Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY ROBERT SABBAG

  Snowblind

  Smokescreen

  Too Tough to Die

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Robert Sabbag, 2009

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Sabbag, Robert.

  Down around midnight a plane crash and its aftermath / by Robert Sabbag.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05771-1

  1. Sabbag, Robert. 2. Aircraft accident victims—United States—Biography.

  3. Authors—United States—Biography. 4. Survival after airplane

  accidents, shipwrecks, etc. 5. Aircraft accidents—Massachusetts—Cape

  Cod Region. I. Title.

  TL553.9.S33 2009

  363.12’4092—dc22

  [B] 2008046688

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  To Patricia

  The flight was an hour and a half late out of LaGuardia: Air New England Flight 248, the last of the night, bound for Cape Cod. With New Bedford shut down by fog, the stop-over there had been canceled. New Bedford-bound travelers had been pulled off the flight, and the plane was approaching Hyannis with the remaining eight passengers aboard. It was two and a half miles out.

  A lot of things could have been different. Not that I had any control over them—it was just my lucky day. Ted Kennedy had been aboard the previous flight, or so it was later reported. The direction in which the senator had been traveling was the subject of conflicting accounts, a question that remained unanswered for me until twenty-seven years later. But I could never escape the supposition that, had he been traveling north that night, given a slight delay, he might just as easily have been traveling on my flight. The senior senator from Massachusetts: that could have made things different in a whole lot of other ways.

  The plane hit the trees at 123 knots. It lost its wings as it crashed. They were sheared off, taking the fuel tanks with them, as the rest of it slammed through the forest. In an explosion of tearing sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting through thick stands of oak and pine for a distance of three hundred feet. Whatever memories time erases, it will never erase the memory of the sound of it.

  The seat belt held up. Nothing else did. I hit the belt with such force that I took the seat forward with me, ripping it right out of the fuselage. My back broke as I was thrown forward, wrapped around the restraint. The lap buckle snapped my pelvis. Through some mysterious marriage of aerodynamics and physiology, my arm broke through the steel band of my wrist-watch, exploding the links—the inevitable measure, as I came to see it, of the physical forces at work, of the mechanics conspiring to kill me. The g-load peaked at around six. My forward momentum was absorbed by a collision with the upright seat back in front of me. Its impact with my face raised a welt over my eye, crushed the cartilage in my nose, and displaced one of the bones in my neck. Most of my bleeding was internal. I came to a stop with one knee on the deck, still strapped in, soaked in jet fuel.

  It was going to be a long night.

  The story I will tell, the story I remember, begins here, in deep woods, shrouded by impenetrable fog, in mid-June in 1979. A story of survival, of varying displays of courage attended by the ever-present fear of failing to display it, of a dark night of the soul and the days and years that followed, in the end it is a story about memory. About the things we can never forget. A story about how, even in our forgetfulness, the present is inevitably haunted by the past.

  In the spring of 1979, I was half a celebrity, the author of a book, my first, that several months earlier had spent three weeks on the bestseller list in New York. I was living in Greenwich Village, I was thirty-two years old, and the topic of the book, cocaine, put me at the center of a circle of new friends and acquaintances who were far more celebrated than I.

  Cocaine’s elevated position in the popular culture of the 1970s is difficult to exaggerate. Periodical rights to the book, Snowblind, were purchased by Rolling Stone; an excerpt appeared in the magazine at the time the book was published. Following the book’s publication, excerpts appeared in two other magazines: High Times, certainly an obvious choice, and Town & Country, probably not. Unless, of course, you were paying attention. Cocaine at the time, conspicuously pouring out of every night-club, was no less indispensable at the hunt club. The common denominator was disposable income. To snort cocaine was to make a statement. The perforated septum was in vogue, a mark of social standing that before the seventies and coke’s outright ownership of the night had been restricted largely if not exclusively to victims of congenital syphilis.

  Cocaine’s enhanced visibility coincided with the publication of Snowblind, and as the book’s author, I was held at least partly responsible for the high profile the drug enjoyed. Some people behaved as if I’d invented it. But the nonfiction book featured a living protagonist, luxuriating in his own notoriety, who was quite happy to take credit for introducing the nation to cocaine’s questionable pleasures. And that, along with the book’s widespread critical acclaim, enabled me to enjoy my celebrity as a phenomenon with a respectable, legitimate foundation, a consequence of the same kind of honest accomplishment associated with the musicians, movie stars, and other millionaires I was routinely running out of control with.

