T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

It took me a week. I called every airline in the directory, listened to a lifetime’s worth of holding jingles, and talked to everyone from the forklift operator at KLM to the president and CEO of Texas Air. I was met by scorn, hostility, disbelief, and naked contempt. Finally I got hold of the schedules manager of Aero Masoquisto, the Ecuadorian national airline. It was going to cost me, he said, but he could hold up the regular weekly flight to Quito for a few hours while Zoltan strapped himself to the wing and took a couple passes round the airport. He suggested an airstrip outside Tijuana, where the officials would look the other way. For a price, of course.

Of course.

I went to Sol again. I was prepared to press my forehead to the floor, shine his shoes, anything — but he surprised me. “I’ll front the money,” he rasped, his voice ruined from forty years of whispering into the telephone, “no problem.” Sol was seventy, looked fifty, and he’d had his own table in the Polo Lounge since before I was born. “If he bags it,” he said, his voice as dry as a husk, “we got the rights to his life story and we’ll do a paperback/miniseries/action-figure tie-in. Just get him to sign this, that’s all.” He slid a contract across the table. “And if he makes it, which I doubt — I mean I’ve seen some crazies in my time, but this guy is something else — if he makes it, we’ll have a million and a half offers for him. Either way, we make out, right?”

“Right,” I said, but I was thinking of Zoltan, his brittle limbs pressed to the unyielding metal, the terrible pull of the G-forces, and the cyclonic blast of the wind. What chance did he have?

Sol cleared his throat, shook a few lozenges into his fist, and rattled them like dice. “Your job,” he said, “is to make sure the press shows up. No sense in this nimrod bagging it for nothing, right?”

I felt something clench in my gut.

Sol repeated himself. “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

Zoltan was in full regalia as we boarded the plane at LAX, along with a handful of reporters and photographers and a hundred grim-looking Ecuadorians with plastic bags full of disposable diapers, cosmetics, and penlight batteries. The plan was for the pilot to announce a minor problem — a clogged air-conditioning vent or a broken handle in the flush toilet; we didn’t want to panic anybody — and an unscheduled stop to repair it. Once on the ground, the passengers would be asked to disembark and we’d offer them free drinks in the spacious terminal while the plan taxied out of sight and Zoltan did his thing.

Problem was, there was no terminal. The landing strip looked as if it had been bombed during the Mexican Revolution, it was a hundred degrees inside the airplane and 120 out on the asphalt, and all I could see was heat haze and prickly-pear cactus. “What do you want to do?” I asked Zoltan.

Zoltan turned to me, already fumbling with his chin strap. “It’s perfect,” he whispered, and then he was out in the aisle, waving his arms and whistling for the passengers’ attention. When they quieted down, he spoke to them in Spanish, the words coming so fast you might have thought he was a Mexican disc jockey, his voice riding on a current of emotion he never approached in English. I don’t know what he said — he could have been exhorting them to hijack the plane, for all I knew — but the effect was dramatic. When he finished, they rose to their feet and cheered.

With a flourish, Zoltan threw open the emergency exit over the wing and began his preparations. Flashbulbs popped, reporters hung out the door and shouted questions at him — Had this ever been attempted before? Did he have his will made out? How high was he. planning to go? — and the passengers pressed their faces to the windows. I’d brought along a TV crew to capture the death-defying feat for syndication, and they set up one camera on the ground while the other shot through the window.

Zoltan didn’t waste any time. He buckled what looked like a huge leather truss around the girth of the wing, strapped himself into the pouch attached to it, tightened his chin strap a final time, and then gave me the thumbs-up sign. My heart was hammering. A dry wind breathed through the open window. The heat was like a fist in my face. “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” I yelled.

“One hundred percent, A-OK,” Zoltan shouted, grinning as the reporters crowded round me in the narrow passageway. Then the pilot said something in Spanish and the flight attendants pulled the window shut, fastened the bolts, and told us to take our seats. A moment later the big engines roared to life and we were hurtling down the runway. I could barely stand to look. At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers. I felt the wheels lift off, heard a shout from the passengers, and there he was — Zoltan — clinging to the trembling thunderous wing like a second coat of paint.

It was a heady moment, transcendent, the cameras whirring, the passengers cheering, Zoltan’s greatness a part of us all. This was an event, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like watching Hank Aaron stroke his seven hundred fifteenth homer or Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon. We forgot the heat, forgot the roar of the engines, forgot ourselves. He’s doing it, I thought, he’s actually doing it. And I truly think he would have pulled it off, if — well, it was one of those things no one could have foreseen. Bad luck, that’s all.

What happened was this: just as the pilot was coming in for his final approach, a big black bird — a buzzard, somebody said — loomed up out of nowhere and slammed into Zoltan with a thump that reverberated throughout the plane. The whole thing took maybe half a second. This black bundle appears, there’s a thump, and next thing Zoltan’s goggles are gone and he’s covered from head to toe in raw meat and feathers.

A gasp went through the cabin. Babies began to mewl, grown men burst into tears, a nun fainted. My eyes were riveted on Zoltan. He lay limp in his truss while the hot air sliced over the wing and the jagged yellow mountains, the prickly pear, and the pocked landing strip rushed past him like the backdrop of an old movie. The plane was still rolling when we threw open the emergency exit and staggered out onto the wing. The copilot was ahead of me, a reporter on my heels. “Zoltan!” I cried, scared and sick and trembling. “Zoltan, are you all right?”

There was no answer. Zoltan’s head lolled against the flat hard surface of the wing and his eyes were closed, sunk deep behind the wrinkled flaps of his lids. There was blood everywhere. I bent to tear at the straps of the aviator’s cap, my mind racing, thinking alternately of mouth-to-mouth and the medical team I should have thought to bring along, when an urgent voice spoke at my back. “Perdóneme, perdóneme, I yam a doaktor.”

One of the passengers, a wizened little man in Mickey Mouse T-shirt and Bermudas, knelt over Zoltan, shoving back his eyelids and feeling for his pulse. There were shouts behind me. The wing was as hot as the surface of a frying pan. “Jes, I yam getting a pulse,” the doctor announced and then Zoltan winked open an eye. “Hey,” he rumbled, “am I famous yet?”

Zoltan was right: the airplane stunt fired the imagination of the country. The wire services picked it up, the news magazines ran stories — there was even a bit on the CBS evening news. A week later the National Enquirer was calling him the reincarnation of Houdini and the Star was speculating about his love life. I booked him on the talk-show circuit, and while he might not have had much to say, he just about oozed charisma. He appeared on the Carson show in his trademark outfit, goggles and all, limping and with his arm in a sling (he’d suffered a minor concussion, a shoulder separation, and a fractured kneecap when the bird hit him). Johnny asked him what it was like out there on the wing and Zoltan said: “Loud.” And what was it like spending two weeks on the face of the Sumitomo Building? “Boring,” Zoltan rumbled. But Carson segued into a couple of airline jokes (“Have you heard the new slogan for China Airlines?” Pause. “You’ve seen us drive, now watch us fly”) and the audience ate it up. Offers poured in from promoters, producers, book editors, and toy manufacturers. I was able to book David Mugillo, my harelipped comedian, on Zoltan’s coattails, and when we did the Carson show we got Bettina Buttons on for three minutes of nasal simpering about Tyrannosaurus II and how educational an experience it was for her to work with such a sensitive and caring director as so-and-so.