Growing Up (29 page)

“This pool doesn’t have a shallow end,” the instructor said.

“Well, what am I going to do?”

“Get up on that platform and jump,” he said.

The pool depth was marked as fifteen feet at that point.

“I’m not kidding. I can’t swim a stroke.”

“Up! Up!” he shouted.

“But I’ll drown.”

“This pool’s got the best lifesaving equipment in the Navy,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Come on.”

“I’m giving you an order, mister. Up!”

Quaking in every fiber, I climbed the ladder, edged out onto the board, took one look down, and, unable to faint, stepped back.

“Jump!” the instructor roared.

I stepped to the edge, closed my eyes, and walked into space. The impact of the water was like being smacked on the bottom by a two-by-four, then I was sinking, then—my God!—I was rising irresistibly to the surface. My head broke water. The water was actually supporting me, just as everybody had always said it would. The instructor glared.

“You didn’t keep your legs straight,” he shouted. “Get back up there and do it again.”

Astonishingly, I was able to make a little progress dog-paddling through the water, and, hauling myself out of the pool, I went back up the ladder and did it again. Again I popped to the surface like a cork. Again I was able to move a little through the water. Fifteen feet of water, too. I was swimming. Swimming! A lifetime of fear ended in those few moments. By the end of a year I was able to swim, fully clothed, for hours at a stretch in deep water.

Flying was trickier. My early instructors tried to put me at ease by saying it was a lot like driving a car. I was afraid to tell them I didn’t know how to drive a car. Didn’t every young man know how to drive by the time he was sixteen? Not knowing how to drive by eighteen seemed shameful. I feared the Navy would wash me out of flight training and send me to scrub decks if they learned about it.

On my first flight the instructor took me to 3,000 feet in a Piper Cub before letting me handle the stick.

“Goddamn it, don’t swing it like an axe handle!” he shouted
when I yanked the plane violently up and down. “You wouldn’t handle a steering wheel like that, would you?”

This was when we were flying out of a field south of Miami where the instructors were all civilian pilots under Navy contract. Mine was a nervous, middle-aged pilot named Jim, a natty little man with bulging eyeballs usually bloodshot from hangover, a handsome cavalry mustache over his lip, and fear of student flying in his soul. After our seventh flight together, he landed the plane, stepped out, smiled at me, and said, “You take her around.”

I was appalled. He was telling me I was ready to “solo.” I knew I wasn’t. He’d demonstrated the basics during our seven flights and then had me practice while he sat in the front seat. Theoretically I knew how to take off, maintain altitude, bank, recover from a stall and a full spin, and land. Actually I’d never done any of these things. Jim was so nervous about having a beginner at the controls that he’d never yielded either stick or rudder to my command. When I had been supposed to be doing the flying, I’d felt the stick and the rudder pedals doing things that were not my doing. The plane had dual controls, which operated simultaneously in front and rear seats. Jim had been “riding the controls” up front; that is, instead of leaving me free in the back to handle the plane, he’d been actually doing all the flying for me. Several times I had tested him by taking my feet off the rudder pedals, and I’d noticed they kept making the right moves, in and out, as if operated by ghostly feet. Occasionally Jim had even congratulated me on the skill with which he had executed a landing. I’d certainly never made a landing while he’d been in the front seat. Nevertheless when Jim said, “Take her around,” I closed the door, pushed the throttle forward, and started to take her around.

The takeoff wasn’t too bad, though I nearly skidded off the runway before getting airborne. All I had to do was climb to 800 feet, turn 180 degrees, turn again, put the nose down, and land. It was exhilarating not having Jim riding the controls, but I was surprised, too. The plane seemed to have acquired a mind of its own. It insisted on going all the way to 1,200 feet when I wanted it to level off at 800, then when I tried to get back down it dived
all the way to 600 feet before leveling off. It finally consented to circle the field, and I got the nose pointed toward the runway and headed for earth at a civilized speed. When the wheels touched down it looked as if I might survive, and, feeling solid runway underneath, I slammed on the brakes. The plane spun violently through a 180-degree ground loop and wound up fifty yards off the runway in the grass. Since my ground loop hadn’t flipped the plane and destroyed a wing, the jury that weighed my case decided to give me a second chance instead of washing me out of the program.

