Applet (Loading things ony once)

Question

Is there a way to only load things that you want once with an Applet. I only want the buttons and the background to load one time and then I want paint to just move an airplane across the screen (on top of the bg). Here is the code I'm using. When I comment out the firstTime flag it works (but it flickers)
private boolean firstTime = true;
public void paint(Graphics g)
  if (firstTime)
   doStuff(g);
   firstTime = false;
  g.drawImage(airplane, xPos, 0, 150, 100, this);
  xPos += 10;
  repaint(); 
// I want this executed once. Possible?
public void doStuff(Graphics g)
  // Get the width and height of the applet.  
  int width = getWidth();
  int height = getHeight();  
  // Set the 'level' buttons to the lower left hand corner
  // of the scren.
  easy.setBounds(0,height-20,40,20);
  medium.setBounds(50, height-20, 50, 20);
  hard.setBounds(110, height-20, 50,20);
  // Draw the background image.
  g.drawImage(bg1, 0, 0, width, height, this);
  firstTime = false; 
}

Answer 1

i did, but the problem was that i couldn't draw the image because i didn't have a Graphics object. When I created a graphics object it still didn't draw it.