Bird Dream

by Matt Higgins

  Nordic ski jumpers land this way by soaring great distances through the air at a 1:1 glide ratio and landing on a slope that is 1:1. An added benefit of landing like a ski jumper: “By a slope covered with snow, there you improve your odds,” Potvin noted with a chuckle. “If indeed you crash and burn, at least the snow is going to save your ass.”

  Yet Potvin was careful not to laugh at anyone who dreamed of landing, or call them crazy. He had a friend and colleague named Roy Haggard who ran a small research-and-development firm near the drop zone in Lake Elsinore, California. For years Haggard had talked about a device he called “the Luge,” based on the principles of the icy chute, which would make it possible to jump from an aircraft and land without a parachute.

  Approaching his sixth decade on earth, Haggard was known for not suffering fools, and if he claimed he could jump out of an aircraft and land without a parachute, then people who knew him were at least willing to listen. A skydiver himself, and a gruff autodidactic aircraft engineer, Haggard built his first hang glider at fifteen and qualified to fly it in a national competition. After completing high school, he skipped college and instead began designing gliders for a leading manufacturer. He founded Vertigo from a garage with partner Glen Brown. The operation had grown to about fifty employees working on projects for NASA and the U.S. military, building decelerators for space vehicles reentering the atmosphere. High-tech stuff, anyway. Vertigo employees included champion hang glider pilots, mountaineers, skydivers, helicopter and fixed-wing pilots, and world-class sailors. The company ethic espoused “a keen desire to continually explore new boundaries.”

  Still, with a family to support, and limited time and money to dedicate to a pet project, Haggard had reluctantly put the Luge operation on the back burner; which was why he was eager to help when Jeb came along to his facility, on the fringe of Skylark Airport, looking for assistance with what he was calling the Wingsuit Landing Project. Given their esoteric interests and shared geography in the Perris-Elsinore area, it was perhaps inevitable the two would cross paths. In Haggard, Jeb had found a kindred spirit, an uncompromising figure driven by innovation and achievement.

  “Is it possible?” snapped Haggard when asked about landing a wingsuit. “Yeah . . . anything is possible. It just requires time, money, and innovation.”

  Haggard described an apparatus similar to a huge vertical skateboard ramp. “You would have no real impact,” he said. “You would simply slide at 120 miles per hour like World Grand Prix motorcyclists” when they fall. “The human body can handle pretty high accelerations.”

  If Jeb raised the needed money, Haggard would help design and build a runway. They estimated the cost would be $3 million. At least $1 million would be needed for the landing apparatus alone. They would be using high-tech materials enabling Jeb to touch down face-first at terminal velocity and, as he would say, “stand up and do it again.” The remaining $2 million would cover production costs to create a televised spectacle to pay for everything. Jeb looked for funding where he always found it—in the entertainment industry. “For enough money,” he said, putting the price tag in perspective, “you could go to the moon.”

  The plan called for Jeb to wear a wingsuit and an exoskeleton neck brace, jump from an aircraft one thousand feet up, and fly as slowly as possible, with a glide of, say, 3:1, lining up with massive tethered balloons creating a grid in the sky, according to ideas acquired at the Christ statue in Rio. “This is my Everest,” he said with brio. He hoped to line up his attempt in the next year, because, as with the push to first scale Everest, he was aware others wanted to beat him and grab the glory. He heard rumors of groups in Russia and New Zealand working toward the same goal, and he could not discount the possibility that first some “psychopath person would land on a snow slope.”

  “Is there some crazy person out there who might beat me because he’s willing to do something more dangerous than me?” Jeb said. “Yes, but I’m not that guy.”

  Concerned that a competitor might steal his plans, Jeb remained circumspect about revealing details or designs of his landing. With the technology extant, Haggard gauged whether other engineers around the world might be making progress in developing their own wingsuit-landing mechanisms. With prestige and pride at stake, Haggard said, “Everybody wants to be the first one to do it.”

