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By John Rippo, ESPRESSO Café Newspaper
Photo: Wreckage of PSA flight 182, San Diego Air and Space Museum (public domain image)
September 26, 2018 (San Diego) -- I drove a fellow USD student back to his room in North Park in the late morning. He was stunned, bewildered and not altogether there after a 727 crashed on the street he lived in. In the back of his Subaru truck, a burned man's shoe lodged behind the jump seats. In the shoe was a burned, bloody and crushed foot. I volunteered to drive him home---and carry the shoe to Saint Augustine High School, which became a temporary morgue that day.
To get to my classmate's home, I drove through a police barricade and almost into the wreckage of flaming plane and houses, debris and dead. We got out of the Brat near where my classmate's home once was. His little room was gone--the houses around it burned out. He stood thunderstruck, unable to talk, blink or answer, and wouldn't touch the grim cargo intended for return, either. Angry, I demanded his shirt from him to wrap the shoe. He yanked it off; and in this, I carried the shoe like a football all the way from near where the plane hit the ground to Saints----perhaps a mile south along 32nd Street.
Nowhere could I see anything not horrifying: the slippery pools of reeking slime, edged with flesh; the ear ring that crunched under my shoe, still attached to a matted ear; the cop to my left lugging a full trash bag that suddenly broke, slithering out what had once been human down his front onto his shoes, a dirty radius and ulna stuck to his gun belt. Carved corpses dripping from smoking trees; images that stayed in my sight, even when I looked away; even when I shut my eyes.
Shouts from distended faces everywhere bellowed incomprehensible noise. A cop rushed to us and half whispered and screamed something; I showed him the shoe and pointed in the direction I walked; he reeled and fell back.
Thick smoke settled on my clothes and hair; I could taste it.
I tasted that smoke for long, long after.
On the long walk, my classmate said something to me that I didn't hear and when I asked him to repeat it, he started to cry and recite the Lord's Prayer. It was as if I had been hit with lightning; I have never again been as angry as I was at the moment I heard his frail prayer against devastation. "Here I am, lugging a piece of a dead man along with an idiot who can't think straight for company. What good is your prayer, now, Idiot? How and why the hell did I get here?" I thought. My heart pounded and I breathed in the smoke and grew even angrier. I seemed to lose my hearing entirely and do not now recall hearing anything for the rest of the journey toward our destination.
At Saints, someone took the shoe from me. He wore goggles. My mind's eye recalls him in a dark green light, as though it was evening, but this cannot be right; it was perhaps the middle of day or maybe even still late morning----my sense of time's passing then is completely warped, askew and undependable. My memory recalls to me no end of sharp, clear images, though in a darkened setting; a woman screaming at two children who refuse to come out from under a car; my classmate standing still, holding a chain link fence and crying; people slamming doors opening onto black-dark rooms; a fire engine nearly slicing into a truck. All in hues of darkness before midday.
When I gave up the shoe I sat down on a curb, spent, breathing hard, battling fury. At my feet was a burned and ashy woman's espadrille. I looked at it for what seemed a long time though I don't know how long I sat there and have no memory of what happened to my classmate, or how I got home. The way back must have been uneventful; had it not been, my parents would have suspected something, but they never said a word.
The smell---of fire, death, wreckage, aviation fuel mixed in hot desert dust of the Santa Ana lingered. No matter how often I showered, shaved my mustache, bathed my face in rubbing alcohol---it lingered. I dared not say anything to my parents about my little adventure; dared not suggest that maybe I needed to talk to someone about that---lingering smell. I was an 18 year old freshman at USD, from a hard bit, American Italian family that didn't do psychiatry or process feelings---or the sharp, dark images that appeared with every blink, or when I tried to sleep, or sat too long immobile.
I reasoned, if one call it that, that if images of memory were troubling, they could be erased by other, superposed images that would overwhelm and substitute for them. A new friend from USD soon became my regular pal at the strip clubs near campus, where I didn't merely watch the girls dance, but absorbed and memorized their actions as though my eyes were filming them for a movie. I saw a lot of strippers strip---paid a great deal of money to do it, too. I remember some of them well to this day. But as a means of erasing stress of sudden overwhelming death and destruction, it was a perfect failure. So was encountering my classmate at USD.
Whenever we'd see each other, one of us would turn tail and leave. There was no animosity--at least on my part--and I don't believe there was for him, either. But if we happened to take the same class as we did twice over the next three years, one of us would change classes, without a word. We never spoke again.
Much later, on one of the nights when friends and I cluttered The Body Shop, I heard from one of my buddies that his girlfriend had been in that plane. I remembered her. Through his beer fog, he told us of how he loved her and as a bon voyage offering, bought her a fine, laced pair of espadrilles from some shop in Tijuana; thin woven rope across her beautiful legs up to the knees. He gave them to her the night before she left and made her promise to wear them when she returned. I recalled the burned espadrille I saw on the curb outside Saints. The room got dark and quiet again. The sleek stripper on stage faded from my sight. My heart pounded and I became angry at I don't know what. But I merely said I had to go, paid for his last beer and left the strip club and never went back. A year or so later, I heard that the man committed suicide as much from the constant binge he began when she was killed as from the loss of her light from his life.
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