Down Around Midnight (24 page)

The pilots, in discussing the crash with Jon, described the airplane's steep descent as intentional. Parmenter, they said, was going for what is known as a “hot look,” dropping below the cloud cover, attempting, in the words of the NTSB, which considered the possibility, “to visually acquire a familiar landmark, the ground or the landing lights.” A willful breaking of the minimum altitude restriction, the maneuver was an unsafe violation of FAA regulations, and testimony revealed that Parmenter had used similar “duck under” procedures on other flights. On one such flight his copilot, a qualified captain, took control of the aircraft from him at six hundred feet, and leveled out at two hundred. In the case of his fatal crash, however, the NTSB concluded, it was more probable that the descent was unintentional.

Had Parmenter's descent been intentional, and had the copilot been aware of it, there would have been little the copilot could have done about it. Crew coordination procedures, since then, have tightened up considerably, but in the culture that prevailed at the time, no matter how immature or irresponsible his behavior, when a captain said, “I've got the airplane,” he had the airplane. Overriding the legendary Parmenter would have taken a lot more authority than that possessed by a probationary junior employee whose representation by the pilots' union was still eight months away.

“I can tell you from the pilots that I met in that bar,” Jonathan Ealy said, “that would be [his] story, that Parmenter had been there forever, that he was the new kid, and he didn't have any authority to tell the guy what to do.”

And though not without justification, it seemed as if it were something he was still angry about fifteen years later.

 

 

I'd like to say my own anger passed quickly.

“In the hospital you were mad,” says my sister Elaine. Mad enough that she remembers it almost thirty years later. “Anger is a good response.”

There are two kinds of anger at issue, however. What Elaine witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the crash, simmering beneath the surface but not invisible to my family, was the initial eruption of anger that saved my life or might have, had the plane been engulfed by fire. No doubt exacerbated by a frustration with my physical injuries, it is the same anger one shows right after taking a punch, and she viewed it in a positive light as an alternative to fear or sadness, preferable to what she describes as the “poor me” posture of the victim.

“I think it's healthier to get mad,” she says. “It puts you in a stronger position.”

A stronger position from which to counterpunch.

It's the kind of anger perhaps best explained with the help of a vocabulary a little bit broader than that which my sister characteristically exhibits, the kind of vocabulary I tend to exhibit on a pretty regular basis: I wasn't angry, I was pissed off.

But there is another kind of anger at play, anger over the longer term.

Dick Morrill, who remembers being enraged when pinned beneath his helicopter, agrees that anger is a natural reaction but also understands the consequences of failing to get beyond it. “Anger,” he told me, “is like taking poison and hoping the other guy gets sick.”

The best I can claim is that I was quick to overcome the anger I was able to identify. The anger I focused on the pilot, for example, I transcended almost immediately. Early in my recuperation, I realized there was no percentage in holding that kind of grudge.

The equanimity I achieved is reflected in Suzanne's experience, in the memory of a chance encounter she shared with me when she and I first talked. Twenty years had passed since the crash, and Suzanne was visiting the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, a modest, much cherished enterprise here, in Brewster, an institution staffed in large part by elderly volunteers. On the name tag of the woman ringing her up at the gift counter, she recognized a familiar surname. Without much thought, she asked the woman, “Are you any relation to George Parmenter?”

The room went silent, she told me.

“He was my husband,” Doris Parmenter replied.

Suzanne, introducing herself, explained to the pilot's widow who she was.

“I know who you are,” Mrs. Parmenter said.

And now, of course, Suzanne was asking herself,
Where did I think this conversation was going to go?
Breaking the uncomfortable silence, she said the only thing that made any sense, closing the painful interchange with the one thing that served to say it all.

“It was a long time ago,” she said.

I suppose I could come up with a variety of reasons for choosing not to call Mrs. Parmenter, which is a choice I made early on. Not the least of them was imagining her heartbreak at the sound of my voice when I told her why I was calling. The simplest explanation is that I just saw nothing to be gained by it. Suzanne's story merely reaffirmed a decision I'd already arrived at by instinct.

The anger I shook off shortly after the crash was easy enough to shed. But Mary believes there was a deeper anger that took me longer to get beyond. I defer to her judgment as that of a person who was in a position to know. If she's right, the anger was so unfocused as to be invisible to me.

“You changed completely after the crash,” she said, “that summer on the Cape. I think it changed you forever.”

But she admits that the impact was difficult to measure. “There were so many other changes, so many other things going on, all of which you had no control over,” the most obvious being sudden success. “There's never been anything linear about your life,” she said, the word echoing Elaine's reference to an absence of continuity.

Mary and I split up the following summer and remained separated for more than a year. Among the people I met that year was an aspiring writer, Bo Bryan, who has remained a friend ever since. I met him through my friend and colleague Maryanne Vollers, who at the time, before distinguishing herself as the gifted author she is today, was an editor at
Rolling Stone.
Recently I talked to Bo, who would have been insensitive to any changes in me resulting from the crash, not having known me before the changes took place. But he was sensitive to other things, anger being one of them.

“One of the first things Maryanne told me about you before we met,” he said, “was the story of your crash and the interruption of your career. Whether you knew it or not, and I suspect you had no idea, the event pervaded the atmosphere around you, the sort of David and Goliath nature of it, Goliath being the force of gravity as it collapsed for a while your ability to go on writing big books. . . . I wondered back then if, while you were laid up, you felt any bitterness . . . while you couldn't work, couldn't produce the follow-up bestseller.”

