Key Grip

by Dustin Beall Smith

  I knew the risk, on that moonless March night in 1960, as I sat crammed behind the pilot, waiting to make my 152nd jump. It was the kind of stuff we instructors joked about every night in bars, when our students weren’t around. Creaming in, we called it, and buying the farm. I know now that I was risking my life. But if you’d asked me back then what risking my life meant, I’d have deflected the question with a cocky grin. At the age of nineteen, my notion of the future remained as opaque and featureless as the California desert a mile and a half below.

  …

  We’d taken off just after dusk from a nearby dirt airstrip, in a four-place Cessna 180. The aircraft, its right door and passenger seat removed, had been climbing steadily for twenty minutes. The whine of the Lycoming engine, combined with the staccato whap-whap-whap of the propeller, made casual conversation inside the cabin impossible. Hot exhaust swirled about in the turbulent air, its oily stink mixing with the odor of old upholstery and adding to the tension in my bowels.

  The last rays of sunlight had long since abandoned the high cirrus clouds, leaving night to settle on the horizon. From my back-seat window, I could just make out the lights of San Diego, eighty miles to the west, and I found myself staring at the city’s glow the way a child might gaze at the sliver of light beneath a bedroom door. God knows, looking straight down into the darkness brought little comfort. From that altitude, our intended target, a white canvas cross lit by two sets of car headlights, looked like a life raft floating on an ocean of ink.

  This was my first free fall at night, and the onset of darkess made me more aware of my usual pre-jump jitters. Increased vertigo; anxiety about dropping my flashlight in free fall; fear of collision with another jumper in the dark. I intended to jot down these observations later. As the plane continued to climb, I wondered how Hemingway would treat the material. Men waiting to jump. That was the gist of it. It just begged for the kind of brief, declarative sentences that could rocket a writer to immortality. Men waiting to jump . . .

  Bill Jolly, a veteran skydiver in his late thirties, sat on the floor next to the pilot, his back against the instrument panel. As I studied his rugged, impassive face for some sign that he shared my apprehension, he stifled a yawn with his hand. There it is, I thought. Men waiting to jump always yawn. No, that wasn’t it. Confronted with the jaws of death, men always yawn. No. A yawn is to a skydiver what spit is to a batter at the plate . . .

  By this time, I was yawning. So was Jimmy Lynn, the thirty-year-old, 275-pound karate expert who sat next to me on the back seat. Nerves. Little was known then about the behavior of the human body falling at terminal velocity, and even less about “relative work”—two or more bodies in free fall together.

  Understand that the free-fall part of a parachute jump takes place between the exit altitude (in this case, seventy-five hundred feet) and the recommended opening altitude (twenty-five hundred feet). On this particular night, we planned to free fall for one mile—thirty seconds—before opening our chutes. (Follow the sweep hand on a watch, if you need help imagining it.)

  The plane banked steeply, then leveled onto jump run. Jimmy Lynn, getting a nod from the pilot, slid forward on the seat and stuck his helmeted head out the door. His chin strap flapped wildly, and his bubble goggles shuddered atop his nose. Using the bottom edge of the doorway as a sighting device, he peered straight down.

  “Where are we?” he called out to the pilot. “I can’t see shit down there!”

  “Should be coming up on the target!” answered the pilot.

  Lynn looked again, then raised his hand. “Got it! Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think they could have made it a little smaller?”

  I tapped the glass on my altimeter, checking that the needle wasn’t stuck. The bulky instrument was strapped to my chest-mounted reserve chute and would be my only means of knowing when to pull the ripcord. I tested my flashlight—essential for reading the altimeter—then tightened the chin strap on my Bell helmet. My fingers trembled—something I hoped Jolly wouldn’t notice.

  “Right ten!” yelled Lynn.

  The pilot kicked right rudder, making a flat correction of ten degrees.

  “Ten more! Ten more!”

  Again the plane jerked right.

  Lynn was screaming now. “No! Twenty! Twenty! Twenty!”

