Having said that, however, and embracing it, I confess that I trust it only as part of a somewhat more complicated story. Not that I don’t believe it. I believe all of it to be true, but I also believe it to be incomplete. For it fails to take into account the price one pays for being so squared away. In the offloading of so much cargo, by accident or simply by incident, certain provisions may go over the side, along with some necessary equipment, including some fathoming gear, any number of instruments you might use to detect what lies beneath the surface.
The best piece of evidence I have for this comes to me by way of another friend. And like the friend I was getting to know over coffee that day, and like my sisters, she is also a girl.
The day Gael Humphrey walked in the door, I was still walking on crutches. She showed up at my house the summer of the crash with a group of people down from South Hadley. She had just started work in a waterbed store, another enterprise associated with the head shop there, and she arrived on the Cape with her boss, a fellow I knew named Michael, one of the many people I’d met on my brief visit to Western Massachusetts with Zachary Swan the previous March. Swan was on the Cape for a few days. He and I would sign books at a Provincetown shop opened recently by a merchant with ties to the group, some of whom would be staying at my place, and as part of the shenanigans scheduled for the weekend, Michael and Gael would assemble a waterbed that Michael had insisted I try.
Don’t take the mention of a book signing as an indication of my going back to work. It was scheduled to take place at a head shop, and it had less to do with selling books than with the merchandising possibilities that Swan had been exploiting at the Boutique Show six weeks before, which is when the event had been planned. It was more a dope thing than a book thing, more social than business, as much as anything an excuse for a party, and having recently been released from the hospital, I was in the mood for one.
Waterbeds were in vogue in certain circles at the time— maybe they still are—and waterbed salesmen promoted their trade as a branch of specialized medicine only slightly less rigorous than that which is practiced by orthopedic surgeons. The bed, in Michael’s diagnosis, was crucial to the health of my injured back, and so convinced would I be of its benefits, he believed, that in time I would agree to buy it.
Apart from a faint air of perpetual amusement that suggested she was not really a part of the crowd, little about Gael, at least at first, proved in any way conspicuous. With long brown hair and pale eyes the blue gray of cigarette smoke, she was three inches taller than I, was almost fourteen years younger, and she had a voice so soft you could sleep in it. Sophisticated beyond her years, charming in a way that radiated from the absence of any attempt to be glamorous, she possessed a rarified sense of the droll, a kind of goofball sense of humor that I would notice only later. It was not until early the next morning that I paid much attention to her. Michael by then had made his move, which served to explain all his urgency in getting the waterbed assembled.
“Setting up the bed in the middle of a party” did seem rather strange, Gael would later observe, adding, “In my experience, it was something you did at the customer’s convenience.”
In this case, it was done at Michael’s convenience, or so his behavior suggested, and it gave the appearance of an ulterior motive in his bringing Gael with him to the Cape. Getting it done freed up my bed, yielding a double mattress, which Michael had then hauled down to the living room for him and Gael to share.
Well, she had to sleep somewhere.
Swan was the first to rise that morning, and no sooner was he up and around than I heard him talking to Gael from the stairway outside my room.
“Aren’t you warm?” he said.
I stepped out onto the balcony that overlooks the living room and saw Gael on the floor below, wrapped in a sleeping bag, fully clothed, crouched on her half of the mattress, putting as much distance as possible between her and the slumbering Michael. With Swan, and now me, smiling down on her, Gael could only laugh at her predicament.
It was hard to know what Gael had been thinking when she’d shown up the day before. She had only recently met the people she was traveling with, she had just that day met me, and she had no reason not to assume that they and I were friends. They were staying at my house, after all. The truth was that I knew them only slightly better than I knew her. If I had met Michael more than once, it had been no more than twice and for no more than a few minutes each time. I was slightly better acquainted with some of the others in the entourage, a couple of whom would later become friends, but the only one on the premises that weekend with what might be thought of as an all-access backstage pass was the man known as Zachary Swan.
Zachary Swan wasn’t his real name. It was the name I’d given him to protect his identity in the pages of Snowblind, the name by which he was known to many people who’d met him after the book was published, which included most of the people on hand. His real name was Charles Forsman, and with the commercial success of the book and the business relationship that necessarily followed, he and I had become friends. He was twenty years older than I, which made him thirty-four years older than Gael, and notwithstanding the impropriety that had made him notorious in middle age—he’d become a smuggler in his forties—he was rather conservative by nature. Chuck Forsman was a gentleman of the old school. His treatment of me, if not publicly apparent, had always been somewhat avuncular and later increasingly protective. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, I found myself in a position to reciprocate that treatment, honoring a contractual relationship with the wife and young children he left behind. Given the circumstances that spawned it, nothing about our friendship was typical. You would not naturally throw the pair of us together, and the friendship seemed no less eccentric to us than it did to most other people. Ours was a strange fraternity. We belonged to a fellowship of two, and the morning we found her bundled up on the floor, the privileges of membership were extended to Gael.
