Beyond Mere Survival

Purposes and Reasons

~GCS~

I don’t remember the actual crash. For that I should be grateful, I suppose.

I remember boarding the plane. My brother saw me off. It was he who had suggested this trip. Actually, ‘suggested’ is too mild a word. He had insisted upon it. It was a gift from him that I had felt forced to accept in order to spare his feelings. Several hours later, he would be sick with guilt – his heart heavy, feeling responsible for my presumed death. I would have given anything to relieve him of his misery but I couldn’t. No one who survived that flight could ease the pain of their loved ones.

I’m a singer. Well, not a full time singer with a label contract or anything. More like a part time singer. At night I sing blues and jazz at a few local clubs. Or rather, I used to. I had developed a small following. Even had a ‘fan’ or two, if you can believe it, haha! During the day, I was a teacher. Taught munchkins how to read and write. My life was divided between two distinct worlds but I managed without completely splitting my personality. It was really a pretty good balance. The club patrons seemed to like me and the kids thought I was great. I was pretty laid back as a teacher. My kids weren’t required to color inside the lines, however they were required to listen to show tunes everyday and by the time my kids hit the third grade, they knew the complete scores of South Pacific, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Oklahoma. Geography and history lessons often accompanied their ventures into Broadway. Kids could learn a lot from musicals. I really wanted to introduce them to Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar but didn’t want to push my luck with the administration. I was already pushing it with a few of the parents -–particularly with a couple of the fathers whose sons seemed suddenly fascinated with show tunes. Peter Smithers, age seven, had caused his dad, Rocko, much distress when he broke out into a solo of ‘I Feel Pretty’ – in front of guests. I think it was the line about feeling gay that really got to him.

I digress. I was saying that I used to be a singer. Actually, I am writing that I used to be a singer, but I’m trying to write the way I would talk. I don’t talk too much. There was a time when I didn’t speak at all. I can talk. I just don’t to most people, but I’ve gotten a lot better. After the shooting and subsequent fire, I didn’t talk at all. Doctors said it was psychological – a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I was singing at a small club in Ybor City one night when a bunch of Cuban Nationalists just barged in and started shooting up the place. I’m still not clear about their motive or who they were after, but when the gunfire, screams and flames stopped, nine people were dead. Three had burned to death. I was wounded. Shot in the shoulder. Not a mortal wound, obviously, but the shot knocked me backwards and my head slammed on the brass bar railing. A concussion, combined with a loss of blood, freed me of my consciousness, but not before the club had caught fire – or had been set on fire. One of the waitresses had fallen to the floor about twelve feet away from where I lay. I watched her burn to death. Then everything got black. I came to at Tampa General two days later. I didn’t speak after that.

I’m basically a very shy person, anyway. I always have been. Even when I spoke, I was quiet. Ebullience was a private affair, never shared – except with my students. I wasn’t shy with children, just other adults. I understand your confusion. How can I call myself shy when I could get up on a stage, albeit a small stage, and sing in front of strangers? That’s because on stage I was GLYN SCARBOROUGH. I wore sexy clothes. My hair was long and loose. My legs were long and loose. Offstage, I was glynnis scarborough. My clothing was nondescript. My hair was pulled back, usually in some kind of knot and my legs were merely functional. People described me as ‘nice’. I think I was nice. I tried to be but after a while, I grew tired of the one-note description. I began to imagine the inscription on my tombstone: ‘Here lies Glynnis Claire Scarborough. She was ‘nice’. Dull as dirt, but ‘nice’’..…

‘Nice’ isn’t always good. It didn’t take me long to discover, that to some people, the word ‘nice’ was synonymous with the word ‘doormat’. Intellectually, I knew all of these things but emotionally, I found it difficult to change.

Shyness has made me a great people watcher. I love watching people – listening to them and trying to figure them out. I’m pretty good at figuring out women. Most of them want to be figured out and give off great signals. But men? They’re a different story. They’re far less honest about themselves – less introspective. That makes them more of a challenge and, in some ways, more fun to observe. Every once in a while, though, you come across an exception…

I’m sorry. I’m going off on another tangent…

I was on my way to Australia. It would be a long, long flight. My brother thought the trip would be good for me. Plus, he was frustrated. He didn’t know what else to do for me and thought that maybe if I spent a week or two in new surroundings, I would gain a new perspective on what had happened. He argued that I needed to step back and ‘deal with things’, as he put it. I needed to leave Tampa Bay for a while. I was ‘too close’ to where the trauma took place. It had already been more than a year and I hadn’t uttered a word. I didn’t really want to go but, like I said, I’m so damn ‘nice’ – too nice to risk hurting his feelings by refusing his birthday gift to me – a round trip ticket to Sydney and two weeks lodging in a fine hotel.

