Down Around Midnight (14 page)

But, nonetheless, I'd meant what I said. The dope business, in its way, a wonderland colorfully populated by entertaining sociopaths, charmers, charlatans, cutthroats, comedians, out-on-the-fringe adventure junkies, and other adrenaline freaks, had provided the raw material with which I had launched a career. And I couldn't blame people like Rick, bringing news from the crash site, if they shared in the delusion that I necessarily had something in common with the characters whose adventures I'd chronicled. As I pointed out in a magazine piece that brought me some national attention recently, no one is more incredulous to learn that I don't smoke dope than those characters themselves. It's like asking them to believe that Damon Runyon didn't drink or hang out at the track. But they get over it after a while.

I hadn't been carrying pot on the plane, but I'd been carrying the proceeds of something that smelled a lot like it. While in New York, I'd borrowed some money. Five thousand dollars. I needed a quick infusion of funds to keep construction of the house going, and there was only one friend I knew I could count on to have the necessary cash on hand. It was a legitimate loan. I paid him back. How he earned the money I can only speculate. He worked in what he liked to describe as “the entertainment business.” It was a description that the owner of Rick's recovered ounce would undoubtedly have found to be apt.

When I was wheeled into the emergency room, and they were about to scissor off my jeans, I asked if it would be possible to slide them off instead. Doctors seemed astonished, but were happy to oblige. I might have volunteered something stupid, like “this is my favorite pair.” I didn't know what they might cut through, though I suppose now, in hindsight, that they're trained to avoid things like pockets, nor did I want anyone rifling through the jeans in preparing to throw them out. In one pocket, I was carrying exactly fifty grams of cash—in hundreds that the paramedic had put there; in another, I could have been carrying something that didn't weigh more than a few.

The doctors didn't get very far with me before Mary found her way into the emergency room.

“Hey, baby,” I said, in a rush of excitement, lifting my head to greet her.

She placed her hand on my forehead, which made it effectively impossible for me to rise up off my back.

She said, “Don't do a lot of moving.”

It was a trick I'd never seen before. Almost effortless on her part, but with all kinds of mechanical advantage. A nursing move. It was impressive.

“Take my jeans,” I told her.

Smiling as though I were telling her how good it was to see her. We were all so hip in those days. I didn't have to say it twice.

D
uring the summer months, Cape Cod Hospital operates the busiest emergency room in New England. It treats up to four hundred patients a day. Some 85,000 patients are treated there on an annual basis. The current emergency room, in use since 1993, saw its millionth patient in 2007.

The hospital, founded in 1920, has had a dedicated emergency department since 1950. I was treated in what is now referred to as the old ER, the upgrade that went into operation in 1976. The hospital's disaster plan, under which key department heads, medical staff, and ancillary personnel are notified and instructed to report for emergency service, was not implemented the night of the crash, but only because the time of the crash made it unnecessary, according to Ann Williams, who was the hospital's assistant director of community affairs.

“It happened at shift change,” she told me recently, “and everybody was held.”

Williams, who the following year would assume the director's job, received a call at home from nursing supervisor Virginia McLeod, who told her, “We think there's been a plane crash.” Ten minutes later, McLeod called back saying the report had been confirmed. Williams arrived at the hospital at eleven-thirty and spent the next thirteen and a half hours handling inquiries. She said that in addition to dealing with the reporters gathered there, about twenty-five media people in all, she fielded “a thousand phone calls before one P.M.,” when she finally left for the day.

“My big job was to keep the press out of the emergency room,” she recalled.

Which didn't keep them from getting to me.

“This is summer,” Williams reminded me. “We had to find a room for you.”

It was on a table in the emergency room that I was notified that I had not been crippled for life. Up to that time, from the instant I stood up in the airplane, with my lower back telling me, “Stop right there,” I confronted the possibility that it could go the other way. I didn't need a medical student like Paul to tell me—and I didn't bother informing him—that the people he was talking about who “shouldn't be moved” included me. With every step I took, moving about the cabin, each kick of the door, every inch I put between me and the wreck, I fought against discovering the answer to the inevitable medical question: At what point does a spinal injury become a spinal-cord injury? As relieved as I was to be alive, lying there in the woods, as happy as I was an hour later joking with the firefighters who carried me out, I knew I was facing a moment of truth.
Can you feel that? How about that? Good. How does that feel?
By the time Mary walked into the emergency room, I'd gotten the news. I don't think I'd been X-rayed yet, but at some point after the pictures came back, she explained the meaning of an L5 fracture, the injury that had kept me guessing.

“A compression fracture of the fifth lumbar vertebra.”

“Compression fracture?”

“You broke your back. You'll be fine.”

Once I had been treated, Mary rolled me out of the ER, where I could light a cigarette without igniting the oxygen in use, and there in the hospital's main lobby, I met the assembled reporters.

“Sabbag refused to talk to anyone,” the
Boston Globe
reported. “His wife, by his side, said little more. ‘He's had a tough day. He was lucky' is all she would say.”

The morning after the crash, Mary and the friend who had accompanied her to the airport were eating breakfast in a Hyannis diner. Seated nearby was a group of reporters, some of whom Mary recognized from our encounter in the hospital lobby. Now, with their stories filed, they simply nodded hello. Gone was the interest they had shown earlier in getting her on the record. With the passage of a few hours, she told me, she was literally “yesterday's news.”

Even members of the press take themselves off the clock, and subsequent coverage of the crash would indicate that a sufficient number of journalists, writers as well as photographers, were on the job that morning. But Mary's observation is an interesting one and as good an introduction as any to a question that, while entirely hypothetical, nevertheless invites exploring: How would media coverage be different if the plane crash happened today?

