Down Around Midnight (11 page)

It had been more than six years since we'd seen each other. Gael's first marriage had just ended. Under the strain of the divorce, she'd lost some weight. Our delight at seeing each other after so much time was tempered by the sadness she was doing her best to hide, and it failed to alleviate in any significant way a different kind of pain that I had carried with me from the East Coast. Concentrated in my upper back, the pain didn't affect my gait, but when I stepped out of the airport I was in sufficient physical trouble that it was noticeable to Gael, and she took it upon herself to help me with my luggage.

The people of Santa Barbara don't need to hear it from me, but theirs is undeniably one of California's more seductive cities. Rising behind the tile roofs and palm-shaded lawns, the Santa Ynez Mountains sweep up from the Pacific over a picturesque blend of California bungalow and mission revival architecture. Its distinctive style, its geography, and its fair, forgiving weather give the place a kind of unmatchable, almost Mediterranean air. But my brief visit to Santa Barbara will always be memorable to me not for the beauty of the city itself but for the hours I spent with Gael and for a short conversation she and I had as we walked its beachfront boulevards.

Gael, concerned about the pain I was in, asked what had brought it about. I explained that it was symptomatic of travel.

Whenever I carried luggage and hauled it over any distance, I was asking for a day or so of serious discomfort, a consequence of the injuries I'd sustained in the crash. The more serious pain radiated down from my neck, and at its worst was just short of debilitating. It was far worse than the pain afflicting my lower back, the site of the more serious fracture. Arising from degenerative arthritic changes, as doctors had explained it to me, the periodic inflammation was a predictable follow-up to such injuries when the damaged area was aggravated. Occasional pain was something they had told me to expect. It happened whenever I traveled, and it was something I'd learned to live with.

“How long has it been that way?” Gael asked.

“Forever. Since the summer I met you.”

I don't know if she said anything right away. It's possible she just listened. We might have talked about something else; maybe we just walked in silence. But at some point while we were walking, Gael came up with a question that, in the ten years since that summer, I'd never asked myself.

She said, “Does it happen when you take the train?”

I can try to reconstruct for you the rest of the conversation, but I'd really only be guessing. What else she said I can't remember, and what I said wouldn't matter. What I remember is her asking me that.

And after she did, it never happened again.

I called to remind her of it recently, and I could hear her smiling over the phone. That she is always smiling about something is part of Gael's enchantment. That her smile is actually audible is one of the spells she's cast on me. She declined to take more than half the credit for relieving me of the affliction. I'd identified the encumbrance on my own, she said. She had merely identified the brand.

“It was a different kind of baggage you were carrying.”

I've come to see the affliction as what happens when muscle memory breaks bad.

In the church of practice-makes-perfect, no principle is more sacred, no icon before which they genuflect more worthy of glorification, than what instructors call muscle memory. You hear it from them all the time. It's an expression I associate through personal experience with endeavors like small-arms training and learning to play the piano. Neuromuscular memory develops over time, through repetition of a sequence of motor skills until their coordination is automatic. Commonly referred to as muscle memory, it will save your life in a gunfight and lead your fingers through “Harlem Nocturne” without your having to think. It's what enables you to tie your shoes. Muscle memory is what people are talking about when they tell you, “It's just like riding a bike.”

In any neuromotor process, your brain is exchanging information with the parts of your body that move. In the exercise of muscle memory, your mind and your body are reminiscing. My back pain reflected a conversation I'd never openly had with my injuries, a memory my mind and my body were sharing below the threshold of my awareness. Maybe it was the sound of landing gear or the whine of a turbine engine, maybe it was the smell of an airport; it could have been the orchestration of a variety of sensory cues, but whatever provoked the dialogue, my subconscious was telling my back muscles, “Hey, they're playing our song.” And everything tightened up.

I might have forgotten the words, but my body remembered the music.

