“Let’s do this.”
The canopies closed. The engines were turned on, their grinding whine making it hard to think. A few minutes passed and then Tupper taxied us to the takeoff runway. He waited for clearance and pushed the throttle down. In a moment, we were down the runway and up above the Pacific. Tupper switched the radio over to Seattle air traffic control and we headed south. We moved through the sky to about 21,000 feet. I nodded my head in an ecstatic rhythm. I was a child again. “This is so cool, this is so cool” was all I could say. We headed south passing over Everett, where Shibaz lives with his wife and kids. Tupper squawked over the radio.
“There’s Shibaz’s house. Hey, Shibaz, whose car’s in the driveway? I’d be worried.”
I learned later this is the oldest Navy pilot joke, but I’d never heard it before. Maybe it was the altitude, but I let out a giddy laugh.
“That’s hilarious.”
I was feeling pretty good. Here I was, flying in my dad’s plane, no sickness and no nausea. We passed over Boeing Field and Sea-Tac Airport. In the distance was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Farther still was a glint at the top of a mountain.
Tupper spoke into the radio.
“Okay, that’s Mount Hood in the distance. That’s Mount Rainier over there.” He paused for a moment. “And this is my ass.”
The cockpit filled with flatulence.
“Sorry about that.”
We continued south toward the Columbia River on the Washington and Oregon border. Seattle air control had us drop to 10,000 feet. Tupper came back on the radio. “Okay, time for the FOD check.”
Tupper put the plane in a slight dive and then pulled the stick back, sending us upward. A screw and some small pieces of metal floated up from the cockpit floor. Tupper grabbed the biggest piece and then leveled off. I began to feel something different, spaciness and queasiness in the belly. Tupper did a G-force warm-up for the flight. He turned the plane 90 degrees to the left and then 90 degrees to the right. This was supposed to increase blood pressure and prep us for more G force to come. I survived the twists and the turns, but bile was creeping up my throat.
Tupper lowered the plane to 5,000 feet and gave a last instrument check. There was one major problem; the radar altimeter—the calculator of air altitude that my father flew without on his final flight—wouldn’t turn on, a malfunction that would scrub a low-level flight. For a few minutes, it looked like the flight would be over before it began. But after a series of turn-ons and turn-offs, the radar altimeter light clicked green.
Tupper descended to 500 feet over the Columbia River near the foothills of the Cascades. He gunned the jet up and then sharply to the left. We were soon flying upside down. I stared deep into an ice pond perched on top of an 8,000-foot peak. Tupper came across the radio.
“Get a good look. I bet no man has stood where you’re looking.”
And then we were right side up. And then we were on our left side. And then we were back on our right side. We bent around a mountaintop close enough that I could count pinecones on the trees. I focused forward. We swooped down and all of a sudden there were sheer canyon cliffs on three sides. Tupper clicked on.
“If we were in a Cessna, we’d be dead men.”
He paused for effect as the canyon wall in front of me moved closer. The radar altimeter started beeping.
“Fortunately, we’re in a jet.”
Tupper pulled the stick back and the Prowler bucked skyward. We cleared the ridge and the beeping stopped. But not for long. Tupper glided us in and out of canyons and cliffs, the beeping altimeter providing a syncopated accompaniment. At one point, a thought came into my head: is this all completely necessary? VR-1355 has a purpose; all the twisting and turning mirrors evasion tactics Prowler pilots use when more nimble and lethal fighters are pursuing them. But Tupper was basically done flying; this was a joy ride, staged for my benefit. I alternately loved every second of it and also wondered whether this kind of flying is what took Dad away from me.
The thought lingered only for a moment. I began to lose consciousness. Well, first came the vomiting. As we skirted the 10,541-foot top of Glacier Peak and then dipped into a valley, the bile burned up through my windpipe. I flipped off my mask and booted a spectacularly bright yellow fluid into my airsickness bag.
