Flight of Passage: A True Story (4 page)

After our sightseeing ride the next day, when we landed at Chatham Airport, Sara pretzeled up her body the way children do when they have something important to say and suddenly blurted it out.

“Dad, when I’m seventeen, can I fly to California with Charlotte?”

“Ah Jeez, Sara. C’mon. Kern and I were teenagers before we cooked up something like that.”

“Big deal Daddy. You’re just saying that because I’m a girl.”

“Absolutely not Sara. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times. Girls can do anything boys can do.”

“Duh, Dad. So we can do it!”

“Sara I’m not saying that. I’m saying I’ll think about it. Someday, if you’re ready, I might let you go. Maybe we’ll even go sooner, together.”

“I don’t want to go with you. I want to go with Charlotte. No parents. That’s what
you
did.”

“Sara. Uncle Kern and I took years of flying lessons from my father before we made that flight. We were ready.”

“Big deal Daddy. You can teach me to fly, and then I’ll be ready. Your father let you go, so you have to let me go. For now, all you have to do is say 'maybe.’”

“Sara I’m not saying maybe.”

“Dad. Maybe.”

“Oh all right.
Maybe.
But that’s a big, fat maybe, I’m telling you. I’m only saying maybe, you understand?”

“Great! You said it. But you can’t forget.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. To think about it.”

“Pinky-swear?”

“Pinky-swear.”

So we pinky-sweared on it, and then Charlotte woke up from her nap in the backseat, saw Sara and I pinky-swearing about something, and she made me pinky-swear it with her too.

I knew then that I had to get the story down right away. I wanted my daughters to know more about the grandfather they had never met, what our lives with him were like, the forces that had swept through our family and propelled my brother and me on a daring flight to California. The truth couldn’t hurt, and my daughters had never really heard the truth about me and the reasons that we made that trip.

Most of all, I was entranced by memories of innocence and exhilaration.

I wanted to convey the sweep of the land, the surprise of the terrain we crossed, the America of smalltown cafes and cheap motels and dusty landing strips wedged in among the ranches and the farms. I couldn’t forget the faces of people and the generosity we found way out there. There were grizzled pilots and old kick-butt cropdusters, adventurers, and newsmen, all of them urging us on west. And my brother. Kern. He could fly like the blazes. I felt I should share what it was like to be fifteen and completely free, the side windows thrown open to the breeze, winging it out across the deserts and the mountains sustained by nothing more than four throbbing cylinders and a dream.

My brother dumbfounded us with his plan on a Saturday afternoon in October. My father, Kern, and I were an inseparable threesome on weekends, and we were out in the back field chopping wood for my father’s fire. I always enjoyed that time in the fall, splitting trunk logs with my father, because you couldn’t be around the man and not feel virile. At forty-nine, he was still as strong and as handsome as a Percheron horse, and all two hundred pounds of him were muscle. Mowing through the logs with ferocious energy, he liked to swing his ax one-handed, just to show Kern and me that he could still do it, splitting big two-footers with a single blow. While he worked he filled the air with his lively banter and gently goaded us along, chiding Kern and me that we couldn’t keep up “with the old man.”

I liked the chill in the air and the feeling of winter coming on for another reason. The children of amputees are aware from the earliest age of the physical limitations placed upon a parent and develop their own accommodations for that. On winter evenings, when my father returned from work and his AA meetings, he generally worked for several more hours in his library downstairs, batting out a letter-to-the-editor or a political speech on his typewriter. He couldn’t compose without a lit pipe in his mouth and a roaring fire in the hearth. But he was exhausted and sore from hauling his heavy wooden leg around all day and habitually took it off and tossed it in the corner as soon as he entered his library. Someone was needed to carry in his wood and stoke the fire all night. That became my job, for some reason having to do with the mysteries of personal desire and need, and I protected it like a sinecure. I did my homework every night on the antique cobbler’s bench in front of his couch, getting up every fifteen or twenty minutes to throw another log on the fire, and then I read on the couch to keep him company until he was done. Many nights I fell asleep before my father was finished, and then he would hop one-legged across the floor to toss an afghan over me and another log or two into the fire. Even when we weren’t getting along very well this was something my father and I could always do together. My memories of him and of winter are intimately bound up with the percussive tapping of his typewriter and the fragrance of cherry-scented tobacco and maple smoldering on the fire as I nodded off to sleep every night.

