Bird Dream Page 11

  Karin Sako met the Suicide Solution crew on a jumping trip to Portland with Jeb, whom she had met through a mutual friend at Perris Valley. A rock climber, competition skydiver, and jumper, Karin is an attractive brunette with an easy smile, and she and Weston hit it off right away and soon became a couple.

  The morbid vibe of the Portland crew was not for everyone, she says. Many were rubbed the wrong way. “They were having fun,” she says in their defense, “and nobody wanted to die or get hurt. Never! There was never any of an attitude of ‘Okay, seriously maybe today’s the day I’m going to die and I’m okay with that.’ It was never that heavy. It was like ‘Today could be the day.’ But any day could be the day.”

  Video of Weston’s monologues speak to his satire. “The exit point does not look good,” he says with his trademark lisp in one. “I’ve been advised by my ground crew that it looks bad for a jump. There’s also wind, about five knots . . . A ninety left would be difficult. But in spite of all that danger, there comes a time when the animal inside says ‘Let me be free,’ and you must roll the dice and throw yourself into the unknown and see what happens, because that . . . that’s truly living. Roger this, and maybe speak to you again down at the bottom. I may be happy or I may be in pain and agony, fucked up, or maybe dead. But that’s the choices we make and we will live with them.” Offering thumbs-up, he adds: “Rock ’n’ roll!”

  In another, a companion, breathless and screeching profanity, runs up after Weston has just landed a jump from an antenna. “Holy shit! Holy shit! You are a . . . fucking psychopath! You are the biggest psychopath I’ve ever seen in my fucking life!”

  Another voice can be heard saying to Weston: “You’re bleeding from the face.”

  “I went through a cactus on landing,” Weston replied casually, absently licking his fingers to wipe the blood, adding: “But I got through the wires.”

  Given his reputation, many jumpers were eager to measure themselves against Weston. One jumped simultaneously with Weston from the Perrine Bridge, four lanes of traffic rumbling 486 feet over the Snake River in Twin Falls, Idaho. It is the only bridge in the United States that is legal to jump 365 days a year. On the way down, Weston slashed the air like a blade with acrobatics while his accomplice remained upright, eyes locked on Weston for some signal that he would pull. Weston continued twisting and somersaulting, finally flicking his chute at the four-second mark. His partner reacted instantly, 4.8 seconds into the jump. But it was too late, and he hit the water at eighty miles per hour, smashing three vertebrae and tearing his rectum; he lived. All Weston got was wet.

  In Weston, Jeb saw a model. A friend would say later, “For sure, Jeb fucking loved the guy. He wanted to be Dwain. For me, [Dwain] couldn’t get hurt. He was in amazing shape. There were those reference points: there was our standard, and then there was Dwain. He really was immortal.”

  Weston encouraged Jeb to rely on experience over luck. He explained the advantage of enrolling in high-dive training if Jeb was serious about performing acrobatics. Both Weston and Slim trained with an Olympic-level diving coach in Portland. The calculus was simple: From a high-dive platform you can practice a hundred exits each day. It might take you an entire year to make a hundred exits as a BASE jumper.

  Through an acquaintance, Jeb arranged a meeting with the diving coach at the University of Southern California, a man named Hongping Li. Li was a national champion from China and a competitor at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where he finished fourth on the three-meter springboard. He agreed to take Jeb on as a student, placing him in a class with those of equal experience, all of them children. Jeb was twenty-three years old. Standing six foot three in his Speedo, he looked like Gulliver in Lilliput at the pool. It was humbling.

  The youngsters proved superior in every way, from flexibility to relative strength to skill. And the kids let him know he was not their equal. A girl called him a pussy one day in front of the other students when he hesitated on the five-meter platform, contemplating a coming jolt of pain from striking the water wrong.

