Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Our daredevil’s suit-beast has no desperation tape but is covered with other colorful things: the logo of a Swiss watchmaker and the logo of a communications company and the logo of an aerospace company and no less than ten iterations of the logo of a billion-dollar energy-drink corporation. Back in 1960, Joe didn’t even think to patch a little American flag onto his suit. Now, down in Ground Control, Joe wears on his polo and his jacket the logo of the billion-dollar energy-drink corporation (BDED Corp) that we will not name because we too want this to be more than a stunt. But we know BDED Corp well and have, at this very moment, one of their slim cans in our hands, hoping to get a little buzz of vivacity to accompany our experience of the fall. In Iowa City and Baton Rouge and Los Angeles and Paris and Istanbul and Vienna and Cairo, we sip our BDED Corp juice and lock in to our Net stream and join our daredevil on the ledge of the teardrop. We tell ourselves consumption does not make us complicit but here we are. We tell ourselves there is no way to be complacent when hopped up on glucose and caffeine and taurine, that we will know straightaway and be jazzed to act if we suspect some farce is afoot. We sip and gulp and look down.

  BDED Corp’s logo is a couple of hot bulls locking horns in front of a yellow sphere that is maybe the sun and maybe the reason the bulls are red-hot, or their heat is meant to be metaphorical because bulls, by definition, still have their balls and are meant to use them. This is, we guess, the kind of vivacity BDED Corp wants us to believe is (barely) contained in their can and rumors of actual bull semen in the formulation have persisted for years. The logo covers our daredevil’s otherwise pristine suit and helmet and mars the slick silver fiberglass of the teardrop space capsule too. The logos, we know, have no bearing on the preservation of life but are all over everything just like Joe’s duct tape and trying to appear just as vital.

  BDED Corp will never disclose exactly how much of the bill they’ve footed to slap their logos everywhere, to be the primary funder and sponsor of the mission—somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million over four years. They routinely spend a third of their profits on marketing, largely in sponsorship of death-defying feats such as cliff diving, BASE jumping, rock climbing, freeskiing, mountain biking, auto racing, air racing, extreme wingsuit flying, and now space diving. And it’s not just sponsorship but often the total creation of these events, from athlete selection to film production. BDED Corp is now as much a media empire as it is an ED corp. Any little documentary or Net clip about death-defying or otherwise extreme feats that we’ve recently seen was likely created, produced, sponsored, and distributed by the corp that annually courses over five hundred tons of caffeine (and probably not any bull semen) through our veins.

  Six people have died participating in BDED Corp–funded stunts in the last few years, including a fourteen-year-old motorcycle racer run down by a competitor and Ueli Gegenschatz, who, after jumping from the Sunrise Tower in Zurich, floated to his death beneath the giant BDED Corp logo screenprinted on the underside of his parachute. After Ueli’s death, German communications professor and media theorist Norbert Bolz said BDED Corp has developed a marketing strategy that is, in a sense, without any competition, because no one else dares to elevate dangerous living to a program.

  Why? Or, what’s the point?

  BDED Corp has again and again said that their Space Dive is not a stunt, that we are not on the ledge of this teardrop twenty-four miles above Earth on account of advertising gimmicks, that their mission, their very existence as a modern global corporation, includes the imperative to “transcend human limits—a core extension of the company’s values.”

  A 2010 complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court claimed BDED Corp stole the idea of the Space Dive from a party promoter who pitched it to the company years ago as “marriage of daredevil, record-breaking ‘stuntsmanship’ and cutting-edge technology.” The promoter claimed the stunt would get any corporate sponsor up to $625 million worth of advertising.

  As far back as August 1938 a guy by the name of Dunkel, who billed himself as a “veteran stunt balloonist,” landed on the cover of Popular Science Monthly boasting he could fall from the stratosphere after being carried there in a “bomb-shaped gondola” tethered to a giant balloon. The 1938 article begins, “One of the most daring and fantastic stunts ever attempted—a twenty-one-mile parachute leap—is now being planned by a Cleveland, Ohio, dare-devil.” Dunkel estimated the stunt would cost $100,000. He planned to carry scientific equipment in the gondola, but clearly science was subordinate to the feat itself. He didn’t have any corporate sponsors lined up. He kept saying stunt. But then we got worked up into our Second World War and the Bomb overshadowed the bomb-shaped gondola and so Dunkel never fell. But maybe he was right not to shy away from the word stunt. Maybe the problem with our daredevil, the thing making us so uneasy up here on the ledge of the teardrop, is that he is not enough like the daredevils we have known and loved.