  Well, almost everybody. By 2008 Loïc was out of the running. While soaring at low altitude under a parachute down a mountain in New Zealand—a practice known as speed-flying—just before Christmas 2007, he had broken his back in a crash. Recovering from surgery to his L5 vertebra months later, it was unclear to what extent he would be available to resume flying. But after spending time in bed at home, around his wife and two young children, whom he tucked in each night with a “Mon cheri,” Loïc had a change of heart and was no longer interested in landing.

  “For me it’s not worth it,” he confessed. “The idea of landing—you will have no return point. This means you need to land or you’re going to die. I don’t want to put myself in a position where I have no out. If I can do it with an out and safely, I will be really happy to do it. Until this moment, for me it’s not going to change my life. It’s not going to make it so much better, and it might make it much worse. It’s a cool thing, but it’s not that important.”

  Chapter 13

  THE TRIAL

  That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  About the time Loïc got injured, the media sank its teeth into the wingsuit landing story. In New York for court appearances, Jeb took the opportunity to make the rounds among the city’s media outlets. On December 10, 2007, a story about the quest to land a wingsuit appeared on page 1 of the New York Times. Soon Jeb landed on Today, where he was interviewed by Matt Lauer, and The Colbert Report, where he told Stephen Colbert about his goal of jumping from an aircraft without deploying a parachute.

  “Um . . .” Colbert said, chuckling. “I guarantee you, you will eventually land on the ground without deploying a parachute.”

  “The thing is, doing it again,” Jeb said.

  “Oh, doing it twice,” Colbert cracked. “And that is the trick.”

  Jeb described how he needed money to build a runway.

  “Is it like two miles of bathroom tile with a little bit of wet soap on it so you can just slide in on a belly landing?” Colbert asked, urging Jeb to generate excitement by wearing a red-white-and-blue wingsuit and bring glory to America.

  When Jeb said he only wears black, Colbert eyeballed him for a second. “Is that because . . .” he said, adopting a tone of profound concern, “you’re sad inside?”

  All joking aside, Jeb had reason to be down. His legal problems only continued to grow more complicated. On January 15, 2008, he filed a countersuit against the Empire State Building Company for $30 million, citing its employees for defaming his character, unlawfully imprisoning him on the observation level, and causing emotional distress and lost income. He announced the suit during a press conference on the steps of the neo-Hellenic State Supreme Court building downtown, Heller at his side. He issued reporters a video of events on the eighty-sixth floor and said the whole episode might have been averted had the Empire State Building bothered with adequate security measures, measures that would have prevented someone like him from getting to the ledge at all. “Very small tweaks in their security will make it impossible to jump off that building,” he told the Times. “I would be more than happy to come in there and show them how to do that.” How representatives from the Empire State Building felt about his offer, they never made clear, but they did not avail themselves of Jeb’s services.

  The countersuit was a strategy designed to push back against police and prosecutors. Video footage from Jeb’s helmet cam had been seized when he was arrested but went missing from a pol
ice evidence room. All of which took on greater urgency when, in March, a state supreme court appellate division panel unanimously reinstated the indictment—not for felony reckless endangerment this time, but for second degree reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

  Worse for Jeb, political sentiment in the city would soon turn hard against stunts after two men scaled the new fifty-two-story New York Times tower, on Eighth Avenue, on June 5.

  The first was Alain Robert, the so-called French Spider-Man, famous for scaling skyscrapers all over the world. Robert had no difficulty scrambling up ceramic blinds on the Times Building’s exterior and unfurling a bright green banner that read GLOBAL WARMING KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN 9/11 EVERY WEEK. Waiting cops arrested him on the roof at about 12:22 p.m. Barely had they trundled Robert off to a precinct when a copycat scaled the West Fortieth side of the building, wearing a T-shirt reading MALARIA NO MORE and a huge grin.

  Mayor Michael Bloomberg had seen enough, and in September he signed into law the bill introduced by Councilman Peter Vallone, banning climbing, hanging, jumping, or swinging from city structures. Violators would be punished by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. “We don’t want New York City to become a Disneyland for daredevils,” said Vallone, summing up prevailing sentiment.