  But Jeb worked hard to improve. What Jeb learned at the pool he applied on jumps around the world, traveling with a cohort of fellow jumpers and friends. One of them he had met while hiking Kjerag. His name was Iiro Seppänen, and he was a professional magician from Helsinki who looked like the Hollywood central-casting idea of a Nordic villain—tall, handsome, square-jawed, with cold blue eyes. Kjerag requires a two-hour walk, and Seppänen spilled the details of his life. The son of a politician and a journalist, he began practicing magic at age ten and by sixteen had left home to join a traveling circus. He parlayed his act into a career touring the world, selling out hockey arenas in Europe, and performing live shows in Las Vegas, Barcelona, Cape Town, Los Angeles, Beijing, and New York and for television audiences on the likes of the Late Show with David Letterman.

  Despite having money waving from each hand and a new woman on his arm in each destination, hopscotching cities and living out of hotels, performing three hundred magic shows each year had begun to wear. “This was not the life I was meant to live,” he told himself.

  He had performed some Houdini-inspired escape acts—suspended from burning ropes while wearing a straitjacket; chained underwater holding his breath for three minutes; bound, a sword of Damocles suspended overhead from a burning rope. He had been shoved from an airplane, hands tied, breaking free and deploying a parachute before becoming a human pancake, a stunt that required learning to skydive. “Once I tasted the freedom and had the feeling of free fall, I said, Fuck magic,” he says.

  His next escape act: he wound up living in a tent at a drop zone in Zephyrhills, Florida, where no one had a clue who the tall guy with the funny accent was. Relieved of the pressure to perform, he lived simply under the Florida sun. It was there that he discovered BASE jumping. “It was one of those things where you know, This is something I was meant to do,” he says.

  Jumping clarified things: If I indeed die after this jump, have I lived the life I set myself to live? He didn’t think so. As he jumped, he began to see the world differently, as if scales had been stripped from his eyes. So much of life seemed like magic, an elaborate sleight of hand. Jumping was real, and it rearranged his mind. It was surprisingly easy to turn from his former life. He pursued happiness, and jumping was one way to get there. He developed powerful bonds with other jumpers. They were not necessarily the tie-dyed, tattooed, pierced longhairs, or the nearly touched you might expect. They were characters, but that wasn’t it exactly . . . If forced to put his finger on it, he would say that those willing to jump from buildings and mountains were not likely to be limited too much in their daily lives. All those books about the power of now suddenly made perfect sense, too. If you could overcome fears of death enough to jump, then you could bust out and break free finally of the Rube Goldberg devices that trapped one in the mechanisms constructed to manage life. Iiro learned a lot through this period and felt somehow reborn into the world.

  And that’s more or less where his head was when he met Jeb on Kjerag in the summer of 1999. Jeb was not exactly socially gifted, but he was not as weird as some people Iiro had known in the circus, either. It turned out that Iiro had met Jeb’s sister Scarlett in Malibu while visiting Finnish director Renny Harlin and his wife, Geena Davis. Iiro had been in Jeb’s house, in his room, and handled the albino python he kept as a pet.

  Jeb had discovered a stash of booze Iiro had bought for Scarlett and poured it down the drain. They had a good laugh over that on the mountain. Parting in Norway, they arranged to meet in West Virginia in October, during the annual gathering of jumpers at Bridge Day, and this would be the start of a North American odyssey. From Bridge Day they drove to Manhattan, both of them requiring a B—a building, the toughest object—to complete the BASE cycle. Sneaking into a thirty-story high-rise under construction on Park Avenue one night, they launched, and Iiro was nearly struck by a taxi when he landed in oncoming traffic. Convinced the cops were after them, Jeb
hid in the back aisle of a bodega until his friends fetched him.

  The next day, they took off for Niagara Falls, Canada, jumping from the observation level of the Skylon Tower, five hundred breathtaking feet above the brink of the falls. Separated on the ground, Jeb encountered a security guard who had called the cops. Soon the police and a newspaper reporter showed up. A photographer snapped a shot of the police writing Jeb a ticket for criminal mischief, in the amount of $65 Canadian. Afterwards, the officer gave Jeb a lift back to his hotel and asked casually, “Who was your friend?”

  Oh, shit! Jeb claimed he didn’t really know—they had met on the Internet.