In the present environment, one would see a difference, I think, not only in the scale of the response, but also in the occupational makeup of the personnel responding. Carried out of the woods today, it is reasonable to imagine, survivors would be met not simply by an array of satellite trucks but by a host of characters like would-be movie-of-the-week producers waving contracts for “life rights.” The hospital would no doubt be home to a legion of segment producers employed by daytime TV. Families of the survivors, hustling to lawyer up, would be looking not only for personal-injury specialists but show-business attorneys as well. They'd be hiring literary agents.

It is not to say that the response that night was in any way genteel or the activity anything short of chaotic. It is not to suggest that the press on hand wasn't acting like the press.

Paramedic William Smith, carrying the middle sister out of the woods, remembers “giving the finger to reporters” as they converged on him and his patient, and he told me it wasn't the first time he'd done so in the four years he'd been on the job. His colleague Robert Jenney, a veteran EMT at the time, can still recount in detail a fight he had with one particular member of the media, a reporter he knew by name, an on-air guy for Channel 5, the ABC affiliate in Boston. “I had a problem with him,” said Jenney, who retired in 1999 after more than thirty years in the fire department, explaining that he took the reporter on in defense of the youngest girl:

“Do you get turned on getting a picture of a ten-year-old all busted up?”

“Well, it's news, I have a right . . .”

“No, you don't have a right! Get out, or I'm calling the cops.”

Today, in many parts of the country, there are cops and maybe a few firemen who would be signing deals with the media.

In the frenzy's immediate outbreak, Ann Williams said, her major concern and that of others on the hospital staff was for Doris Parmenter. The pilot's widow was known personally to many of the people on hand. She managed the hospital thrift shop. (The thrift shop was situated off-site, taking donations on Main Street in downtown Hyannis.) One of the better-connected journalists covering the crash was Francis Broadhurst, the news director for local radio station WQRC, and through sources only he was able to access, Broadhurst was the one reporter who knew that George Parmenter had been flying the plane. Broadhurst had been acquainted with Parmenter and had been friendly with Ann Williams “for years,” having been involved with her in town politics in Barnstable, where Williams had served as chairman of the Finance Committee. Broadhurst, telling Williams what he knew, held on to the information until Doris Parmenter had been notified.

“If it happened today,” Broadhurst told me recently, “there'd be a convention on her lawn. There would be photographers sneaking into the emergency room and taking pictures. Journalism's changed.”

And with it, I think, something else has changed.

Tugging at the sleeves of every victim would be one of the insistent, altogether dysfunctional partners in the contemporary marriage of psychotherapy and the media.

 

 

I do not dismiss the value of therapy—I didn't question my fellow survivors about any help they might have sought—but I have trouble taking it seriously in the forum it has come to exploit. Individual therapy has measurable benefits, and I assume group therapy, in support of it, has its salutary effects. But therapy has lately transgressed the limits of the group, and grief and trauma counseling have gone public. Recovery today is entertainment.

In this, the age of information oversupply, the age of celebrity without delay, has the willingness to step forward opened us up to what is perhaps a more salubrious way of dealing with trauma? The experts tell me no. Such scrutiny so distorts the experience as to render any of the benefits of openness trifling. Talking does seem to come naturally at times, and in its way may be therapeutic, but such talk is not necessarily driven by a need for therapy; it's simply instinctive. Instinctive in certain circumstances. It's not instinctive in the company of strangers. War stories are rare even among intimates. Veterans, we know, don't talk to their spouses about combat. They don't share such memories with their children, not even, in my experience, when those children reach adulthood. All I know of what my father saw in the South Pacific I gleaned from the albums compiled by my mother of the photographs he had sent home with his letters, pictures more atmospheric of the Broadway musical of that name than of the drama that was playing out in places like Guadalcanal. War stories, when they are shared at all, are typically traded by comrades, understandable and fully explicable only when growing out of the common experience of brothers-in-arms. Coming from that guy sitting alone at the other end of the bar, they are a symptom of dissociative behavior.

“You run into guys, in various stages . . . they haven't left there yet,” my friend Kevin Roberts tells me.

I've known Kevin for some thirty years now. We've experienced a lot together, most of it good, some of it bad, the worst of it his. There's not a lot we don't talk about. “There” is Vietnam, where he served with the U.S. Marines about fifteen years before he and I met. In all the years we've been friends, we've never talked about that. When he and other veterans cross paths, they don't talk about it much either.

“ ‘When were you there, where were you?'—and that's about as far as it goes. It certainly never gets into combat.”

Calling upon such memories outside intimate circles is seldom rewarded, though there are circumstances in which doing so is entirely natural. In discussion of a plane crash reported in the news, or in discussion of air travel in general, I, for example, am not averse to bringing some perspective to the exchange of ideas.

“The reason she wants you to raise your seat back,” I might notify the argumentative passenger reclining in front of me, “is not for your safety, it's for mine. When the airplane crashes, and there's a pretty good chance it will . . .”

Stuff like that.

It's one of the few subjects on which my expertise is never challenged.

But opening up to the typical stranger or media personality, unbuttoning your shirt and letting your heart fall out before a television psychologist and the public at large, is neither instinctive in humans nor in any way natural and ultimately perverts the experience in a way that makes transcending it that much more difficult.

When I started looking back, one of the things that struck me as telling was that in over twenty-five years, none of us who had survived the crash (the three Michigan sisters being considered collectively) had been in contact with any of the others. I think that simply registering the thought shows how much things have changed. For on the most natural, human level, a reluctance to relive the experience, to subject it to the kind of public postgame analysis we bring to almost everything these days, doesn't seem unusual at all and never did, not to me or to the other survivors I talked to. Yet I believe it is unlikely that survivors today would similarly disperse never to see one another again. They would fall prey to external forces that didn't prevail at the time.