The Skydiving Incident

This story is completely true. Until we get to the skydiving part, that is.

In his book Red Dragon, Thomas Harris said (I’m paraphrasing) that fear is the price of imagination. This rung true for me because most of my fears are indeed based upon my ability to imagine the worst.
The best example of this is my fear of heights. It’s one of those primal, crippling fears that I rarely even attempt to overcome. Don’t misunderstand; my acrophobia isn’t so bad that I steadfastly remain on terra firma regardless of the situation, like John Madden’s long-lost son. I’m not that much of a pussy. My phobia simply means that, on the occasions that I do tempt fate, I cannot help but imagine the horrible and gruesome death that my hubristic ascent into the heavens must surely lead to.
For example, anytime I find myself on a plane I inevitably picture the plane losing all power and dropping from the sky like the multi-ton hunk of metal that it is (airplanes are unnatural; surely only witchcraft of the most evil sort keeps them in the sky). I imagine my subsequent descent into madness, in which I lose all control over my mind and bodily functions, for the long wait between the realization that I am going to die and my actual death is what truly terrifies me about heights.
I have repelled into an open cavern (with no walls or stalactites nearby to provide even the slightest comfort), the only thing between me and my piñata-style death being a terrifyingly thin bit of climbing rope. I tried to enjoy the experience of hanging hundreds of feet above a cave floor, and I might have done so for about 6.3 microseconds, but the rest of the descent was spent in the company of an extreme surety that, any second now, that thin rope was going to snap and send me plummeting to a grisly death in which I would (with my luck) end impaled upon a stalagmite.
Then there was the trip I took to Italy with my family. We were in Florence, I believe, and decided to climb to the top of a bell tower or something. The stairs are on the inside of the building, you say? No problemo. Up we went. And up. And up. Until that point, I was convinced that only an Escher drawing had that many stairs. I was mistaken. When we finally reached the roof, we found ourselves approximately 80,000 feet above the city of Florence. It was beautiful. Pants-wettingly beautiful. Try as I might, I couldn’t help but imagine the inevitable earthquake that the gods would send to punish me for climbing to such unnatural heights. The earthquake would topple this tower of Babel, sending me racing towards the earth with thousands of tons of rubble at my flailing heels, just in case the drop somehow spared my life.
Despite this healthy and justifiable fear of a horribly protracted death, I occasionally get it into my head to tempt the Fates. This explains the repelling. It also explains the skydiving trip I recently took. Deciding that I once again needed to face my fears, I took a friend up on an offer to go skydiving. Sounds like fun, right?
We arrived at the airport at 9:00 AM and the process began. We signed waivers. “Something something undersigned…something something liability…blah blah high risk…blah blah see you in the afterlife…” Wait—what?! I re-read the end and was relieved to see that that last bit was merely a figment of my overactive imagination. I signed at the bottom, feeling the mild unease that one must surely experience when signing one’s own will. A little spooked, I began climbing into my jumpsuit, beginning to feel like a man who was being prepared for execution, but oddly giddy as well.
Our instructors did their instructy thing, telling us what to expect, how not to hurt ourselves when leaving the plane and landing, and generally psyching us up for a “bitchin’ time, dudes!” It worked. I was excited. You always jump tandem on your first jump, so I had a talk with my instructor before getting on the plane.
“Look, I’m kinda afraid of heights, so I might need a little help out the door. No matter what I do or say, I want you to please make sure we jump out of that plane as planned, okay?”
“No problem, bro. I’ve jumped with plenty of people like you. We always end up jumping and they always thank me for the help with that first step. It’s gonna be epic!”
I thanked him for his assurances and we all climbed into the plane. We took our seats and off we went into the wild blue yonder. The first thing that I noticed is that this aircraft, a medium-sized prop plane, was decidedly less steady than your average passenger plane.
“Okay,” I told myself, “I should have expected this. It’s a lot lighter than the other planes I’ve been on, so I’m sure that this alarming increase in bumps and noise is perfectly normal.” I tried to calm myself.
