“West Slope Air?”
“Up in Alaska,” he said. “I was a bush pilot, mostly flying Cessna Caravans from village to village.”
“That sounds ... uh ... exciting,” Celia said.
“Exciting and dangerous,” Njord assured her. “I’ve got a thousand stories from that stint.” He gave a salacious look at Laura. “Maybe you and I could sit down at the bar tonight after your show and I’ll tell you some of them.”
“Wow,” Laura said, “that sounds like fun, but ... well ... I’m usually pretty beat after a show.”
“Oh,” Njord said, “well maybe we could...”
“You know who would like to hear some of those stories though,” Laura cut in. “My husband. He’s a pilot too. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Jake Kingsley?”
“Uh ... well ... of course I’ve heard of Jake,” Njord said. “But he’s not here with us, right?”
“Not currently,” she said. “But he does plan to fly out and visit at some point, maybe travel along with us for a week or so. Did I mention he’s the jealous type?”
“Oh ... I see,” Njord said, obviously a bit dejected.
“I think you just got shot down, Nordie,” Suzie said with a chuckle.
Njord nodded. “Actually,” he said, “I think I just got strafed on the ground before I could even take off.”
“A good analogy,” Celia said. “And before you even think of it, I’m married as well, and even if I wasn’t, you would have no chance with me.”
“All right then,” Njord said with a sigh. He shook his head a little. “I thought this was going to be a fun assignment.”
Suzie smiled and shook her head a little. “Now then,” she said, “how about we go over the rules and procedures this one time, just to remind everyone who was here before what they are and to instruct Laura and Eric on how we do things.”
“Sounds good,” Celia said, suppressing a chuckle of her own.
She went over the rules and procedures, giving pretty much the same speech she had given before their first flight on the last tour, making a point to emphasize the allowed baggage weight, the prohibition against smoking anything on the aircraft, and that nothing other than urination, defecation, or hand-washing would be done in the aircraft’s washroom.
Once the lecture was done, they lined up to have their bags and themselves weighed. They then boarded the aircraft and found their seats.
At 10:45, Eastern Time, the King Air lifted off for the one hour and twenty-minute hop to Orlando.
There was another show to do tonight.
Jim Ramos had not been able to spend Christmas with his family. Instead, he had spent most of it in a Houston hotel suite getting drunk and taking bonghits with Matt Tisdale and a couple of groupies Matt had scrounged up from a shopping mall. In retrospect, he undoubtedly ended up having a better time, but he did miss out on seeing his parents and his sisters and his nieces and nephews on the holiday.
The next day, Matt underwent cardiac ablation therapy in the catheterization lab of Methodist of Houston hospital, the procedure performed by Dr. Daniel Kaplan, the interventional cardiac radiologist who had personally learned the procedure from the pioneers who had developed it at Stanford. The procedure went “as planned” according to Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Rostami, the cardiologist, and there was (statistically anyway) a better than ninety percent chance that Matt would no longer be plagued by episodes of SVT.
“Well then,” Matt replied from his ICU bed that night, “if the fuckin’ Iranian and the Jew agree on that shit, it must be true then, right?”
The two doctors shared a look with each other and then nodded. “That’s right,” Rostami replied.
Matt was discharged from the hospital on December 28th after being given strict instructions to change his diet to a low-carbohydrate based regimen, to avoid alcohol, and, most important, to cease and desist from any stimulant use at all.
“Yeah, yeah,” Matt told Rostami after hearing this lecture, “you bet, doc. I’ll take that under serious consideration.”
“You’d better,” Rostami warned. “We did not cure you of all that ails you, Matt. We just made it harder for you to go into SVT. You still have all the underlying problems. You still have considerable occlusion in your coronary arteries and you still have an enlarged heart. Your blood pressure is still too high. And you’re still well on your way to developing type two diabetes.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Matt assured him. “I’m turning over a new leaf come the new year.”
“That’s good to hear,” Rostami told him, patting him on the shoulder.
On the way to the airport, where Matt had booked two first class seats back to LAX, Jim asked, “Were you serious about turning over a new leaf with the new year?”
“Fuck no,” Matt scoffed. “I was just saying that shit to get that fucking A-rab to shut his ass.”
“Ahhh,” Jim said. “Of course.” He then felt compelled to point out, “Most Iranians are not actually Arabs, you know.”
“What?” Matt asked.
“You said ‘that fucking A-rab’,” Jim said. “But the vast majority of Iranians are not Arabs. They’re Persians, more closely related to Caucasians than anything else.”
“How the fuck do you know that?” Matt asked.
Jim shrugged. “I used to bone an Iranian chick,” he said. “She was an ED tech at one of the hospitals.”
“Yeah?” Matt asked, interested. He had never had himself any Iranian gash, after all. “Good pussy?”
“It was okay,” Jim allowed.
Matt seemed disappointed by this. “Just okay, huh? Well, anyway, for the record, if I want to be corrected on my ethnicity and race misconceptions, I’ll give fuckin’ Nerdly a call.”
“Sorry,” Jim said.
They flew back to LA. Matt gave Jim a ride to the rehearsal warehouse so he could pick up his car. After that, they parted ways. Jim went home and spent a few days visiting family and generally just resting up from the three months he had just spent. And then, last night, New Year’s Day, he received a phone call from Matt.
“Dude,” Matt said, “you got anything going on tomorrow?”
“Uh ... no,” Jim had told him. “Just resting and relaxing as much as I can before we go back out on tour on Thursday.”
“Uh ... yeah, well the tour is what I need to talk to you about.”
“You do?” Jim asked slowly, feeling a little worm of dread. “What do you mean?”
“It’s nothing to talk about on the phone,” Matt told him. “I’ll be at my LA pad tomorrow. How about you drive over around two o’clock or so and we’ll talk this over.”
“Uh ... sure. I guess I can do that.”
“You’re the man, dude,” Matt said. “You got something to write on?”
“Yeah,” Jim said, picking up a pen and sliding the notepad that always sat next to the phone over.
Matt gave his address and the code to get into the parking garage. Jim wrote it down.
“And bring the football with you,” Matt added.
“Right,” Jim said, the dread growing. “I’ll bring the football.”
And now, as he pulled into the parking garage of the twenty-three-story residential tower where Matt owned his LA condo, that dread was still with him.
He doesn’t need me anymore, Jim thought. Now that he got the ablation, he has no more need for a tour paramedic. He’s going to fire me, and I’ll have to go back to working the streets in a rig.
This was a much more distressing thought than it had once been. He had grown to quite like being a tour paramedic. It was exciting and fun, he got laid more than he would have ever thought possible, and he didn’t have to spend twelve hours at a time in a hot, cramped ambulance dealing with what amounted to eighty or ninety percent bullshit and drama.
And the paychecks! Matt paid him extremely well and he didn’t have to spend hardly any of his own money out on the road. His meals and travel and lodging and booze were all taken care of by Matt. Sure, he had banked almost everything he had made so far and his credit cards were all paid off now and his bank account and savings were both in the five-digit range, but he couldn’t live off of that for very long if the revenue was suddenly cut off.