  With our old pal Evel Knievel there was never any reason to ask Why? when he jumped a motorcycle over a twenty-foot-long box of rattlesnakes or fourteen Greyhound buses or 141 feet of fancy fountain at Caesars Palace Hotel & Casino, the 450-pound Triumph Bonneville rumbling between Evel’s legs as they (man and machine) sailed between two forty-foot geysers spurting their good-luck welcome to suckers from every corner of the world. Presiding over everything at that particular stunt was a clone of The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the ancient Greek statue now housed in the Louvre. The clone of Winged Victory still perches on the Strip and guards the casino fountain and we snap selfies with her while stumbling around with our yards of margarita, but forty-five years ago, during Evel’s stunt, she kept her back turned to him and his Triumph, her marble head gone and her marble arms gone but her marble wings intact, a broken angel, a bit of foreshadowing about the price Evel would pay for trying to fly through those palace geysers, but also, in the precise sculpting of her rippling toga and the flight-strained feathers of her wings, a reminder that even twenty-three hundred years ago we humans had a sense of the overlap between violent action and absolute paralysis—the way right now we’re totally motionless on the ledge of a fiberglass teardrop in the stratosphere as the first part of an epic fall.

  Looking back at his whole life, in an interview published in Maxim just two weeks before his death, Evel pondered the ledge question: You can’t ask a guy like me why. I wanted to fly through the air. I was a daredevil, a performer. I loved the thrill, the money, the whole macho thing. All those things made me Evel Knievel. Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an ass not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death.

  Some years earlier Evel said, Being a hero in the United States of America is the shortest-lived profession that anybody could hope to participate in. Or hope not to participate in.

  Another corporation is reaping the advertising benefits of this great fall: a camera company whose slogan is Be a Hero. We’ll avoid this corp’s name out of fairness and because still we hope the Space Dive is not a stunt. This corp makes small cameras that get strapped to all sorts of athletes and animals and professionals and porn stars and average joes and janes, cameras made small to share points of view that have never been shared before, that most of us would never otherwise experience. Their innovation is in the small size of the camera and the consumer-friendly price point and the ease of sharing what the camera captures: every imaginable point of view. In this way the cameras are a sort of empathy system, a way to get us to quite literally see the point of view of another, of all the others when the cameras inevitably get small enough and cheap enough, a Digital Empathy Imaging System of Mankind. So, these little cameras—DEISM, we’ll call them—are strapped all over our daredevil and his teardrop and they are the magic portals by which we are on the ledge too.

  Here we are.

  Deism is a word we remember from our high school studies of the Enlightenment. In that context the word is about belief in something akin to a god—a creator—but one known not through divine revelations such as the Bible or Koran or a
ny amount of miracles or angels, just a sense of god understood through paying attention, looking around, and seeing. This is more or less what our little cameras—the DEISM—are about in their best iterations. Be a Hero is the slogan of DEISM Corp and their aim is to put every experience forever in the most present tense. With DEISM we get to see the world from the POV of a dog and see the world from the POV of a squirrel’s nut and see the world from the POV of a fireman saving a cat. We get to see the world from the POV of a whole lot of people fucking in a whole lot of interesting ways. And we get to stand on the step of a fiberglass teardrop and hear Joe invoke a guardian angel that Deist theology more or less repudiates. Well, alright. We will get to fall.

  FULL POV is the title of the Net video BDED Corp will eventually release that contains all the DEISM views of the fall, all at once. They mean that it is uncut recordings of our daredevil’s point of view, the points of views of all cameras on his body, throughout the fall. But the video’s title maybe also means FULL to describe the amount of POV rather than just the recording’s length, as if first-person or third-person POV can never be enough, that there is somewhere, somehow a FULL POV that is maybe every possible angle, that disregards physics and even time and gives us the most complete possible view of a scene from past and present and future, such that we feel not that we are just a single point viewing a scene but that we have fully inhabited every possibility of the scene, a kind of collective omniscience—the FULL POV of DEISM. Have we ever had a medium with such lofty aspirations? What you are reading now is called an essay.

  In sixteen months, DEISM Corp will get a thirty-second spot during the Super Bowl. And not just any spot, perhaps the most coveted commercial spot of all, just before the start of the halftime extravaganza. They will use the spot to showcase their video of our daredevil on the ledge. In the moment that spot airs we will become not just the 8 million of the Net stream and the tens of millions who will have replayed the thousands of Net videos of the fall, but also the 116 million watching and waiting for the Super Bowl halftime show. DEISM Corp will edit out Joe’s talk of guardian angels and leave only talk of what we put our faith in now: Start the cameras, says Joe, and then we are on the ledge and when the commercial ends with our daredevil falling toward Earth we’ll be transported to the fifty-yard line of MetLife Stadium and a chorus of children holding hands and singing beneath a downpour of hangdog fireworks at the start of the halftime extravaganza for Super Bowl XLVIII. The kids will sing a pop song: “Billionaire.” They will sing about being blinded by their names lit up bright on marquees around the world. They will sing: Oh, I … I swear the world better prepare. Prepare! And then PREPARE once more as they raise their little hands triumphantly, but this time the word will be accompanied by an offstage angelic chorus rising a few octaves higher than even the kids can manage. But the kids won’t finish the verse that everyone knows concludes with the kicker that gives the song its name: For when I’m a billionaire. That would be over the line, we know, to have children singing with an angelic chorus about the unfettered pursuit of gross wealth. But, fame? The aspiration of frivolous riches will be left unsung and we’ll have only the moment of the children belting about fame while behind them the pixels of a giant LED American flag flash in an approximation of the ripple of Old Glory’s fabric in wind.