It wasn’t a lot, but the activity sucked away my life force. I entered an awake coma. Tupper took us into a different canyon and the altimeter began chirping again. But this time, there was no angst, just a vague feeling that if we flew into the side of a mountain at least that would put an end to my misery.
I watched the rest of the flight with a detached third-person feeling. Sweat began dripping down my arms and legs. Tupper gunned the Prowler over the Sauk River low enough that I could see the waves from the floppy-hatted fishermen. We were going 540 miles per hour, at roughly the altitude Dad was at before he crashed. The radar altimeter ticked off again, and in my hazed state I had an obvious thought: “Boy, that radar altimeter would have come in handy for Dad.”
We headed for home. Whidbey’s Ault Field could be seen in the distance and Tupper put the jet into a shit-hot break. We flew over the runway at about 450 knots—100 knots above the speed limit—and banked to the left at 4.5 Gs and a 90-degree angle. I tried the HICC maneuver, but didn’t get much air. Tupper then chopped the throttles and applied the Prowler’s speed brakes to bring us below 250 knots so he could lower the landing gear. The gear and flaps were extended and he slowed the Prowler to about 135 knots and brought us toward Earth. We glided down toward the concrete. I let out an exhausted breath of relief. It was over.
But then the nose rose and Tupper went to full power. His mic went back on.
“I need to work on my touch-and-gos.”
We circled back around Whidbey. I saw the same things my father would have seen: cows in a pasture, the white caps of the ocean, my elementary school and the peaked roof of the Navy chapel. But the catharsis I was looking for wasn’t there, not that I could put my finger on what exactly I was looking for. After four or five touch-and-gos, Tupper set the Prowler down quietly and we taxied back to the hangar. He turned off the engines, and they whined slowly to a stop. He pressed a button and the canopy opened. I immediately began to feel better, gulping in the ocean air. I was helped down the steps and peeled off my helmet. Someone joked about my hippie hair. I threw my arms around Tupper and Sherm and posed for pictures. We headed into the hangar, where I stripped off my sweat-soaked gear. I had not shat myself.
There was a post-flight brief that I remember nothing about. A few minutes later, I walked past the Prowler memorial and got into my car. I wish I could say that I stopped and touched Dad’s name again, but I didn’t. I drove back to Sherm’s, oblivious to everything—the flashing light indicating I was nearly out of gas, the left on red I took near the base. The flight had sucked out all my energy, all my pain, and all my joy.
I slept for the rest of the day, waking once when I thought I heard the beeping of the plane’s radar altimeter. It was just a garbage truck. I spent a lot of time thinking of the line between recklessness and joy, the infinitesimal space between shit-hot flying and mortality. I wondered if the risks Tupper took that day were for my benefit or for his.
Over that summer, we talked for hours about other things—kids, wives, and politics—but never about our flight. But then months later, somewhere at a noisy bar, maybe Jacksonville, maybe Pearl Harbor, Tupper put his glass down.
“When you fly, you’re always looking to do something perfect. But usually you fuck something up, miss something, or the plane is broken or your crew isn’t there for you. I never had the perfect flight pilots talk about.”
He slung a drunken arm around my shoulder. “But that low-level, VR-1355, that was my perfect flight. You saw my perfect flight.”
Tupper’s face broke into a smile. I wanted to believe him.
Cha
pter Twenty-Eight
I called Mom a few weeks after my flight and told her I wanted to drive out to Michigan and sift through Dad’s things, maybe sit with her for a formal interview. Her response was chipper, in language cadged from TV commercials.
“Bring it on. Let’s do it. ”
I was wrong-footed by her happy talk and enthusiasm to discuss our terrible years. I drove to Flint and began questioning my whole narrative. Maybe she had always been the sweet woman whom everyone loved. Maybe I’d just been a bad son, giving her grief and heartache when I needed to lessen her burden. Maybe I was remembering everything exactly wrong.
Things thawed quickly between us after I moved out of the house. I’d see her two or three times a year and it would be fine. Mom marveled at my academic success and then my young career. She framed my first articles and hung them in my old bedroom where I used to hide from her. The years passed and I became her first call when she needed some instant courage.
