This Is What You Get

1
Driving the Band
(Airbag)

I should not have taken the 405. I know better than to get to the airport this way. I will be stuck on the 405 all the way past the 10 and all the way to the airport. If I don’t get there in time, they will take a shuttle and then I won’t know what hotel they will be at and I will call Niall’s cellphone or the others’ but they never turn them on. Not right away, not as soon as they get off the plane. If I am not there to pick them up in the van I had to rent, then they will take a shuttle and they will go to a hotel and I won’t know which hotel and it will be hours if not the next day before one of them turns his cellphone on, or someone thinks to call me and ask where I am.

So yes, I’m pissed off sitting in this traffic and not moving. And they would say, pissed, that’s getting drunk, you American girl. They think I’m funny even though they have toured in the States for years and they’ve seen more of it than I have; I’ve never been out of California. The Hyperboreans, you know, alternative rock group? Fourth album sold like 10 million copies, everyone’s waiting for the fifth album? And they will be waiting for me, or not waiting if I don’t fucking get to the airport.


Planes are coming in over L.A. toward the airport. I think, one of those could be the plane they are on. I imagine them sitting in first class and the young people who might be on the plane, when they walk through first class, they see the band members sitting there and the fans go back to their coach seats whispering, did you see? Did you see who that was?
But I check the dashboard clock and their plane will have landed just a few minutes ago and I figure by the time they are off, and they get their bags and go through customs, they will be looking for me in about forty-five minutes and with any luck I can get from the Sunset exit, past the 10 and down to LAX in forty-five minutes.

There is no point to me. I am a pointless person. I am not a girlfriend of any of them. I am not a groupie, I am not a manager nor a p.r. rep or record company rep or any kind of rep. I am called a personal assistant. When they come to L.A. I do everything for them, the everything kind of things that no one else would do because they are too high and mighty to do them. No record company rep will go out at midnight to find McVie’s cookies that Henry craves (gotta feed the drummer) and which are available only at one store (closed at nine) and one bar (open until two a.m.) in all of Los Angeles.

“How do you know everything?” Niall asked me, the very first time I worked for them. We were standing in the lobby of a Best Western in east Hollywood – this was eight years ago when they stayed in normal motels and not the upscale, high security places they stay in now – waiting for Henry to finish his incredibly long phone call with his wife back in England. “How do you know where to buy our cookies near the ocean and how to park in Hollywood without paying anything and the best newsstand to get the British press, and it’s way the bloody hell over that mountain?”

“Hill,” I said, “The Hollywood Hills.”

“Do you just drive all the time?” asked Michael, the bass player. “In London, none of us drive. Don’t even own cars in London.”

I can’t imagine not having a car. I had one when I turned sixteen and drove away from my parents’ home in Newhall to live with my boyfriend’s family in Mar Vista, finish high school where things were happening. “Well, yeah,” I answered. “I drive all over L.A. I am trying to learn it all.”

“Like a fucking London cabbie,” says Niall. “They can’t even drive a cab until they pass some mad test and prove they know every street . . . “

“And hotel and restaurant,” said Brendan.

“All of London,” finished Niall. “You, Maggie May, are the L.A. equivalent. The driver.”

“I am,” I agreed with him. “And I will be driving you to all the places you have to go here, and I can get you whatever you want while you’re here and that even means McVie’s in Santa Monica.” In the two days since I first met them, I had developed a crush on every one of the five guys, although Niall scared me. His eyes were intense, his conversation intense, and he would back out of talking to me in the middle of a sentence, leaving me wondering if he thought I was not worth talking to any longer or if he had a sudden inspiration for a song.

That time, Niall said, “Too many fucking cars here, I don’t know how you can even have a complete thought with all this frenetic energy around you.”

“I find it invig . . . ” I started to say.

Niall walked away from me, across to the far side of the lobby and leaned his pale blonde hair into the sunlight streaming through the window. There, glowing like a medieval saint, he stared at cars speeding past on Wilshire Boulevard.