So, I always looked forward to that time with him. That day, while my father and I split the wood, Kern worked ahead of us, sectioning the logs with a chain saw. Midway through the afternoon, Kern switched off the saw and dropped it to the ground.

When he looked at my father, Kern’s face was cocked sideways and his chin was angled high.

This generally meant trouble. Kern disliked confrontation, especially with my father. He tended to hold important things in until the last moment. By then the idea burned so intensely inside him that he tended to argue his case more insistently than he had to.

“Dad,” Kern said. “Rinky and I are going to fly the Cub out to California next summer.”

My father put down his ax.

“Whoa. Say again?”

“Dad. Rinky and I are going to fly the Cub to California next summer.”

“Ah Jeez Kern. Where’d ya get an idea like that?”

“From you Daddy. You.”

“Me? I never said anything like that. I mean, a thing like this takes time. Lots of time.”

“No Dad. I’ve thought it all out. We’ll rebuild the Cub in the barn over the winter and fly it west next summer. Think about that Dad, just think about it! Rinky and I flying coast to coast.”

“Now listen here, son. When I was your age I
worked
my way across, piecemeal, over four years. I didn’t even get to Texas until I was almost twenty. Hell, I bet you don’t even know what comes after Ohio.”

“Illinois.”

“Wrong. Indiana.”

“Big deal Daddy. Big deal. Who cares about Indiana? You’re just saying no to say no.”

“Big deal! Is that what you say to your father? Big deal? Well listen here Kern, this is a big idea. It scares the bejesus out of me. Have you thought about money? Have you thought about the deserts? And what about the mountains? How the hell are you going to get a Piper Cub over the Rockies? What pass are you going to fly?”

Kern wasn’t sure about that yet.

“See Dad? See? You always turn a conversation into a quiz. How do I know what pass to fly? I’ll figure that out later.”

Even though the pipe in his mouth was already lit, my father reached into the pocket of his work jacket for his spare and nervously tapped in some tobacco.

“Oh Christ Kern. Why do you do these things to me?”

“Dad, you can’t say no. I
have
to do this thing. I mean . . . Dad, I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time.”

“Kern, I’m not saying 'no.’ I’m saying 'maybe.’ And that’s a big, fat 'maybe’ too. I’ve got to check my thinking on this.”

“Fine Dad. Do all the thinking you want. But I’ve already made up my mind. We’re going.”

Kern pulled the chain saw back to life and roared through another log.

I was annoyed that my brother had included me in his scheme without consulting me first, but it never occurred to me to consider his plan unrealistic. We were very impulsive and barmy as a family and I was used to it by now. In 1958, when I was seven, my father decided that the ideal family vacation for us would be a horse-drawn tour of the Civil War and Revolutionary battlefields in Pennsylvania, so he went out and bought a team of horses and a large covered wagon and we spent a delightful summer doing just that, camping out by the roadsides or in farmers’ fields every night. The year after that he bought an immense yellow school bus and we spent the next couple of summers bombing around in that. In the summer, when the weather was good, my father rode into his job in New York City on his motorcycle; in the winter, when there was snow, we rode to church on Sunday in a horse and sleigh. Now my brother was proposing that we fly coast to coast in the family Piper Cub. In the abstract, these ideas of ours always sounded insane. But then again they really weren’t, considering us.

But the afternoon was ruined. My father was distracted by my brother’s idea and was terrified that he was going to say yes too quickly, and he didn’t have much heart for swinging the ax. Kern was distracted by the fear that my father would say no, which made him dangerous with a chain saw. Eventually they both lost interest in the wood pile and wandered off, and I finished splitting the wood myself.

My brother’s timing could not have been worse for me. I was backsliding again, in trouble at school, and my father was furious about it. We had barely spoken in weeks. Any objections I might have had to my brother’s coast to coast plan weren’t going to count for much now.