Terry joined the Army as a second lieutenant after college, emulating Dad in a way that I couldn’t imagine. She was sent to Kuwait just after the Gulf War started in 1991. Mom was hysterical, weeping on the phone, terrified she was going to lose another loved one.
“I won’t survive it, Stephen. I won’t survive it.”
I took the train from Chicago to Flint to help her ride it out. Thankfully, the war ended quickly. She dropped me at the train station and told me she was lucky to have a son like me. I brushed off her words, telling her that I was glad to help, but on the train back I cracked open a celebratory Budweiser and stared out the window, turning her compliment over in my mind like a new treasure. It was as if all the years of fighting had never happened.
Her own world remained small and contained. Nancy urged her to go back to school—the government would pay for it—but she put it off, claiming that Christine needed her at home. Christine graduated from high school in 1995 and headed to the University of Michigan. I feared Mom would go to pieces living alone. But Mel died and her mother had nowhere to go. Mom took her in, a selfless act that gave her somebody to talk to. Eventually, she regretted the kindness—living with her eighty-year-old neurotic mother aged her before her time—but it eased my mind.
She eventually got a part-time job working in the Ralph Lauren section of a Flint department store, her first job in over thirty years. Sometimes I would pass through the Midwest for work, and I’d drive up to the Genesee Mall and surprise her. Her eyes would fill with tears and she’d clutch me tightly, her nails digging into my ribs like a drowning child grasping a rescue buoy.
But then I hit thirty-six, Dad’s age when he crashed. I had dabbled with my grief and loss, mostly on November 28, the anniversary of Dad’s death, pushing it away the rest of the year. Denial was less of an option as I aged. Anything could set me off. I was on assignment in a faceless city killing time on its generic boardwalk when I saw a black-haired young man helping his little boy pedal without training wheels. I burst into tears. I started going to Army-Navy games in Philadelphia and the Meadowlands whenever I could. The sight of the academy brigade marching onto the field filled me with pride and then sobs that I’d try and stifle in a press box bathroom stall. Still, I went back year after year. One night in 2003 or 2004, I caught the Denzel Washington submarine flick Crimson Tide on cable and was fine until the soundtrack started bleating “Eternal Father,” the Navy hymn played at Dad’s memorial service. I wept for an hour.
The more I thought about Dad, the less I wanted anything to do with Mom. I replayed my childhood but began looking at it differently, a director sifting through footage shot by the second unit. Now I didn’t see our long-ago battles as war between two superpowers. I walked the streets in my Brooklyn neighborhood staring at all the happy moms with their perfect kids in $500 strollers and was struck by a simultaneously banal and profound thought: Wait a second. She was the adult and I was the child. I was a boy with a dead father. Was screaming that I was ruining her life helpful? Did she really think that was right?
So I cut her off. Actually, it was more benign neglect. I stopped returning her calls the same day. Then I waited three days. Sometimes, I didn’t call back at all. I lost interest in her squabbles with her mother and sister. I let the burden of Mom pass to Christine and Terry. My relationship with Christine remained close and important to me even if we didn’t talk or see each other very often. That childhood bond, me looking out for her and her loving me in return, couldn’t be broken.
Things with Terry were more complicated. Being only eleven months apart, we waged a low-intensity conflict with each other for our first eighteen years over everything from Star Trek versus football on TV to who was Christine’s favorite sibling. By high school, we were exhausted with each other.
We didn’t bridge the gap as adults. Our temperaments were always different. She was controlled and quiet. Mom always thought there was a happy carefree part of her that shut down when Dad died and never returned. I was the opposite, a jokey drama queen always playing the fool. We’d go skiing together and the old fault lines would emerge as Terry, a former all-conference skier, tried to goad me down double black diamond runs by questioning my manhood. She’d roll her eyes at my hesitation and call me a wuss. I’d pout, wondering aloud why she was surprised by my lack of coordination after forty years of front-row observation. At the time, she owned a Range Rover, a Miata, and a motorcycle. One day at Mount Bachelor, I muttered under my breath that she was the real man of the family.