  The pilot glanced over his shoulder, eyeballing me and smirking. I swatted his arm in response, which made him laugh. I welcomed his levity, wished it would spread. You had to laugh. Men waiting to jump must laugh.

  Bill Jolly wasn’t laughing. Indeed, he looked quite uneasy. Maneuvering to a kneeling position on the floor, he switched on his flashlight, then signaled me to do the same. I nodded, giving him a thumbs-up and winking. Still, his anxiety had unsettled me. I checked that my ripcord handle was secure in its elastic housing, then fingered the pins on the reserve chute to be sure they were seated. I tested the Capewell releases that connected the parachute to the harness, and felt the snap connectors on my leg straps. Everything was set. I’d done all I could. There was only the jumping now. I took a deep breath. We’d be in the bar in an hour, I told myself. Indulging in raucous laughter, scoring chicks.

  “Ten more!” Lynn clutched his flashlight close to his body.

  Were we that far off course? I wanted to see for myself, but Lynn’s enormous bulk prevented it. Stuck in the corner and squirming to get some leg room, I set my flashlight on the seat behind him and tried to raise myself up to see.

  Just then, without warning, Lynn yelled, “Cut!”

  The pilot obediently throttled back, and the plane mushed as it slowed. Then, Lynn dove out the door—alone.

  That wasn’t the plan. We were supposed to go out together.

  The stall warning sounded. Jolly muttered something and waved at me to follow, as he too dove out.

  I felt like a sprinter still crouched on his heels after the sound of the gun. I squirmed out from behind the pilot, heaved myself forward into a standing crouch, duck-waddled a few steps to the door, and toppled out into the night.

  When my body left the slipstream, I caught sight of the pilot staring down at me, his face lit green by the instrument panel, as he was sucked up into the stars.

  I didn’t realize I’d forgotten my flashlight until a few seconds after I stabilized in free fall. This oversight now seems impossibly reckless, a foreshadowing of the years I would spend addicted to drugs and alcohol; an omen of future relationships carelessly entered and painfully abandoned; a portent of my episodic life. It steals breath from my narrative, tempts me to quit writing it. But as I continue to recall that night long ago, I find myself less disturbed by my rash, impulsive carelessness and more impressed by the faith that allowed me to hang in there as I fell.

  My mind became serenely clear. It was not going to be any other way than this. Time could not be wasted in thinking it might be. There could be no reaching back into the aircraft or looking away from what was happening. Like the time, ten years down the road, when a doctor would tell me that my second child had been born “Mongoloid.” Or the night, eighteen months later, after I’d come home from being with him in the hospital, when a nurse would call to say he’d died. Or the night I zipped my father into a body bag. Or the morning I photographed my mother’s corpse.

  Clarity.

  Falling face-to-earth through the night, I was ruled by gravity and time. I had to blink repeatedly to make sure my eyes were open. After a few moments, I could see the shiny steel housing around my altimeter. But the instrument’s face remained dark, its phosphorescent needle too dim to read.

  I felt the uprushing cushion of air support my body and heard the flapping of my chest strap against the harness. I hadn’t fallen for ten seconds before my eyes began to tear beneath my goggles.

  Executing a flat right turn, I searched for the target. Nothing. I shook my head, trying to clear the tears, and turned back to the left. Nothing. Once, I thought I glimpsed it from the corner of my eye, but then it vanished in the darkness.r />
  The horizon was black, San Diego gone.

  When would it seem that dark again? In a sweat lodge on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. So dark in there, I will have to shut my eyes. A darkness that will illuminate the black hole of failure: ten thousand bar napkins on which I’d scribbled brilliant insights. The decades spent laboring as a key grip on movies. The years wasted, pretending that I knew how to love. The truth endangered by my fear of it. The laziness. The inspiration pissed away. The countless times I told this very story in bars, giving it away to the wind:

  So, there I am, falling through the night. I could pull the ripcord right now, of course, but then I’d drift for miles over the desert and it’d take them forever to find me, and everyone would think I panicked. Fuck it, I tell myself, keep going. Then suddenly I remember that Lynn and Jolly are below me. I sure as shit don’t want to come crashing through their open canopies at 125 miles per hour, so I go into a tracking mode, like this [I jump off my barstool and assume a delta position, like a ski jumper in midair]: I’m traversing the ground at about 90 miles per hour—which doesn’t mean I’m falling any slower—and I keep tracking until I figure there’s enough distance between Jolly and Lynn and me, right? Okay, then I relax a little. But I don’t like all this blackness—it makes me feel antsy as hell—so I collapse one arm, and I do a half-barrel roll and extend my arm again, like so, and just lie there on my back, looking at the stars. Seeing Orion makes me feel better. Time’s gone by, but how much? I flip back over, face down, and tell myself again, No way in hell I’m going to make an ass of myself by opening high. But then I start to think, Shit, if I haven’t seen the target yet, I must be way out in the tules, which means they’re going to have to come looking for me anyway, so . . .

  By this time, I’ve kept my audience on the hook way past the time I was supposed to pull the ripcord. I’m standing there on the barroom floor, arms and legs spread as if I were in free fall. A few people are looking at me like I’m already dead. Then I uncork the part they want to hear:

  . . . so, I tell myself, It’s better to be seen as a coward than to cream in without a word. And I reach across my chest, take hold of the ripcord handle, and pull.

  Even now, I can feel the sleeved parachute peeling off my back, and the nylon suspension lines ripping free of the rubber stows. I tense my shoulders, bracing for the opening shock. When it comes, I grip the harness, anticipating the second and final opening.

  And then, just as the chute breathes fully open, my feet gently touch the ground, and I find myself standing next to a ball of tumbleweed.

  The chute collapses onto the desert floor. I stare ahead into the night.

  10. No Feeling of Falling

  FROM MY CURRENT PERSPECTIVE as a college professor, it startles me to remember that in the autumn of 1958, after nine weeks of binge drinking, class cutting, and compulsory ROTC drills, I blew off my first semester of college and took a train back east to live with my parents and two younger siblings in a small town forty miles north of New York City. I announced to my family that I had become an existentialist. In what I see now as penance for wasting my father’s money, I refused to reoccupy my upstairs bedroom and chose instead to camp on a thin straw mat in a corner of the basement. There I would sit in half-lotus for hours at a time, reading Camus and Kierkegaard, drinking strong Darjeeling tea, and smoking un-filtered Chesterfields. My mother, delighted that I was reading philosophy, encouraged me to read aloud long sections of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness while she cooked dinner. My father, on the other hand, seemed to take my new philosophical assertiveness as a threat. When I informed him, for instance, that free love was the cool new thing, he told me, “It might interest you to know that your mother and I kicked up our heels a time or two before you were born.”

  Yeah, right, I thought.

  My reading had primed me to defy the ticky-tacky, appliance-happy, postwar American Zeitgeist. I aspired to and embraced the Beat life—the rebellious, angst-ridden celebration of rootless America—but my father’s comfortable living as a commercial artist and my mother’s role as artist and homemaker gave me little to rebel against. The nineteenth-century house, decorated with their paintings, lithographs, sculptures, and drawings, exuded an atmosphere of creativity and taste. They owned only one car and hardly any modern appliances. The house had no shower, just two small bathtubs. We almost never watched TV, and dinner table discussions resembled seminars, with subjects ranging from presidential politics (Ike shouldn’t have beaten Adlai a second time) to art (photography threatened to replace the canvas) to sports (could anyone ever top that Willie Mays catch?).

  This engaged family atmosphere, and my father’s seemingly effortless work-at-home lifestyle, created a problem. I needed him to be a weary, briefcase-toting commuter who went to work in a gray flannel suit every day, and because he wasn’t, I was forced to respond to his constant presence in a rude and petulant way that betrayed, with its clumsy resentment, an underlying love and admiration. Clearly he was leading an enviable life, but I had no clue how he had arrived at it.

