Down Around Midnight (10 page)

According to Elaine, our being uprooted with every tour of duty resulted in a certain kind of dexterity. “We were so used to stopping one thing and starting another,” she said, and the pattern was established so early in our lives that we developed “skill at letting things go.” Military kids, in all the services, tend to be like that, she said. What they all share is measurable by its absence.

“We don't have continuity.”

Or we don't experience continuity the way other people do. For children in the habit of “letting things go and moving on,” argues Elaine, the burden of continuity is inevitably displaced. “You have to carry it within yourself.”

Terry, the only child in the family who spent her formative years as a civilian, was in a position to view the characteristic objectively.

“You never get used to investing that much in other people,” she said.

Later in life, when romantic entanglements became complicated, others would sometimes identify this to me as being “emotionally unavailable.”

We did invest in one another. The devotion and loyalty that exist among all the members of the family are as unconditional as the love that continues to unite us. Whether that has anything to do with being a military family is open to question.

“You don't depend on the friendships that sustain others,” Terry said.

But it's not as though, growing up, such kids are incapable of close friendships. According to Elaine, we form very close bonds: “We form close bonds and we break them.”

Contending that “military kids don't carry baggage,” Elaine was referring to the virtual sort, but what she said is also true in a literal sense. Not until I grew up and lived on my own did I possess much of what might be described as a tangible or material heritage: There was never a lot of memorabilia. We as a family never held on to the kinds of things that other people typically keep in an attic. All but the essentials got thrown out in anticipation of the next move. And so the lack of continuity in our childhood was intensified by a missing history, certainly a history of the kind that you could physically sift through. The house I was building when the plane crashed was emblematic of a constancy I'd never enjoyed.

The boxes and the random assortment of old property that have piled up in the basement of the house may be viewed, by those who look for meaning in such things, as a response to my vagabond upbringing, but I think what is more telling is that I never know what's down there until I run across it by accident. Try as I might to hold on to the past—and there are those who find me quite sentimental—the evidence that I ever enjoyed one is not something I could lay hands on in a hurry. My failure to incorporate history into my everyday comings and goings has proved sweeping. My haphazard collecting of memories gives the appearance of being nothing more than some service I render my biographers.

So as not to appear entirely shameless in offering what I believe to be an excellent example of this, let me explain how the book business works, or tries to, at its best.

A first author, by tradition—a custom in force when I started out and, I think, still respected today—is seldom slammed by critics. He is reviewed favorably, or he is ignored. Book-review editors, when dealing with beginners, tend to proceed on the advice of their mothers, the etiquette endlessly drummed into them when they were children: “If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all.” As a consequence, first authors in large part are insulated against bad reviews, and I unquestionably was one of them. The poor reviews
Snowblind
received were few. That they were published at all was probably explained by the outpouring of positive attention showered on the book, which was nothing short of phenomenal.

There is no writer alive who would not have wanted to be me then. The book was embraced critically by publications and people I'd admired for years. In great number. The press the book received, the reviews, the letters and tributes from distinguished authors I'd never met, were enough to fill several boxes. Mary, for my birthday that year, bought me an expensive leather portfolio in which to organize and display all the material. And that portfolio today is where it has always been—stashed, unutilized, in one of those boxes, none of which I'd be able to locate in a pinch.

Memorabilia? I've been all over the world, I've made hundreds of friends, and I've bought maybe three rolls of film in my life. The clippings I collected after the plane crash are still stashed in a blue plastic bag labeled PATIENTS BELONGINGS. Incorporate the past? I can't even file it.

Patricia—I call her my girlfriend, but that doesn't really explain it . . . I like to tell people we're dating, but she's been living here for fourteen years—Pat likes to say, “Time is a river.” And in all the years she's been saying it, I've never really given much thought to its meaning. Doing so of late, I wondered who said it first. It's attributed to Marcus Aurelius—
Meditations,
book 4—and the great Roman emperor and stoic philosopher wasn't kidding when he added, “and strong is its current.”

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, my neglecting to grant it any significance, at least on a conscious level, came as no surprise to my brothers and sisters. My readiness to get up and move on was a characteristic we all had in common. Able to jettison by necessity, however reluctantly, the things and the people we loved, we became that much more readily able to throw overboard the things that threatened to drag us down, things like painful experiences and memories. Dumping them was as natural in its own way as offloading those things that merely
slowed
us down: the scrapbooks, photos, and unsaved treasures that offered uninterrupted connection to our past. Putting the past behind, developing an ability to distance ourselves from the things that didn't love us back, was a necessary survival mechanism when the five of us were kids. And proficiency came swift—proficiency and speed. After a while, it was as quick as cutting an anchor line.

Having said that, however, and embracing it, I confess that I trust it only as part of a somewhat more complicated story. Not that I don't believe it. I believe all of it to be true, but I also believe it to be incomplete. For it fails to take into account the price one pays for being so squared away. In the offloading of so much cargo, by accident or simply by incident, certain provisions may go over the side, along with some necessary equipment, including some fathoming gear, any number of instruments you might use to detect what lies beneath the surface.

The best piece of evidence I have for this comes to me by way of another friend. And like the friend I was getting to know over coffee that day, and like my sisters, she is also a girl.

