Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  He worked the crash until six, he said, and had to be on duty that morning at eight, at which time he responded to a building fire, so it was not until later that afternoon that he and other firefighters had an opportunity to sit and reflect upon the disaster. Such reflection, a collective debriefing of sorts, was ordained by long-standing tradition.

  Pete Norgeot, when he and I talked, said that while posttraumatic stress disorder might be better understood today, firefighters are “still the same morons running into a burning building while everyone else is running out.” Like Smith, a paramedic lucky never to carry the faces of his patients around with him, Norgeot spoke of the “selective amnesia” that enables all firefighters to do their job, the survival mechanism that kicks in “when you realize you can’t sleep.” Fire-and-rescue work brings with it, he told me, “things you don’t need constant reminders of.” You have to be able to put those things behind you when you go home, “to be able to go back and go to sleep. You have to learn to do that or it will destroy you.” Sleeping is not something that comes easy, he said, “when you see body parts all over the ceiling.”

  Stress counseling as we know it today wasn’t available then to first responders, and the prevailing therapy for firefighters, Smith told me when I visited him that day at his cottage, was the “choir practice” we associate with cops, the getting together after the shift ends for rounds of drinking and talking.

  And, when necessary, more drinking.

  “Savin’ lives, I did that for a livin’,” and did it for the next twenty years, he told me, until he was forced out of the department.

  Smith today gives the impression of a man who has put some significant distance between him and the drinking.

  Before I left, I showed Smith a picture. It had run on page one below the fold of the Sunday Cape Cod Times, to the left of the article in which he had been quoted. It was a picture of me, on my back in the woods, and leaning over me was an unidentified fireman. This was the paramedic who had treated me, and I was hoping to track him down. His helmet visor obscured his face, and none of his uniform insignia were sufficiently distinctive to identify him, so all Smith could do was guess.

  I would show it to as many veterans as I could talk to.

  When the paramedic appeared over me that night, I told him how many survivors there were and said that all of us were outside the wreck. I told him there were two people on the other side of the fuselage, and one person had set off looking for help. I said I didn’t know the extent of the first officer’s injuries but believed them to be severe, and that the two girls lying off to my left were injured more seriously than I.

  What he communicated to other firefighters, if anything, I can’t remember now, but whatever he said, whether to them or to me, was sufficient to quiet me down after that, and the triage proceeded of its own momentum without further input from me.

  “I’m just going to check you out,” he said, and started patting me down, looking for things like broken bones and all the terrible stuff that can happen to people when they drop out of the sky without parachutes.

  “Whoa, what’s this?” he wanted to know, when his hands lighted upon a swelling above my ankle. “Can you feel that?”

  “It’s money,” I told him.

  He seemed relieved.

  “I’m going to take it out,” he said. “And I’m going to put it in your pocket, OK?”

  “OK.”

  He hiked up my cuff, and from inside my sock, where the currency was folded, he removed the five thousand dollars I was carrying.

  “I’m taking it out,” he said, showing it to me. “Here it is.”

  “OK.”

  The care he took in reassuring me at every step in the transfer gave the whole endeavor the flavor of an ancient shadow play.

  “I’m putting it in your pocket.”

  And with that he stuffed the fifty hundreds into one of the tight side pockets of my jeans.

  “It’s in your pocket, OK?”

  “OK.”

  The consideration he showed was indicative of the way he treated me throughout the next few hours.

  I was reminded of this moment a few days later, during one of the visits I received from the airline rep, a very nice fellow I got to know over the week I was confined to the hospital. I can’t recall his title. I think he was some kind of public-affairs or customer-relations guy. Risk management was probably a part of the job description. I don’t think he was a lawyer. I remember him only as tall and fair and always a pleasure to talk to. Suzanne says his name was Rick. He was the local Air New England employee who later accompanied her on her flight to Nantucket. He had shown up at the foot of my bed soon after my condition had stabilized.

  To me—and I assume, to the other survivors—he was the identifiable face of the airline. He was the company front man in the matter of the crash, the one employee of the airline I would meet. I don’t know where he was when the plane disappeared, but whenever I think of the people at the airport who were lying to Mary that night or of the person there who kept asking Suzanne if she was sure she hadn’t crossed the highway, I envision a guy who looks like Rick. But he was a very nice guy for all that. While I was in the hospital, he visited me regularly, answering questions, passing on information, and always making sure I had everything I needed. In the crash, I had lost my eyeglasses, and I think he was the one who, once they’d been found and inventoried, delivered them to me on the ward. There was an informality to our relationship. Everything about it was casual. It couldn’t have been more relaxed. It was like that of any two people doing business together who have agents overseeing the deal points. Rick and I were just friends. That other stuff? That’s up in legal. The airline’s folks at Lloyds of London, my “representatives” at 99 Park. Somebody’s handling that.

  I can’t say so with certainty, but I want to say Rick was engaged. I seem to remember saying hello to a young woman who came in with him on the weekend, someone he brought by to meet me. (Suzanne believes they were married.) Not that it’s particularly important. I offer it as one more illustration of the friendship we both pretended was personal.

  Not that I doubted the sincerity of the kindness Rick displayed. If he was doing what he had to do, he was doing exactly what I would have done if I’d accidentally injured somebody. If thrown together under other circumstances, we might very well have become friends. He seemed to be my kind of guy. Nor was I ever suspicious of his motives. Yes, he worked for the airline, and I was careful not to volunteer anything that I thought might prejudice my damage claim and that he might feel obliged to share with his employers, but he wasn’t there to soften me up. Mainly what he was doing, from what I could tell, was making sure that the hospital was treating me well, that I was getting the care I needed.