He picked Australia because they speak English there and it was more ‘exotic’ than the other obvious choice, England. – and the weather was better. His reasoning was that if, out of the blue, I suddenly became verbose, I should be someplace where I would be understood. So, armed with two weeks worth of clothes and several writing tablets, pens and pencils, he put me on a plane bound for Sydney.

*****

~KSR~

I remember the crash. I remember that when I realized what was happening, all sound just…..went away. Complete silence as the plane went down. I remember that, despite the panic around me, I felt calm - almost relieved. No more hassles. No more bickering. No more failures. No more expectations….

The last tour had been financially successful – barely. Of course, it wasn’t enough for the label. Our lawyers probably made more money than we did. We were constantly besieged with lawsuits. It had been a tough fourteen months. Tough physically and emotionally. Tough personally. We had tried to make the transition to musical adulthood but it was a difficult road and we were tired. Cracks in the team had grown into canyons and we were holding on to each other by a thread. After the tour, we took an extended break and tried to regain our senses of self and what we wanted, both personally and professionally.

I don’t know what Howie wanted. I don’t think he cared too much one way or the other. He would go along with the majority. Nick wanted to be treated like an adult. Trouble was, he still played like a kid. He also wanted to leave the nest. We knew that and accepted it, but he made some lousy decisions that had affected us all. AJ wanted acceptance. What he needed was confidence. He already had the acceptance. He just couldn’t accept the fact that he was accepted. Does that make any sense? When he fell apart, I really thought that was it for Backstreet – that it was over. I was surprised at how much that possibility scared the shit out of me. AJ had used booze and drugs to escape. I realized that I had used the group to do the same thing.

Brian wanted the picket fence, rug rats, the adoring wife. You know. June Cleaver. Leighanne would never be a Mrs. Cleaver. We’d grown up watching the same sitcom reruns but I was a little older and knew that stay-at-home moms didn’t vacuum in high heels and that tablecloths were usually reserved for special occasions. You wanna know what always bugged me about that show? They always had these shots of the Cleaver house. Nice house. Pretty good size. But Wally and the Beaver had to share a room. Now you know that house had at least three bedrooms, but they had to share…. I guess I noticed because I had to share a room with Tim and he always let me know how much he hated it. Like I really enjoyed listening to him jerk off in the middle of the night…. Jerald, being the oldest, got a room to himself, lucky bastard. Anyway, Brian hadn’t gotten his rug rats yet. I told him that I thought you had to have sex first. He didn’t appreciate the humor but really, I was only half kidding. I’ll bet Ward and June had more sex than Brian and Leighanne.

I love those old family sitcoms. You just know that Andy Taylor never got any. I’m sure Aunt Bea living with him put a kink in his sex life. Poor Helen, the school teacher, probably wished more than once that Opie would get lost. Then there’s Lucy and Ricky. They’re married forever and then, all of a sudden, she pops up pregnant. If I was Ricky, I’d be wonderin’ about that a little, ‘ya know? And, God – let’s not forget Fred and Ethel! I can just see Fred running down to the drugstore buying rubbers. One at a time, of course. Didn’t want to spend more than he had to. Can’t forget Rob and Laura Petrie. I think they probably did it the required two times a week. Hell, my old man loved to watch that show. Funny thing, he never really laughed that much, though. I think he liked to look at Mary Tyler Moore. I think Jerald liked to look at Rob.

Now the Waltons were my kind of family. I could’ve done without Grandma poking her nose in my business, but they were a pretty good crew. John and Olivia did it all the time. I mean, Jesus – look at all the kids! And John was always teasin’ her and shit…. Yeah. I liked those people.

What I thought I wanted, I got to some degree. It just wasn’t what I thought it would be. None of it. Now Backstreet was going to try and regroup and see if we could come together again. We had tried something similar after the ITM tour and it had worked to a point, so we thought we’d try it again. I found a lot of hope in the fact that everyone was willing to try. We decided to go to Australia. Just the five of us – plus Leighanne. Everyone liked Australia and we hadn’t made it back there on the Black and Blue tour. We wouldn’t be performing but hoped to get some decent PR from the trip. If we could manage to pull it back together, then it wouldn’t hurt to garner a little good will from our Aussie fans – if we had any left. Fans are funny. They can forgive your neglect as long as they don’t think you’ve forgotten them altogether.

So anyway…. We all arrived at the Tampa airport early on a Wednesday morning. We’d come separately and had been individually escorted to a VIP waiting room. Little did we know that by late that night, the Backstreet Boys would be missing and that just a few days later, they would be presumed dead.