 

 

The day Gael Humphrey walked in the door, I was still walking on crutches. She showed up at my house the summer of the crash with a group of people down from South Hadley. She had just started work in a waterbed store, another enterprise associated with the head shop there, and she arrived on the Cape with her boss, a fellow I knew named Michael, one of the many people I'd met on my brief visit to Western Massachusetts with Zachary Swan the previous March. Swan was on the Cape for a few days. He and I would sign books at a Provincetown shop opened recently by a merchant with ties to the group, some of whom would be staying at my place, and as part of the shenanigans scheduled for the weekend, Michael and Gael would assemble a waterbed that Michael had insisted I try.

Don't take the mention of a book signing as an indication of my going back to work. It was scheduled to take place at a head shop, and it had less to do with selling books than with the merchandising possibilities that Swan had been exploiting at the Boutique Show six weeks before, which is when the event had been planned. It was more a dope thing than a book thing, more social than business, as much as anything an excuse for a party, and having recently been released from the hospital, I was in the mood for one.

Waterbeds were in vogue in certain circles at the time— maybe they still are—and waterbed salesmen promoted their trade as a branch of specialized medicine only slightly less rigorous than that which is practiced by orthopedic surgeons. The bed, in Michael's diagnosis, was crucial to the health of my injured back, and so convinced would I be of its benefits, he believed, that in time I would agree to buy it.

Apart from a faint air of perpetual amusement that suggested she was not really a part of the crowd, little about Gael, at least at first, proved in any way conspicuous. With long brown hair and pale eyes the blue gray of cigarette smoke, she was three inches taller than I, was almost fourteen years younger, and she had a voice so soft you could sleep in it. Sophisticated beyond her years, charming in a way that radiated from the absence of any attempt to be glamorous, she possessed a rarified sense of the droll, a kind of goofball sense of humor that I would notice only later. It was not until early the next morning that I paid much attention to her. Michael by then had made his move, which served to explain all his urgency in getting the waterbed assembled.

“Setting up the bed in the middle of a party” did seem rather strange, Gael would later observe, adding, “In my experience, it was something you did at the customer's convenience.”

In this case, it was done at Michael's convenience, or so his behavior suggested, and it gave the appearance of an ulterior motive in his bringing Gael with him to the Cape. Getting it done freed up my bed, yielding a double mattress, which Michael had then hauled down to the living room for him and Gael to share.

Well, she had to sleep somewhere.

Swan was the first to rise that morning, and no sooner was he up and around than I heard him talking to Gael from the stairway outside my room.

“Aren't you warm?” he said.

I stepped out onto the balcony that overlooks the living room and saw Gael on the floor below, wrapped in a sleeping bag, fully clothed, crouched on her half of the mattress, putting as much distance as possible between her and the slumbering Michael. With Swan, and now me, smiling down on her, Gael could only laugh at her predicament.

It was hard to know what Gael had been thinking when she'd shown up the day before. She had only recently met the people she was traveling with, she had just that day met me, and she had no reason not to assume that they and I were friends. They were staying at my house, after all. The truth was that I knew them only slightly better than I knew her. If I had met Michael more than once, it had been no more than twice and for no more than a few minutes each time. I was slightly better acquainted with some of the others in the entourage, a couple of whom would later become friends, but the only one on the premises that weekend with what might be thought of as an all-access backstage pass was the man known as Zachary Swan.

Zachary Swan wasn't his real name. It was the name I'd given him to protect his identity in the pages of
Snowblind,
the name by which he was known to many people who'd met him after the book was published, which included most of the people on hand. His real name was Charles Forsman, and with the commercial success of the book and the business relationship that necessarily followed, he and I had become friends. He was twenty years older than I, which made him thirty-four years older than Gael, and notwithstanding the impropriety that had made him notorious in middle age—he'd become a smuggler in his forties—he was rather conservative by nature. Chuck Forsman was a gentleman of the old school. His treatment of me, if not publicly apparent, had always been somewhat avuncular and later increasingly protective. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, I found myself in a position to reciprocate that treatment, honoring a contractual relationship with the wife and young children he left behind. Given the circumstances that spawned it, nothing about our friendship was typical. You would not naturally throw the pair of us together, and the friendship seemed no less eccentric to us than it did to most other people. Ours was a strange fraternity. We belonged to a fellowship of two, and the morning we found her bundled up on the floor, the privileges of membership were extended to Gael.

“You and Chuck took me under your collective wing,” she later recalled, reminding me that the silliness of her situation is what brought the three of us together. “It was a joke we shared. I didn't know how bizarre it was until I saw it through your eyes.”

Escalating over the years, from camaraderie through intimacy to what might be seen as a kind of psychic attachment, the bond that Gael and I forged that weekend is a bond that prevails today. Surviving the distance that separates us and the decades over the course of which we have shared our lives with others, it is a friendship that has always been special for its silences, for the mysteries we never tried to solve. Our silences were rich, and though the memory of them today is as persistent as any I have of her, nothing is quite so memorable as the way she had of breaking them. She was a friend I could always count on to tell me what was on my mind. And I never questioned the source of her magic.

Ten years after the crash—by which time I had boarded flights to London and Paris, to Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, and other ports of call—I was writing a book on the U.S. Marshals, an adventure that, among other things, would find me in the course of my research at a training base in Louisiana rappelling from a combat helicopter hovering ninety feet in the air. With interviews for the book taking me to California, I met Gael in Santa Barbara, about two hours down the coast from where she had been living since leaving the Pioneer Valley. Bonnie Raitt was appearing in concert there, Gael had a pair of tickets, and I'd arranged to fly in and attend the performance with her before keeping appointments I'd scheduled in Los Angeles.