  The previous fall, with new money in my pocket, I had broken ground on a house some three hundred miles from Manhattan. Situated on the edge of a salt marsh, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, the house was now nearing completion. In more than one way, I felt I’d arrived. It wasn’t that I’d never owned a house, though that was also true; it was that I’d never really had a fixed address. The eight years I’d lived in Manhattan—I was now on my third apartment—was longer by
a good five years than I’d lived anywhere else in my life. My arrival on Outer Cape Cod, anchored to a thirty-year mortgage, signaled a kind of coming to light.

  Having recently set up camp within the unfinished walls of the house to participate in its construction, I returned to New York in the middle of June to devote a weekend to what passed for business: the National Fashion and Boutique Show. A trade fair held three, maybe four, times a year, the show opened on June 16 at the New York Coliseum, and there I joined Zachary Swan, the former cocaine smuggler featured in Snowblind, who was negotiating licensing deals with manufacturers of drug paraphernalia. As a result of his efforts, a variety of products, marketed through the nation’s head shops—those now-vanished fixtures of the American landscape that flourished in the Age of Aquarius—would boast, for better or worse, merchandizing tie-ins to the book.

  Drug paraphernalia, of course, represented only a tiny fraction of the merchandise trafficked at the Boutique Show. But you were unlikely to see the Hallmark buyer in attendance at the High Times party. The party, aimed at the magazine’s advertisers and crawling with the usual suspects among New York’s “beautiful people”—along with drug dealers, smugglers, criminal lawyers, policy advocates, and people like me—was a special feature of the Boutique Show, a celebration hosted by the magazine’s publishers whenever the fair came to town. It was at one of the larger High Times parties, thrown at Studio 54 (it could have been at the magazine’s Christmas party), that I first met Andy Warhol. He was standing in line, waiting his turn at one of the nitrous oxide tanks. What we might have said to each other I can’t remember now, and it was very much in keeping with the tone of the event that I probably couldn’t remember it then. As Kinky Friedman was moved to say in such circumstances at the time, “I can’t even remember the Alamo.”

  Swan and I had first attended the Boutique Show in the fall of the previous year, and among the first people to introduce themselves to us was a contingent of entrepreneurs from South Hadley, Massachusetts, a college town situated in the Pioneer Valley, on the east bank of the Connecticut River. They represented a variety of businesses, all of which seemed loosely associated with a head shop located there, just off the Mount Holyoke campus. A couple of them had been marketing a game they had invented, or the rules of which they had formalized, a dice game they called Cosmic Wimpout. I would meet these people again, along with some of their friends, but never really know them that well, and I never saw them after the following March, when Swan and I signed books in South Hadley after a television appearance in Boston. But I did read about them in the paper. Late on the night of June 17, two of them, along with their girlfriends, were driving back to Boston from a Cosmic Wimpout tournament in Eastham, a town on Lower Cape Cod, when a young woman walked out of the woods in Yarmouth Port and flagged them down on the Mid-Cape Highway. Drenched in aviation fuel and stained with blood, she had been walking for an hour, and she told them, “I’ve got to get help.”

  The woman’s name was Suzanne, and she was one of seven other passengers with whom I’d boarded the plane that night when I left New York to return to the Cape. “A petite, brown-eyed brunette,” as the local newspaper would later describe her, with straight, shoulder-length hair, dressed entirely in white, she was a nineteen-year-old college student, a Rutgers University sophomore, and she was the only passenger to whom I had spoken at any length prior to the crash. Summering on the Cape with her family, she had been visiting friends in New Jersey, celebrating her birthday. She had planned to drive, but as a birthday gift, her parents had bought her a round-trip plane ticket. We were sitting next to each other, on opposite sides of the aisle, and when the announcement signaling our descent to Hyannis put an end to her socializing with some other students on the flight, she engaged me in conversation. She was a chatterbox, maybe she was nervous. She wanted to know what I did for a living and what kind of car I drove. She advised me to tighten my seat belt. I had been wearing it, in airline parlance, “loosely fastened about the waist” for the duration of the flight. I must have been slow to follow her advice, because I remember her reaching across the aisle and pulling it tight herself.