Chapter 2

First Class Thoughts & Observations

~GCS~

My brother had arranged for me to travel in first class. I had never ridden in first class before and was a little curious about what went on behind door #1. Apparently, he had also forewarned the airline that I was mute because as soon as I was seated, a flight attendant approached me, bent over and started yelling in my ear.

“I brought you this, Miss Scarborough…”

She handed me a small zippered bag with the airline logo printed on the front. When I unzipped it, I could see that it contained a tablet of paper, two pencils and assorted travel aids, such as aspirin, a small sewing kit and a package of tissues.

“If you need anything at all, just write it down on the paper, okay?”

She was wearing one those automatic smiles that people put on out of habit and not sincerity. I decided that, unless I wanted to be screamed at for the next dozen hours or so, I’d better set her straight right away. I took out the pad and a pencil and started scribbling.

‘Thank you, but I’m not deaf.’

Her smile froze momentarily and then she nodded and left.

This particular plane carried 167 passengers, eighteen of whom were in the first class section. I was seated next to an Australian professor, who had little to say once he discovered that I wouldn’t respond in a ‘normal’ way. I’m not putting him down when I say that. He was a nice man. He just ran out of things to say and soon buried himself in a book, although I noticed that the pages didn’t turn too often. Picking up bits and pieces of conversation allowed me to get a line on some of the other passengers in first class. It was a generally chatty group, which I guess is natural when people know they’re going to be spending lots of time together in a tight space.

I discovered, for example, that my cabin-mates included a male nurse, a wool-merchant who was on her way to New Zealand for a show, an herbalist and a group of asshole survivalist types who were planning to explore the outback. These men were out-bragging each other about their jobs, money and prowess with the opposite sex. They flirted shamelessly with the other women in first-class, including an endowed blond who was seated with a man I presumed to be her husband. The husband didn’t like it much and complained to the flight attendant about these passengers ‘harassing Leigh, his wife’. I thought that the blond looked like she could take care of herself.

They slowed down some, but only for a brief period. They were drinking a lot and got more brazen with their body language as time went on. For a while, they latched on to two English women who were spangled from head to toe and seemed to enjoy this type of behavior, but the rest of the passengers were becoming increasingly annoyed by their boorish actions and non-stop sexual innuendo. It looked like I would be spared any personal attention from these over-aged frat types but my luck ran out somewhere over Utah. One of the men – ‘Brad’ – decided to bring my nose out of my book by standing next to my seat, leaning down and wagging his tongue up and down in front of my face. I could feel myself turning red.

“I got something in here that you can read…” he schmoozed, grabbing his crotch. “Wanna see?”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the man who was seated across the aisle and two rows up, throw a stack of papers onto the empty seat next to him, jerk his head in our direction, frown and stand up in the aisle. His voice resonated through the cabin, low and deliberate.

“I think the lady might need a magnifying glass to read what you’ve got, Dawg.” ‘Brad’ looked like he’d been slapped. “Now back off…,” the goateed stranger growled.

This guy meant business. To say he was intimidating was a gross understatement. I could see the attendant making a beeline for the cockpit, no doubt to alert the captain. The atmosphere was tense and there were a few uneasy seconds but the dark haired stranger held his ground and ‘Brad’ finally backed down under his burning gaze. A brawl had been averted. He stood in the aisle until the asshole found his seat and then his gaze fell on me. He looked like he was eight feet tall from my low vantage point and I felt myself swallow. When he nodded, my eyes fell to the floor. Then he turned and went back to his seat, leaving me to wonder what the hell had just happened. You don’t see too many examples of chivalry these days. Despite the grand gesture, I was mortified.

I let my eyes wander again to the other passengers. There was a man across the aisle from me who had dark, curly hair and was sleeping with a cell phone in his lap. He never twitched. The two English women had their heads together. One of them nodded towards the dark-haired stranger and rolled her eyes, apparently sorry that the impromptu party had ended. I heard a voice somewhere behind me say “Backstreet”. That’s when it hit me. I had a couple of their CD’s and had looked at the covers. The five Backstreet Boys were here in first class. The tall stranger was a member of this singing group. After my epiphany, it wasn’t hard for me to spot the others. I hadn’t even realized that these five men were together. Only two of them were seated together and so far, I hadn’t seen them speak to each other.

I liked their music and had even covered a couple of their tunes in my play-list, giving them a jazz twist. Suddenly, the air seemed thick. I hailed an attendant and handed her a slip of paper which simply read, ‘bourbon/rocks, please’.

