Tangent

Tangent

Life is really kind of funny, ya know? Like how many unexpected things come up and slap us on the face -- almost like right out of the blue -- except maybe we've been setting out little breadcrumbs all along the way. When you look at it that way, well, that little slap on the face almost seems inevitable, kind of like we planned it that way. That would almost make a weird kind of sense if we were actually smart enough to pull something like that off. Yet it's funnier still how many of these consequential slaps remain just out of sight -- and then at just the wrong moment, they strike. We go through life and never hear anything from them, and -- like meteors that narrowly miss the earth -- sometimes our little breadcrumbs cruise on by and we remain blissfully unaware of how utterly close we've come to annihilation.

Or...we come full circle and trip over our trail of breadcrumbs and despite all our so-called smarts, we remain in no position to effect any sort of positive outcome. That's just life I suppose, yet I've always been a little more proactive about the things I am aware of to let even the littlest things slip by. But there's a catch here, and it's a biggie: you have to be, at the very least, aware of the world unfurling around you. If you aren't...well then...you have no one to blame but yourself -- even if you aren't a total control freak.

Which, of course, we all are. Yet in a way being a control freak has contributed to the nature of our success, as well as more than a few of our personal failures along the way -- but that, too, is just life. After all, everyone has to be something, so why not be a control freak?

Yet through it all, I keep coming back to the idea of circles.

Yeah, circles.

But cut me some slack here, because while I'm not exactly sure where I'm going I have a feeling it's someplace interesting. Circles are like that, I guess.

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Didn't Elton John write something about taking me to the pilot for control? Yeah, that one. Take me to the pilot of your soul. You get the drift -- of the song, I mean? Well, I look back on all that time in college and think I wanted to get a handle on the whole soul thing, and I did right up to the exact point in time when my brother was killed in Southeast Asia, on a dark and stormy night all his own. I know that's when I first started thinking about circles, anyway.

See...my brother was a full-fledged member of the war corp, yet I was well on my way to becoming some kind of rock 'n roller when I got news that his life had reached an unexpected end. He'd been flying off carriers in A-4 Skyhawks; he'd been flying one of the very first missions in early '66 to go after shipping in Haiphong Harbor -- when a Russian SAM removed him from the ledger.

There was a place I used to go up north of the Golden Gate, and I drove out to that cold little beach after my dad called to let me know I didn't have a brother anymore. Lost out there in a fog, I tried to picture him alone in the middle of the night in one of those jets, here one second and gone the next -- literally just gone -- and then all these other memories of him came back in a dull roar that maybe sounded a little like surf out there in the mist. Throwing the football in the backyard with him, my fingers so cold they hurt and smoke from a million wood stoves hanging in the air. Learning to drive with him by my side, all patience and so full of confidence because he was such a good teacher. Such a good friend. Maybe that's what big brothers are supposed to be, in the world as it's supposed to be, anyway. Friends. Role models. And sure, yeah, teachers. And Doug was all those things. I was lucky, and even then I knew it.

Because when I was a spud I had friends whose big brothers were bullies, who we avoided like the plague. You know the type, I'm sure, maybe even if you were one. But sitting out in the fog on a cold rock with Pacific tides rolling in all I could see in my mind's eye was some kind of missile warning light blinking red and then a few last seconds of dawning awareness -- that my brother knew his life was about to end, that the light he had carried through his life was about to go out, and I wondered what he thought and felt in those last few seconds of his life. Work the problem? Fight the inevitable until the very end? I'd never know, of course.

Because a couple of hundred pounds of high explosive had turned him into purple rain, little bits of death slipping into the ooze and out of my life. One more point of light switched off in a sea of flickering stars disappearing in one black hole after another.

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I was playing keyboards a lot back then, kind of a college side gig to earn money for pizza. But the group I was with had cut a second album and we were getting a reputation. And that's when I showed up for a gig with my long hair long gone. I was, I told them that afternoon, joining the Navy, headed up to Washington State for OCS and then, hopefully, on to flight school. I was following in my brother's footsteps, you see. Walking along the remains of his circle.

