Brit. She almost got away clean, but the éclair chocolate had other plans. She smiled broadly as she wiped the chocolate from her blouse, the kind of smile that’s reserved usually for vagrant relatives and people at the DMV, and continued on her way. She probably didn’t even hear my 15 apologies over the engine’s roar.

At this point I resolved to not so much as make eye contact with another flight attendant for the remainder of the journey, sure that I had been blacklisted and knowing they would probably spit in my food and give me Darjeeling when I asked for Earl Grey (I don’t know. I’d imagine that’s a serious offense in British culture).

I feel it is important to mention, though, that my fears of inviting the hatred of the flight attendants were not unfounded. I sat in the back of the first section of the plane, and during takeoff, landing, and high turbulence, the flight attendants sat right behind me. They can be brutal, unforgiving creatures.

“Did you see that horrid cow in 53J?” I was pretty sure I didn’t qualify as a cow, but to double check I looked at my row and seat. 72C. All clear.

“I certainly did! But she wasn’t much compared to that trotter in Premium Class.” I don’t know what a “trotter” is, but judging by the sound of her voice, I hope to God I’m not one.

There was also some confusion during afternoon tea. For one thing, there was some difficulty with my taking coffee instead of tea. I got a look that said, “There’s a reason it’s called afternoon tea.” The other hang-up was another problem with regional dialects.

While watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I was interrupted by a small notice in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. “Afternoon tea in 10 minutes,” it explained, “choice of salad sandwich or cheese rocket.”

There’s something particularly electrifying about the prospect of new words in one’s own language: the possibility that a “rocket” was another name for something I’d already eaten in my life led to dramatically funny possibilities. “Oh, those English,” I would say, “calling a food item a ‘rocket.’ What will they think of next? [insert American condescension here]”

So when the flight attendant (not the éclair one… I had lost the privilege of her service) came by to ask which I preferred, salad sandwich or rocket, the answer was clear.

“Rocket, please,” I requested in a boisterously singsong voice, proud of my intercontinental savoir-faire and suavité.

She stared at me blankly. “… yes?” she asked, looking puzzled. It turns out that to just ask for a rocket is like just asking for a drink. One needs a bit more information to continue.

After the éclair incident, I was on edge with the flight attendants, and I panicked. She didn’t understand me, what’s wrong with me, oh God they’re all going to hate me and call me a trotter and there’ll be a much more horrid goddamn cow in 72C then there ever was in 53J! So I did what, in my frantic mind, made the most sense.

“Sorreh,” I tried with a devastatingly inauthentic English accent, “Ay’d layk a rock-it, if yoo’ve got wun.” Unfortunately the plane did not crash at this point.

Of course she was just lost. I’m sure she had no idea what this obvious American (I had spoken to her previously with my regular accent) was saying or if he was trying to be funny or if he was just odd. “Look,” she offered finally, “we’ve got cheese rockets and veggie rockets. Which would you like?” I held out my hand and quietly asked for cheese, politely clearing my throat as an excuse to look away--much as one does when being examined for a hernia. A rocket, to dispel the mystery, is something like a hot pocket. At this point she could have given me a refrigerated one, and the heat from my face would have nuked it in no time. The pain continued, “And coffee?” she asked. I nodded and gave her my mug. “No, on the tray,” she said firmly, and I at once understood the origin of the stern English nanny stereotype. She took my tray, filled my mug with coffee, and handed it back to me. I looked in my complimentary travel bag, and, not finding a razor with which to kill myself, munched shamefacedly on my rocket.



The wedding, however, was well worth the embarrassment. The ceremony was beautiful and very touching: Amy and Ted found out that for $50, the great State of California will award to anyone the title of Deputy Justice of the Peace for a period of 24 hours. So they asked their very good friend Brian to go get Deputied and officiate. The three friends stood before their friends and family and bonded in a way that was expressive and yet entirely intimate. Tears were cried, laughs were had, sand was poured, and all of a sudden Ted had a wife. It was short and sweet; a model of modern efficiency. We had a reception to get to, damnit.

I walked into the reception hall after the ceremony to warm up for my Josh Groban performance (on a white baby grand! I felt like Elton), and found the cake decorator poring over the many-tiered beauty, looking a little flustered. “Fastest ceremony in the West,” she muttered. She clearly was counting on a long drawn-out schmaltz fest. Not for T&A.
I’ll not linger my own Josh Groban stylings, except to say that Ted’s rewriting of the “When You Say You Love Me” lyrics were on my mind during the whole performance. Towards the end, I nearly slipped, but missed saying “When You Say You Cream Me” just in time.

Epilogue:
As we were walking through the adjoining park, Jimmy and I were talking about our families, and he said something interesting: “… your sister-in-law.” Saying “Ted’s wife” hadn’t seemed at all strange, but when applied to me I found things became different entirely, and I realized for the first time that I have indeed had an in-law for nearly a month. I didn’t say anything, but felt a little bit of a warm fuzzy inside. Amy is a fantastic candidate for the sister I never had, but have always wanted. Along with the title of "Most Feminine One in the House" comes a heavy tiara indeed. One which I'll no longer have to bear.

Congratulations, guys. I couldn’t be happier for you.

The music right now is decidedly not warm fuzzy, so to preserve the feeling I’ll say only that Bizet’s musical treatment of Carmen’s murder by a jealous lover with a long dagger is masterful.