  In 2014, BDED Corp will settle a lawsuit claiming that their slogan Gives You Wings constitutes false advertising. There is no known instance of BDED Corp formulations ever giving anyone wings and in fact right now we are experiencing BDED Corp’s Space Dive, which relies entirely on not having wings. You will not get wings from any of their ED formulations including Original, Total Zero, Red, Blue, Orange, Silver, Cherry, Lime, or F1, the Formula One race car flavor (unclear if it’s meant to be the flavor of a race car or licking a race car or just drinking the octane gasoline). As part of the settlement, the slogan will continue to be used and BDED Corp will give its customers up to thirteen American dollars each just to shut up about how drinking their product does not literally give them wings in a naturally growing or gene-altering or artificial/mechanical implantation way. But already lawsuits are pending in which drinkers claim the BDED Corp juice is physically unsafe. BDED Corp says that no more than five 250 milliliter cans should be consumed per day, though technically a caffeine overdose would not occur until consumption of the hundred and twentieth can. The lawsuits include cases of alleged blindness and full-on heart attacks resulting in deaths of avid drinkers. Maybe the BDED Corp juice really does try to live up to its slogan and maybe the human heart just cannot bear the burden of growing wings, and when the juice is gulped, there begins a rearrangement of nerves and the slight shift and elongation of ligaments in the shoulder but as soon as the human heart gets a notion that it might be a party to the growing of wings, it just fucking explodes. We are not meant to fly. We are the falling sort.

  The hoopla in recent days makes much of BDED Corp’s fall happening on the sixty-fifth anniversary of Chuck Yeager becoming the first human to break the sound barrier. He did it in an X-1 rocket plane. Our daredevil will do it with just his body and the suit-beast and us. But nobody mentions Eilmer the Flying Monk, who, just about exactly one thousand years ago today, took to a tower of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire with wings of willow strapped to his hands and feet. He gets the First Man in Flight award from many of our detectives of hidden history, but what Eilmer really did was have himself a good old-fashioned fall. If we were all to stand around watching Eilmer as he stood on the ledge of the abbey’s tower in the year of our Lord 1012, or better yet, if we were to somehow get DEISM’s FULL POV of the stunt way back in the year of our Lord 1012, we would see the cool wind tousling the hairy halo part of Eilmer’s pious tonsure and the cool wind making the bald part of his pious tonsure all bumpy like a goose’s ass, see each ripple in the fabric of his gray frock that is covered in no logo save the wooden crucifix dangling from his neck, see bound to his ankles and wrists with desperation twine the dried branches of willow now finished with all their weeping and formed like wings complete with hinges to flap and chicken feathers to flutter. In DEISM’s FULL POV of Eilmer’s crowning moment we would hear on the wind from neighboring Winchester Abbey the sound of four hundred pipes and seventy men squashing the twenty-six giant bellows to force air through the pipes to make the world moan and wobble. A bishop named Aelfeg has recently installed at Winchester Cathedral the world’s largest pipe organ and the echoing melodies of its powerful exaltations of the Lord daily grinds at Eilmer, who cannot stand to have his church overshadowed by the fancy, newfangled tech of a neighboring abbey. Or maybe Eilmer has just noticed how his monk pals have begun to depict the ascension of Christ in their art, the Messiah no longer carried to the heavens by angels as their paintings had shown for centuries, but now, as one historian puts it, “The Anglo-Saxons of Eilmer’s days were beginning to show Christ almost jet-propelled, zooming heavenward so fast that only his feet appear at the top of the picture, while the garments of his astounded disciples flutter in the air currents produced by his rocketing ascent.” So in Eilmer there is envy of technology and envy of divinity, a suspicion that there must be some sweet spot in their overlap. But also we know Eilmer likely read the Roman historian Tranquillus, who relates the death of a daredevil who donned wings to entertain Nero during a lull in gladiatorial bouts but, because of a technical malfunction, fell from the sky and crashed near the imperial couch and “bespattered the emperor with his blood.” Maybe Eilmer was just enamored of an old stunt. And what words did he have on his lips, who of his pals down in Ground Control invoked our guardian angel and what prayer—that oldest of wireless communications—did our monk pray?

  Maybe there has always only been the ledge question.

  “What with the violence of the wind and the eddies and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of the attempt,” related one of Eilmer’s monk pals about his winged stunt, “he faltered and fell, breaking and crippling both his legs.” And so
Eilmer never flew or fell again. And so Eilmer hobbled forever after.