*****

~KSR~

I’d brought some work with me on the plane, but you know how it is. Your mind starts wandering and you lose your focus. The five of us had discussed some of our problems and we agreed that we would try to find a new beginning. We had spread ourselves way too thin and things that management should be taking care of, we had to worry about. I planned on bringing that up. We needed help. Help that cared. If we lost our musical following, other ventures could be fucked up. We had to make some decisions and set some priorities.

Brian and Leighanne were sitting in front of me – up near the cockpit. Brian’s priority seemed to be sitting next to him. It sorta pissed me off that Leighanne was coming along on this trip and I hoped that her presence wouldn’t interfere with what we had to do. She had a tendency to butt into Backstreet business. We had had meetings so many times with no real results. This try had to be different. We were running out of time.

Brian didn’t irritate me. Brian and Leighanne did, though. When she wasn’t around, he and I were fine. Too bad that didn’t happen too often. I hadn’t spoken to him in over three weeks, not since he had jumped my ass when I complained about Leigh coming on this trip. I had valid arguments against her coming but Brian had countered by hitting below the belt.

“Fuck you, Kevin…” he had said. “Just because you have a lousy marriage doesn’t mean they’re all lousy…”

I think he surprised himself when he said that. I guess my glare shut him up because he paused then, like he was waiting for me to start yellin’. I didn’t yell. I just walked away. That probably surprised him too, but the fact was, he spoke the truth. He knew it. I knew it. My marriage had never been right. I had cared about Kristin at one time…. I mean I still cared, but not the way I should care. Not the way I wanted to care about a woman. Not the way I always thought I would care. I’m ashamed to say she probably tried more than I did – in the beginning, anyway. I did try at first, but habit and love are two different things. I didn’t miss her when we were apart and we were apart a lot. I think the feeling was mutual. We had a marriage of convenience and that was all.

I was twiddling with my ring again. Damn thing never did feel right on my finger. I slipped it off and put it in my pocket. The marriage was over. She and I both knew it. None of the guys knew that we had separated – again. I screwed around. She screwed around. At least we both knew how to be discreet. Would hate to fuck up that Backstreet image, whatever the hell that is.

I used to check out internet message boards every once in a while – the Backstreet ones. Over and over, I saw people ask the classic question: ‘Why did they get married?’ It was a good question that only had bad answers. I think that I believed that a ceremony would …I dunno…’validate’ me in some way. The fact that I was running as hard as I could from the ‘boy-band’ image didn’t help. Kristin had issued ultimatums. She was tired of waiting. I owed her. This relationship was as good as it was gonna get for me. Considering things that had happened in my life, I started to think she was right. This was as good as it was gonna get. No bells and whistles, but that was okay. I was ‘above’ all that. I was ‘mature’ and ‘realistic’. Passion wasn’t all that important. Yeah, right. Even now, I’d give anything to hear just one tiny bell…. My marriage was over.

Why do the biggest jerks always travel in first class? The longer the trip, the bigger the jerks and - lucky us – we had four dick heads in the cabin. I figured there would be trouble when they kept hollerin’ for drinks. One of ‘em kept walking around the cabin, talkin’ about how they were gonna ‘tame the outback’… Jesus. They really thought they were something. This guy – I think his name was ‘Brad’ tried making a pass at Leighanne. I could tell Brian was pissed off. I tried to imagine how I would feel if he was giving Kristin a hard time but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t imagine reacting at all. What does that tell ‘ya?

Anyway, this fucker got louder and louder and then I heard him making rude comments to another passenger and looked to see who he was speaking to since I didn’t hear anybody talking back to him. He was bending over this woman I had seen when we boarded. I had brushed past her when one of the attendants was talking to her about something. Actually, the attendant was kinda yelling at her…. I don’t know what that was all about. The woman was young – I’d say mid to late twenties – and had light brown hair. Or maybe it was dark blond… No. Very light brown…

Well, she was a pretty little thing, anyway. Struck me as kinda the quiet and shy type and this horse’s ass was givin’ her a hard time, making lewd remarks and embarrassing the poor girl. He was also annoying everybody else in first class, except maybe his drunk friends and two sequined whores who sat across the aisle. Sooooo, I got up and butted in. Made some smart assed crack and told him to back off. He did. The end.

I glanced at the woman he had been falling all over and she looked like she could have gone through the floor. She could hardly look me in the eye but she did seem surprised by the little scene. Kinda like she was afraid of me or that she couldn’t believe anyone would come to her defense or something. Yeah, that’s me… Sir Walter Fuckin’ Raleigh…

I never did hear her say anything.

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"Beyond Mere Survival" is a work of fiction.
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