The cause of the air crash, however, was not terrorism: Investigators suspected that the tail fin and rudder of the Airbus A300 had been sheared off when the plane hit turbulence caused by a 747 in front of it. It was a reminder that life could still be taken by fate, as well as by Osama bin Laden. Two of the victims, Kathleen Lawler, forty-eight, and her twenty-four-year-old son Christopher, were simply sitting at home in Belle Harbor when a fireball came out of the sky and devoured them.
I desperately wanted to leave New York. I knew I was supposed to love the Big Apple, but I couldn’t pretend anymore. I hated it. It was nothing like the relaxing, sunny business trips to Silicon Valley I had taken while covering the dot-com industry in the late nineties. By spring I saw a chance to move when Peter Stothard, The Times’s editor for a decade, announced his retirement. He was replaced by Robert Thomson, managing editor of the American edition of the Financial Times. I asked Patience if there was a chance Thomson would reopen The Times’s Los Angeles bureau. Patience said yes, but that I was unlikely to get the job. “Chris, you’ve got to remember: You’re still very young,” she said. “And besides, you’re a serious financial journalist. Los Angeles is all about celebrity fluff.” A week later she called back: I was the new Los Angeles correspondent. Thomson had also decided to reopen the New York bureau, this time in Battery Park, and hire two people to cover Wall Street—essentially ending the culture of lift and view. I wasn’t quite sure how it had all happened, but I was delighted. Thomson, apparently, had wanted someone on the West Coast who could write about the economics of celebrity fluff as well as the celebrity fluff itself.
Alana, on the other hand, was distraught: She hated the idea of giving up the West Village for La-La-Land. I suggested going alone and trying a long-distance relationship. After several furious arguments and a brief separation, Alana decided to come with me. In the end we drove there, picking up my company jeep in Long Island and pointing it west. California, I imagined, would mark the end of my career as an accidental war correspondent. My two years in New York would be a violent blip on an otherwise peaceful life. I would spend my days lounging by the Beverly Hilton swimming pool and my evenings at celebrity parties in the Hollywood hills. I would drink cappuccinos in Shutters of Santa Monica, sink vodka martinis in the Sky Bar, and cruise up and down Sunset Strip with Led Zeppelin crunching out of the jeep’s stereo system. There would be no anthrax, and no falling skyscrapers.
Oh yes: In California, I would be a new man.
CORONADO ISLAND, CALIFORNIA
2002
8
A TERRIBLE MISTAKE
“Any nervous fliers onboard?” asked the pilot.
I wanted to raise my right arm, but it was being restrained by a nylon belt that was creating a deep red welt in my flesh.
The pilot’s voice was coming from within a pair of heavy black headphones wrapped around my blue crash helmet. I tried to say something, but my chin strap was pulled so tight it had immobilized my jaw. The other passengers, I noticed, faced a similar problem. No one responded.
“Outstanding,” said the pilot. “Because it sure is gonna be reeeal bumpy up there today. Whoayeah! And when we land… yawl might think we’ve crashed. But don’t worry folks, it’s only gonna feel like that.”
Whoops of distorted laughter filled the headphones.
The pilot coughed, then added: “Ah’ll be pretty darn impressed if none of you media folk don’t get reacquainted with your breakfast.”
More distorted whoops.
I tried to remember what I had eaten for breakfast. I had a horrible feeling it involved eggs. Again, I tried to speak.
“Ungh,” was the best I could manage.
I was facing the rear of the aircraft, looking out at the hot tarmac of the runway through an open hatch, my feet planted at shoulder level on the back of the seat in front of me. I could hear nothing, apart from the pilot’s distant, almost mechanical voice—he sounded like a stormtrooper from one of the early Star Wars films—and the industrial drone of the twin T-56 turboprop engines, which had redefined my understanding of loudness. Nausea tickled my stomach.
“Okeydoke folks!” said the pilot, and I felt the battered aircraft, a U.S. Navy C-2A Greyhound, start to jerk forward.
Within the next hour we were due to land on the USS Constellation, a five-thousand-crew aircraft carrier sailing in wide circles one hundred miles off the coast of San Diego. My plan to write about celebrity fluff in Los Angeles had gone badly wrong. The Greyhound would collide with the Constellation’s deck at 150 miles an hour and be yanked to a standstill within two seconds, or 320 feet, by a hook on the tail that snagged an “arresting cable” stretched across the deck. Sometimes, I had been told, the hook would miss and the plane would skid off the other end of the runway, into the Pacific.
That would explain why I was also wearing a life jacket.
I emitted a loud groan, rendered silent by the engines.
The Greyhound gathered speed and the pitch of the turboprops jumped an octave. The hatch slowly closed. Finally, with clatter and a violent wobble, the twenty-eight-ton plane heaved itself off the tarmac. I wasn’t near any of the aircraft’s tiny, porthole-shaped windows, so I stared instead at the exposed ducts and wires inside the cargo bay, making an internal promise never to complain again about Virgin Atlantic’s economy class. The headphones gave a cough of radio static.
“Okay kids,” said the pilot. “Looks like it’s gonna be another real nice, sunny Californian day. But it ain’t gonna be so nice and sunny where we’re going. Hope yawl brought some warm sweaters…”
I wondered if I would be okay in a T-shirt: It was all I had packed.
The aircraft banked, groaned, and corrected itself.
The pilot continued: “Sit back, relax, and I’ll check back with yawl when we make our dee-scent. Remember folks, this ain’t like flying American. We’ll be landing on a moving runway, in a gusty crosswind. If you feel an impact followed by a bounce, it means we missed the SOB and we’ll have to try again. But don’t worry folks: We got THREE tries before the gas runs out.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled jet fuel vapor: my favorite smell.
I wished I was lying by the pool.
Life in California hadn’t gone exactly to plan. Alana and I arrived at our new home in late August, having bumped and rattled three thousand miles across the country in The Times’s jeep, at first heading southwest through Virginia to Atlanta, then directly west via Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Eventually, after two weeks of roadside cheeseburgers, thirty-dollar motel rooms, and 55 mile-per-hour speed limits, we made a scorched dash through the Mojave Desert, passing razor-wired Department of Defense missile ranges and proving grounds, before dropping down into the neon-lit pinball machine of metropolitan Los Angeles. By that time, my copy of Exile on Main Street had almost melted into the jeep’s CD player.