  After I dropped out of college, I saw that my hard-won life experience—two high school summers spent mimicking Kerouac by hitchhiking back and forth across the country, holding an assortment of odd jobs, hopping freight trains, and getting jailed for vagrancy—had no value on an adult résumé. I was supposed to get a real job now, but the jobs available to high school graduates did not square with my romanticized selfimage. How could a Beat existentialist stoop to working as a clerk at Macy’s? I needed a guide to the real world, but my father knew nothing about résumés, personnel agencies, or help-wanted ads. My mother might as well have been living in the nineteenth century. The youngest child of a stock broker, she had never held a full-time job outside the home.

  It didn’t help that, having been sent away to private school on a scholarship at age fourteen, I knew almost no one in my hometown. My former classmates, most of them from New York City and Boston, had all gone off to college, where, unlike me, they remained. My high school girlfriend lived in the city, only an hour’s train ride away, but with my confidence gone, my libido was in hiding. I simply couldn’t get off my mat to go see her.

  Every night, I assured my parents that the next day I would catch the first train to New York City and ship out to Europe on a freighter, as I had been threatening to do for months. I could count on my mother to respond kindly: “I know you will, dear.” But not my father. Though he made few trips into New York himself—and then only to visit the major museums—he pressed me daily to “buckle down and do it.”

  “I’m going tomorrow, Dad. Take it easy.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” he would ask. “You said the same thing yesterday! And the day before.”

  “Don’t worry, man,” I would tell him. “I’ve scoped it out. I’m going tomorrow.”

  It got so that I even convinced myself: tomorrow I would do it. But every morning, I would wake up with a terrible sinking sensation and go right back to sleep. I developed a persistent headache. One day dragged into the next and a new year rolled around. I couldn’t sleep, and I could make no sense of my waking life. I’d been eighteen years old for nine months, legally adult and free, but I couldn’t get out of the basement.

  …

  Then, one evening in late January 1959, after I’d been home for three months, my father ventured into the cellar. He seemed more upbeat than usual, or maybe less pained at the sight of me. He wore a sweater and slippers and clenched a lit pipe between his teeth. Approaching my straw mat with the prudence of a lion tamer, he tossed me the most recent issue of The New Yorker, folded open to the “Profiles” page.

  “This might be an interesting avenue of approach,” he said. Without waiting for my response, he returned upstairs to have an evening cocktail with my mother. I stared at the article, titled “No Feeling of Falling.” A crudely drawn illustration depicted a broad-shouldered man wearing a football helmet, bubble goggles, and two parachute
s—one on his back and a smaller one on his chest.

  Grudgingly I read the first two sentences: “Jacques André Istel, a twenty-nine-year-old French-American with a Princeton education and a distinguished family background of banking and international finance, is the nation’s leading parachutist. It is scarcely too much to say that Istel is the parachute movement in the United States.”

  I stood up from my mat and went upstairs to sit on the living room sofa, where the light was better for reading. My sister and brother, when they saw me, began laughing and playing chopsticks on the piano, but I hardly noticed their antics. I learned that Jacques Istel lived with his beautiful wife, Claudia, and his business partner, Lew Sanborn, in a secluded twenty-seven-room hilltop mansion in Bedford, New York, a town that just happened to be only four miles down the road. The writer pointed out that despite Istel’s family wealth, he had gained real-world experience by hitchhiking, working odd jobs, and getting into trouble. His thirst for adventure had proved nearly inexhaustible, leading him as a youth into all sorts of delinquent and attention-getting behavior. (At age nine, while playing a game he called “bombardier,” he broke all 175 panes of glass in his uncle’s greenhouse.) He later became a Marine Corps lieutenant in Korea, and in recent years, a combination of rebelliousness and fastidious discipline had propelled him past many obstacles to a position of prominence in the international parachuting world (whatever that was).

  As I continued to read, my headache went away and I felt unusually alert. The thirteen-page profile alluded to the military aspects of parachuting and to international parachute competition, and it portrayed the United States as fertile ground for this as-yet-unrecognized sport. The profile writer, Robert Lewis Taylor, concluded that Istel “feels that he is exploring a vast and silent new medium, the deep blue well of the sky, and who knows what may come of it?”