Johnny Hangtime (8 page)

“If anything happens to Johnny,” she warned Roland, “it will be
your
fault.”

No matter what, I would have to make the Niagara Falls gag work.

B
y the second week of January we had finished all the stunt work for
Two Birds, One Stone
except for the Niagara Falls scene. Everything had gone smoothly. I hadn't suffered so much as a mosquito bite, and Mom was starting to relax a little bit. The speaking parts hadn't been shot yet because Ricky and Augusta weren't back from Tahiti. They were scheduled to meet us at Niagara Falls, where we'd finish up the film.

The TV was on as Mom and I were packing for the trip to Niagara Falls. I wasn't really paying attention, but the words “Ricky Corvette” found my ears and I looked up.
Entertainment Tonight
was on and Ricky's obnoxious face filled the screen. Mom knows how much I hate Ricky, and she grabbed for the remote to change the channel. But I got to it first.

“Liar!” I screamed, throwing a sneaker at the TV screen. “How can he say that with a straight face?”

“What do you expect him to say?” Mom said calmly, changing the channel before I could hear the rest of the interview. “He's an actor, and he's got his image to protect. You know what you've accomplished. That's all that matters.”

I felt like my blood was boiling. It never really bothered me that I didn't get the credit for what I did in Ricky Corvette's movies. But
we were nearly finished with
Two Birds, One Stone
and I had done
everything
. Ricky wasn't even on the screen yet. When he flat-out lied on national television, it pushed some kind of button in me and made me furious.

As Mom and I flew to Niagara Falls the next day, I stewed the whole way.

M
om and I checked into the Sheraton Fallsview Hotel, which overlooks Niagara Falls. I could hear the roar of the water from our room. When I went to the window, I could see the falls.

It had been three years since the accident, but I had a mental videotape of the stunt that would stay with me forever. Dad was wearing a tuxedo, confidently piloting the boat down the river. He had shown me the boat earlier in the day, when it was still on land.

“Stand clear!” he'd said. Then he pushed a button on the dashboard and the two wings popped out of the side of the boat. “Is that cool or what?”

He tested it ten or fifteen times, and there was never any problem. But then, the only time it mattered, the wings didn't pop out.

The boat had been equipped with a parachute in case of emergency. I saw it come out. But it must have become tangled up or caught by the spray of water, because it never fully opened. The boat just dropped like a brick. It must have been awful. But knowing my
dad, if he had been given a choice of dying peacefully in his sleep or going over Niagara Falls, he probably would have picked the falls.

Mom closed the shades and turned on the TV to drown out the sound of the water.

 

The schedule that Roland handed out called for us to spend three days at Niagara Falls. On Saturday, he would shoot some background scenes and the crew would prepare for what he called the big gag—the helicopter rescue. On Sunday we'd shoot the big gag. On Monday, Ricky and Augusta would do their talking scenes.

Early on Saturday morning, the lighting guys, prop guys, grips, gaffers, and gofers gathered around Roland in the hotel parking lot, where they had set up a little tent city. There was a food truck for when we had the munchies, and portable toilets for when we had to go. Everybody was busy, going about their business getting ready to finish up the movie. There must have been a few hundred people scurrying around.

All activity stopped when a white, impossibly long limousine pulled up. Ricky Corvette and Augusta Wind stepped out, followed closely by their mothers. Ricky shook hands with Roland and greeted a few of the cameramen he knew. Augusta—looking more spectacular than ever—didn't say a word to anybody.

Within seconds a buzz had traveled through the crowd, like a wave at a ballgame.

“Ricky's voice changed!”

“Ricky's voice changed!”

“Ricky's voice changed!”

Watching Ricky Corvette was like watching a horror movie. I didn't want to look, but I had to look anyway. I pushed up closer. I hadn't seen Ricky in a few months.

At first, I almost didn't recognize him. He looked older. He wasn't as cute as he used to be. Ricky still had that good-looking baby face, but there was a sprinkling of zits on it. Too many M&Ms, I guessed. Puberty can really do a number on a guy, and fast.