For the longest time, though, I flew and flew without ever being in control of any airplane. It was a constant struggle for power between the plane and me, and the plane usually won. I approached every flight like a tenderfoot sent to tame a wild horse. By the time I arrived at the Naval Air Station at Memphis, where Navy pilots took over the instruction, it was obvious my flying career would be soon ended. We flew open-cockpit biplanes— “Yellow Perils,” the Navy called them—which forgave almost any mistake. Instructors sat in the front cockpit, students behind. But here the instructors did not ride the controls. These were courageous men. Many were back from the Pacific, and they put their destinies in my hands high over the Mississippi River and came back shaking their heads in sorrow.

“It’s just like driving a car, Baker,” a young ensign told me the day I nearly killed him trying to sideslip into a farm field where he wanted to land and take a smoke. “You know how it is when you let in the clutch? Real smooth and easy.”

I knew nothing about letting in the clutch, but didn’t dare say so. “Right,” I said. “Smooth and easy.”

I got as far as the acrobatic stage. Rolls, loops, Immelman turns. Clouds spinning zanily beneath me, earth and river whirling above. An earnest young Marine pilot took me aside after a typical day of disaster in the sky. “Baker,” he said, “it’s just like handling a girl’s breast. You’ve got to be gentle.”

I didn’t dare tell him I’d never handled a girl’s breast, either.

The inevitable catastrophe came on my check flight at the end of the acrobatic stage. It was supposed to last an hour, but after twenty minutes in the sky the check pilot said, “All right, let’s go in,” and gave me a “down,” which meant “unfit to fly.” I was doomed. I knew it, my buddies knew it. The Navy would forgive a “down” only if you could fly two successful check flights back-to-back with different check pilots. If you couldn’t you were out.

I hadn’t a prayer of surviving. On a Saturday, looking at Monday’s flight schedule, I saw that I was posted to fly the fatal reexamination with a grizzled pilot named T. L. Smith. It was like reading my own obituary. T. L. Smith was a celebrated perfectionist famous for washing out cadets for the slightest error in the air. His initials, T. L., were said to stand for “Total Loss,” which was all anyone who had to fly for him could expect. Friends stopped by my bunk at the barracks to commiserate and tell me it wasn’t so bad being kicked out of flying. I’d probably get soft desk duty in some nice Navy town where you could shack up a lot and sleep all day. Two of my best friends, wanting to cheer me up, took me to go into Memphis for a farewell weekend together. Well, it beat sitting on the base all weekend thinking about my Monday rendezvous with Total Loss. Why not a last binge for the condemned?

We took a room at the Peabody Hotel and bought three bottles of bourbon. I’d tasted whiskey only two or three times before and didn’t much like it; but now in my gloom it brought a comfort I’d never known. I wanted more of that comfort. My dream was dying. I would plumb the depths of vice in these final hours. The weekend quickly turned into an incoherent jumble of dreamlike episodes. Afterwards I vaguely remembered threatening to punch a fat man in a restaurant, but couldn’t remember why. At some point I was among a gang of sailors in a hotel corridor, and I was telling them to stop spraying the hallway with a fire hose. At another I was sitting fully dressed on what seemed to be a piano bench in a hotel room—not at the Peabody—and a strange woman was smiling at me and taking off her brassiere.

This was startling, because no woman had ever taken her
brassiere off in front of me before. But where had she come from? What were we doing in this alien room? “I’ll bet I know what you want,” she said.

“What?”

“This,” she said, and stepped out of her panties and stretched out flat on her back on the bed. She beckoned. I stood up, then thought better of it and settled to the floor like a collapsing column of sand. I awoke hours later on the floor. She’d gone.

