It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 5: The Author (Cont'd)

The early morning journey from LaGuardia to LAX did nothing for the Author's untethered sense of discomfort. The mood had begun in the office of Ms. Blanchet, but the Author had shrugged it off as a result of being in the editor's presence for too long. No one who passed through her 'Gates of Hell' could be judged for leaving with a queasy sensibility. And true, once out on the hot and humid 5th Ave, clutching the folder of information the secretary, (not Janet, Janice, or even Janine, but Julia), had given her, a sense of elation did momentarily take hold. Breathing in the smoggy air, inundated by the blaring horns and curses of passing taxis and pedestrians, the Author couldn't help but feel that her luck was finally coming around.

At last, a real assignment!

How many people in the world could say they spent anytime with Alan Carr, let alone four days?! What right did she have to feel unsettled? Certainly, the horrid fantasies of her mother, confused and panicked and all alone, standing amongst the smoldering wreckage of their house still tugged at her heart, but the Author had to put all those thoughts out of mind. She had to think positively, she told herself. This was it, the 'big break' she'd been pining for, the uncatchable whale now at the end of her harpoon. This was the job that would pay for all the promises that had piled upon her over the years. The promise to her parents that she would do everything in her power to keep them in their home. The promise to pay for her sister's rehabilitation, and raise her nephew, and along the way, there had been the smaller promises. The most immediate and consequential. Promises to the electric, water, and mortgage companies; the internet providers and medical insurances that, for all her efforts, only seemed to gain in amounts. But if this business with the one and only Carr was half as lucrative as she believed it would be...No, she didn't want to tempt herself with the thought of what could be. Not again. It had to be just a job.

The joy and relief of her assignment soon gave way to the frenetic does of hysteria that always consumed her immediate family members whenever their routine was disrupted.
Her nephew, all too accustomed to abandonment by mother figures, cried when the Author told him that he'd be staying with their Cousin Jim for the remainder of the week, and refused to talk to her the whole, early morning drive to Flushing. Her parents were the real issue. When they heard that she was having their home health aide stay for the four night she was away, her mother stamped her foot and declared loudly that it was all a ruse to send them to the 'The Poor House'.

'Mama, I just need to go to California for a couple of days. I'm interviewing Alan Carr. The Alan Carr!'

'I don't know who that is, but I'm telling you: I won't go to that horrid place! I'm not a beggar! I WON'T GO TO A HOME! I'll die first!' And at the pronouncement of the mother's foretold demise, the nephew had sobbed louder.

'Would you talk to her, please?!' the Author angrily demanded of her father, but he simply shrugged his shoulders.

'Don't fight with your mother.'

She didn't even bother calling the facility that kept her sister. There was only so much dependency the Author could cope with in one day.

Twelve sleepless hours later, and countless outbursts from her tantrum prone family members, the Author found herself bundled into last row of the passenger plane, smooshed in the middle seat between two snoring businessmen. Ms. Blanchet would be damned if she paid for extra leg room for her underlings.

It was the Author's wish to use the hours in the air for some much needed research, but the plane jolted and rattled in horrific fashion as it passed through every storm that perfectly and ominously lined up with the flight plan across the vast country. The little research she was able to accomplish proved fruitless. It didn't help that Ms. Blanchet had given the Author no directives, not even the faintest idea of what she was supposed to be interviewing the legend about. From what the Author could tell, there was no impending event that Alan Carr wished to promote. No album release, no biography, or charitable event. All she knew was that he wanted to talk, and after 40 years of well-practiced silence, she hoped it would be, at the very least interesting.