Makeup could hide the zits, but it couldn't do much for his body. His arms and legs didn't quite fit anymore. He looked gawky, awkward. Ricky had put on some weight too. If he resembled a young Elvis before, now he looked like the
old
Elvis. The fat, sweaty, Vegas Elvis.

Ricky was smoking a cigarette, undoubtedly because he thought it made him look older, or cooler, or maybe he was just trying to kill himself as slowly as possible.

Then there was that
voice
. Ricky always had this adorable little boy voice. It was a big part of his appeal. When I was about ten feet away from him, I could tell it was gone. His voice was lower and deeper than before, but not quite as low and deep as a man's voice. It was somewhere in the middle. His voice cracked, like a door that needs to be oiled.

His voice may have changed, but Ricky was just as much of a jerk as ever. He didn't say hello to me. He didn't ask how I was, or how the movie had been going.

“Hey, stuntkid,” he said when he saw me. “Get me a Mountain Dew.”

I had always tried to be as nice as possible to Ricky, no matter how awful he acted. But after seeing him on
Entertainment Tonight
, I wasn't in the mood to do him any favors.

“I hear you do all your own stunts,” I replied. “So you can get your
own
Mountain Dew.”

Ricky looked at me with his eyes wide open, like he couldn't believe anyone would dare to address him in such a disrespectful manner.

“If it weren't for me,” he growled, “you'd be flipping burgers at McDonald's.”

“If it weren't for
me
,” I shot back, “you'd be sweeping the
floor
at McDonald's. I doubt you have the hand-eye coordination to flip burgers.”

I thought Ricky was going to slug me, which would have been great. I knew I could flatten that weasel with one punch. I was ready for him. But he just stormed away and found somebody else to get him a Mountain Dew.

Word quickly swept around the set that I had stood up to the great Ricky Corvette. I was getting high fives and thumbs-up signs for the rest of the day.

It was probably a mistake to get into a war with a Hollywood heavyweight like Ricky. But I didn't care. I had other things to worry about. Tomorrow, I would be going to the brink of Niagara Falls in a canoe.

T
he clock said it was 1:30
A.M.
, but I wasn't tired. The constant rumble of Niagara Falls was pounding against my ears. I looked over at the bed next to mine and saw that Mom was asleep.

There was nothing to worry about, really. Roland and I had gone over the gag repeatedly. I would paddle the canoe out to the middle of the river a few miles upstream from the falls. The river moves fast, up to forty miles per hour in some places.

A helicopter would be right above me, but out of camera range. When I reached the edge of the falls, it would swoop down. All I would have to do would be to stand up, wrap an arm around the skid at the bottom of the helicopter, and let it carry me away. The canoe would go over the falls and shatter into a million pieces while Roland got it all on film. It was a simple gag that would seem very dramatic.

Still, I wanted to look it over for myself one more time. I threw on the dirty clothes I'd worn all day, pulled on my sneakers, and
grabbed my room key. Quietly, I clicked the door behind me. Mom didn't wake up.

January in Niagara Falls is
cold
. It was a short walk to the observation deck. Some guy wearing a hat was out there, but he left by the time I got to the railing. I looked out over the falls. It wasn't illuminated, but the full moon lit it up pretty well.

When you see Niagara Falls on TV or in photos, it doesn't convey what an awesome sight it really is. The first time I'd been here, three years ago, I was too young to appreciate the beauty. I was overwhelmed by the power, the noise, the spray of the water when you get anywhere close to the edge.

When we were talking about the gag during the day, Roland told me how the falls came to be. Twenty million years ago, he explained, the Ice Age began and the polar ice caps crept across the planet. Glaciers swept down North America. Inch by inch, they gouged out the Great Lakes.

Through the centuries, the glaciers melted. About 12,000 years ago, huge torrents of water formed the Niagara River connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Little by little, the pounding water created this seven-mile canyon called the Niagara Gorge. It's still happening, actually. The falls has moved about seven miles upstream in 12,000 years. It was the nearby Indian tribes that named it “Niagara,” which means “thundering water.”