“What did you say?”
“Uh, nothing.”
We were just wired differently. But we were there for each other when we had to be. In 1993, she stayed with me when she came to Washington, D.C., for a gay rights demonstration, particularly heroic since she was still an officer in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” Army. We didn’t talk about her private life, but we went to the Mall and looked at the AIDS quilt and walked for hours. We didn’t say much, but I knew it meant a lot to her that I was by her side.
During my divorce, she flew out to Boston and helped keep me upright when I had no desire to do that. She was the first member of my family to call my ex an asshole. Whether it was true or she meant it didn’t matter. I was still grateful.
I often wondered what Dad meant to her, or if she ever thought of him. Maybe she had put him away, the pain too great. But I was wrong. In 2013, Terry and her partner, Bari, prepared for the birth of their son. They arranged to have the Cesarean section on January 6, a Sunday. When the doctor asked why that day, Terry told her it was our father’s seventieth birthday. A photo of Dad from flight school was kept in their room during the delivery.
Mom moved to Port St. Lucie, Florida, to escape Michigan’s winters. A year later, a hurricane bore down on Florida and an evacuation order was issued. Mom was petrified to drive north with all the fleeing traffic. It was Terry who flew down and drove her to safety, not me.
I wasn’t proud of myself. I didn’t have the courage to have an actual conversation with her about these things, so she was left to wonder why her son was doing the slow fade. I did the minimum—calling on birthdays and Christmas and visiting once or twice a year—just enough so she had to ask herself if maybe it was all just in her head. Part of me reveled in leaving her alone with her doubts. But, mostly, I was ashamed.
I called her early in 2008 and casually dropped into conversation that I wanted to write something about Dad. There was a momentary pause, and then she squealed with delight.
“Oh, you go, boy! That sounds wonderful! I am so proud of you. I’ll go through my phone book and think if I come up with names for you.”
I was confused. We had not talked about Dad for more than forty-five minutes in the past thirty years. Now she was fired up that I was going to write about him?
“You write what you want to write. You’re owed that much.”
The year 2008 slowly rolled by. I watched with everyone else as Barack
Obama took over our lives. He was everywhere in my Brooklyn neighborhood. His posters hung in wine bars and his face jumped out from T-shirts on toddlers rushing off to preschool conflict resolution seminars (or so I imagined).
As Obama and John McCain received their parties’ nominations, my heart filled with dread. I’d been voting Democrat since I was twenty-two, but this was different. There are few things I knew with certainty that Dad would have done if he had lived. One would have been voting for John McCain, a fellow Annapolis grad and Navy flier. So I would do it for him. That seemed the least I could do.
But it wasn’t that simple. I remembered my Chicago years, laboring for black candidates in lost causes, not far from Barack Obama’s home. I remembered the tears I shed when they lost. When I worked for Alan Dixon, I had, inexplicably, helped draft the first Senate prayer given by a Muslim, Wallace Mohammed. There was a connection there, too.
I had friends who worked on Obama’s staff and swore by him. But I was never a fan of a 2008 Obama candidacy; the Navy brat in me wasn’t able to see past him as a line jumper, vaulting from lieutenant to admiral. I was supposed to profile Obama in 2004 for a magazine, but it fell through. I always regretted it—partly out of egotism, but also because I wondered if maybe I would see what others saw if I’d met him.
I followed the campaign without joy. McCain seemed like a lost, tragic hero more than a plausible president. Watching him give his St. Paul acceptance speech, I was struck with sadness—his moment had been 2000 and that seemed long ago.
Still, John McCain felt like kin in some sense. I mentioned to a few friends that I was considering voting for him, and this admission was met with stony silence or the kind of condescending New York chuckle that greeted the revelation that I really liked the film Love, Actually.
The Magical Stranger Page 23