That fall, I had enrolled as a freshman at Delbarton School, a Benedictine preparatory academy a few miles from our house. Kern had spent three years there and was now a senior. My father was very concerned about this step in my educational career. From kindergarten on I had been that most awful and perplexing kind of student—the academic star who was also a disciplinary terror—and my father was convinced that by sheer force of will and concern for my own future I could be cured of this schizophrenia. Because of AA, he was an advocate of the power of positive thinking. Several times over the summer he called me down to the library to deliver his favorite disciplinary chat, the “good kid” lecture. Essentially, my father said, I was a “good kid”—good at my studies, good at sports, good at making friends—but I was forever endangering my academic reputation with these “jackass stunts” of mine. He thought that I had done an excellent job of pulling the wool over the eyes of my grammar school teachers, but the Benedictines up at Delbarton were highly educated, sensitive monks, and they would see right through my antics. Over the summer, I was supposed to be “mentally preparing” myself for starting over at a new school, the enormous strides I was going to make in my behavior. For the duration of the lecture I nodded attentively and fixed my face with a purposeful, optimistic expression, and sometimes I even meant it. The conversation always ended the same way.

“All right son. That’s the program. Cut out the bullshit, and behave. Kern’s been up there for three years now and I haven’t heard a single complaint. It’s a new school for you, a clean slate. Deal?”

“Deal. Dad, I’m going to work on this.”

Hazing was a big part of Catholic school life then. Every year, during the last week of September, the monks at Delbarton allowed the seniors to run this dumbass little institution called Freshman Initiation Week. Freshmen were required to run around the campus all day in these hideous green-and-white beanies, and to carry shoeshine kits, just in case a senior who had already had his shoes shined by twelve toadying freshmen decided that he needed still one more. At lunch, freshmen enjoyed the privilege of finishing off the seniors’ half-eaten chocolate puddings. Afterward, the seniors stood around in a large group, calling out useful suggestions, while the freshmen made passionate love to the Greco-Roman statues in the formal gardens.

One morning that week, up at the bus stop in Morristown, a senior picked me out from the crowd of freshmen and instructed me to “moon my ass to traffic.” It was a straightforward assignment. All a freshman had to do when a senior told him to moon his ass to traffic was hang his butt out on Route 24, shake it vigorously at a few passing cars, and then quietly drop back into the crowd and become an anonymous freshman again.

Of course, I could never comply with a request like that without adding some highly individualistic statement of my own. Besides, it was a beautiful, sunny morning, with the smell of crisp, dried leaves in the air and yellow and pink chrysanthemums shining in the courthouse beds across the road. Autumn weather inspired me. Why be an anonymous freshman, I thought, when I could go for broke and hang out a “total” bare-ass moon?

So, that’s how I handled it. Unbuckling my belt, unzipping my fly and pulling my Fruit of the Loom briefs all the way down to my knees, I stepped out onto Route 24 and bent over with my butt facing the road, exposing a full bare-ass moon to traffic. The seniors howled with delight.

Nobody riding by in traffic seemed to care very much until this incredibly haggard old woman with saggy jowls and breasts screeched to a halt in her VW Bug. Jowls and breasts swaying, she leaned over, rolled down the window on the passenger side and screamed out.

“Young man, you’re exposing yourself. Stop that!”

The Del boys loved that, and they all began to shout and cheer. For good measure, I gave the old lady another vigorous shake of my ass.

“Stop that! You’re
exposing
yourself!”

When I wouldn’t stop, the old lady squealed off in the VW, pulled to a stop at a pay phone, and called the cops. We heard the siren of a police cruiser just as our bus pulled up to the stop. By this time I had my pants buttoned back up and the old lady had run up from the corner. Jabbing a liver-spotted finger in my face, she pointed me out to the cops and demanded that I be “strung up” for exposure. To assure her that I’d be dealt with firmly, the cops placed me in handcuffs, stuffed me into the cruiser and we drove off for the station with the harridan in the VW following behind.

Down at the police station, it was the usual bogus routine. Most of the cops in that town were Catholic school dropouts, and most of the prosecutors were Catholic school graduates, and nobody got very excited about a Delbarton kid mooning traffic during Freshman Initiation Week. The police sergeant politely took down the lady’s story on a yellow complaint sheet, thanked her for her trouble, and assured her that the department would “be in touch.” As soon as the old bag left the police station the sergeant tossed the complaint form in a wastebasket and told one of the cops to drive me up to school.