I was looking across the top of the Horseshoe Falls, where my canoe would be destroyed the next day. It's called the Horseshoe Falls because it's shaped like a big horseshoe. There are two falls here. The river forms a border between the United States and Canada, with Goat Island in the middle. The Horseshoe Falls is in Canada, and the American Falls is in the United States.

The Horseshoe is 176 feet high. That's eight feet lower than the
American Falls, but it's much more spectacular. Including the plunge basin beneath it, the total drop is 356 feet. It's a long way down. As I stood there on the observation deck, more than 200,000 cubic feet of water rushed by every second.

A freshwater gull flew by, and I imagined that she threw me a smirk.
She
wasn't worried about going over the falls. Following her flight path, I saw a figure at the other end of the observation deck. It appeared to be a man holding a cane in his right hand. I pretended not to notice the guy as I looked out at the falls, but I heard his footsteps scraping toward me. Suddenly I realized he was alongside me at the rail.

“John?”

Everybody who knows me calls me Johnny. There was only one person who ever called me John. I recognized the voice. I had gotten used to the idea that I would never hear it again. I turned to look at his face.

It was my dad.

Somehow, it didn't surprise me. We stared at each other for a moment.

“How's Squirt?” he asked.

“He's dead,” I replied. “I thought you were dead too.”

“So did I.”

He wrapped his arms around me. He seemed so different from the man I remembered. So thin and frail. Dad used to have a crew cut, but now his hair was long and stringy. He was a little stooped over, and his hug didn't have the strength that I remembered. But then, I'm stronger than I was when I was ten.

“I
nearly
died,” he said, his head on my shoulder. “The boat bounced off the rocks about halfway down and threw me into the basin. It broke nearly every bone in my body. But I managed to get
to the Devil's Hole Ravine, a formation in the side of the gorge. I lay there for the longest time, thinking things over. It took about a year to get better.”

So many feelings washed over me. Happiness. Astonishment. Exhilaration. You go through years thinking somebody you loved is gone forever, and then suddenly there they are, right next to you. It's a shock to the system.

“How did you know I would be here tonight?” I asked.

“Nobody can sleep the night before they go to the edge of the falls.”

“But how did you know I was doing that?”

“I saw an article in the paper about them shooting the movie here.”

All at once another feeling washed over me, replacing all those other feelings.
Anger
. I pushed Dad away from me, almost knocking him over.

“You've been alive all this time,” I yelled, “and pretended you were dead!”

“John, I owed money to some people,” he explained. “Bad people. I couldn't pay them back. They were going to hurt me. They might have hurt you too. I figured that if I was dead, my problem would be solved.”

“So you just abandoned Mom?”

“The night before I went over the falls, your mother told me she wanted a divorce, John. We hadn't been getting along for some time. She never got used to me doing stunts, I guess, and finally she said she couldn't take it anymore. I figured that as long as we were splitting up, I might as well be out of the picture entirely. I changed my name and started a new life nearby here, in Canada.”

“So
that's
why Mom doesn't like to talk about you,” I said. “That's
why she doesn't have any photos of you around the house. She never told me she was going to divorce you.”

“I'm sure she didn't want to hurt you. It's bad enough for a kid to lose his father. He doesn't have to know his folks were going to split up.”

“But I never saw you and Mom fight.”

“You probably never saw us kiss either.”

Everyone had always told me that my dad was the bravest man they ever met. He would jump off anything. He would run through fire. He would do any stunt, no matter how dangerous. He was fearless. But he was afraid to tell his own family that he was alive.

“You're a coward,” I said.

“I suppose I am,” Dad replied wearily.

“Do you expect Mom to take you back now? Is that why you came here?”

“No,” he sighed, shaking his head. “She has a new life now.”

“I could call the police, you know,” I said. “I could go to the press. I could tell everybody.”