  To a question I’m asked invariably, the question posed in first position more often than any other, the answer is that the crash came without warning. There was no time in which to be terrified or ponder the state of one’s soul, to inventory the events of one’s life as it passed before his or her eyes, or to calculate assets and liabilities pertaining to one’s standing with God. The plane was at five thousand feet, maybe twenty-five miles southwest of Barnstable Municipal Airport in Hyannis, when the voice of the captain or maybe the first officer came over the cabin speakers with the announcement that the plane would be touching down in ten minutes; we were instructed to extinguish any cigarettes and fasten our seat belts in preparation for landing. Suzanne and I said hello, we talked for a little while, she tightened my seat belt, our conversation eventually trailed off, and we along with the other passengers retreated to the privacy of our thoughts as the aircraft descended through the final stages of the approach.

  The temperature at the airport that night was sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, with a ten-knot breeze out of the southwest. Visibility on the ground was three quarters of a mile in fog and light drizzle, sky obscured, with an indefinite ceiling of two hundred feet. The moon was in its last quarter but lost to view in the weather. A glance to my left as we descended through the clouds revealed no more than my reflection in the window. The only evidence of forward progress was the occasional dip brought on by turbulence and the direction of the water streaking the glass. Beyond the window there was nothing but the black of an invisible night and the hypnotic drone of the turboprop engines, an insistent, monotonous hum to which I inevitably surrendered, slipping into that easeful state of interrupted animation familiar to anyone who has ever flown or been rocked to sleep in a cradle.

  If, in those final ten minutes before facing potential death, I pondered anything at all, it would not have been the state of my soul but more likely the indignity of an empty stomach. I had arrived at LaGuardia before dinnertime as it is commonly observed in Manhattan. The flight was leaving out of the Marine Air Terminal—used to accommodate commuter airlines and as a general-aviation facility—and the only source of sustenance there was a poorly maintained candy machine, its age and condition suspiciously suggesting a shared provenance with the Art Deco building itself. Had I died, I would have died hungry. And tired. There is no one aboard an airplane in the hours that Hamlet in his madness calls “the very witching time of night” who isn’t beat.

  In the ten minutes following the landing announcement, there was no hint of what was to come. There was the somnolent drone of the engines, the beads of moisture scarifying the window glass, perhaps a slight increase in cabin pressure, and the prospect finally of home. Then impact. In the interval of a heartbeat. Lights out. You don’t own it. I breathed in, fairly unmindful of any real sense of forward progress, and when I breathed out I was pulling six g’s. Angling in at seven degrees, four degrees off the glide path, coming out of the sky at a rate of descent of 1,500 feet per minute, the airplane hit the trees at a velocity of 204 feet per second, breaking out of the cloud cover about two seconds from contact.

  Time never had a chance to stand still.

  Once the plane was down, Suzanne and I shared responsibility for making happen much of what happened, I because of my determination and the authority that attached to me by way of my age, she because she was uninjured, mobile, and utterly fearless. At thirty-two, I was more than ten years older than all but one person in the passenger cabin, and I had at least seven on him. I was a year older than the copilot, and he was out of commission. Only the pilot was older than I, and he was dead. Suzanne would ascend that night to a whole other level of heroics away from the site of the crash, but for now it was she and I, and what motivated me that night, more than courage or fear, was anger.

  Coming around, within seconds of impa
ct, I experienced an epiphany the violence of which remains vivid to me today. The plane had come to rest in silence. There were no ambulances, no lights or sirens, none of the scrambling you associate with an airport disaster. We had not crashed hitting the runway. No help was on its way. And in the absolute stillness of that instant, before the screaming started, I was overcome by the realization that whether I lived was up to me.

  The people who operated the airline, the same people whose indifference we had suffered for an hour and a half at LaGuardia, were responsible for this, and now they were nowhere to be found, and I remember being propelled by the resolution that I wasn’t going down with their ship.

  Raising myself up off the deck, near paralyzed below the point of my fracture, I didn’t do a lot of thinking. You don’t really think in those circumstances; you act, or react, or you simply shut down, control of your vital processes being the ultimate prize in that physiological face-off between adrenaline and shock. In the minute or so following impact, if I was given to thoughts of anything, they were thoughts of an airplane in Chicago, an ill-fated DC-10, American Airlines Flight 191.

  That airplane, bound for Los Angeles, went down after losing one of its engines on takeoff from O’Hare International, exploding in a massive fireball a mile and a half beyond the runway, taking the lives of 273 people. One of the dead was Sheldon Wax, the managing editor of Playboy. I had never met Wax, but as a freelance contributor, I had worked with some of his colleagues. I had known him by reputation and remembered reading his obituary. His wife, Judith, an author, had died with him, and so too had a woman named Vicki Haider, the magazine’s fiction editor.