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Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival
Robert Sabbag
By
Published: May 19, 2009
Category:
Memoir
Video
Robert Sabbag recalls the crash
I wanted Bob Sabbag to be my friend as soon as I finished reading his first book, Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade. The snarks among you might think I had this desire because “Snowblind” was so knowledgeable about drugs that I just knew its author would have a rock of pharmaceutical coke on his coffee table. Sorry. I don’t roll that way.
No, what astonished and thrilled me was that Sabbag seemed to have written a book about the hippest subculture of the 1970s — a book that, in Hunter Thompson’s words, “moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank full of ether” — without a single verb contraction. And yet he was sharp as a single-edge blade.
Over our first lunch, I recommended an article in The New Yorker. “This month’s issue?” Sabbag asked. That innocence — that artless distance from the media game — sealed it for me. I simply adored the guy.
A few months later, Sabbag moved to Cape Cod. He still showed up in New York to see friends and work his book; plane fares were cheap then, so he flew. One June night in 1979, he had the extreme bad luck to be flying with a pilot who should not have been at the controls. Two miles from the Hyannis airport, the pilot made a tragic decision and pushed the commuter plane under the fog:
The plane hit the trees at 123 knots. It lost its wings as it crashed. They were sheared off, taking the fuel tanks with them, as the plane slammed through the forest. In an explosion of tearing sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting thick stands of oak and pine for a distance of three hundred feet…. The seatbelt held up. Nothing else did. I hit the belt with such force that I took the seat forward with me, ripping it right out of the fuselage.
The plane was in a forest that was hard to reach from a road — not that anyone at the airport, two-and-a-half miles away, knew where it was. The pilot was dead, several passengers were trapped. Sabbag had a broken pelvis and couldn’t walk. Oh, and there was a good chance the wreck would catch on fire.
The first great story of that night is about the young woman who went for help and the subsequent rescue of the injured passengers. The second is about Bob Sabbag’s reaction to his near-death experience, which was pretty much none — he recovered in the hospital, returned to his house and got on with his life. Indeed, he downplayed the crash so completely that I never thought to drive up and see him in the hospital; when I visited him that winter, I don’t recall we talked about that night at all. That’s typical Sabbag. As he writes, “I’ve been all over the world, I’ve made hundreds of friends, and I’ve bought maybe three rolls of film in my life.”
So Sabbag’s denial — let’s call it by its rightful name — lasted for 27 years. A book? “It is not something that suggested itself to me,” he says, “and I have a literary agent.”
Down Around Midnight: A Memoir of Crash and Survival is Sabbag’s belated effort to find out what happened that night. Across the years, he reaches out to the seven other passengers, investigates the pilot and his spotty flying record, and deals with his own long suppressed feelings. What he finds is surprising but not exactly remarkable: a string of coincidences that reveal unlikely links between strangers, life choices changed by the flight, the kind of stuff that might make a writer — though not Bob Sabbag — believe in a God who monitors even the wings of butterflies.
But the reason to spend a few hours with these 210 pages is the writing. If you’ve read “Snowblind”, you know that Sabbag is a magnificent craftsman. His books are short on verbiage, long on anecdote — he’s a born storyteller, and he plays to his strength. Reading him, for me, is like sitting at his kitchen table in the Old Days: Sabbag drinking one cup of black coffee after another, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, and talking. And what talk!
Is there wisdom? You bet: “You don’t recover, you simply recuperate. Belief in the proposition that ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is just another form of denial.” Is there the sentence that stops you cold? Of course: “She had a voice so soft you could sleep in it.” And never, for all the talent, does he show off: “I’ve made the intimate acquaintance of a lot of people who give the concept of dangerous behavior new meaning. I’ve witnessed it as practiced by the world’s most serious professionals. I’ve watched the playoffs. And believe me, I don’t qualify.”
I envy the talent that composed those sentences — and all the others I’ve marked in a book that is, for me, a model memoir. Not, as I say, for what happens, because in a Bob Sabbag book, what happens is the booby prize. What you learn about writing and thinking and seeing — that’s, as we now say, priceless.
To buy “Down Around Midnight” from Amazon.com, click here.
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To buy “Snowblind” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Robert Sabbag’s web site, click here.
