“Are you serious?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay about it?” he asks. “Can you deal?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, inhaling.
“Wow,” he says. “I guess I’m sorry.” There’s a pause. “Should I be?”
“Don’t,” I say, dialing information for LAX.
I walk up to the crash site with a Cessna 172 engine specialist who has to take photos of the condition of the engine for his company’s files and a ranger who acts as our guide up the mountain and was the first person to appear at the wreckage on Friday. I meet the two guys at my suite at the MGM Grand and we take a jeep up to about the midway point on the mountain. From there we walk a narrow path that is steep and covered with dead leaves. On the way up to the crash site I talk to the ranger, actually a young guy, maybe nineteen, about my age, good-looking. I ask the ranger what the body looked like when he found it.
“You really want to know?” the ranger asks, a smile appearing on his calm, square face.
“Yeah.” I nod.
Well, this’ll sound awful funny but when I first saw it, I don’t know, it kind of looked to me like a … like a miniature hundred-and-ten-pound Darth Vader,” he tells me, scratching his head.
“A what?” I ask.
“Yeah, like a Darth Vader. Like a little Darth Vader. You know. Darth Vader from Star Wars, right?” the ranger is saying with a faint accent I can’t place.
The ranger, who I guess I’m starting to flirt with, sort of, continues. The torso and head were completely skinless and they were sitting upright. What was left of the arm bones was resting on where the steering column should have been. None of the cabin was left. “The torso was just sitting there, right on the ground. It was like completely charred black, down to the bone in a lot of places.” The ranger stops walking and looks up at the mountain. “Yeah, it looked pretty bad but I’ve seen a lot worse.”
“Like what?”
“I once saw a large group of black ants carry part of someone’s intestine to their queen.”
“That’s … impressive.”
“I’d say so.”
“What else?” I ask. “Darth Vader? Wow, man.”
The ranger looks at me and then at the engine specialist ahead of us and continues up the path. “You really interested?”
“I guess,” I say.
“That was about it,” the ranger says. “There were a lot of flies. Some smell. But that’s about it.”
After walking for another forty minutes we reach the site of the crash. I look around at what’s left of the plane. The cabin was almost totally destroyed and so there’s nothing much left except the tips of the wings and the tail, which is intact. But there’s no nose and the engine is completely smashed. No one has found the propeller even though there has been an extensive search for it. There is no dashboard either, not even melted parts. It seems that the plane’s aluminum frame crunched on impact and then melted.
Since small Cessnas are such lightweight planes, I’m able to lift the entire tail and flip it over. The specialist tells me that the fire that melted the plane was probably caused by impact rips in the fuel tanks. On a Cessna the fuel tanks are in the wings on both sides of the cabin. I also find bits of bone in the ashes and pieces of my father’s camera. I stand against a rock next to the ranger as the Cessna specialist hesitantly takes some photographs of us that I want.
I also talk to the pathologist later that day, after a nap, and he tells me that the body was shaken up on its trip down the mountain in the plastic bag, since what he received in the pathology lab is quite different from what the primary sighting reports indicate. The pathologist tells me that he found most of the organs unrecognizable “as organs” due to the devastating impact and severe burning damage suffered by my father. Since the body is unrecognizable as my father, identification is done on his fake teeth. My father’s original teeth were lost in an automobile accident on PCH when he was twenty, I find out.
On the flight back to L.A. I sit next to, an old man who keeps drinking Bloody Marys and mumbling to himself. As the plane makes its descent he asks me if this is my first time in L.A. and I say “Yeah” and the man nods and I put the headset back on and listen to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts sing “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” and tense up as the plane breaks through smog to land. As f get up, taking out my overnight bag from the overhead compartment, I drop my lighter in the old man’s lap and he hands it to me, smiling, and, sticking his tongue out a little, offers me a role in a p**n film starring some good-looking black guys. The only things in my overnight bag are a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, one suit, a copy of GQ, an unopened letter from my father that was never sent, my bong, and a handful of ashes in a small black film container, the rest having been gambled away at a blackjack table in the casino of Caesars Palace. I close the overhead compartment. The old man, wrinkled and drunk, winks at me and says “Welcome to L.A.” and I say “Thanks, dude.”