  At the hotel, Iiro had cleaned out their room but Jeb hooked up with him outside at their car. Iiro had ditched his gear on landing, with police in hot pursuit, and had injured his ankle while launching over a wall and finally shaken his pursuers by darting in front of a moving train and hiding out in a stand of bushes. He would have misgivings, though, about abandoning $2,000 worth of canopy, container, and harness. He wondered if Jeb would be willing to retrieve his gear, since he had already been captured.

  “It’s a waste of time, bro,” Jeb said. “There’s no way it’s there.”

  But when they arrived at the parking lot, the parachute, container—everything—remained right where Iiro had ditched it.

  They returned to Manhattan and the New York Palace Hotel, a glass-and-steel tower sprouting from the seed of an elegant nineteenth-century stone mansion in midtown. Located across Madison Avenue from the rear of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the hotel is the height of luxury, room rates starting at $600 per night. Jeb jimmied open the window of his room on the fiftieth floor using needle-nose pliers. The small size of the window aperture required dexterity developed during yoga to slip his long body through and steely nerves to remain steady on the thin ledge. The slippery glass skin of the building descended to a rooftop some five hundred feet below, and stray traffic crawled along Madison Avenue. Clad all in black, crouching like a gargoyle high above the midnight city, Jeb launched, chute snapping open in the wind. Steering his canopy, he sailed past office windows lit for overnight cleaning crews, but no one spotted him as he settled onto the street and disappeared into a desolate city, making a clean getaway. Seeing the difficulty of slipping through the small opening, Iiro passed on following his friend out.

  It was clear that high-rise hotels offered the best way to avoid the hassles associated with jumping from private buildings—from the need to outfox security to the risk of trespassing charges. Hotels don’t figure on their guests exiting through the windows of the upper floors, so it barely rates a consideration.

  In Las Vegas, they booked a room at the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino, a place Hunter S. Thompson described as “what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war . . . the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.” The spectacle outside was stranger yet. From a window five hundred feet above the Strip, two guests leaped in quick succession, opened their parachutes, touched down in a parking lot, and hightailed it out of there, security already in hot pursuit.

  Iiro injured his ankle again on landing. Rather than go to a hospital, where he might encounter the police, he hobbled into a gentlemen’s club and killed time and his pain with cocktails and lap dances. Jeb got away clean. But a girl he was seeing, filming the stunt from a nearby parking garage, was captured by a hawkeyed security guard. When Jeb found out, he turned himself in. Security sat him at a table in a windowless room and told him he was going to prison for trespassing. When he pulled a room key from his pocket and explained that he was a paying customer, they changed tack and said he had endangered the lives of others. Jeb explained that he had a video camera mounted on his helmet that would show such a claim was untrue.

  “Are you a law student?” security asked.

  Jeb smiled. “I kind of am.”

  “You can tell it to the police when they get here.” The cops arrived four hours later; collaring BASE jumpers did not rate high on their list of priorities. They checked Jeb’s license for outstanding warrants, and when he came back clean they returned his driver’s license and explained to security that they couldn’t charge him because no laws had been broken. The guards’ faces collapsed, and Jeb walked free, although he would henceforth be as unwelcome at the Circus Circus as the most notorious cardsharp.

  Jeb didn’t care. Jumping took him further afield. To mark the millennium, on New Year’s Eve Jeb jumped with fourteen others to set a world record from the Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur. Next he was in South Africa to film scenes for a documentary on BASE jumping. He continued to Paris and performed a double reverse flip inside the Eiffel Tower from 320 feet. He fell 140 feet in three seconds, and pitched in time to swoop below the latticework arch, 180 feet above the ground—an astoundingly difficult jump that required months of training and impeccable timing to pull off. Scattering pigeons as his boots skidded to a stop on the Champ de Mars, he embraced a female security guard and screamed, “I’m alive!”

  “Yes,” she said, “and you’re in trouble.” But the police let him go with a warning not to jump again.