I remember the looks of stupefied disbelief on the faces of people I'd called friends for more than a few years, then the sense of betrayal in their downcast, red as stoned eyes. I wasn't war corp, they cried. I was one of them. How could you do such a thing...?

I had a girlfriend, of course. Joyce. Joyce of the long red hair and deep green eyes, her batik skirts that always swept the floor. Patchouli. I remember clouds of patchouli most of all when I thought about her. I loved her, of course. As a matter of fact, she taught me how to love. Not the mechanics but the soul-searching embrace of love. Probably the best song on our last album together was all about her, about the way she moved, about the way she made me feel inside when she smiled at me just so. She was a light acoustic number, all gentle chords wrapped up in little love knots, and I always felt closest to her when her music came to me.

I had a little green Porsche back then, a new 911E I'd picked up a few weeks before all this went down. I bought the car with the money from the album, and Joyce picked it out. In a way I guess I always thought it would be our car -- because I couldn't imagine life without her. She was my circle if that makes sense.

I can still remember throwing a few bags in the front boot and getting behind the wheel of our car, looking around at the life I'd had, at the life I was turning away from. Driving away from familiar streets I turned on more time and got on the I-5 Northbound, bound for Someplace I'd Never Been Before.

Two days followed two days of thinking about how much I wanted to kill the people who'd killed my brother. Two days to come to terms with the fact that I'd already started to hate the person I was becoming.

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NAS Whidbey Island became my home after Berkeley, especially after doing hard time in OCS and then Pri-Fly in Pensacola. Like my brother, I went into attack aircraft, in my case the A-6E Intruder, and after my initial squadron orientation and readiness training ay Whidbey I was assigned to VA-165 and sent to Southeast Asia. I won't dwell on this part of the circle but in my mind I avenged my brother by plastering targets all around Hanoi and Haiphong, but even if such a thing was truly possible I have to admit now that I found no pleasure or satisfaction in anything about the experience. If anything I felt more empty than I ever had, but Death is like that. Maybe I was just bitter now, probably because the whole vengeance thing proved nothing at all. Then, as the war wound down I couldn't wait to...do what? To do what...exactly...with the burned-out husk of my life?

Stay in the Navy? I used to go up to the hangar deck then aft to the fantail and I'd stand at the rail and watch the churning water down there in the dark. My brother was down there now, a part of the sea again. What would he have wanted me to do, I wondered?

No. The Navy wasn't going to happen. Not to me. The Navy had taken his life and was chewing mine up slowly. Each cat shot in the night, every bombing run, the night traps, and the endless endless endless stress of living up to everyone's endless endless endless expectations. About the best thing I could say about flying is I didn't have to look into the eyes of the people I killed, but that didn't mean all those broken circles would leave me be; no, they came calling in my nightmares, where I least expected them. Where there was no place to hide.

I'd kept in touch with some of the guys in the band and one of the guys wrote back and told me the group still wanted me. But Joyce, he wrote, my red-headed green-eyed girlfriend and the love of my life was long gone, married to a realtor and I realized she was well beyond my reach now, but yet somehow that loss felt like a reward I all too richly deserved.

Staring down into the churning sea behind an aircraft carrier is a strange thing, especially so at two in the morning. Your mind dances in phosphorescent chaos and there are no stars reflecting off the echoes of fleet-footed memories. You are alone with the cold truth of the sea, her eternal nothingness and an all beckoning gravity singing her siren's songs you could swear you'd heard before -- maybe in another time, or another life...

There was a piano in one of the squadron ready rooms on the Connie, a beat-up old upright tied off to a bulkhead, and I went to her on my last night aboard and played Take Me To The Pilot. I mean I really banged it out, five years of hate pouring through my fingers into the poor old thing and when I looked up there were a couple dozen pilots standing there in awe, maybe because I'd stopped playing when I left Berkeley so no one knew I played. I finally told my shipmates about the group I'd been in before all this flying shit and no one could believe it. "What the fuck are you doing out here," they asked.

"I hate the world and I want to set it on fire," I replied -- and everyone laughed.

