Rolling in the Sixties

I love the sky. People love the reliable blue. They adore the sun. They think sky, sun, and ocean, though not necessarily in that order or preference. One morning I’m able to seamlessly combine all three and I think Hey man, this is it. This is fucking cool. When I’m feeling particularly ecstatic I like to slip into the sixties and roll around in its smooth idioms. I find myself in a six-passenger helicopter sitting beside a sandy-haired pilot who looks exactly like Mike Nichols─when he was making records with Elaine May─a son’s somewhere in the deep spacey blue and his mother admonishes him: “You don’t even have time to phone your own mother,” she says. Abie is always telling me I start from the tail end or thereabouts: "Gimme the subject and get to the point. What’s the point? Well?” he says. I tell him he’s a business man and I’m a writer, but the truth is he’s a schmuck.

Our travel agent who owns Pacific Island Adventures, which is a solid and accommodating agency as far as I can see, even though Abie refers to the owner as bitch, "the bitch this and the bitch that, get the bitch on the line," booked us on a flight to Kauai where we’d go on a remarkable helicopter tour. The woman in charge of the seating arrangements told us to walk along a dotted white line marked out on the runway. Where the line halted and shifted into a right angle, she made sharp military adjustment and abruptly stopped, jabbing her index finger toward the dotted line. Abie grinned and swerved into a curved pass. But then I was placed in the front seat beside Mike Nichols and Abie was directed to the back along with the girls.

“What’s your name?” Mike says.
“What?” I don’t hear well unless I focus. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, I just don’t open my ear drums unless I’m expecting company.
“Your name.”
“Janice.” I don’t like the sound of my name. Next time I’m going to say Pandora which is my pseudonym─Pandora Cohen. Janice just doesn’t fit.
“Have you been in a helicopter before?” he yells.
“Once. Over Niagara Falls.” I say, expanding my vocal chords.
“Well you’ll love this,” he says, flashing a celestial smile and rummaging through a black plastic case with tapes.

I’m afraid of heights. I hate roller coasters. Even children’s rides at amusement parks unnerve me. But as we soar up the sides of sienna mountains into the cavernous blue to the theme from 2001, I fall in love. Shit, I think, shit, I’m never going back. The sky taps into my veins and I’m hooked. Tracking the mountain’s slope from valley to peak, catapulting into an ancient valley where Mike the pilot-historian says four thousand years earlier, tribes chanted and danced to sacrificial offerings. “Notice,” he says, “the same waterfalls. There are hippies in these here mountains who set up camp in the sixties and never left. Even the feds can’t find them.” I can’t stop smiling. I sit encased in glass and I'm grinning away.

When I grow old and can no longer lift weights of any significance, I’m going to phone old Mike in Kauai and take a lesson or two. Then screaming all the while, shit this is it man, this is where it’s at, I’ll merge with these Hawaiian skies, flash an ethereal smile, and become a Jewish Amelia Earhart even though I don’t identify with my Semitic tribe and could be mistaken for Greek or Italian. Still when a Jew is lost, newspapers print name, sex, and religion the way they do in cases of any race besides white, which I read somewhere is two-thirds of the world, and Jews world-wide mourn for a lost relative. I don’t want anyone to mourn for me. I don’t care whether or not I’m remembered. I just need to get away and know my girls will be fine. Sometimes I sit with myself─forty-five, I say, my voice soft and reassuring, forty-five. It’s just a number I know, but I enlarge it, keeping the original black and white which is my preference since black and white illuminate shadows which are truer to life than colour. So I create a billboard with a numerical enlargement worthy of any photography annual. I’ve always been wary of false advertising except when I was a teenager and dyed my hair red because I heard blonds had more fun and I wasn’t having a great time at all. So I used Lady Clairol, and my hair turned a pale shade of purple. Still, I repeat the number even though I know, I really do, you can’t have faith in advertising, even when it’s your own.