  • • •

  That was the mood of the authorities on October 1, 2008, a bright, crisp autumn morning, when a yellow cab eased to a stop on East Fifty-first Street in front of the New York Palace Hotel, brakes whining. The rear driver’s-side door swung open and Jeb unfolded his long legs and stepped into the thrum of the city. His head shaved clean like a monk’s, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, he threaded a crowd of cars with loping strides and planted himself on the sidewalk near the hotel’s uniformed doormen, who greeted him. They knew the thirty-two-year-old stuntman from California had twice parachuted from the fiftieth floor of the hotel.

  Jeb would have been difficult to overlook, clad as he was all in black, from his combat boots to his cotton pants to a hooded wool sweater, topped with a sleek ankle-length leather trench coat constructed from the skin of cows, stingrays, and a rare species of frog, all stitched together to create embossed images of demons and flames fanning out over the back and sleeves. Shiny silver buttons shaped like skulls ran in a studded line up the front of the coat. This would be Jeb’s uniform during the coming trial.

  Jeb had just come from a hearing at criminal court downtown, where he was facing reckless endangerment charges and a prosecutor who wanted to put him in prison for a year. Clomping defiantly into the courtroom, accompanied by his lawyers, cruising past citizens caught up in their own criminal-justice-system dramas, he had arrived in Judge Thomas Farber’s courtroom, a windowless cube with high ceilings, bright fluorescent light, and blond wood. Heller made a motion to dismiss the charge, based on the missing video evidence. But the judge was not swayed and announced that a trial would begin the next month.

  Jeb’s mind was already elsewhere while standing on the sidewalk outside the Palace Hotel, though. He scanned the black-tinted facade of the building, paying particular attention to the ramparts. He calculated that they were about as tall as the landing structure he planned to construct, the one that would borrow from the principles of Nordic ski jumping.

  That morning, in a far-ranging conversation with a journalist, Jeb had talked about his plans for landing. Between bites of breakfast at a diner a couple of blocks from the hotel, he explained how he had once been suicidal but that BASE jumping had been the agent of his salvation. “In my journey for death,” he said, a Zen koan delivered in a California surfer’s voice, “I found my life.”

  “Every time I wake up in the morning, I wake up with a smile on my face,” he said. “Even on days like today, when I have to go to court and deal with this crap, I’m still here, and worst-case scenario is always dead. I had a lot of really cool friends that are dead. Being dead was really uncool for them, because they had to stop experiencing this thing called life.”

  He brought up the most recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight, expressing admiration for the incorruptible Joker character played by Heath Ledger. Jeb’s parents had offered him $1 million to not attempt a wingsuit landing, and he had been insulted that anyone would assume he could be so crass. “I’m like, ‘I don’t want money,’” he explained. “I have no desire for money. My life isn’t about the acquisition of things. That’s why I don’t own things—because I don’t care about things.”

  A vibrating phone would eventually bring this particular jeremiad to an end. The call concerned an assignation later that day with television executives eager to talk about his wingsuit-landing plans. They would possibly be willing to fund the project—at least they were willing to hear his pitch—and he needed to return to the hotel to prepare. He swept from the restaurant, black leather coat billowing behind, filling the doorway like a stage curtain coming down on a dramatic act.

  • • •

  THE TRIAL WAS A show of sorts. It began on Friday, November 14, at the Criminal Courts Building, on Centre Street across from the Tombs. After more than two years of hearings and motions and legal wrangling, Jeb’s freedom was in the hands of a New York jury, nine people screened and hand-selected in a city in which acts involving landmark structures post-9/11 result in highly charged and politically symbolic reaction. The jurors had seen two iconic buildings destroyed during the terrorist attacks, office workers desperately jumping to their own deaths, and during the course of the trial they would hear how more than thirty suicides had flung themselves from the Empire State Building since it opened in 1931. That was the subtext into which Jeb Corliss waded on a bright autumn morning.

