Bird Dream Page 5
Gary was the younger of their two sons. His brother, Jon, is two years Gary’s senior. Yet it was Gary who learned to ride a two-wheeler without training wheels first. He was four. It was an early sign of a competitive streak. “Everything was a challenge as far as he was concerned,” says Hazel. “If you told him something was impossible, he wouldn’t believe you.”
Gary raced up hills to beat classmates to the top. In archery classes, he burned to hit the bull’s-eye. “I would have to be the winner,” he recalls. “I always wanted to be first in terms of physical performance, because academics did not interest me.”
He was galled when soccer and rugby teammates did not bring the same fierce intensity to training that he did, and quit in frustration. Individual sports suited his personality better anyway, because he had only himself to blame for failure. He and friends built ramps for their BMX bikes at a parking lot along the River Lea, launching over barges into the water. Soon Gary found another outlet for his restless energy, paddling kayaks in the very same water for the Herts Canoe Club.
Obsessive training meant that Gary performed well enough in local competitions to earn an invitation to a European kayaking championship in Austria. “Unfortunately, when the two boys were young, we were quite hard up,” Hazel recalls, “struggling to pay a mortgage and so on.” Gary cried when his parents explained that they could not afford to send him.
His disappointment soon hardened into resolve, and Gary vowed that money would never again stand between him and his ambitions. He delivered newspapers and knocked on neighbors’ doors, lugging a bucket and sponge, offering to wash windows or cars. He worked at a sporting goods store on weekends. Some days he skipped lunch at school and pocketed the money his mother had given him.
By sixteen Gary had saved enough to cover half the cost of a school skiing excursion to Leysin, Switzerland, a resort in the Bernese Alps. His parents paid the other half. Although Gary had never been on skis, he wanted to avoid beginner’s lessons. “I haven’t done it in a while,” he lied to his chaperones, “but no worries.”
By observing others, he acquired basic skills and soon began linking turns. Returning home, Gary announced that he had discovered a sport worthy of his talent and dedication. He earned work experience and school credit helping out at an artificial ski slope fifteen minutes from home. In snow-starved England, they used Dendix, a short-haired bristle material that is to snow what Astroturf is to grass. It wasn’t the Swiss Alps, but it got him on skis. And Gary loved it.
That was important. Gary and Jon understood that their father despised the long hours he spent on his feet in front of a lathe each day. Determined to plot a different course for their lives, Jon would earn a college degree in graphic design. Gary did not figure on college, though. He was not interested in a conventional career. Still, fresh out of school, he wound up as a gopher in an office. The job was a stopgap until Gary could figure things out. His wardrobe tended toward bright colors and loud prints, and he rejected the office dress code, showing up wearing ripped jeans and sneakers. During Gary’s teenage years, Jon had watched a change come over his brother’s personality. Outgoing and supremely confident, Gary spoke freely and generally did what he pleased. His parents found him beyond persuasion when he set his mind to a task. “There was conflicts between him and me dad,” Jon recalls. “The pair of them would argue.” Strong-willed himself, Chris met his match in Gary. “If you try to talk him out of doing anything,” Chris says, “he would just go and do it anyway. That’s the way he was.”
Gary eventually shed the office job and returned to the dry ski slope, where he worked as the least experienced instructor on staff, a status he was determined to change. Every day at lunch, while the others ate and lolled about, Gary dragged gates out and set up a slalom course, bashing gates. He trained in his spare time, too.
Two months after starting at the dry slope, Gary entered a downhill race at Bad Gastein, Austria, a resort town in the Alps that had hosted the 1958 world championships. Inspecting the course, surveying all of the turns, bumps, and jumps, he paused to watch other competitors’ training runs. They soared nearly a hundred feet from a jump.
On his first training run, Gary crossed the finish fifteen seconds behind the leaders, an eternity in competition. At the end, legs turned to jelly by fatigue and fear, he wiped out while attempting to stop.