  As his skills sharpened, Jeb’s stunts grew more complex and audacious. He, Iiro, and Arne Aarhus, the host of an extreme sports show in Norway, traveled to San Francisco. Gates bar pedestrians from the Golden Gate Bridge at night to prevent suicides. When they opened at 5 a.m., the jumpers walked onto the span at dawn wearing yellow hard hats. The bust factor on the bridge was high, and Iiro was on a tourist visa, so he offered to film rather than jump. Other aspects of the jump spooked him, too. “You’re going to die,” he told Jeb.

  “I’m not going to die,” Jeb said. “You’re going to film it.”

  In the purple light of morning, with fog on the bay, Jeb and the Norwegian walked along thick suspension cables rising five hundred feet to the top of the tower, next to a blinking red aircraft beacon some seven hundred feet above the water. Video would show Jeb gripping his knees tight to his chest as he tumbled backwards, plummeting, a mere speck against an enormous sweep of bridge and sky. Opening his body, arms and legs extended like a black X, he pitched and swung like a pendulum as he descended beneath his black parachute.

  Iiro’s camera caught the reaction of a spectator who just happened by on the bridge. “Sheee-ut!” the man yelled at the sight. “That’s a hell of a free climb! Damn!” Leaning over the rail, the onlooker let out a “Woo-hoo!” in the direction of the drifting parachutes. By then sirens were wailing on the bridge.

  “Hide! Hide! Hide!” Iiro screamed into a handheld radio. And for seven hours they did, behind scrub vegetation on a dirt slope beneath the bridge, on the Marin County side, as cruisers circled below. Finally, Jeb and Aarhus slipped away, sitting through a forgettable movie and returning after dark to retrieve their gear. It was all starting to seem, well, easy.

  Back in Las Vegas, Iiro would strip the insides from a mammoth stuffed dog and place his and Jeb’s rigs inside, in order to slip them past security at the 1,149-foot Stratosphere Tower, part of a hotel-casino and the tallest structure in the city. Their friend from Norway, Aarhus, had devised his own secret method for smuggling his gear inside. They met in a bathroom a thousand feet above the paved and dust-parched landscape of Vegas, donning their rigs and emerging onto an observation level, hustling away from guards and up a flight of stairs. Scrambling over a fence, they walked onto the glass roof of an observation deck. Startled tourists glanced up at the sound of their feet. “Awww . . . ,” someone said. “Look, there goes one of them there!” All three men jumped, Jeb balling into a triple reverse flip, and floated to a parking lot across the street. Stuffing their billowing parachutes into a waiting car, they split, breathless and sweaty with excitement.

  Months later, at Bridge Day in October 2001, fall colors setting the gorge aflame in red, orange, and gold, Jeb launched fro
m a platform jutting off the span. He spun into a double inward front flip, legs straight, tucked to his chest, helmet buried in his knees. Folded like a pocketknife, he opened for a half twist, and tucked tight again into a double outward backflip.

  It was a stunning maneuver, the sum of his hours of high-dive training. Jeb stole the show with his moves and one of those who approached along the riverbed to offer congratulations was Slim. Only a few men in the world could have pulled off the sequence, he said. Alas, Slim was no longer one of them. He walked with help from a crutch, due to permanent injuries resulting from an off-heading opening that slammed him into a cliff in Australia. He had sustained two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, a broken collarbone, and a punctured lung and shattered pelvis. Although he would return to jumping six months after the injuries, Slim would never be the same. For the remainder of his life, even walking would be difficult.

  At Bridge Day, Jeb gushed about the praise from Slim. “He was the excited little kid,” Iiro recalls.

  It was around this time that Helliwell encountered Jeb on a frigid winter morning on a mountainside in Arizona. As she and others looked on in amazement, Jeb approached the edge of a cliff, stood in a handstand, and sprang off. “And he was doing it well,” she remembers. “He looked trained. He wasn’t just throwing some maneuver. He was approaching it the right way.”

  To Helliwell, here was proof of a profound transformation. “The student,” she says, “became the master.”

  Chapter 8