“I know.”

“Why did you come here?” I asked.

“To ask you not to do this gag.”

“I'm doing it,” I said, turning away from him.

“It's okay to hate me, John, but don't ignore me. This gag is too dangerous. There's a curse on these falls. They could kill you.”

“They didn't kill
you
.”

“They almost did. Look, I don't care if you do stunts for one year or twenty. Something will go wrong eventually. It's gonna catch up with you. If you do stunts for a living, you're gonna get hurt. Maybe you're gonna die. Did you ever hear of Dar Robinson?”

“No.”

“Dar was a friend of mine. He was the greatest high-fall man ever. He jumped nine hundred feet off the CN Tower in Toronto. Once he jumped from the wing of a plane onto another plane flying beneath it. I saw him drive a car off the rim of the Grand Canyon and parachute down safely.”

“He must have been a maniac,” I said, marveling.

“He
wasn't
a maniac. That's the point. A maniac is an idiot who does something crazy and hopes he'll live to brag about it. A stuntman makes it
look
like he's doing something crazy. Dar Robinson never broke a bone in his body. Then one day he was doing a routine motorcycle gag and his bike slipped on some loose gravel. It went over a cliff. Dar was just thirty-nine.”

“Accidents happen.”

“Yeah, but especially if you do something foolish. John, it took a near fatal fall to get me to quit. You might not be so lucky. Let me tell you a story—”

“I've got to get some sleep,” I said, waving him away. “I have a big day ahead of me.”

“You're not going to sleep tonight,” Dad insisted, walking unsteadily to a bench nearby. “Sit down. There's an old Indian legend you need to know about.”

I followed him to the bench.

“Once,” Dad explained, “people knew the wholeness of the world. They spoke with the earth and the sky. The sun, the moon, and the stars spoke with them. They knew the animals and the plants as their brothers and sisters. The Thunder beings taught them about what is and what will happen. People knew all these things, and knew the wholeness of the world.”

“What's a Thunder being?” I asked.

“Don't interrupt,” Dad continued. “Young Indian men who lived
in Niagara used to demonstrate their courage by riding over the falls in birchbark canoes. Amazingly, they would be unharmed by the water.”

“Why?”

“When they were behind the falls, they found themselves in a cave with a high ceiling and many creatures in it. These were the Thunder beings. They lived behind the falls and would lower the canoes gently to the base. There, the Thunder beings told the young men, ‘You don't need to test yourselves this way. When you were created you were given all the courage and bravery that you will ever need.' The young men saw the wisdom in this, and they stopped testing themselves. But when white men arrived and pushed the Indians off the land, the Thunder beings moved away. People forgot their message. The earth and the stars and the animals continued to talk, but the white men didn't listen. As they forgot their oneness with the world, people became selfish, or mistrustful, or jealous of others. And that's where we are today, you and me. The Thunder beings, I believe, put a curse on these falls when they left. It makes white men want to go over them. In boats, in canoes, even in barrels. Most of them die.”

“I'm doing the gag, Dad,” I said.

Dad sighed. He knew he wasn't going to talk me out of it. Just as nobody could ever talk
him
out of all the crazy stunts he did when he was younger.

“Are you scared?” he asked.

“No,” I stated firmly. “I know what I'm doing.”

“If a stuntman isn't scared,” Dad said, forcing me to make eye contact with him, “he's lost his respect for fear.
That's
dangerous. If you don't have a little fear, you don't belong out here tomorrow. When you become so sure of yourself, that's the time to quit.”

“Why should I listen to
your
advice?” I demanded. “Like
your
judgment is so good? You walked out on me. You pretended you were dead.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It was the biggest mistake of my life. Just do me one favor. Don't do the gag, John.”

“What favor did you ever do for
me
?”

I walked away. He struggled to catch up, and handed me a card with his phone number on it.

“If you need anything, you'll know how to reach me.”

“I needed you three years ago,” I said, and walked back to the hotel without looking back at him.