Want this to be a screenplay eventually-Incomplete
I stood on the second floor of the Eiffel tower, kissing a French woman named Gabrielle. She was taller than me, not by much, but enough for me to take notice and think about the fact afterwards. She wasn’t big breasted American beautiful; she was the European anorexic beautiful. We had just eaten lunch at the Le Jules Verne restaurant. I had met this woman two hours previous to this embrace, to this kiss, to this fulfilling of a wish. It was a passionate kiss--- no love, no last names, no phone numbers or emails, just passion. I think that is the way it is supposed to be when you kiss someone on the Eiffel Tower, or at least this is what I think James thought it would be like.
She invited me back to her flat, I then told her that “I had to go, I had to see the Mona Lisa before I left back to New York”.
She understood. She had grown up in Paris. She had seen and had many flings with American tourists.
I stood with this woman on this street because my brother had died six months earlier. I will not say that it is his fault, because it was not his fault; but it was for him. I kissed Gabrielle. Both of us new this was goodbye forever and I jumped into the taxi. I opened my briefcase and asked the driver how long it would take he said it would be a few minutes because of traffic. I pulled out the old piece of tattered paper. It had some stains on it. Some of the things on the list were beginng to fade others were written within the past year. A rainbow of pen, pencil, marker, and few items in crayon. I had this list practically memorized, but loved looking over it everytime I crossed something off. Number 45, Kiss a woman on the Effiel Tower.
I looked into the eyes of Mona Lisa for as long as the line behind me allowed. I wondered why this woman and why the history and magic behind this painting was so meaningful to people, it is just paint; all of this was just paint. This entire museum is worth millions of dollars and it is just paint, a mixture of oil, water, color, dried clay, and granite. I thought about how funny it would be to make a bomb or some napalm and blow this place up, after a few years people would forget that it ever existed. I understood the kiss on the Eiffel Tower, that was romantic and powerful, but museums seemed like a waste of money to me.
My brother, however, would disagree, He said “I had to look at her, look at her like I loved her, then she, this painting this fictional women or (what I thought could be a man) would return the look with either love or hate”. I’m sure he read it in some book somewhere, he was always reading books.
James and I were 10 months apart, exactly; he was one of those “uhoh” babies. Because of the close age we started school at the same time, so my mother could get us out of the house and enjoy her “alone time”. We were good friends --the kind that call when a big event was happening, but we didn’t visit very often.
After graduation, he wanted to save the world and I wanted to become a real estate agent, so he got a girl pregnant and got married, so much for saving the world. I went on to real estate starting off horrible but eventually found my niche in mobile home parks.
As the driver drove speedily towards the airport, he told me in his broken American, that I should hurry, it would take a few extra minutes to get through customs, there had been a bomb threat earlier that day. I walked through the metal detector a number of times. I had to be frisked and then walked through again. I began thinking about the piece of paper that had been in my brief case for the past eight months. I looked at it every day, sometimes two or three times. I almost had the list memorized: Great Wall of China walk two miles. Binion’s Casino, reenact the scene from “Rounders” with anyone on the table. Oh and yes, number 84, kiss a girl on the Eiffel tower.
I only did this one out of sheer convenience, technically she kissed me, but it’s the same thing isn’t it? As I stood on the walking escalator in the airport, I opened my briefcase and opened the tattered piece of paper. It still had the smell of cigars and plastic from the box. That is where my brother kept the list and his “emergency” condoms. The list had sat in that box for twelve years. Occasionally it looked like he had added things on the list, there were a few different colors of writing scrawled both on the front and the back.
“Eighty-four” I said aloud, as I grabbed a pen and Scribbled it off the list.
“He has got to be kidding.”
I looked at it again and again; the more I thought about it the more I thought how silly it was and how much time and money it would take. I checked in at my gate and slowly sat back in the seat near the television listening to the events that had taken place earlier at the Airport.
One of the things I love about first class is that well its first class. generally there are no kids, no babies, no hastles, and basically you get whatever you want. One of the things I don’t like about first class, is that I think I’m turning into the guy from “Fight Club”, not Tyler Durden the badass one played by Brad Pitt, but the narrator, the one Ed Norton plays. At the beginning of the movie he talks about his addiction to Ikea, I have that same addiction with SkyMall. I know all the stuff they sell is shit, but man! when I’m super tired and on the plane I think to myself, “yeah I do need a shampoo/conditioner dispenser that plays CD’s and has an alarm clock built in." Then three weeks later, I open up a package and I’m like what the hell? Why the fuck did I buy this? Its not like I’m going to be taking a shower when I’m asleep and the alarm clock actually wakes me up.
So I hand the flight attendant the magazine and she gives me this look like, who the hell are you? Just put it in the little pouch in front of you.
“I will buy something if they stay in front of me”, I say.
She nods “Oh one of those types, huh?”.
I thought to myself “one of those types” what the hell is that about?
After looking at her nametag, I asked “Sherry can I have a pillow and a blanket?”.
Sherry got me a pillow and a blanket and something I wasn’t expecting, a stroke on my shoulder every time she walked pass. Of course the entire idea of dating a flight attendant wouldn’t ever work because of obvious reasons, but the occasional, “Oh I’m going to be in New York for the night, would you like to go to dinner and then have casual sex,” didn’t bother me at all.
