the Fall

He called me at 10 p.m. that Friday upset that my article hadn’t made the paper that week. He was a little drunk. It took ten minutes to convince him that his story was slated for the next issue, had been slated there for two weeks. He wasn’t happy, and he hung up on me. Ten minutes after that, he called back to apologize. He’d had too much to drink with dinner, he said. He was sorry. I think he may have mentioned something about calling him for another dive, but I’m not sure. It was late, and I was trying to get off the phone.

I no longer felt bad about failing Carl. I was, however, faced with the problem of what to write. My deadline was coming up, and I hadn’t written a word. My 38 pages of notes sat shut in a drawer in my desk.

I really wanted to pan this guy. I wanted to make him look like a person who would take your money and ruin forever any romantic notions of skydiving you’d ever had.

I called Sarah, whose number I’d written down on page 16, and tried to feel her out. Did Carl make her feel uncomfortable in any way? No, not really. Did she feel safe with him at all times? Absolutely, she did. Did anything happen, either before or after her jump, that made her question her decision to go in the first place? No, not that she could think of.

I didn’t bother calling John. It didn’t matter. Whatever either one of them said, I took a $200 jump strapped to the front of this guy and I couldn’t very well slam him in the article I was using to pay for it. Which was too bad. Because I really wanted to. I didn’t feel ashamed anymore, I felt angry. Angry I’d put myself in this situation. Angry Carl had chewed me out halfway up the stratosphere. Angry Sarah hadn’t given me anything I could use.

I sat down to write, and stared blankly at the cursor. Nothing came. In my head, I made myself a deal.

I wrote the article straight. I made skydiving exciting and dangerous, and just a little exotic. I painted Carl as the renegade outsider, as crazy as you’d want anyone hired to pump your adrenaline, and painted the experience as once in a lifetime.

I saved the other story, full of mixed feelings and disillusionment, for another time. I wrote that article straight, and in return I promised I would write another where Carl played the villain and I played the innocent.

I wrote that article straight, and promised that someday I’d write the story I wanted to tell. And that’s exactly what I’ve done.