I sat at the gate at JFK, having red-eyed my way from Los Angeles, exhausted, minding my own business, reflecting on what I’d seen the night before, shortly after takeoff, shortly before sleep, something I’d never seen before from an airplane.
I’d been on the left side of the plane, and we’d gone south over the ocean, accident of fate, affording me a panoramic view of the city at night: amber streetlights dotting neighborhoods; red-stripe, white-stripe garlands of freeway traffic; mysterious black gaps of waterways and parkland. Then a small burst of light, not at ground level but above it. Another burst of light, streaks opening like a flower in time lapse. A fireworks show. I watched the little explosions until we penetrated the cloud layer.
It wasn’t a holiday.
I was thinking about how a sight that might consume our attention completely on the ground could, from another perspective, barely register as a blip on an enormous field, when I heard a name over the PA.
“Jeff Cook,” the agent said. “Please check in at the counter for Gate Eleven.”
A common enough name, but it piqued my attention. I had known a Jeff Cook once, at UCLA, almost twenty years earlier. Looking up, I saw a handsome man in his forties striding toward the counter. He was dressed in a sharp blue suit, no tie, glasses with transparent Lucite frames. Expensive leather loafers. He said his name to the gate agent and slid his boarding pass and identification across the counter. While she clicked away at the noisy keyboard, he leaned slightly on the handle of his fancy hard-shelled roll-aboard suitcase.
From where I sat near the gate, I could examine this Jeff Cook closely, in profile. I had all but determined that he wasn’t the Jeff Cook I’d known and was going to turn my attention elsewhere, when he looked in my direction. I knew those high, broad cheekbones and that penetrating gaze.
It was he. But Jeff had had famously long, dark flowing hair, not this cropped salt-and-pepper business. Plus he’d put on weight, become more solid in the way so many of us did after college, continuing to grow into manhood long after we thought we’d arrived.
We hadn’t been friends, exactly, barely acquaintances, but Jeff was one of those minor players from the past who claimed for himself an outsize role in my memories.
During my freshman year I experienced a series of encounters, if they could even be called that, in various locations on and off campus, with a fellow student who had, for some reason or another, caught my attention. With his cascading hair and distinctive features, he was hard to miss, a sort of thrift-store Adonis, and he carried himself with the quiet confidence of an upperclassman. We didn’t cross paths so much as he would just pop up from time to time, at a table in the corner of a coffee shop, wandering around a protest for the first Gulf War, or—most randomly—lit up by my car’s reverse lights as I backed out of a friend’s driveway one night. Every sighting of this mystery man yielded a frisson, as if he were my guardian angel keeping tabs on me, followed by a pang of anxiety at the thought that I
might never see him again.
Near the end of that year, I went with a friend to buy weed from an acquaintance of his, a fellow stoner who had picked up a little extra to hook up his buddies and make a few bucks in the process. We swung by an apartment building on Gayley, an ugly multiunit box. The shabby security vestibule opened on an elevator that stank of rancid hydraulic fluid. Upstairs, the hallway was anonymous and bland, but the apartment had a distinctive grotto-like atmosphere, the windows covered over with bedsheets and the walls festooned with posters, all of them for the same band, a band I had never heard of: Marillion. We stood awkwardly in the middle of the living room while a line of stoned residents deliquesced into the couch in front of us, eyes more wary than friendly. At the end of the couch, as stoned as the rest of them, sat my long-haired guardian angel. My friend got the pot, and, perhaps to make the visit seem less transactional, his friend made introductions around the room. I learned the name of the mystery man, a name not nearly as mysterious as he was: Jeff.
First quarter of sophomore year, there he was again, in Cinema and Social Change. Every Tuesday and Thursday, in Melnitz Hall, his myth disintegrated further, the slow grind of familiarity rendering him into just another undergrad, a fellow non-film major as clueless as I was about the movies we were discussing. This process struck me as curious. Over the years, it would spring to mind whenever I found myself having to deal with people whose fame summoned in me an irrational but persistent agitation.
The gate agent bent behind the counter to retrieve something from the printer. She handed Jeff his identification and boarding pass. He thanked her and turned to go. When he came past me, I said his name.
He looked at me quizzically.
“Yes?” he said.
“UCLA,” I said.
His eyebrows went up behind those Lucite frames.
“Jesus,” he said. “You look exactly the same. Plus twenty years or so, but you know what I mean.”
I wondered if he was trying to place me. I started to say my name, but he beat me to it.
“That’s me,” I said.
“Names and faces,” he said, tapping his temple. “It’s a thing.”
Oh God, I thought, he’s become a salesman.
He put out his hand to shake.
“That film class,” he said. “I remember. Only one I ever took.”
“Same.”
“Almost failed it. Couldn’t stay awake in the dark. The whole thing felt like a dream.”
“You didn’t miss much,” I said. I didn’t mean it, but I was making conversation.
He smiled and took me in for a moment. “Hey, why don’t you join me in the first-class lounge? I’ve got an extra pass.”
“What about the flight?”
He pointed at the display above the gate. We’d been delayed.
I had already spent hours in the airport, my tickets having been purchased last minute and at the cheapest possible fare—a red-eye from LA, a layover at JFK, a flight to Frankfurt, a fourhour train ride to Berlin—and the idea of a first-class lounge was so appealing I could have hugged old Jeff right there and then.
I trailed him through the terminal, his soft-leather briefcase and fresh-looking roll-aboard making me wish I’d replaced my scruffy backpack with something more adult. The terminal wasn’t packed, but it was crowded enough that we made better progress single file than two abreast. His hair was cropped cleanly in a line above his collar. Everything about him conveyed neatness and taste. In college I’d never seen him in nice clothes, only ripped-up jeans and weathered T-shirts worn inside-out to obscure whatever was written on them. Whether this was fashion or indigence was never clear to me.
The whole way from gate to lounge elevator, as I followed him and the rhythmic ticktock of his bag’s wheels across the terminal’s tiles, he didn’t once look back to make sure I was following. I wondered if he was having second thoughts about inviting me into the land of the fancy people. I hoped I hadn’t seemed too desperate when accepting his offer.
At the elevator, he was back to normal, or how he had been at the gate, delighted at the coincidence and looking forward to catching up, though as far as I knew we didn’t have much to catch up on.
I presumed that he was one of those people who hated being alone. Perhaps if I’d been paying closer attention, or if I’d known what was to come, I’d have detected a glimmer of desperation in his eyes. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t there, not yet.
—
Excerpted from MOUTH TO MOUTH. Copyright © 2022 by Antoine Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
