Chapter 108: Hollywood Bound

Friday, June 28, 1985

The answering machine again gave me a very welcome surprise when I woke up. Emma had left a message saying she’d gotten six Live Aid tickets. Four were for us, and one was for her boyfriend. There was some implication in her message that she might not sit with us, since some of her boyfriend’s friends were also going, but that was fine. I’d still happily pay for her ticket.

I called back and got her on the phone, thanking her (fairly profusely) and promising to bring money with us, unless she wanted a wire or money order sooner. She said she was fine waiting, so we were good there.

It wasn’t a trivial amount of money. Five tickets, plus the money I’d promised her, came to £175, or about $225 at the current exchange rate. Emma was going to USC as a foreign student, though. Unless she was on a full scholarship, most likely her family was at least comfortably middle-class (like ours) and could afford that sort of thing.

For me, $225 in ticket costs for four of us to see perhaps the best concert in history was well worth it.

Every cloud has its silver lining. Not that going to LA to see Jess — and ‘Back To The Future’ — was a ‘cloud,’ but it kept me from one leg of the family vacation for the first time ever, so it perhaps counted as one.

In any case, since I wasn’t going on the train, I could take everyone to the train station. Six people’s luggage barely fit, with two bags in the laps of the back-seat passengers (Jas, Angie, and Paige), but we managed.

When they got to Chicago, Dad’s plan was to rent a car at the train station and send the luggage in a cab. Angie, Paige, and Jas would fit in the back seat. I already had a rental car reservation (which took some doing, but the people at AmEx knew their stuff and figured out which firm would allow a nineteen-year-old to rent), so we would have two cars for the rest of the trip.

I dropped them off in plenty of time for their train. As before, they would leave a bit before noon, get to New Orleans by late afternoon, go to the hotel, and spend about twenty-four hours there before leaving for Chicago. After a bunch of hugs and kisses, I was back on the road, this time heading for the airport.

Two hours later, the car was settled in long-term parking and I was through security, waiting for my flight. I gave Jess a call and let her know I’d be on my way and reconfirmed the timing. She was planning on picking me up at LAX. In 1985, that was a ‘wing and a prayer’ sort of thing. I would have no way to tell her I was waiting at the curb, so she would just have to circle.

She reminded me she had a new car, one I’d never seen. Her old Datsun B210 would probably never have survived the trip to LA. They’d bought her a relatively late-model used Toyota Corolla out in LA. She said it was dark blue, which felt like it would suit her well enough.

Of course, Jess could make anything suit her, pretty much. That’s who she was.

The flight itself was perfectly fine. Nothing unusual, except from the perspective of someone who’d experienced the decline of air travel as an ‘experience.’ The seats were wider than they would have been in 2021, there was more legroom, there was a meal, and the service was better in general.

Unfortunately, there was also a smoking section. Thankfully, I wasn’t in it, nor would we be for the flight to London, but (as usual) smoke doesn’t care about sections, and this flight had a lot of smokers on it.

My ex-wife had hated flying ‘back in the day,’ so she said. We’d met well after the smoking ban on US flights, so it had never bothered us, but I could sympathize. A kid growing up with fairly severe asthma having to sit in a smoke-filled plane for hours? Even if she didn’t have an attack, it must have been nerve-wracking sitting there and hoping for the best.

It wasn’t much of an issue for me, per se, but I didn’t like it. A shower would definitely be in order once I landed.

LAX was, pretty much, LAX. I hadn’t flown through it so often that I ‘knew’ it, so every trip was much the same as the others. It was big, complicated, and very busy.

I got my bag with no difficulty, though. After giving the hotel in New Orleans a quick call and leaving a message saying I was safely in LA, I headed for passenger pickup. After just a ten-minute wait, I saw a blue Toyota Corolla, and then saw Jess. I headed over while she parked and popped the trunk. She got out while I was stowing my bag next to hers (that seemed like a hint!) and met me with a big hug.

“Thanks!” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I’m very happy to be here!”

We gave each other a quick kiss, and then both got in her car.

She got moving, looked over, and said, “It feels weird to be driving you around!”

“Fine, though,” I said.

“I should make you drive!”

“I’d be happy to.”

She giggled.

“You’d have to change everything. I’ll drive!”

“Works for me.”

“So,” she said, “You saw the bag.”

“I did,” I said.

“If it suits you, I was thinking to save on commuting and spend the night near the theater,” she said. “A friend of mine has a room at a hotel there, you know.”

I smiled.

“I’m pretty sure I was aware of that.”

“If it’s not okay...” she said, though there was a grin suggesting she knew very well it was more than just ‘okay.’

“I’d quote what Jas had to say, but it’s uncouth. Suffice it to say, it is considerably more than ‘okay.’”

She giggled.

“Jas does have a way with words. Would it have had to do with screws? Or maybe nails?”

“The latter,” I said, chuckling.

