Up, And Away

Michael Graff: He's sitting on his couch, shirtless, hunched over a hard-earned belly, breathing hard-earned air, in and out, trying to remember. His face droops, and his right side is numb.

"Aw, Christ," he says. "What the hell am I trying to say?"

We're attempting to steer around the blotches of white matter on his brain.

"You were talking about the raccoon," I remind him.

The raccoon. Yes. He remembers this. Back there, somewhere, along about 1967.

He was 23 years old, and on a fine afternoon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he was about to throw a dead raccoon from an airplane when something bad happened. The wind caught the pilot chute that was tied to the animal and sucked it into the sky. The chute broke off and fell slowly to the earth. The dead raccoon fell faster.

Fearless Freddie Giraffe, as they called him then, was a skydiver, and a good one. He would soon become the 647th American to earn his gold wings, an award bestowed only on crazy-asses like him who jump out of a plane more than 1,000 times. He was a member of an elite club of sport parachutists, the Pelicans. He could jump from 12,000 feet in the air and land on a ten-centimeter-round target on the ground, dead center. He could do that in the morning, or at night, or hung-over out of his mind. Yet at this moment, Fearless Freddie was scared to death.