“You and Chuck took me under your collective wing,” she later recalled, reminding me that the silliness of her situation is what brought the three of us together. “It was a joke we shared. I didn’t know how bizarre it was until I saw it through your eyes.”
Escalating over the years, from camaraderie through intimacy to what might be seen as a kind of psychic attachment, the bond that Gael and I forged that weekend is a bond that prevails today. Surviving the distance that separates us and the decades over the course of which we have shared our lives with others, it is a friendship that has always been special for its silences, for the mysteries we never tried to solve. Our silences were rich, and though the memory of them today is as persistent as any I have of her, nothing is quite so memorable as the way she had of breaking them. She was a friend I could always count on to tell me what was on my mind. And I never questioned the source of her magic.
Ten years after the crash—by which time I had boarded flights to London and Paris, to Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, and other ports of call—I was writing a book on the U.S. Marshals, an adventure that, among other things, would find me in the course of my research at a training base in Louisiana rappelling from a combat helicopter hovering ninety feet in the air. With interviews for the book taking me to California, I met Gael in Santa Barbara, about two hours down the coast from where she had been living since leaving the Pioneer Valley. Bonnie Raitt was appearing in concert there, Gael had a pair of tickets, and I’d arranged to fly in and attend the performance with her before keeping appointments I’d scheduled in Los Angeles.
It had been more than six years since we’d seen each other. Gael’s first marriage had just ended. Under the strain of the divorce, she’d lost some weight. Our delight at seeing each other after so much time was tempered by the sadness she was doing her best to hide, and it failed to alleviate in any significant way a different kind of pain that I had carried with me from the East Coast. Concentrated in my upper back, the pain didn’t affect my gait, but when I stepped out of
the airport I was in sufficient physical trouble that it was noticeable to Gael, and she took it upon herself to help me with my luggage.
The people of Santa Barbara don’t need to hear it from me, but theirs is undeniably one of California’s more seductive cities. Rising behind the tile roofs and palm-shaded lawns, the Santa Ynez Mountains sweep up from the Pacific over a picturesque blend of California bungalow and mission revival architecture. Its distinctive style, its geography, and its fair, forgiving weather give the place a kind of unmatchable, almost Mediterranean air. But my brief visit to Santa Barbara will always be memorable to me not for the beauty of the city itself but for the hours I spent with Gael and for a short conversation she and I had as we walked its beachfront boulevards.
Gael, concerned about the pain I was in, asked what had brought it about. I explained that it was symptomatic of travel.
Whenever I carried luggage and hauled it over any distance, I was asking for a day or so of serious discomfort, a consequence of the injuries I’d sustained in the crash. The more serious pain radiated down from my neck, and at its worst was just short of debilitating. It was far worse than the pain afflicting my lower back, the site of the more serious fracture. Arising from degenerative arthritic changes, as doctors had explained it to me, the periodic inflammation was a predictable follow-up to such injuries when the damaged area was aggravated. Occasional pain was something they had told me to expect. It happened whenever I traveled, and it was something I’d learned to live with.
“How long has it been that way?” Gael asked.
“Forever. Since the summer I met you.”
I don’t know if she said anything right away. It’s possible she just listened. We might have talked about something else; maybe we just walked in silence. But at some point while we were walking, Gael came up with a question that, in the ten years since that summer, I’d never asked myself.
She said, “Does it happen when you take the train?”
I can try to reconstruct for you the rest of the conversation, but I’d really only be guessing. What else she said I can’t remember, and what I said wouldn’t matter. What I remember is her asking me that.
And after she did, it never happened again.
I called to remind her of it recently, and I could hear her smiling over the phone. That she is always smiling about something is part of Gael’s enchantment. That her smile is actually audible is one of the spells she’s cast on me. She declined to take more than half the credit for relieving me of the affliction. I’d identified the encumbrance on my own, she said. She had merely identified the brand.
“It was a different kind of baggage you were carrying.”
I’ve come to see the affliction as what happens when muscle memory breaks bad.
In the church of practice-makes-perfect, no principle is more sacred, no icon before which they genuflect more worthy of glorification, than what instructors call muscle memory. You hear it from them all the time. It’s an expression I associate through personal experience with endeavors like small-arms training and learning to play the piano. Neuromuscular memory develops over time, through repetition of a sequence of motor skills until their coordination is automatic. Commonly referred to as muscle memory, it will save your life in a gunfight and lead your fingers through “Harlem Nocturne” without your having to think. It’s what enables you to tie your shoes. Muscle memory is what people are talking about when they tell you, “It’s just like riding a bike.”
In any neuromotor process, your brain is exchanging information with the parts of your body that move. In the exercise of muscle memory, your mind and your body are reminiscing. My back pain reflected a conversation I’d never openly had with my injuries, a memory my mind and my body were sharing below the threshold of my awareness. Maybe it was the sound of landing gear or the whine of a turbine engine, maybe it was the smell of an airport; it could have been the orchestration of a variety of sensory cues, but whatever provoked the dialogue, my subconscious was telling my back muscles, “Hey, they’re playing our song.” And everything tightened up.