Up and up we went. It felt like an eternity. Finally we leveled out and I took a peak out of a window. I’m pretty sure I see stars. And was that a satellite that just cruised by at a bajillion miles per hour? The first creeping tendrils of mind-numbing terror began to wrap around my mind.
What the fuck am I doing?! I’m terrified of heights, and I’m about to jump out of a perfectly functional airplane! Good lord, I’m gonna die! The parachute is going to fail and my instructor and I are going to race each other towards our deaths. We are going to become one, in the most inescapable and appalling manner, with the earth and each other. Oh shit, I am officially freaking out!
Then someone opened the door.
It was as if they opened the door to Hades itself. The wind shrieked like a banshee, buffeting everyone inside with icy cold. I swear I could hear the screaming of the damned in that wind, and they’re all saying the same thing: “You’re gonna die, honky!”
“Dude, I can’t do this!” I yelled over the wailing wind. “I appreciate this opportunity to laugh in Death’s face, but I think I’m going to pass, ride down with the sane people piloting this thing, and live the rest of my life with a healthy and responsible fear of Death instead.”
The instructor laughed and told me everything would be fine. That son of a bitch! I decided that if I live through this I’m going to kill him and everyone he’s ever loved. Twice.
My friend and her instructor positioned themselves at the door. She gave me the thumbs up, turned back to the door and jumped out. I’m convinced that it’s the last time I’ll ever see her, unless, of course, you count the quick glimpse I’ll get of her mangled corpse embedded in the ground before I hit and become one myself.
We began walking towards the door. At this point I am nearly insane with fear. I beg. I plead. I threaten. Nothing fazes this guy.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t think I forgot what you told me! ‘No matter what I do or say, I want you to make sure we jump.’ I’m helping you face your fears, dude! Have fun with this!”
The small sliver of me that has managed to remain sane makes a mental note to invent time travel with the intent of going back in time and kicking my own stupid ass for uttering what was clearly the stupidest thing I’ve ever said. I’ll give me a beating I won’t soon forget!
I continued begging anyway. I was now crying, complete with snot running down my face. The instructor, hooked to my back, couldn’t see this. He patted me on the shoulder and we were out, falling towards the earth at what will soon be terminal velocity.
I screamed like a 5-year old girl who has just watched an axe-murderer butcher her favorite pony.
I flailed like an epileptic spider monkey.
Never in all my life have I experienced such mind-altering terror. My mind couldn’t even begin to process the enormity of the fear I was experiencing as I plummeted towards what was surely my death. And, oh great zombie Jesus, did I just…
Yep. I just wet myself.
At first it was warm, a somehow soothing feeling that spread from my nether regions. This did not last long. The thing about the air at that height is that it’s cold. The warmth of my ever-spreading urine is no match for the bitter cold of the air and wind at several thousand feet. The icy hands of fate quickly turned my naughty bits into a crotchsicle. I began to fear that, even should the parachute properly deploy, my now frozen penis might just snap off upon landing.
I estimate that it was at about this time that my instructor noticed something was wrong, because he suddenly yelled, “Dude!” He yanked the chord, and, much to my surprise, the parachute unfurled without a hitch.
“Dude, did you piss yourself?!” are the first words I’m able to hear once the wind dies down.
“Um, no!” I yelled back, trying to find a way to save my dignity. “I think we hit a duck! That must be blood!”
He wasn’t buying it. “Dude! Uncool, man! Uncool! I’m covered in man-piss!”
And without warning, my instructor began to retch uncontrollably.
This was an extremely unfortunate situation for me, as I was directly in front of him. As warm, chunky vomit covered my head and back I did what came naturally. I myself began to puke. Violently.
“BLAAARGH! OH GOD!” I screamed. “BLAAAAAARGH! SOME OF YOUR PUKE GOT IN MY MOUTH! BLAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
And so we descended back to earth, an ever-dwindling twin fountain of bile and breakfast. We landed and crumpled to the ground, two men covered from head to toe in vomit and urine, dry-heaving in the puke-splattered grass.
“Never—HUUUUUAAH—again—HUUUUUGGGGH,” I said between heaves.
“You got—HUAARGH—that right—HUUUAAAAH—buddy!” came my instructor’s reply.
And thus was I banned from skydiving in Colorado. I attempted to get my money back, citing the unprofessional manner in which my instructor unloaded the contents of his stomach onto me, but they would hear nothing of it.
Apparently a little pee puts the blame squarely on me.