As skilled as I was at letting things go—“and moving on,” as suggested by my sister Elaine—as successful as I had been, or thought I had been, at putting the crash out of my mind, it lay there beneath the surface. And like the fingering of some Beethoven piece long left unrehearsed, my body remembered it for me, a realization to which Gael directed me ten years after the fact. And she did it with a simple question. I don't know where I lost the means necessary to realize it on my own, or even if I ever possessed the means, but once I was introduced to the source of my suffering, I ceased to be its victim. I concede this with some misgiving, for I fear it can only further encourage those who dwell among us who persist in the practice of psychoanalysis. The source of my salvation lay elsewhere. I see it in the heavenly witchcraft of a friend I never stopped loving and whose magic has never failed me.

S
uzanne walked out of the woods sometime after midnight on the eastbound side of the Mid-Cape Highway. Jim Bernier, by then, was celebrating the end of a day that even by the standards of the time he could honestly describe as “ridiculously excessive.” Bernier, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend, Kammy Tribus, along with their friends Terry Opperman and Debbie Oster, had been part of a gathering of between “a hundred and two hundred” people who had convened on the Lower Cape for a Cosmic Wimpout tournament twelve hours earlier, though the taking of refreshments had begun before that.

“Everybody had been partying all day long,” Bernier says.

Bernier was already known to many of those who had made the pilgrimage to Eastham, being one of the few people on what could be considered the Cosmic Wimpout payroll. Fulfilling mail orders out of the South Hadley head shop where Cosmic Wimpout was based, he was the familiar interface between the game and its legion of players throughout the country. The only other person as closely associated with the game was Bernier's friend Jim Rice, also known as Maverick, the young lawyer who had introduced himself to me at the Boutique Show the previous fall. Rice, who also attended the Eastham tournament, was recently described to me as the dice game's “founding father.”

“While I did (with some others) bring the game to the valley,” Rice modestly concedes, “at the time, I was just another clown, just another member of the Amorphous Cosmic Wimpout Traveling Circus.”

Bernier and his companions, in Opperman's pale yellow Chevy Impala, left the gathering in Eastham and headed for Boston, about eighty-five miles away. Opperman was driving, Oster was sitting up front with him, and Bernier and Tribus were reclining in the rear seat of the “well-seasoned” sedan. They were about twenty miles into the trip, west of the highway exit for Yarmouth, when Suzanne stepped out of the woods into the glare of the Chevy's headlights.

None of the four, Bernier says, harbored illusions about what was coming. What they saw was certainly odd, but nothing about it was funny.

“Whoa, this is not good,” went the collective thinking inside the car.

Bernier today works as a legal assistant in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, law firm with which Rice's practice shares offices. I caught up with him on a Sunday morning at the Boston apartment just off Commonwealth Avenue that Rice has occupied since his days as a Boston University student. It was two days before Christmas. The streets of the city were covered with snow. Rice was out of town for the holidays. The third-floor apartment, a spacious remnant of former student housing at BU, was artfully cluttered with memorabilia dating to the seventies, having changed little, according to Bernier, since the day Rice had moved in.

Bernier served coffee, and we sat in the living room, where we talked for a couple of hours. The television was on, but the sound had been muted. Bernier, who had been watching a news program before I showed up that morning, couldn't see the TV, and I paid it no attention until midway through our conversation, when a movie came up on the screen, silent, yet unignorable, almost ridiculous in how fitting and proper it was in light of the discussion under way: the 1969 counterculture classic
Easy Rider.
A cinematic period piece in which peace, love, dope, and tragedy sentimentally converge, it appeared as if part of the set decoration, an accessory to the apartment. You couldn't have stipulated a more appropriate backdrop. Its advent brought a certain hallucinatory quality to the endeavor.