“God, I miss all of you!” she said, sighing. “Seriously, I love it out here, but I haven’t met anyone who matches up with any of you. You most of all, of course, but I love Jas, and Ang, and Paige, too.”

“Not Emma?” I said.

She sighed a bit.

“So,” she said. “Emma is ... a pretty good friend.”

“And roommate?”

Jess looked a little embarrassed, which wasn’t like her. After a second, she looked over and said, in a perfect British accent, “Emma is a wonderful friend, but she is not actually my roommate.”

I blinked, twice.

“You mean...?”

“That was me,” she said, still being British. “If my accent could convince you, I was pretty sure it was working. Emma put me on the phone with friends of hers and they were trying to guess where I’d grown up. The consensus was either Notting Hill or Earl’s Court.”

“That ... is amazing,” I said, smiling. “Not a problem for me. You never actually said it wasn’t you, nor that Emma was your roommate.”

“Lying by omission,” she said, slipping back into her normal voice, “But, it was for a good reason. I’m working on French now. Both the language and the accent.”

“Very cool!” I said.

“It’s ... well. It’s a way to get my voice more under my control, to test myself, and to make myself more versatile. Emma was my main language coach for British English, but I took an evening class from one of the theater professors, too. Not for credit, but it helped a lot.”

“I think it’s a great idea.”

“You see movies where an American is trying to play British. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it’s just awful. The reverse is true, too, though they seem to do a little better than we do, mostly.”

I nodded.

“I’ve noticed that, too,” I said. “There’s a hilarious clip from a movie that will hopefully get made in a decade or so. A British actor, who I don’t think you’d know...”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Anyway, so, in a few years an American actor, one you probably also wouldn’t know, makes a movie playing a classic British character. His accent is terrible. Mel Brooks makes a movie about the same character a few years later and casts the guy I’m thinking of. He has a speech in the movie in which, after someone asks him why they should believe he’s who he says he is, he says something like ‘Unlike others, I can speak with a British accent.’”

Jess laughed pretty loudly at that.

“I love it!” she said. “So good! Mel Brooks cracks me up! They showed all of his movies, I think, over the year. They show a lot of good films on campus and I’ve been soaking them all up. God, the Golden Age movies are so amazing! Not that there’s anything wrong with some 1980s movies, but it’s totally different.”

“It is,” I said. “Trends come and go. Right now we’ve got a bunch of teen comedies, which really is somewhat a new genre. Sure, there are some teen movies in the past...”

“The beach movies, at least,” she said.

“Those, definitely. Some of Elvis’s movies.”

She nodded.

I continued, saying, “But, really, what we have now is new. A decade or so, that’s about it. Less, maybe. Some of these are going to be classics. A whole lot are going to be forgotten.”

“Which are going to be classics, do you think?” she said.

“Of the ones I can talk about, ‘The Breakfast Club’ will still be pretty well known and relevant thirty years from now. ‘Indiana Jones’. ‘Star Wars’ and its sequels. ‘Airplane!’, ‘E.T.’, and ... there’s a bunch.”

“The one we’re seeing tomorrow?” she said, eyes twinkling as she gave me a look.

“Classic.”

“Yay!” she said, bouncing in her seat a bit. “If I was going to drag you away from your family and halfway across the country for a movie, I’d want it to be a classic!”

“Jess,” I said. “You are family, too.”

There were a few seconds of silence, and then she sniffled.

“Don’t do that while I’m driving!” she said, giggling and sniffling again.

“Okay,” I said.

She paused, then said, “That means ... I mean, I know it. I do! It still means a lot, you saying it. And meaning it! And it being all of you, too, I mean. You first, you most, but ... yeah. You’re all definitely family. People I can count on both to be on my side and to tell me the truth, not some sugar-coated nonsense.”

“We can do that,” I said. “Hell, if I lied to you, you’d know it.”

She giggled.

“Okay, fine. I would, I think. But ... it’s not that. It’s ... Michael ... he’s actually a really cool, level-headed person. I’ve seen what happens to him, even now, though. He’s smart, and he gets it, but there’s ... there’s this ... non-stop thing where people tell him how great he is and how talented he is and how funny he is and how handsome he is and ... it wears on people. Like, ‘If they’re all saying that, hey, I guess it’s true!’ It’s really not far from there to believing your own hype. I got it at Memorial, over and over, and mostly saved myself from it, but ... now, looking back ... I think dating you was partly me taking a look around and picking someone I thought wouldn’t give me that stuff. And you didn’t! Which was perfect!”

“I caught that at the time, actually. I mean, that you wanted a friend, not a sycophant.”

She giggled.

“Good word! Yes! I mean, most of the cheerleaders weren’t. It’s just — well, ego alert! — I was the best of them at a lot of things. We all knew it. But after a while, ‘just being honest’ is still ‘believing your own hype.’ I wasn’t better than they were, just ... you know ... I won the genetic lottery, I trained my ass off to be the best damn flier ever, I studied people as much as I could so I could learn to manage them, I paid as much attention as humanly possible to the gossip grapevine...”