Whatever bitterness I might have harbored at the time did not manifest itself in a way that was identifiable to Bo, who said he remembered my being somewhat subdued, a little less frenetic than the people around me.

“Later I understood,” he said, “that your body had taken a tremendous beating. None of us who were close to you then knew what it was like to be physically limited in ways that weren't going to change. You had been given an advance look into the stage of life that we're all much closer to now.”

In the course of that second summer, another lifelong friend I made was Gregory Katz, a reporter for the
Cape Cod Times.
Greg was the writer who, on the anniversary of the crash, wrote the piece for the
Times
on how the survivors were faring, the article in which the mother of the three Michigan sisters was quoted, though he and I had met before that. Today, having since won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, he is an overseas correspondent with the Associated Press. He doesn't recall my being entirely subdued.

“I remember you being in serious physical pain and having your physical ability to write hampered to a great degree,” he told me recently, “and my feeling is that you actually turned away from writing at this point in favor of celebrity. The crash made it impossible for you to write and gave you lots of empty time to fill up. You filled the time kind of coasting on your fame as long as you could.”

He described it as “a destructive time.”

Admittedly, with the exception of money, which after the crash was in short supply and would continue to be for the next couple of years—affirming my status as only half famous—I didn't lack for any of those kinds of things in which celebrities indulge when they have nothing better to do with their time, those kinds of things that go from self-indulgent to self-destructive when the same people have nothing better to do with their lives. There was no shortage of female companionship, no deficiency in the brand of refreshment that in another age, in a lost-weekend kind of way, would have been provided by whiskey. All that, and rock and roll, too. But how much of this behavior was attributable to the crash rather than merely exaggerated by it is open to question. It wasn't as if I had been driving under the limit up to then; what happened was a little bit more like pulling the speed governor off a racecar.

This is the “very dark period” that Terry was calling attention to.

“Maybe the whole thing had something to do with testing your indestructibility,” she said. “ ‘If the plane crash didn't kill me, nothing will.' ”

That, of course, is indisputable. Daredevil behavior in the aftermath of escaping death is something of a cliché. My own behavior along those lines, even at its most memorable, was nonetheless pretty lame. I never had the courage to really push the envelope. And I'd describe my response as situational rather than symptomatic. But I remember certain moments, alone on the Cape that year after everyone had returned to the world, finding myself behind the wheel and thinking exactly what Terry described. I remember speeding along the deserted straightaway that parallels the ocean, double-clutching through the twisting roads that wind through the woods of the national park, the radio speakers cranked to the point where I could actually feel the music—tunes about to go platinum recorded by people I knew personally but hadn't seen in a while—thinking, “I'm wearing my seat belt. If I hit something, how bad can it be?”

But my friends and family saw more in this unhealthy behavior than I did, and they see more in it today than I can, looking back. If I seem to be cavalier about it, if I seem insufficiently penitent or (probably more damning in such exercises as these) inadequately flagellant—if I don't twelve-step you here, if I appear to be “in denial”—it's because I come at the subject from an entirely different frame of reference.

Not only did I write one of the more famous books on dangerous behavior, but as a consequence, I've made the intimate acquaintance of a lot of those kinds of people who give the concept new meaning. I've witnessed it as practiced by the world's most serious professionals. I've watched the play-offs. And believe me, I don't qualify. I'm talking about self-destructive behavior that comes with the warning “Don't try this at home.” These are characters who will tell you that your best measure of whether the wheels have really come off the bus is the number of parties you've thrown at which you were the only guest.

Look for evidence where you want. What my friends, my loved ones, and my family are reluctant to mention is that, like a lot of people a lot of the time, I can simply be a fool, and for a while there, back then—and I won't argue with them about the reasons—I was a bigger fool than usual.

 

 

I called the number I had for the copilot several times and received no answer. I left voice-mail messages twice. I placed the calls at various times of the day, all of which were met by a variety of theatrical outgoing messages recorded by the woman of the house. The listing in the local phone book showed the copilot, if it were he, to be married to a woman named Priscilla. I presumed it was she whose voice I was becoming familiar with. I don't know why she didn't return my calls. It was possible, I suppose, that she lived in the house alone. Maybe I had the wrong number. I wondered, and will continue to wonder, if she was the ticket agent who had been weeping that night.

F
our days after the crash—some eighty-eight hours and thirty-three minutes from the moment that plane hit the trees—I celebrated my thirty-third birthday. I don't have the actuarial figures on males of my generation; I'd like to think it's possible I'll live longer than sixty-six years, but however long I live or don't, that moment will always be halftime. Everything up to and everything following will always be before and after. While whatever it cost or contributed may or may not be obvious, or may simply be obvious no longer, it is the record-keeping device I tend to fall back on, a kind of biographical point of nativity, the B.C. and A.D. of my private chronology.

I was writing a book at the time. Its merits and deficiencies are irrelevant.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc,
a material fallacy in logic: after this, therefore because of this. Let's not fall victim to that. Let it simply be sufficient to say that the book, which was never published, was ultimately inadequate to the requirements of a decent novel, and very possibly would have been just as inadequate in default of the experience in question. But the book provides an easily accessible illustration of the before and after I'm talking about.

When I returned to the manuscript after the crash, I ignored a reality the significance of which was not as clear to me as it was to my editor, who sensed in my subsequent effort “the will doing the work of the imagination.” Had I shared with him the reality I'd confronted after picking up where I'd left off, I might have arrived at the inevitable sooner. Looking back on it, I find it pretty compelling: I won't go so far as to claim that the thirty-two-year-old writer who started that book was unrecognizable to me, but the way he looked at the world was absolutely unrecoverable.