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Slipstream is the story of five characters whose lives intersect at a pivotal moment in the Los Angeles International Airport. Logan, a thirty-something con man who has just been paroled from a stint in prison is trying to stay away from drugs while he scrapes by working as a personal attendant. Jewell, his daughter, is an architecture student on the brink of breakup with her girlfriend. Wylie is a bartender at the airport who witnesses the daily ebb and flow of travelers passing through his bar. He’s about to receive the surprise of his life. Inez is a fundamentalist Avon lady plotting a secret escape from her marriage to Rudy, a freshly-fired member of the airport ramp crew who’s showing signs of going postal. Tension builds as the characters go about their business, unaware that their lives are drawing together in every narrowing circles. Against the backdrop of the sprawling city—the La Brea Tar Pits, Wilshire Boulevard, Union Station—the characters’ lives cross and recross. Finally, in the featureless expanse of canned air and florescent lights at the airport, their paths converge in a climax that changes the fate of each. There’s a noirish tinge to Slipstream. The shadows of Philip Marlowe and the Black Dahlia linger in the streets and buildings, and a jittery atmosphere left over from Cold War apprehensions of air raids and sabotage pervades many scenes. There’s also a sense of the city beneath the concrete and asphalt: the natural world of the canyons, underground rivers, and vacant lots; the bones of mammoths and sabertooths jumbled in the tar next to skyscrapers and townhouses. Finally, there’s the ordinary yet otherworldly strangeness of the airport, that megalith of modernity where tens of thousands of people pass every day. Readers experience the uneasiness of being in a crowd, the disquiet of knowing that anything can happen at any time, and that we don’t know from one moment to the next when catastrophe will strike. Blending suspense, humor, revelation, and irony, Slipstream is a tale of last chances, single parenthood, unexpected love, addiction, renewed hope, loneliness, the fear that limits so much of what we do, and the miracles and coincidences that shape our lives. Why I Wrote It: In my early twenties I was on a flight from London to Los Angeles when, over the middle of the Atlantic, the plane started falling out of the sky. There was no warning; the flight had been smooth and uneventful. We dropped for what seemed like forever. A group of Italians in the back of the plane screamed, the armrests flipped up, loose objects hit the ceiling. Then we seemed to hit an invisible net. The plane bounced up and continued on its way. No one ever came on the intercom to tell us what had happened. I didn’t go anywhere near a plane for four years after that. Gradually, I did start flying again, but I’ve never been able to forget that feeling of freefall that overcomes me whenever I step on a plane. As a result, I spend a lot of time in airport bars. On one occasion I missed my flight in San Antonio and spent three or so hours in the bar. Hardly anyone was there. A woman’s golf tournament was on the television. The bartender was a quiet, middle-aged guy with a pock-marked face and something very intelligent and watchful about his eyes. When he set down my napkin and took my order I told myself that I was going to write his story, because I felt that he definitely had one. We all do, of course, but I felt like I knew his, or that I wanted to. So for the three or so hours I sat there, I watched him. I thought of everything he saw, all the people coming and going, all the stories he heard. I watched his customers talk to him, telling him about themselves, and the unobtrusive way he nodded and attended to everyone’s needs without revealing anything about himself. Anyway, after a few beers, I took out my notebook and started writing then and there. He became Wylie and his story, and my novel, began at that moment. When I began the project, I envisioned it the story of people and their work. Among the characters would be a bartender, a dishwasher, a phone sex operator, an Avon lady. I was interested in the particulars of the often tedious work that consumes most of our daily lives, the pride we take in it, and how it defines who we are and what becomes of us. Like all promising projects, this one quickly got out of hand. Some of the minor characters started hogging the limelight while pivotal characters withered on the vine. Their lives began to crisscross and tangle in ways I hadn’t planned. Families emerged. Characters weren’t interested in working and when they were it was for all the wrong reasons. I began to realize how these characters’ stories would combine to make one story, how they would come together for a moment that would change all of their lives. And I discovered that people’s work was just one aspect of the larger, deeper thing I really wanted to explore, which was people’s desires. Desires we’re born with that never go away, desires we never realized we had, desires we thought we’d let go of, but never really did. Desires that lie at the bottom of our hearts as we go about our business of serving drinks, or mopping floors, or selling Avon. |
© Leslie Larson, 2006. |
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