*I would like to thank Tucker Max for inspiring me to move past simple urination and go for the gold--a full on floating vomitfest.

Choices

Well, this got some interesting reactions when I posted it on Facebook, and I've decided that they're reactions that I would like to reply to at some length, so I thought I'd do it here. And since I don't want those of you who aren't my friends on Facebook to feel left out, I figured I'd post the original material first. In the next day or so I'll post the reactions and my responses to them.
So here's a rare bit of fiction for you guys.


Xander stared at the two items on his desk, assessing his options. On his left sat a blue and green glass pipe, filled with marijuana. The object on his right was a .50 caliber Mark XIX Desert Eagle, its finish dark and unpolished. Both offered relief, but the variety offered by the Desert Eagle was much less fleeting. Xander sat there, trying to decide whether that sort of finality was what he truly desired.
Things hadn’t always been this way. He hadn’t always been tempted to mute the pain with drugs or orally applied hunks of high velocity metal. His childhood had been wonderful, charmed. He’d gotten pretty much whatever he’d wanted, not because he was spoiled, but because he’d always had realistic expectations and a taste for simplicity. Sure, he’d ask for a new video game console every now and then, but for the most part he was content with a pile of books when Christmas or his birthday rolled around.
He’d always loved to read, to learn. He had an insatiable curiosity, an almost physical need to know as much as he could. It was a non-competitive desire, completely self-fueled. His thirst for knowledge had nothing to do with being at the head of the class or making others feel inferior. He just needed to know things. It was compulsive.
This could have been his social downfall, his ticket to Nerdville and daily swirlies, but his skills on the football field had saved him from that fate. Despite his distinctly brainy bent, he had a love of football and talent to match. He was discovered in 5th grade, during recess. A friend’s father had come to the school to drop off a forgotten bag lunch and witnessed Xander making a diving one-handed catch. True, the ball had been of the spongy variety, but the man, the local high school’s football coach, knew talent when he saw it and quickly sought to mentor him in the subtle art of being a wide receiver.
By the time Xander reached high school his hands were superb, and he quickly earned a spot on the varsity team. His ability to catch anything that came within reach earned him the nickname Super Glue, a moniker he was proud to have earned. By the time he left, he’d set school records for career touchdown catches, yards after catch, and yards per catch. He seemed destined for the NFL, but college, of course, came first. Many universities had courted him, football powerhouses like USC and Texas, but he had decided upon Stanford. He was, after all, a geek at heart.
And that’s when things started to deteriorate for Xander. It’s not that Stanford was bad for him; it was simply that his life had changed drastically, had taken a form that he found unfamiliar and daunting. The first thing to go wrong was football. He played football because he enjoyed it, but high school and college football were different beasts. College football was a ravenous thing, eating up free time, never satiated. There were endless practices, innumerable weight training sessions, and piles of video footage to comb through. The demands on his time began to overwhelm him, destroying Xander’s enjoyment of the game. He quit after one season, a red shirt who never touched the playing field.
This had left him in something of a predicament. He’d foolishly assumed that he’d breeze through college, get drafted by the 49ers and make millions. Now that this was no longer a possibility he was unsure of what to do. Unlike many people, he hadn’t grown up wanting to be a fireman or surgeon. He’d never put much thought into that kind of stuff. It wasn’t as if the football thing had been a lifelong dream. It was simply what he had perceived to be the path of least resistance. Now he’d lost that path, and a new one failed to present itself.
Faced with the sudden necessity of choosing a career, Xander’s mental health had begun to fail. His intellectual strength now felt like a weakness. He honestly believed that he could do whatever he set his mind to, but rather than comfort him this belief brought only despair. The wealth of options before him was too large; it paralyzed him. He fell into a deep depression and began to have such powerful anxiety attacks that he often had trouble leaving his room. He managed to stay in college, eking out mostly Bs with the occasional A, but he flitted from major to major, unable to find something that truly ignited a passion within him. He was stalling and he knew it, but he couldn’t find an answer, couldn’t see a way out.
Having never been much of a drinker, he turned to weed for solace. It calmed his anxiety, and quieted his depression, at least in the short term. But he knew, even if he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, that he was simply masking the pain, not eliminating it. The green was a crutch that he was slowly becoming dependant upon. It was becoming as much of a problem as a solution, but it was all he had, his only path to a moment of peace, and so he limped onward.
After seven years of college, he finally graduated with an anthropology degree. He didn’t really want to be an anthropologist and he had no intention of going on to grad school, but he had decided that he needed something to show for all of the time he’d spent in school. So he got the degree, for all the good that it did him.
And now here he was, an over-educated bookstore clerk making $8.50 an hour, struggling to make ends meet, student loans hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. He was no closer to a career now than when he had started college. He was still lost, still rudderless in choppy seas. He felt that he was capable of so much more, but he was unable to distinguish what “more” meant.
All he knew was that he was miserable, and that he could see no way out of his predicament. Because the problem, as he saw it, wasn’t just with him. He detested the necessity of money, the struggle to procure enough so that he could live even a modest life. He saw no point to modern life. It felt cold, pointless, and hollow. He despised the rat race. He felt he was running a maze in which cheese was the only prize, and he was lactose intolerant.
And so here he sat with the only two choices that made any kind of sense to him, flawed as they were. He could take the path to the left, smoke his green and find a short-lived and imperfect peace, a numbness more bearable than the existential pain that haunted him. Or he could turn to the right and rush down that short and violent path, whose terminus was shrouded in mystery.
He sighed and picked up the pipe, brought it to his lips and set fire to its contents, inhaling deeply. His body and mind relaxed. His curiosity had been the deciding factor, just as it always was. There was still so much to explore, to learn. But that other path stirred his curiosity as well. It held a macabre allure, and he recognized that one day, if things did not take an unexpected turn for the better, the weight of the world would drag him down, and his curiosity would get the better of him.