Down Around Midnight (5 page)

For five months, in its damaged condition, the appointment book sat on my desk, just one more in an assortment of necessary office supplies. Was it some kind of keepsake? A good luck charm? I doubt it. I think my consigning it to the everyday was my way of depriving it of significance. And I believe it was out of the same impulse that I put off calling Suzanne.

After deciding to make the call, I put it off day to day, week to week. I managed to put it off for over a month.

“I don't know,” I told her over the phone, when she asked what it was I was looking for.

“OK,” she said, seeming to understand perfectly.

And I took it to mean that she didn't know either but that she knew there was something to find.

“
W
hat seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” is how Prospero put the question to his daughter.

Had he asked the question of Tom Waits,
The Tempest
would have been shorter.

“You can't really look in the mirror that much,” is how Waits answered when I put the question to him.

We were driving around downtown Los Angeles, it was six or seven years after the crash, I was interviewing the singersongwriter for a magazine feature I was writing, and we were managing without the blank verse. Beyond the obvious needs of the piece I was reporting, I had no reason to argue with Waits. Revisiting the past can be dangerous if you invest the meeting with anything more than a polite handshake and a “Just passing through.” Lingering too long in the company of your memories, you run the risk of finding yourself stuck there.

I had resisted calling Suzanne because intuitively I knew that once I did there would probably be no turning back. Making the decision I made when I picked up the phone is more than looking in the mirror. It's like throwing yourself through the glass.

If you're going to do it, you better bring lunch.

And a stack of newspapers wouldn't hurt either.

In the dark backward of 1979, the year I was about to revisit, there was news other than the news I was making. It was the year of the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the year of the nation's resumption of full diplomatic relations with China. Pink Floyd released
The Wall
that year, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons released John Mitchell and Patty Hearst on parole. It was the year Charlie Mingus died. Recalling the events of that year, you are struck by the passage of time—until you chance to walk past a television and stop to watch as those same events continue to play themselves out. The year began with the flight of the shah from Iran and ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was the year Saddam Hussein assumed control of the government in Iraq.

Of the things I remember about that year, the things I don't have to look up, none is more vivid than the speed and thoroughness with which a friend of mine managed to divert to himself all the attention I was receiving. My good friend Michael Metrinko, a former college classmate, was serving that year as a political officer at the United States Embassy in Teheran. In November, four months after my release from the hospital, revolutionaries stormed the embassy and took him and sixty-five other Americans hostage.

“I'm sure he's OK,” I remember telling his mother when Mike turned up noticeably absent at the Christmastime propaganda party staged by the Iranians for the benefit of the press. I had no evidence on which to base the assertion other than my longtime friendship with Mike. I spared Mrs. Metrinko my thinking, but I was put in mind of “The Ransom of Red Chief,” the O. Henry story in which a pair of hapless kidnappers, failing to collect on their demand, end up paying instead to unburden themselves of the young troublemaker they have regrettably abducted. As easy as it was for me to be cavalier, it was probably that much more a necessity, a comforting exercise in wishful thinking, and I took consolation in the certainty that Mike would have been equally irreverent had our positions been reversed.

Held for 444 days, Mike was released to a hero's welcome, and he told me over dinner one night, some time after returning home, that he found all the attention rather ridiculous: the lifetime Major League Baseball pass, the record albums, the blue jeans, the unstoppable flood of handouts pressed upon all the hostages, offers of air travel and psychiatric counseling, haircuts, groceries . . . everything from vacations to vacuum cleaners.

There is nothing heroic about being a victim, he told me. “It's like being glorified for being raped.”

The manner in which Mike conducted himself during the period of his captivity, a display of day-to-day heroism not revealed to the public until recently, is another matter altogether. Mike is living testimony to the rewards of a good education. One of the pleasures that helped sustain him throughout the fourteen-month ordeal he owed to his excellent command of Farsi. It allowed him to communicate with his captors more fully and intimately than otherwise, to advise the Iranians in their own language and in a variety of interesting ways, on a regular basis, to go fuck themselves. The systematic beatings he received as a result, and the endless stretch of solitary confinement, set him apart from the typical hostage, and the memory of how utterly he annoyed his tormentors will no doubt comfort him in his dotage.

But down all the years, Mike's heroism—valor legitimately exhibited, not the celebration thrust upon him by others—has never outweighed, to his way of thinking, the essential fact of his simply having been a victim. Think of courage as a fall-back position. At least in one significant way, it's an expression of self-interest: You have to live with what you do for the rest of your life. In the end, to the extent that you have a chance, you don't really have a choice. There are no rewards for doing what's right, only penalties for failing to do it. That's how people in such circumstances, more often than not, end up viewing these things.

Suzanne's experience is a good example. Suzanne was celebrated for legitimate heroics, courage in the classic tradition, marching off alone in the night and sending back the cavalry. Pierre, not long after it happened, was reminded of just how deeply admired his sister was for her bravery. That summer he was driving home late one night when a police cruiser pulled up behind him. “I was clearly speeding,” he recalls. Two officers stepped out of the squad car, checked his license and registration, and before dealing with the speeding infraction, asked him how Suzanne was doing. Both cops had been on duty the night of the crash and had talked to Suzanne at some point. Pierre thanked them for their show of concern and told them she was doing fine. They asked him to pass along their regards and said he should drive more carefully—“Next time you'll get a ticket”—letting him know that the reason they were not writing him up was their high opinion of his sister and their admiration for what she had done.

And still, in the light of fitting cause for esteem:

“The first two years were the worst.”

I wondered how the members of my own family would answer if asked how quickly I recovered, if asked how the experience changed me. Would they see it as having made me a more “mature, outer-directed, caring individual”? For my part, I never looked at the experience as having endowed me with maturity so much as having stolen what I think of as my youth, as belated as its abandonment might have been. It took away my immortality, the sense of invincibility that maturity inevitably tempers, and with it, I think, some of my confidence, because the changes transpired overnight, rather than over time.