I met three or four women like this a year. They mostly just wanted a guy to take them around New York for the day, afterwhich proceed to fulfill their sexual desires that had been bound up for the past eight days as they traveled around the world. Some of the women I saw on more than one occasion.
In fact last year I tried to actually date one of them. Sarah was her name, and then it came to me that she probably had other men, in other big cites, to release the tension from the flight from New York to Europe. In fact I was convinced they all had men stashed all over the world, like coins in the couch, kept there on purpose, for that rainy day that they need some change for the wash, or a coffee.
Note to reader I plan on developing the jerkiness of the older brother a little more, following is a exerpt from a later portion of the novel or long story.
I dreamt about James lying on the hospital bed that the V.A, had let my parents take home. My father always repeating “this isn’t the way its supposed to be, he is supposed to take care of us”. I had bought my parents huge home on three acres outside of Boise were my dad grew up, but we both new that was my idea of taking care of them, not his. My father wanted someone to be there to program the VCR, mow the lawn, and help him check his email from his grandkids, from James’s wife. I knew what my father wanted and needed I just could not afford to leave my life in New York and move to Boise to take care of them. But there I was standing on my parents’ doorstep in response to a phone call I had received earlier that morning.
A tap on the shoulder awoke me, “Excuse me Monsieur, anything to drink”.
“No, no thank you”, I replied in a kind but annoyed tone.
It had been two months since the phone call from my father. I awoke every morning wondering when it would come and when it finally did I still didn’t believe it.
“Peter, I know it’s early, but I don’t think he will last through the week, ” my father said, trying to hold back the tears that fought him every time he called.
At the age of thirty with a wife of ten years and 3 beautiful children James was diagnosed with cancer, which had formed a tumor in his brain. The symptoms first started showing up when he was about 27 or 28. When the doctor’s first diagnosed him they told us that he might live five years, but not to except anything longer than that. It was in the middle of the third year when my father called.
I got on the next flight home to Boise. I hadn’t been home since the previous Christmas, which my father reminded me of, ever time he called to update me on James’s condition. I brought James a painting of Central Park, a place that he had never been in his ten years travelling with the Air Force. His wife Stephanie said that he would love it. The mood in the house was sullen and an overwhelming sense of fear had come over everyone. The fear of the unknown, our, his future. I went into his bedroom, and he lit up just a little bit. I think that he was ready to say goodbye to us, or at least me. I showed him the painting of which he thanked me for and had me put on his dresser at the end of the bed. He asked me to reach into the nightstand and grab an envelope that our names (James & Peter) written on the outside. I grabbed the envelope and handed it to him.
“Do you remember what this is” he asked.
“Vaguely”, I replied.
He grinned and winked, “It’s the list”.
“The list, you’ve got to be kidding, I thought we threw that out with your old love letters”.
“We did, but I made a copy of it ‘cause I knew you would forget about it”.
“To well James, you know me to well”.
He opened the envelope and pulled out two pieces of paper, one with my name on it and one with his. Underneath my name was written in my still horrible handwriting---
1) Be a successful Realotor
2) Be a millionaire before the age of thirty
3) Buy a 7 series BMW
4) Meet Warren Buffet, and Charles Schwabb
5) Buy Mom and Dad a new house in Boise
I laughed out loud as I read them.
“So Peter, how are you doing on yours,” He asked.
“Great I think, I gotta Volvo instead of a BMW though”.
He laughed, “Peter, I’m missing a lot of mine its hard to take the family to Paris on a Captain’s income.”
I laughed but also felt his pain. On the night before he left for Texas, we stayed up all night writing down the things that we wanted to do or accomplish in life. My list obviously was geared towards my career and becoming wealthy. James had never seen my list or I his, but every ten years we were supposed to check up with the other person to see how they were coming along on “the list”. It had been twelve years since we wrote these lists and this was the first check-up that we had ever had. Ironic as it was, my best friend and brother sat on his deathbed laughing about his list and all the things he hadn’t accomplished. As he read them out loud we both laughed at the sound of some of them.
46) Eat a 72-ounce steak from The Big Texan
63) Bluff the hell out of High roller in Las Vegas
108) Keep a piece of the Berlin wall
James wasn’t necessarily an adventurous man, but wanted to live life for all that it had to offer. That it why he wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I thought of all that James was going to leave behind and wondered why God hadn’t picked me to bring home. I had no kids, no wife, and really no one would be affected by my loss except for my parents and James. Why was life not fair, why would his children not be able to grow up with a Dad, why would he not be able to take care of our parents?
“Peter, I want you to finish my list” he asked, but implied.
“What, I can’t travel all over the world to fulfill a twelve-year olds wishes.”
“I’m not twelve any more, Peter,” he said with a look of disgust on his face.
I took the list fully not planning to do a thing. I did not want to upset my brother and family when the situation was already stressful and negative.
As I looked out the airplane I thought of this entire situation and why I had kissed a women named Gabrielle on the Eiffel Tower, and why the Mona Lisa really seemed to hate me. A piece of paper, “the list” a thirty-year old man’s dreams.
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