Big and Nasty

They beat us up pretty bad. The check-in, the x-rays, then wandering around in our socks. Now we’re on the runway, waiting to take off. The flight attendants have demonstrated how to buckle and unbuckle a seatbelt. (Now there’s a scary thought: people travel who haven’t mastered this much technology?) I ask the man next to me, “Do you believe in God?”

“Excuse me?” he says.

He’s forty or so, balding, with pinched eyes. He looks like a scared rabbit.

“Just kidding,” I tell him.

He hitches up in his seat, gives a little cough and pulls out his cell phone to confirm that it’s turned off, in keeping with our instructions. He doesn’t speak.

“It’s funny because some people freeze and get all nervous at that question because they think they’re going to be trapped coast to coast next to somebody trying to convert them,” I explain. “But I’m not trying to convert you. It was just a joke. My partner and I used to perform a routine where I’m this militant atheist, see, sitting next to him on an airplane? And the weather is bad and the plane starts to shake all over? The kind of moment when people who don’t usually pray, find themselves praying. But not me. I start saying: God, I’m not impressed! You call this a storm? God, you pussy! If you really exist, I defy you to strike this plane down! Bring it on, asshole! Stuff like that? Just to wind people up? It was edgy material, for college crowds mainly. We don’t do that routine anymore. Of course if I tried a stunt like that here, right now, some sky marshal would probably shoot me.”

Now he’s staring at me—but still, no smile.

“It was just a joke,” I repeat.

He reaches for a magazine, muttering, Some joke. He turns a page with a slap and begins to read.

Now, how could I let that pass?

“It’s why I’m making this trip,” I begin, but then the intercom crackles and announces that we can expect a twenty minute delay before takeoff. The man groans, pulls out his phone, and turns it on, scrolling down his menu for a number.

“I’m making this trip,” I resume, “because I’m going to shoot some commercials. That is, I’m not going to shoot them, somebody else is going to shoot them, but I’m going to be in them. With a funny part.”

He shows me the back of his head, looking out the tiny oval window as if there’s something to see on the tarmac. “Yeah, it’s Matt,” he says. “We’re already delayed. If you have to start without me, go ahead. But don’t finish without me. Bye.”

After he turns off his phone and slips it back into his front pocket, I tell him, “So you’re a Matt, too.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a coincidence. My name is Matt, too. Matt Niles. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

He shakes his head, waving his arm to get the attention of a flight attendant. I ask, “What do you do for a living, Matt?”

He gives a little sniff and taps his breast. “I design these.”

“Hearts?” I ask.

“Phones!” he replies as the flight attendant, a young man with gel and bleach highlights in his hair, bobs down the aisle in our direction.

(At this instant I’m sure that Matt and I are thinking the same thing: Kid looks gay as a goose.)

Matt asks, “Can I have some headphones, please?”

“Not yet, sir. We’ll pass those out later.”

“I was joking,” I explain as the attendant leaves us. “That’s what I do for a living. Jokes. I’m a comedian. An actor, too, and I used to do magic shows.”

Matt returns to his magazine. “Well, that makes you three of my least favorite people.”

He didn’t miss a beat. Put a lot of snot into it, too. He was a...