  My fight with the airline wasn’t something particularly sensitive to tactics and strategy. Air New England assumed liability. I didn’t have to prove to some hypothetical jury that the reason I couldn’t walk wasn’t my fault. Our lawyers would spend the next three years arguing over nothing much more than the size of the payout, which, all other things being equal in such cases, is a function of the size of one’s salary. Rick and I didn’t talk about how much money I did or didn’t make.

  The anger that washed over me the night of the crash waxed and waned during my stay in the hospital. It was ameliorated, certainly, by how happy I was simply to have survived, by the visits I received from the members of my family—I was as happy for them as for me—and by the endless rounds of entertainment that my hospital stay seemed to insist on providing. But it was never far below the surface. It came and went in flashes, the impossibility of my physical condition always there to feed it. Focused now on the airline in general—the Parmenter family, in its hour of grief, could do without judgment from me—the anger was never directed at Rick. He presented himself as an advocate, and taking him on those terms, I was grateful for his help.

  The visit of his that I remember best was one of his
earlier trips to South 2, the orthopedic floor on which my four-bed ward was located. Updating me on discoveries that investigators had made at the crash site, Rick, with a smile, informed me that they had found an ounce of marijuana in the debris. He wasn’t being accusatory. Those on the scene had greeted the find with what Rick’s lighthearted laugh would have me believe was an appropriate sense of humor. He wasn’t going anywhere with the observation, just sharing a funny story. But everything in the way he said it told me he assumed the dope was mine.

  He and probably everyone else.

  In newspaper accounts of the crash, I was identified not simply by name, but as “the author of Snowblind, a candid view of the South American cocaine trade.” There was a reason for this that had nothing to do with a desire to single me out, to ascribe to me any prominence. While I certainly thought of myself as somebody special, that belief was not widely held. The source of the attribution was Suzanne. Had it not been for Suzanne, I would have been described, if at all, simply as “a writer,” much as, say, Paul had been described as “a medical student.” Suzanne, however, in interviews she gave immediately after the tragedy, made regular mention of “the author” in her recounting of the escape: “I was sitting next to the author . . .” “When the author opened the door . . .” When Mary queried her at the airport, Suzanne said, “You mean the author?” She didn’t say, “You mean Bob?” What Suzanne knew about me was what she remembered from the conversation we’d had before she reached across the aisle to tighten my seat belt. She might just as naturally have said, “You mean the guy who drives the three-liter BMW?” Quoting Suzanne in the news accounts, reporters had to clarify her remarks, had to explain what she meant by “the author.” Once the description was set in type, it was treated like newspaper boilerplate and inserted into all subsequent stories along with my name.

  Had I in fact been famous, referring to me as “the author Robert Sabbag,” the way one would refer, for example, to the author Norman Mailer, would have been sufficient. But I wasn’t famous that way, certainly not in Boston, despite its being my hometown. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. As I said, I was half a celebrity. Any notoriety I might have enjoyed, a substantial readership notwithstanding, was limited to certain small circles in New York and Los Angeles. I did get my share of fan mail, but a lot of it came from prisons. I wasn’t famous in the typical way, nor was I ever likely to be. Even today, when almost everyone has a shot at celebrity, rarely is it thrust upon writers, and almost never on the basis of a body of work that consists of a single book, a nonfiction book at that. When the Today show appeared on the itinerary of the Snowblind promotional tour, I was taken aside by my publisher’s director of publicity, who explained as kindly as possible that I was not being invited to appear. Host Jane Pauley’s producers were interested in her talking not to me but to Zachary Swan. Seldom, over the course of several books, have I been interviewed as an author per se; invariably it is as a commentator on the subject of the book in question. It’s true of most nonfiction writers.

  Snowblind was always more famous than I. The book has been in print for thirty years, but even in the feverish days of my rise to visibility on the strength of it, my name meant nothing to most people, even to those who were inveterate readers. Conversations that began “So, you’re a writer?” had a way of changing course with mention of the book’s title: “You wrote that book?” The subject matter of that book, in the absence of everything else, did have a way of ensuring that any mention of my occupation, at least for a time, would be followed by the kind of clarification evident in accounts of the crash. For the truth is that some people were not quite sure that I was a writer, not a real one, at any rate. Even today, Snowblind, in confused and erroneous references carried forward from the past, is occasionally referred to as an autobiography. People who hadn’t read the book (whose main character, Zachary Swan, was born when Wyatt Earp was alive) and even some who had read it were quite prepared to believe that, rather than a reporter who had been commissioned to write the book, I was in fact a smuggler capitalizing on the one story I had to tell.

  Not that I’m ungrateful for all the book brought my way. I recall attending a broadcast of Saturday Night Live in New York as a guest of comedian John Belushi. After the show and the party that followed, a group of us found our way to Studio 54. I was standing with Belushi’s wife, Judy, when a cheer went up on the dance floor, raised in response to the sudden appearance of the nightclub’s signature piece, a suspended Pop Art installation in the form of an animated crescent moon snorting cocaine from a spoon. As the two of us were laughing, I remember saying, “It’s been very good to me.” As true as that might have been at the time and as funny as we both found it—and despite the probability that she forgot it almost immediately—my having told her so is not something I look back upon with particular fondness. It wasn’t very good to her. With the death of her husband three years later, cocaine would lose much of its charm and nearly all of its cachet.

  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.

  During 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.