The following morning, he woke up with a stiff and aching knee, which he wrapped tightly, and headed up the mountain, noting how fast the other racers were moving and how far they flew in the air. “Suddenly fear hit me,” he says. “My God, I thought, I’m doing what they’re doing.”
Trembling in the start gate, he tucked for twenty seconds, sufficient time to build terrific speed, snow racing beneath his skis. He hurtled over the course’s jumps in a dream and crossed the finish line. He remained far back in the standings, but Gary believed he could eventually compete.
The following winter, Gary started a run of five straight seasons racing International Ski Federation (FIS)–sanctioned events, mostly downhill, competing in the federation’s bottom rung. Without lessons or coaches, he would never win a single race or rank among the top five hundred in the world. He bluffed his way into races, never under the imprimatur of the British Ski and Snowboarding Federation. He faked eligibility, working up official-looking letterhead with the words “GB Ski Federation” attesting to his credentials. He failed to disclose that GB stood for Gary Bullock and not Great Britain, as FIS officials might assume. When caught, Gary talked his way into races on charm and balls. He took heart that he was competing on the same World Cup courses he had seen on TV, legendary places like Val Gardena, in the Dolomites, on the famous “Camel Hunches” of the Saslong run. “To be one of the guys pushing out the start gate, racing, and finishing was a high for me,” he would remember.
Yet his was often far from the glamorous existence enjoyed by the stars of the World Cup series he saw on TV. Gary swapped odd jobs at hotels in exchange for a room. Often he slept in his frozen car. Each summer, he worked on construction sites in London as a hod carrier, hauling cement for bricklayers. It was backbreaking work, but the heavy labor kept him fit and helped finance the coming ski season.
One summer, five years into his racing career, Gary got the idea to operate a water-sports business in Portugal, hauling tourists behind a boat on tubes and floats. When the venture failed, he and a partner wound up deep in debt. The building trades were in recession that autumn, and there was no work. With the ski season fast approaching, Gary was out of money and ideas. So, on May 19, 1993, he did what legions of desperate men without options have done throughout the ages: Gary joined the army. He was twenty-three.
He had already begun researching prospects for a career as a stuntman in TV and film. A contact he made in the industry explained that he had learned all of the necessary skills to join British Actors’ Equity and the Stunt Register while serving with the 3rd Battalion. An army recruiter noted that, with his skiing background, Gary was a shoo-in for the army’s ski team.
In three years with the army, Gary would never once see a pair of skis. It took little time to figure out that he and the army made an ill-suited match. Although he excelled at training and was a strong runner, with stamina, who shot well on the range, military culture struck Gary as surreal. He met men ten and fifteen years his senior who had joined fresh out of school and, to his thinking, appeared brainwashed into mindless obedience. Gary constantly ran afoul of his superiors and was not shy about telling them that “indeed their systems do suck and that they ought to get out a bit more.” Such an attitude rankled command and would fail to endear him to fellow soldiers, who ganged up and slapped him around on occasion to teach the mouthy private some manners. In retaliation, Gary resorted to small acts of subterfuge. One took the form of becoming a vegetarian, just so the army would have to go to the trouble of furnishing him with special rations. After a few weeks of abstaining from meat, he actually noticed an improvement in the w
ay he felt.
Still, Gary was fed up with the military by the time he discovered BASE jumping. And he would soon have other reasons to want to get free of his military obligations. The first arrived in the form of a petite blonde he met on a Wales beach while on leave in the summer of 1995. Gary had just made a jump from a nearby cliff and was ambling along the sand when a woman sunbathing caught his eye. She had her hands full with a toddler, and Gary stopped to watch her, wondering if a man was in the picture. After a spell, Gary strolled over and started a conversation.
Years later, Vivienne Lee would recall one of the first things Gary said: “How would you like to go sailing around the world with me?” She was twenty-seven years old and mother of a two-year-old daughter named Lydia. Vivienne had a house in Nottingham, a university degree, and a career as a personnel manager in recruitment for a bingo club. Her life to that point had been, in every respect, a conventional one. Everything about Gary, from BASE jumping to his confidence to the way he zigzagged through life, excited Vivienne. They would never sail around the world, but she joined him for a bonfire on the beach and on a skydiving camping trip. After Gary returned to the army in Dover, and Vivienne to her life in the Midlands, they kept in touch through the summer and autumn.