I find it hard to disagree with Mike. There's really no upside to severe trauma. As poetic as it might seem to think so, nothing good comes of victimization. The most you can hope for is to survive it. You don't recover, you simply recuperate. Belief in the proposition that “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger” is just another form of denial.

In getting at the truth of that night, there would be questions, I knew, without answers. The question of denial was probably one of them. Dispensing with it as unanswerable from the start, I set out to follow other, more promising avenues of investigation.

 

 

Present yourself to a statistician as somebody who is one in a million, and he'll tell you that there are thirteen hundred people in China exactly like you. Statistics, specifically the science of inferential statistics, rises out of that branch of mathematics called probability theory. Probability theory is what you get when you give God a pair of dice. A mathematical expression of the random nature of things, it has been around since the time of Pascal. In such fields as quantum mechanics, it has given birth to equations that border on the metaphysical, but long before its protocols were established, its power was appreciated instinctively by anyone who ever laid down a bet.

According to one of a variety of methods applied to coming up with a figure—the numbers are all over the place—the probability of your ever being in a plane crash is about one chance in 11 million. Statistically you would have to fly once a day for fifteen thousand years before, figuratively, the dice came up seven. If, with that in mind, you still don't like your chances, you might hope to hedge your bet by flying with someone like me. I don't know the precise odds against anyone's being in two crashes, but I know the odds are prohibitive. A friend of mine, calculating the percentages, volunteered a memorable estimate as I lay in the hospital after the crash.

“You can fly without pilots,” he said.

That wisecrack, delivered while I was flat on my back, subsisting on an IV drip and 50-milligram injections of Demerol every four hours, continues to hold magic for me. It helps ease the feeling I get in my stomach whenever I board an airplane. And it remains a comforting proposition even though I know it to be delusional. Mathematicians call it the gambler's fallacy, a mistaken belief in the maturity of chances. Probability theory advances the principle that every chance event is independent of all preceding and following events. Before my crash, yes, the odds against my being in two crashes were higher than my being in one. The chances of my crashing now are exactly the same as they were before. One in 11 million.

Ask a bookie.

In U.S. plane crashes, on average—and I was surprised to discover this—nearly 96 percent of passengers survive. In even the most severe crashes, one's chances of walking (or maybe crawling) away are slightly better than fifty-fifty. Even money. Even for me. I like the one in 11 million better. The likelihood of a crash, apparently, has little to do with the fear of flying, insofar as the condition is expressed clinically. Ill disposition to air travel is as widespread as certain primeval fears, as natural as the fear of snakes, but at its deepest, as true dysphoria, an inherent fear of flying, I'm told, is a manifestation of extreme claustrophobia.

I am not claustrophobic, but I do suffer from a fear of flying. And what I fear whenever I fly is that the airplane is going to crash. Statistics notwithstanding, I still board every flight figuring things could go either way. But board the flight nevertheless. My fear is not inherent but acquired—in June 1979—and not so much a fear as an expectation. For me, an airport is just a poorly managed casino, a joint where the people running the show don't care if you have a good time.

When I was a child, maybe five or six, I came down with some sort of infection. No one in the family can say what it was, none of them even remembers it, which leads me to believe that the affliction was fairly routine and probably of short duration, one of those bugs that kids typically pick up that run their course in maybe a week. Whatever it was, it made a lasting impression, not for its symptoms—I cannot remember experiencing any—but for its treatment, a series of shots. More than once, and it need not have been more than twice, my father, a career naval officer, stationed then at the Naval Medical Center outside Washington, took me with him to work in the morning, where a pediatrician wearing a lab coat over the uniform-of-the-day injected me with penicillin.

The high white tower of the hospital, which dominated the Maryland landscape, rising like a whale spout on a windless ocean over a sloping expanse of manicured grounds, was just a short drive from our house in Bethesda. And the first trip was no doubt a thrill, as I alone among the children in the family set off to work with my dad. The excitement gave way to trembling, of course, once my condition was diagnosed and the hypodermic needle was brandished. But the injection was not the worst of it. The shot is not what I remember. What I remember are the subsequent visits: those brief trips in the car to the hospital under the unbearable burden of inevitability, a young heart haunted not so much by a feeling of dread but worse, really, a kind of sadness, an awareness in apprehension of the follow-up shots that all my alternatives had been exhausted.

It is the same sadness I feel when I board an airplane today and feel in the twenty-four hours or so before boarding, the same heaviness that overcomes me in the anticipation of having to fly. It is a feeling, as it was during those early-morning rides to the medical center, that drains all the joy out of travel.

Like Suzanne, I was back on a plane within weeks of the crash. On a Tuesday in the middle of August, not two months after being carried out of the woods, I boarded one of the DC-3s operated by Provincetown-Boston Airlines and flew from the Outer Cape to keep an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon in Boston.

There was no easy alternative to flying. Still walking with the aid of crutches, I was not yet able to drive. I could have hopped on a bus, I suppose, an all-day proposition; I could have found some other way, if necessary. But sooner or later it was coming. There was never really any question of my not flying again. Travel had always been a significant part of my life, and it was a substantial part of my work now. How, in pursuit of a story, how else except by air, was I to get from New York to Bogotá or someplace like Beirut? And what about all that breathlessly urgent “business on the coast”? If every time I had to be in L.A. I planned to travel by train, I was facing trouble on the professional front, on that poorly fortified side of the literary life known to every poor sucker in the creative arts rather dismally as “career management.” Or so I was happy to believe. Not to mention all those movie stars who couldn't live without me.