What about when they aren’t in L.A. because they only come here two or three times a year? Then I am a personal assistant to personal assistants. I don’t work with the stars, since they like beautiful, fetching young men and women to interact with them. No, the beautiful, fetching ones call me when they have too many tasks, or tasks that they abhor doing, and then I go – take dogs to get washed, or shop in the ‘hood for a particular food item that can’t be found in B. Hills. Or even drive through Burger King for fries and a burger because the personal assistant can’t bring him/herself to enter a drive-thru line.

But it’s not that I’m not pretty, I’m just not pretty enough. The guys like me, the band. Real-life guys like me too. But I am not polished and presentable, my hair doesn’t conform to any particular style, it just does its own thing which is rather curly and wild. I am not fat, not overweight, not even chubby, but I am not skinny and I don’t wear skinny people’s clothes. In fact, I wear only t-shirts and jeans and for that reason alone I cannot be in the presence of a star. The personal assistants remind me of this often, as if they are worried I want their jobs. They are so dumb; why would I want to work directly with their clients? Most of them are assholes, or they are insecure and need reassurance, or they just don’t see the assistant for the person he or she is.

See, when the Hyperboreans comes to town, they see me. They love me. They make a big deal over meeting up with me and asking what I am doing, and kissing me and of course I like being kissed by all of them, and then while they are here in town they include me in everything they possibly can. I think I am their pet. Or their court jester. I said that once. And Niall – the genius – he said no, I am not a pet or a jester. I am a friend. And they like having real friends around.

I can’t call him a genius, though, he said he’s not, he said, don’t call me that. So I don’t, but I think he is. Niall Stafford. He doesn’t look like a genius, whatever one would look like. He isn’t that tall. His hair is that kind of blonde that two-year-old children have, bright, nearly white-blonde, but his is bleached to be that way. It’s a disheveled, not-really-a-style cut that goes to his chin. His eyes are a kind of pale blue that become more vivid depending on what color t-shirt he wears. He’s slender, with muscular arms, and long fingers that look beautiful when wrapped around a microphone. His voice has been described as astounding, ranging from delicate clear high notes to powerful, head-on blurs of syllables. He rarely smiles; in magazine articles, they describe him as sullen, but really he’s just thinking, he’s just deep in thought about things far removed from the craziness around him. That’s what he does, he separates himself from the rest of us and then he writes these incredible lyrics about what he sees from his vantage point and then we are in awe at his insight. It’s true and this is why he is a genius even if I can never tell him that to his face.



The traffic starts to move, there was a car on the side of the road, no two. They are crashed and crumpled and things look bad. An ambulance just left, I can see it ahead of me veering off at Santa Monica Boulevard, and as I pass, because we go so slow, I look at one car. The door has been ripped off, perhaps by the jaws of life? I can see a deflated airbag draped over the steering wheel, I can see a high heel shoe sitting upright on the floor as if the driver just slipped out of it for a minute. A very sexy shoe, the kind you would wear to a dressy event. It makes me very sad. I feel terrible for this girl who is being taken away in an ambulance and I hope she will be okay. I hope the airbag saved her and she is not too damaged and all this reminds me to drive more carefully, to stop tailgating, to live. Even if they go to a hotel and I don’t see them for a few hours, at least my shoe isn’t left behind on the floor of a car that can never be repaired.

And so I drive with my attention on the road and not on every stray fleeting thought in my brain and I navigate the LAX turn-off and the entry to LAX and follow the signs for arrivals, and I am in front of the international terminal at the end, where very important people are given a special waiting room with big windows so they can see who is coming but do not have to stand on a curb to be ogled by the passers-by. And I pull up and it is exactly forty-eight minutes from when I said it would take forty-five minutes, and I wait and hope and wait. The door opens, a porter with a luggage cart careens toward me and then there they are, the Hyperboreans, smiling and laughing and running toward my van, yanking open doors, and sliding in – Brendan, Leith, Michael, Henry – tumbling over each other to welcome me with a kiss and saying “Hi, Maggie,” and telling me they just walked into the waiting area and there I was already and how wonderful I am.

Niall sits in front, the one I like the most but will never, never have as anything but a friend, so I tell him about the airbag and the high heel shoe and how it made me drive safer and I thought I would be late. And he leans over to kiss me on the cheek and says, “Maggie May, never get in an accident on our account,” and I nearly run into the back of a hotel shuttle bus, so everyone laughs and now I am happy.