I might have forgotten the words, but my body remembered the music.
As skilled as I was at letting things go—“and moving on,” as suggested by my sister Elaine—as successful as I had been, or thought I had been, at putting the crash out of my mind, it lay there beneath the surface. And like the fingering of some Beethoven piece long left unrehearsed, my body remembered it for me, a realization to which Gael directed me ten years after the fact. And she did it with a simple question. I don’t know where I lost the means necessary to realize it on my own, or even if I ever possessed the means, but once I was introduced to the source of my suffering, I ceased to be its victim. I concede this with some misgiving, for I fear it can only further encourage those who dwell among us who persist in the practice of psychoanalysis. The source of my salvation lay elsewhere. I see it in the heavenly witchcraft of a friend I never stopped loving and whose magic has never failed me.
Suzanne walked out of the woods sometime after midnight on the eastbound side of the Mid-Cape Highway. Jim Bernier, by then, was celebrating the end of a day that even by the standards of the time he could honestly describe as “ridiculously excessive.” Bernier, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend, Kammy Tribus, along with their friends Terry Opperman and Debbie Oster, had been part of a gathering of between “a hundred and two hundred” people who had convened on the Lower Cape for a Cosmic Wimpout tournament twelve hours earlier, though the taking of refreshments had begun before that.
“Everybody had been partying all day long,” Bernier says.
Bernier was already known to many of those who had made the pilgrimage to Eastham, being one of the few people on what could be considered the Cosmic Wimpout payroll. Fulfilling mail orders out of the South Hadley head shop where Cosmic Wimpout was based, he was the familiar interface between the game and its legion of players throughout the country. The only other person as closely associated with the game was Bernier’s friend Jim Rice, also known as Maverick, the young lawyer who had introduced himself to me at the Boutique Show the previous fall. Rice, who also attended the Eastham tournament, was recently described to me as the dice game’s “founding father.”
“While I did (with some others) bring the game to the valley,” Rice modestly concedes, “at the time, I was just another clown, just another member of the Amorphous Cosmic Wimpout Traveling Circus.”
Bernier and his companions, in Opperman’s pale yellow Chevy Impala, left the gathering in Eastham and headed for Boston, about eighty-five miles away. Opperman was driving, Oster was sitting up front with him, and Bernier and Tribus were reclining in the rear seat of the “well-seasoned” sedan. They were about twenty miles into the trip, west of the highway exit for Yarmouth, when Suzanne stepped out of the woods into the glare of the Chevy’s headlights.
None of the four, Bernier says, harbored illusions about what was coming. What they saw was certainly odd, but nothing about it was funny.
“Whoa, this is not good,” went the collective thinking inside the car.
Bernier today works as a legal assistant in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, law firm with which Rice’s practice shares offices. I caught up with him on a Sunday morning at the Boston apartment just off Commonwealth Avenue that Rice has occupied since his days as a Boston University student. It was two days before Christmas. The streets of the city were covered with snow. Rice was out of town for the holidays. The third-floor apartment, a spacious remnant of former student housing at BU, was artfully cluttered with memorabilia dating to the seventies, having changed little, according to Bernier, since the day Rice had moved in.
Bernier served coffee, and we sat in the living room, where we talked for a couple of hours. The television was on, but the sound had been muted. Bernier, who had been watching a news program before I showed up that morning, couldn’t see the TV, and I paid it no attention until midway through our conversation, when a movie came up on the screen, si
lent, yet unignorable, almost ridiculous in how fitting and proper it was in light of the discussion under way: the 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider. A cinematic period piece in which peace, love, dope, and tragedy sentimentally converge, it appeared as if part of the set decoration, an accessory to the apartment. You couldn’t have stipulated a more appropriate backdrop. Its advent brought a certain hallucinatory quality to the endeavor.
If Bernier had changed since the seventies, you wouldn’t have known it from me. I had a vague memory of a bearded, soft-spoken fellow, maybe six feet tall, with shoulder-length hair. The beard was now gone, and what was left of his brown hair issued in long strands from beneath the crown of a baseball cap to a point well below the temples of his eyeglasses. Jim Bernier was no slave to fashion. Wearing work boots, blue jeans, and more than one shirt, he fell on a sartorial scale somewhere “between a lumberjack and a hippie,” which is how Gael Humphrey had answered when I’d asked her to be more specific in recalling the old friend whom she’d lovingly described as “unkempt.”
Gael and Bernier had known each other pretty well in South Hadley. Like all his friends, she knew him as Jeb, the acronym that incorporated his middle initial. Today, she says, Jeb still holds a place among the more intelligent people she’s ever known, and she recalls his having “one of the quickest wits . . . really, really funny.” Bernier admits to having given people back then “the impression that I had it together more than I did.” Gael remembers being saddened by what she refers to as an “unfortunate drinking problem,” so he didn’t give that impression to her, though she is quick to add that his intemperance never obscured a “soft and sweet heart.”
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