  Perhaps the mood would have been different if Jeb had succeeded. He might have joined city lore, like Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope spanning the World Trade Center towers in 1974, an event depicted in the critically acclaimed film Man on Wire in 2008; or Owen Quinn, who jumped from one of the Twin Towers with a chute in 1975 to highlight the plight of the homeless; or Thor Alex Kappfjell, the oil worker from Norway who, during a six-month span in 1998 and 1999, mocked Mayor Giuliani as he parachuted from the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the South Tower of the World Trade Center. But in the interceding years, the zeitgeist had changed, and so had city laws.

  The trial would last nearly a month, and the jury would hear a Harvard University meteorologist testify to the impossibility of predicting wind speeds and directions in the swirling currents around skyscrapers. Prosecutor Mark Crooks would cite the defendant’s Howick Falls jump, where Jeb wound up with gruesome injuries when he miscalculated, and as the trial wore on, a professor of physics from New York University, an expert in projectile motion, would take the stand to explain how before he had a chance to get ready or deploy his parachute, a ten-mile-per-hour wind gust could have carried Mr. Corliss right over the final fifty-five-foot tiered wedding-cake section on the sixth-floor level of the Empire State Building, all the way on down to Thirty-third Street, to a thick current of pedestrians and vehicular traffic.

  Flanked by his lawyers at a table, Jeb listened attentively, occasionally whispering in the ear of Heller’s assistant Peter Toumbekis. Concerning all the hypothetical scenarios put forth, he commented wearily during a recess: “I could land on a unicorn. A fairy could have landed in front of me.”

  Following court each day, in the cool darkness below Canal Street, Jeb would step into a cab for a ride uptown, and he surely saw the lighted ramparts of the Empire State Building glowing above the city.

  On Monday, December 1, Jeb took the stand to explain how he’d made more than a thousand safe jumps in the United States, Japan, Russia, France, and Malaysia. “I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what I do. Some people choose to use elevator systems, stairwells . . . I use the parachute system.”

  But he did admit to the prosecutor that even if he had landed precisely, h
is deflating parachute might have gift-wrapped the windshield of a moving car and blocked a driver’s view. It took the jury a day and a half of deliberations following closing arguments Tuesday to find Jeb guilty.

  • • •

  HE RETURNED TO NEW York for sentencing on January 22, 2009. Seated on a bench outside the courtroom, between Toumbekis and Gigi, waiting for bailiffs to signal the start of proceedings, Jeb listened as Toumbekis explained how events would unfold. If given jail time, did Jeb want to begin serving a sentence immediately or come back at a later date?

  Jeb did not hesitate. He wanted to begin immediately.

  Toumbekis explained that in that case, Jeb would be led from the courtroom in handcuffs by bailiffs. They would strip him of his shoelaces as a precaution so he could not hang himself out on Rikers Island.

  “Oh, Jebbie,” Gigi sighed.

  Inside the courtroom, two jurors who had convicted Jeb a month earlier asked the judge that he be spared prison. Prosecutor Mark Crooks nevertheless asked for the maximum sentence. “Defendant routinely went to countless media outlets . . .” he said, “repeatedly lambasted the people of the State of New York . . . He would go back to the Empire State Building, try it again . . .” Crooks noted that Jeb had to see “tourists, strollers . . .” Jeb, he said, had shown no remorse, and he pointed out how nine fire trucks and four ambulances had responded to his Empire State Building escapade, diverting valuable city resources.

  Hands clasped, head bowed, Jeb sat like the very picture of Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene. Heller called his client contrite. “Mr. Corliss is in complete acceptance of responsibility for his actions . . . He’s not defiant. He’s certainly not happy about it. But he accepts it.”

  Heller rattled off concessions his client was willing to offer, from issuing a public service announcement in which he would discourage anyone from BASE jumping in New York City to lecturing youth and BASE jumpers. Hearing this, Jeb suddenly buried his face in his hands. After all the hassling, posturing, and lawyering, he had thrown himself on the mercy of the court in a bid for leniency. Given an opportunity to address the court, he declined.