I mean, really, who wouldn't? Who knows, maybe we all wanted something as insane as that -- each in our way, but whatever, it was good for a laugh.

But not me; I wasn't laughing. In fact, I'd never been more serious in my life.

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After signing some papers that part of my life closed like a bad book. I found my Porsche and got her ready to roll and then threw my bags in the front boot again and after a little soul searching on a beach turned onto the I-5 once again and this time headed South, only when I got to Berkeley I looked at the offramp and shook my head then just drove right on by. It was time to go home so home I went. Back to Newport Beach. Back to standing in line at The Crab Cooker on Friday afternoons with mom and dad, back to catching up with old friends from high school. I went up to SNA, that's Orange County Airport to the uninitiated, to one of the flight schools there and I talked about maybe teaching or something like that but one of the owners asked me why I hadn't considered the airlines.

Because I hadn't. No reason, really. Maybe I just didn't want to be a bus driver, I think I said and that made everyone laugh. Everyone there wanted to be a bus driver...

So anyway, me being me that's exactly what I did.

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I ended up at TWA because I thought maybe flying internationally would be more interesting, and who knows, maybe it was. I started off in 707s, well, actually the 707-320c, and like all the new hires back in the day I drew the really glamorous routes during my first few years. In my case it was JFK to LAX -- which is, believe me, about the most boring route a commercial pilot can get saddled with. Two years of boring and I was about ready for a career change. Maybe something exotic. You know, maybe something along the lines of dental hygiene or plumbing.

Then I drew JFK to Stockholm.

Lots of blonds in Stockholm, right? That had to be a good thing, right?

I was happy again and all thoughts of going to dental hygiene school vanished. But within a year the word was we were going to drop 707s and transition to L-1011s for most of our trans-Atlantic European routes, so it was back to school -- then a year after getting my type I went back to school to work on my transition to captain. To four stripes. The promised land of commercial aviation.

And I ended flying out of Boston Logan for the rest of my career, flying the TriStar to either Heathrow or Charles De Gaulle, though occasionally to Frankfurt or Munich. It was fun work, satisfying in its way, yet all this flying stuff has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Well, almost nothing, but circles are like that. You gotta follow the breadcrumbs, ya know? You gotta go where the open doors take you.

A lot of people think that cockpit crews work as teams, like two or three pilots working together all the time, and there was a time when this was true. The problem with such groupings is simple enough to understand, though. When people work together all the time relationships develop. Some relationships are good, some are not so good, while others may grow toxic and mean-spirited -- but none of these relationships end up creating a competent cockpit environment. The end result of all this is you really never know who you'll be working with you until you show up at the airport and get your manifest and load-out from the dispatch office.

Getting to know the people you fly with is not exactly discouraged, but neither is it encouraged. Call it a gray area. Inviting some of the guys over to watch a football game is sort of okay, while screwing one of the flight attendants you fly with is kind of a no-no (uh, sorry Jill). Assuming male-female gender combinations in the cockpit happen more frequently these days -- as opposed to when I was flying -- screwing your co-pilot is about the worst thing cockpit crews can do today. Period. I have to assume that the same principle applies to male-male or female-female hookups as well, if you know what I mean...but I'd rather not go there.

Still, you get to know the people you do fly with. If, for instance, you fly with John Doe three times a month you kind of pick up where you left off, talking about his farm in Indiana or his son's interest in wearing stockings and high heels. And you might fly from Boston to Paris with one First Officer and Flight Engineer and then have an entirely new crew for the return. Again, we just never really knew who we'd work with, but even so -- over time, anyway -- you begin to know quite a bit about the people you're flying with.

And everything is inevitable, ya know? Like points on a curve. More breadcrumbs along the way. Doors open and close. It's your move.

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Mike Elliot was one such character. He was a couple of years older than I yet he'd never expressed any interest in moving up to captain. None. He didn't want the added responsibility, he told me once, or all the extra pressure that went along with the position. And, as it happened, Mike's attitude wasn't really all that unusual. I met a number of First Officers over the years who were comfortable where they were, the same with a whole bunch of Flight Engineers. Mike was usually down in the dumps about something his wife had done to him and he was, generally speaking, a very unhappy fella.