With the hangover I took back to the base Sunday night, I would have welcomed instant execution at the hands of Total Loss Smith, but when I awoke Monday morning the physical agony was over. In its place had come an unnatural, disembodied sensation of great calm. The world was moving much more slowly than its normal pace. In this eerie state of relaxation nothing seemed to matter much, not the terrible Total Loss Smith, not even the end of my flying days.

When we met at the flight line, Total Loss looked just as grim as everybody said he would. It was bitterly cold. We both wore heavy leather flight suits lined with wool, and his face looked tougher than the leather. He seemed old enough to be my father. Wrinkles creased around eyes that had never smiled. Lips as thin as a movie killer’s. I introduced myself. His greeting was what I’d expected. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

We walked down the flight line, parachutes bouncing against our rumps, not a word said. In the plane—Total Loss in the front seat, me in the back—I connected the speaking tube which enabled him to talk to me but didn’t allow me to speak back. Still not a word while I taxied out to the mat, ran through the cockpit checks, and finished by testing the magnetos. If he was trying to petrify me before we got started he was wasting his efforts. In this new state of peace I didn’t give a damn whether he talked to me or not.

“Take me up to 5,000 feet and show me some slow rolls,” he growled as I started the takeoff.

The wheels were hardly off the mat before I experienced another eerie sensation. It was a feeling of power. For the first time
since first stepping into an airplane I felt in complete mastery of the thing. I’d noticed it on takeoff. It had been an excellent takeoff. Without thinking about it, I’d automatically corrected a slight swerve just before becoming airborne. Now as we climbed I was flooded with a sense of confidence. The hangover’s residue of relaxation had freed me of the tensions that had always defeated me before. Before, the plane had had a will of its own; now the plane seemed to be part of me, an extension of my hands and feet, obedient to my slightest whim. I leveled it at exactly 5,000 feet and started a slow roll. First, a shallow dive to gain velocity, then push the stick slowly, firmly, all the way over against the thigh, simultaneously putting in hard rudder, and there we are, hanging upside down over the earth, and now—keep it rolling, don’t let the nose drop—reverse the controls and feel it roll all the way through until—coming back to straight-and-level now—catch it, wings level with the horizon, and touch the throttle to maintain altitude precisely at 5,000 feet.

“Perfect,” said Total Loss. “Do me another one.”

It hadn’t been a fluke. Somewhere between the weekend’s bourbon and my arrival at the flight line that morning, I had become a flyer. The second slow roll was as good as the first.

“Show me your snap rolls,” Total Loss said.

I showed him snap rolls as fine as any instructor had ever shown me.

“All right, give me a loop and then a split-S and recover your altitude and show me an Immelman.”

I looped him through a big graceful arc, leveled out and rolled into the split-S, came out of it climbing, hit the altitude dead on at 5,000 feet, and showed him an Immelman that Eddie Ricken-backer would have envied.

“What the hell did you do wrong on your check last week?” he asked. Since I couldn’t answer, I shrugged so he could see me in his rearview mirror.

“Let me see you try a falling leaf,” he said.

Even some instructors had trouble doing a falling leaf. The plane had to be brought precisely to its stalling point, then
dropped in a series of sickening sideways skids, first to one side, then to the other, like a leaf falling in a breeze, by delicate simultaneous manipulations of stick, rudder pedals, and throttle. I seemed to have done falling leaves all my life.

“All right, this is a waste of my time,” Total Loss growled. “Let’s go in.”

Back at the flight line, when I’d cut the ignition, he climbed out and tramped back toward the ready room while I waited to sign the plane in. When I got there he was standing at a distance talking to my regular instructor. His talk was being illustrated with hand movements, as pilots’ conversations always were, hands executing little loops and rolls in the air. After he did the falling-leaf motion with his hands, he pointed a finger at my instructor’s chest, said something I couldn’t hear, and trudged off. My instructor, who had flown only with the pre-hangover Baker, was slack-jawed when he approached me.