The Membrane that Separates Us
“The road is long and seeming without end/ The days go on, I remember you my friend/ And though you're gone/ And my heart's been emptied it seems/ I'll see you in my dreams”— Bruce Springsteen.
JT — we called him Jackrabbit — was a scampering halfback with a never-say-die heart. At 115 pounds as a freshman, he began his high school football career against the advice of those who worried he would get hurt. By the time we were seniors, I was the varsity quarterback and he was my 145-pound wide receiver. if I passed the ball to him at the snap, he would take off like a tightly-wound spring-driven machine and churn up the turf until confronted by a larger defensive end or linebacker. He would lower his head, plow right into his would-be tacklers and drive them back with exploding force. His secret — invisible to them — was his heart, thrumming like a hummingbird’s in flight.
On graduation night, we took off in his Corvette at midnight and drove to California’s central coast along the route that James Dean took on his final drive before he crashed his sports car near Cholame and died at 24. The next day at the coast, we met Janet, who grabbed my heart. She came from Minnesota to visit her divorced mother each summer. She was my summer sweetheart that summer and the next.
In the third summer, when we were both 20-year-old college students home for summer, JT called me at dawn on a Sunday and asked if I wanted to fly with him to his Cal Poly apartment to pick up some things he needed at his family home. “Didn’t you say Janet might be there at her stepdad’s ranch? You told me he had a landing strip, right?”
Once again, we took the coastal route, this time looking down on James Dean Curve. We landed in San Luis Obispo, where JT’s roommate drove us to their apartment. I called Janet at her stepfather’s ranch in the foothills. She was eager to see us. “But be careful,” she said. “My stepdad says it’s a one-way approach with a bluff and mountain at the end of the strip. You have to set it down quickly.”
We didn’t. JT decided after committing to land that we might not make it. He pulled up at the last second and powered straight at the face of the mountain. The single-engine Cessna, the smallest made, lacked the power to sustain the ascent. We stalled at the peak and crashed on the mountaintop. As I lay bleeding in the wreckage, paralyzed, thinking I had been decapitated at the waist, I heard him take his last breath. Then came a week of unconsciousness.
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Ten years into my life of paralysis, I returned to the strip in a dream. In the foggy distance, I saw the Cessna land safely. I walked (as we all do in our post-paralysis life) toward a small figure waiting near the plane. We stared into each other’s eyes. Not a word was spoken. His eyes told me he was OK. We embraced, knowing we were joined for life.
At my 50th high school reunion, I talked with JT’s younger brother for the first time since the crash. He owned the hotel where we met. Alone, he wanted to apologize. “Why?” I said. “I never blamed him. It was my fault as much as his. We made the decision together. We were 20. We thought we were invincible.”
Not a single day passes that I don’t remember JT — the shooting star, the hummingbird, the Jackrabbit, the heart that said yes to any challenge. If only we could talk about that day. Will I see him again? Is there an afterlife? I choose to believe there is. At 78, the membrane that separates us grows thinner and thinner.