Gary continued jumping, launching from the White Cliffs at Dover, near where his regiment was stationed. He had dreams beyond what the military had in mind for him. In December, with Christmas leave approaching, he put the finishing touches on a plan that he hoped would bring a nice windfall—and the attention of the professional stunt world.
• • •
On December 20, 1995, the front page of the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s largest tabloids, published a color photo of a man wearing a red Santa Claus costume and a BASE rig on his back, leaping from the roof of the twenty-eight-story London Hilton on Park Lane, in Mayfair. A headline blared, “Why Santa Took a High Jump off the Hilton.” Inside, on page 3, six color photos depicted a sequence, beginning with the exit from the roof—where two models in a pantomime reindeer costume stood watching—and continuing to show a parachute opening a third of the way down the modern tower, to a final tumble on landing, in a field at Hyde Park. There, two waiting cops collared Santa, still wearing red hat and white beard.
The stunt had occurred a day earlier, on a hazy, mild morning six days before Christmas. The Daily Mail story explained that Saint Nick was actually twenty-six-year-old Gary Bullock, who had checked into the luxury hotel on December 18 and spent the night in a room. However, in the morning, rather than checking out like other guests, Gary sneaked to the roof, 330 feet above streets clogged with rush-hour traffic. Staring down on one of the city’s most exclusive and elegant precincts, dressed as Father Christmas, two Australian women playing a reindeer, he jumped.
Gary was not the first to leap from the hotel. The first time occurred in 1985. And two years before Gary, in May 1992, Darren Newton, twenty-five, had famously died jumping from the hotel one night when his parachute opened and spun him 180 degrees off-heading, back in the direction of the hotel. He had smashed into a balcony on the eighteenth floor, causing his parachute to collapse. He plummeted through an awning, the metal frame ripping his arm off, and the mishap made newspapers across Britain.
“If you know what you are doing and are careful, it’s really not dangerous,” Gary told the Daily Mail, after he was freed following questions from police. Although not charged with a crime, he admitted that his superiors in the army might not be pleased. He was correct.
When Gary returned from holiday leave to Connaught Barracks, in Dover, the regimental sergeant major was waiting to chew him out, explaining that Gary would face a court-martial for bringing the regiment into disrepute. Gary weighed these facts as the sergeant major lit into him. He figured that what he had done had brought a little holiday cheer to the city during the yuletide season. Marched back to the barracks, Gary stewed as he was informed that he was about to be placed on every single duty until the court-martial proceedings, meaning, among other things, that he would receive no leave. He had already made plans to meet Vivienne for the weekend. “We had this wonderful relationship going,” he says. “It was very young. I only saw her weekends, because I was in the military, based a couple hundred miles from where she lived.”
His heart wrenched, Gary made up his mind in the barracks. Hanging his gear in a locker, he handed the key to another soldier whom he trusted, with instructions to wait a couple of hours before turning it over to someone in authority. He told the soldier to explain that the army’s property could be found in the locker but that Private Gary Bullock was gone. Hopping in his car and driving to London, Gary hid out at a friend’s house, where he called Vivienne to explain that he was AWOL and he wasn’t going back. It was January 8, 1996, and Gary was about to begin life as a fugitive.
• • •
The evasion techniques taught in the army would come in handy during Gary’s days on the run. A month after his disappearance, he was captured attempting to sneak into England at the port at Dover, late on a cold February night on a ship from Holland, where he had been laying low. Customs and immigration officials saw that he was a wanted man during a standard passport check of passengers.
“Does the name 3 PARA mean anything to you?” arriving police asked.
“Not anymore,” Gary said.