If Bernier had changed since the seventies, you wouldn't have known it from me. I had a vague memory of a bearded, soft-spoken fellow, maybe six feet tall, with shoulder-length hair. The beard was now gone, and what was left of his brown hair issued in long strands from beneath the crown of a baseball cap to a point well below the temples of his eyeglasses. Jim Bernier was no slave to fashion. Wearing work boots, blue jeans, and more than one shirt, he fell on a sartorial scale somewhere “between a lumberjack and a hippie,” which is how Gael Humphrey had answered when I'd asked her to be more specific in recalling the old friend whom she'd lovingly described as “unkempt.”

Gael and Bernier had known each other pretty well in South Hadley. Like all his friends, she knew him as Jeb, the acronym that incorporated his middle initial. Today, she says, Jeb still holds a place among the more intelligent people she's ever known, and she recalls his having “one of the quickest wits . . . really, really funny.” Bernier admits to having given people back then “the impression that I had it together more than I did.” Gael remembers being saddened by what she refers to as an “unfortunate drinking problem,” so he didn't give that impression to
her,
though she is quick to add that his intemperance never obscured a “soft and sweet heart.”

I found nothing in my conversations with Bernier, who'd been sober for more than sixteen years, to contradict what Gael said about his intelligence or his wit, or even his heart, for that matter—he is one of the more thoughtful and articulate of the people I talked to—but what struck me about him initially was his extraordinary memory.

“It rarely fails me,” he admitted. “For good and for ill. There are nights, and entire presidential administrations, that I wish I could erase completely.”

He has possessed it since childhood, he said.

I knew that I had met Bernier, if only briefly, at some point prior to the crash. He remembered the moment and the circumstances precisely. I was introducing myself to him and a woman friend of his, he said, when her dog—a troubled mutt who had managed to find in his owner “the only person who loved him”—jumped up and made “such a mess” of me that I had to change my clothes. I don't remember the encounter (Bernier claims I handled it well), but I do remember the day. It had to have been Saturday, March 13, the fourth day of the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the day in 1979 that Zachary Swan and I signed books in South Hadley. It's in the calendar I carried on the plane.

Equally memorable to Bernier was the moment he first saw Suzanne.

“There was unanimous and immediate recognition that she was in trouble,” he told me. That she stood there alone—there was no car, no sign of a breakdown—made her appearance all the more ominous. “It looked serious, but it also looked seriously strange.”

For Bernier and his friends, strange circumstances were a common occurrence, given “the way everybody was living life at the time,” and by that measure, he said, “this was not so extraordinary. ‘First, do no harm': That's pretty much how we were living in those days. Avoid violence and legal problems, and everything else was just fine.”

As soon as Opperman saw Suzanne, standing there in the light of his headlamps, he pulled the car over.

“Terry did exactly what I expected him to do. And he didn't need any help from me or Kammy or Debbie. If Terry had reacted differently . . . I'm sure Kammy or Debbie would've told him to stop.”

Bernier confessed that considering the . . . let's call it festive . . . nature of the expedition, he invited some legal risk stopping that night, knowing that he might eventually be dealing with the police. He and Opperman identified themselves to Suzanne as the Cosmic Wimpout Clowns. But none of that came into consideration. Neither for him nor any of the others. “There are certain things you do because of who you are, no matter how uncomfortable they make you.”

He might just as easily have been referring to Suzanne's behavior that night.

“Given the situation she was in, it was amazing how together she was.” He was not alone in that assessment. All four travelers that night were “struck by how heroic this person was.”

When I asked if he'd been helpful in directing authorities to where Suzanne had exited the woods, he said, “Most of that is to the victim's credit,” pointing out that Suzanne “was in shock
and
she was composed.” Expressing again his admiration for how well she handled things that night, he was unequivocal in asserting, “She was a hero. Four out of five of her peers would have been useless.”

Suzanne asked to be taken to the airport rather than the hospital, presumably seeing it as the more direct approach to completing her mission. In the end, her choice was the perfect choice, eliminating as it did numerous links in the chain of communication. When they arrived at the airport, Bernier waited in the car with the women, and Opperman walked Suzanne into the terminal.