On one trip to Paris, Mike's wife, a petite fire-breathing dragon named Isabel, joined us on the flight across from Boston; they were going to spend a few weeks in France on vacation -- together -- and yet Mike was despondent about the whole thing.

Because, as it turned out, Isabel was a total control freak. Not a casual misanthrope but a real balls-to-the-wall man-eating hell-bitch sort of control freak. She'd been a dancer of some sort, ballet, not exotic, and even I could see she was cute. Or, well, maybe once upon a time her looks had covered up certain character traits. When I met her the first time, and it was on that trip, all I noticed was an uncertain meanness in her eyes, and a tendency to mock everyone and everything around her -- her husband Mike most of all. After being around her for about five minutes I realized she was a toxic compound, really mean to the core, and I couldn't wait to make my excuses and get away from her. Which was exactly what I did, too.

Then again, I was flying back to Boston the next morning and had to hit the sack fairly early; Mike had no such luck and he was stuck with the bitch, and it didn't take a lot of imagination to understand where all his existential despair came from. Anyway, after we cleared customs I found the crew shuttle to the hotel and left Mike and the hell-bitch to enjoy their vacation together.

We typically got into CDG, or Charles De Gaulle International, a little after six in the morning, and I usually didn't go back out to the airport until nine the next morning, so my routine in Paris was fairly casual. Check-in at the hotel then head down to a favorite bistro for a quick breakfast before a long walk to nowhere in particular followed by a late lunch and then heading off to bed, and that's exactly what I did that December night.

Except in the middle of that night I jumped out of bed, startled by the pounding drumbeat of someone banging on my door; and there was Mike in a bath-robe, all bleary-eyed and blitzed out of his mind, crying and halfway out of his mind. I was, on the other hand, shaking from yet another nightmare, and that was before Mike's fists started hammering on my door. Anyway, he said he couldn't take it anymore. At least that's what he said between ragged sobs full of pointless accusations and pointed recriminations. He couldn't, he said, spend a dime without her approval. He couldn't eat a thing she didn't approve of first; at dinner that night she'd ordered his meal, told him what he was allowed to drink and even the people sitting around them had noticed her overbearing crudeness and it had all gone downhill after that.

Yet there wasn't a whole lot I could do, and certainly nothing I was willing to say about matters. In truth, I didn't know Mike all that well and I sure didn't know his wife, which, if nothing else, meant I really didn't know both sides of the story. By the way, getting pulled into this kind of drama without knowing the true dynamics of the relationship is, in my experience, a toxically stupid thing to do and besides, it was two in the morning. I helped Mike get a room then trudged back up to my own and promptly passed out.

Sleep was, however, not to be. Probably less than a half-hour later I sat up in bed, my ears ringing like church bells as even more furious pounding on my door woke me -- again. Yes indeedy, I was a really happy camper. Only when I went to the door this time I found a vampire bat named Isabel frothing at the mouth in rabid fury on the other side of the peephole.

And even as I opened the door to my room she tried to push her way in -- not with much success, I might add -- and then she demanded to know where her husband was. I pointed to the open doors that led to my balcony and said as politely as I could that when her husband had heard her banging on the door he had decided to jump, then I slammed the door in her face.

I listened to the stream of four-letter invectives as she made for her broomstick and yes, I smiled, not really caring what the witch was thinking but nevertheless somehow quite pleased with myself. And, if I was lucky, or so I thought, I might even get two more hours of sleep.

So...and this in no way accounts for what happened next, I went and packed my overnighter and caught the next crew shuttle back out to De Gaulle. I'd had enough of their drama and I'd had just enough sleep to get me through the day. Yet I halfway expected to read about Mike in the morning edition of the International Herald-Tribune. You know, something like 'American Murders Vampire Wife, Throws Decapitated Body From Eiffel Tower.' That sort of thing. But no, nothing happened. Matter of fact, I didn't fly with Mike again for a week or so.