The cops took Gary back to Connaught Barracks, his mind all the while running at top speed, considering his options. Police released Gary into the custody of a guard he knew from his days in 3 PARA. By then it was around 3 a.m., and Gary refused to spend the night in the cells at the base. Instead, as the guard was distracted phoning the commanding officer, Gary made his move, hauled his fellow soldier down, snatched his passport, and bolted outside. Soldiers and guards in pursuit, Gary vaulted the front gate of the base and sprinted down into Dover, where he hid behind hedgerows, sneaked through gardens, cut across rooftops, and ducked into doorways, all while watching soldiers roaring through town in personnel carriers and Land Rovers, scouring the streets for a sign of him. By dawn Gary had made his way to Folkestone, a town eight miles down the coast, and phoned a friend in London for a lift.
Climbing into the car, Gary Bullock continued a life in hiding. Although nerve-racking at first, the longer he lived on the run, the more Gary realized that perhaps Big Brother was not as big as he had thought. Pulled over for speeding and given a summons, he arrived at the station to pay his fine. After showing his identification, he waited for the subject of military service to come up. But it never did. Still, there were close calls. Nine months after he’d run out of Dover, Gary and Vivienne were visiting his parents when police knocked at the door. “We’d all been sitting around quite happy that afternoon,” Hazel recalls, “chatting and laughing, although he was AWOL and that was a worry all the time.”
Gary bolted out the back door, past his startled father in the back garden, who was on a ladder inspecting the roof of a shed. Scaling a fence into a neighbor’s yard, Gary continued down the block and out of sight.
Hazel trembled as she invited the police inside, where Vivienne, eight months pregnant with her and Gary’s son, Kali, began weeping. The police took down Vivienne’s name and address. By establishing another connection, the police tightened the net around Gary.
If Gary were to remain free, it was time to take added precautions. He and Vivienne paged through a phone book, scanning surnames for one that would suit their growing family. They rejected a few before settling on Connery, which had a nice ring to it. Some figured the name had something to do with a James Bond fetish, but it was nothing like that. “They weren’t looking for a Connery,” Vivienne says about the police. Filing the proper paperwork raised no red flags, and they thus became clan Connery.
• • •
GARY SUPPORTED HIS FAMILY with a small inheritance from a grandmother, with work on building sites, and by smuggling beer, wine, and cigarettes from France to sell at a profit in Britain. In the meantime, he
studied to acquire the certifications to become a professional stuntman, visiting film and TV sets, introducing himself around while observing the trade. In November 1997, the paperwork came through and Gary was accepted on the Stunt Register, a division of Actors’ Equity. To announce his arrival, he had dreamed up a scheme to impress his new colleagues, a BASE jump down through the center of the Eiffel Tower.
He arrived in Paris in December, snow swirling in the weeks before Christmas. The conditions were not ideal, and Gary would have been wise to call off the jump. Vivienne watched from above as Gary plunged from the first stage of the tower, three hundred feet high, through the middle of the monument, and opened his parachute as planned. Then, seized by a gust of wind, Gary flew forward, feet striking a curb, momentum cartwheeling him into a fence.
Security nabbed Vivienne as an accomplice, and handcuffed Gary and placed him in the back of an ambulance with broken ribs, a bruised lung, compressed vertebrae, and his foot and hip aching. He spent seven days in intensive care. “I was stupid to have jumped, and I know I was stupid to have jumped,” he would say later. “It was a big ego lesson, which was great.”
Taking pity on him, gendarmes eventually returned his passport and dropped all charges. Months later, in May 1998, fully healed and sitting in the garden out back of Vivienne’s house in Nottingham, Gary was enjoying a warm day with the kids when Vivienne walked out with the phone pressed to her ear. She mouthed the name of a well-known stunt coordinator. Gary knew it was a job at last. He had an offer of regular work on a TV show about a high-tech, high-adventure crime-fighting team. Gary Connery, the erstwhile Gary Bullock, had his start as a stuntman.
Chapter 3
A CHILD CALLED X-RAY MUJAHIDEEN
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.