So, What Do You Do?

Despite having already posted “Art. vs. Income” and “On Being a Productive Member of Society,” in previous blogs, I somehow still feel like I'm not quite done with this topic.

Although I can't say for sure how young I was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I do know with certainty that it was my stated ambition by the age of ten, because it was in the newspaper.

I had (for some strange reason) sent a letter to the Pentagon explaining my idea for a defensive anti-missile laser. Someone in the public relations division had written me back a very polite letter encouraging me in my future studies and saying that if I applied myself in school I could perhaps someday become an engineer or a physicist and work for the Defense Department. This friendly invitation to join the U.S. military-industrial complex found its way to the local paper, and a reporter was given the plum assignment of coming to my house to interview me. Her name was Goldie Blumenstyk. A short article appeared the next day. It included a picture of me holding a diagram of my “invention” and concluded with the revelation that my goal was not to be a scientist, but to write novels.

After toying around indecisively with various college majors including journalism and philosophy, I finally settled on history. The only jobs available in that area are historian, college professor and museum curator, and I didn't really plan to do any of those things. I just thought history was really cool. But then in my final year, deep budget cuts across the entire humanities department meant that there was not a single senior-level history course available for me to take, so I wouldn't be able to graduate with a history degree after all. (The school's football program, on the other hand, was fully funded. I’m just saying.)

So in irritation and desperation, I switched my major to English for the eminently practical reason that I already had the most credits in that subject. (I had been participating in creative writing workshops for elective credit, mainly just because I enjoyed them, which was closely related to the fact that it was an almost unlimited opportunity for me to be a wise-cracking smart-ass.) I took one class in Milton and a second one in digital rhetoric, and that was it, I was done. I had an English degree. (Side note: I got an A in digital rhetoric, and I'm still not sure what that is.)

So now it was time to get one of those pesky “job” things I had been hearing so much about. I picked the obvious option, and did what anyone with an English degree would do: I became a commercial pilot.

I towed gliders for a while and also worked as a flight instructor. My most interesting and memorable job, though, was “elevator operator” — flying the jump plane at a parachute school. The small operation was owned by man with more than 8,000 skydives. (He later got out of that line of work and became a patent attorney.) The job consisted of climbing up to jump altitude in a big slow spiral with a self-jettisoning human payload on board, lining up on jump run, opening the door, watching as the students and instructors bailed out, and then diving back down to the airport to do it all over again.

The jump plane was an old Cessna 182 — a fixed-gear, high-wing, strut-braced, single-engine machine that was, for a period during the 70s and 80s, the most common jump plane in the world. (Ever see that 1985 movie Fandango? Remember the funky-looking plane from the Pecos Parachute School? It’s one of those.) Like all jump planes, it was butt-ugly, its interior ripped out to save space and weight, leaving bare riveted aluminum. The exterior was stained with grass from the turf runway, smudged and streaky from the oily exhaust. The airstrip was in a rural area with lots of woods, so I was always cleaning bug guts off the windscreen. Without any soundproofing, it was loud. I wore a radio headset, the kind with heavily insulated ear cups. The instructors and more experienced jumpers often wore earplugs to save their hearing. The students had other things on their minds and hardly noticed the noise. There was only one seat, and it was for the pilot. Up to five jumpers, packed in tightly wearing their bulky gear, sat directly on the metal deck. They wore safety belts, but only for the first thousand feet of the climb. (Above that point, it’s preferable to jump out of a disabled aircraft rather than to land with it.) I also wore a parachute of my own, an emergency military rig to be used in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as a jumper accidentally deploying his main while leaning out the door, entangling it with the horizontal stabilizer. Strange things can happen when you’ve got people climbing around on the outside of an airplane while it’s in flight, and at one point or another all of them have. (Run an Internet search for “jump plane accident” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)

The student would come trudging out to the jump plane, escorted by the instructor and encumbered with a heavy rig. (“Rig” is the conventional term for the entire assembly, including a main parachute, a reserve parachute and the container-harness system.) Students wore floppy jumpsuits in bright colors to make them easy to find in case they missed the target and wound up landing in a field or a forest or a basically anywhere other than the drop zone. The jumpsuits didn’t get washed often, so they bore all the ground-in dirt marks of previous student touchdowns, which ranged from the imperfect to the spectacular. Students were taught to do a “parachute landing fall,” or PLF, similar to the technique actors use to faint or collapse dead on stage without hurting themselves. Learning to land a parachute gracefully takes time to master, to the students always did PLFs for their first few jumps. They also wore comically large helmets and oversized freefall altimeters on their wrists. The altimeters have a yellow “pull” arc and a red “oh, shit!” arc.

I would generally already be strapped in and have the airplane engine running, and I would help to guide the student (accompanied by one or two instructors) as he or she got settled in uncomfortably, either cross-legged or hugging knees to chest, fastened the safety belt and prepared for takeoff. At this point, they were usually pretty calm, although they always looked preoccupied from the hours of training. They were worrying about forgetting something important, or freezing up.

Advancing the throttle, I would steer the plane down the grass runway, gaining airspeed until we lifted off. This was what I really loved: the flying. The ground would drop away, and the landscape would open up around us. Suddenly, the north central Florida scenery, with its lakes and cattle pastures, phosphate mines and orange groves, long straight highways and winding swampy rivers, was spread out before us in every direction. There is no view in the world quite like it. On a clear day, you can see both coasts from up there.

The Cessna 182 is not a fast climber, so it took a while to get up to jump altitude. Experienced jumpers often catnap on the ride to altitude, but of course the students are wide awake and concentrating, reviewing what they’ve been taught and trying to remember it all. The instructor would usually remind them of a few things as we climbed, and most importantly would point out where the drop zone was relative to prominent landmarks.

On a typical AFF (accelerated freefall) training jump, we would climb up to 11 or 12 thousand feet. I would be talking to Air Traffic Control on the way up, letting them know we were there and that we were about to fill the sky with plummeting humans. As we finally turn onto jump run, that’s when we open the door. Opening the door is The Moment of Truth.

Like most jump pilots, I was an experienced jumper myself, so an open airplane door didn’t freak me out. The first-jump students were another story. What I found really interesting from a psychological standpoint was observing people, up close, over and over again, as they confronted what was almost certainly one of the most thrilling and terrifying moments of their lives: their first skydive.

Some people were like me, and had always wanted to learn to skydive. I had first expressed the desire at the age of four, when my mother read me a story from Reader’s Digest titled, “Skydiving: Rapture of the Heights.” I waited impatiently for years and years until I turned 18 and could legally make my first jump. While I waited, I read everything I could get my hands on related to parachutes and airplanes. At last the day came: on the morning of my 18th birthday, I got out of bed, drove straight to the drop zone and made my first jump. But that’s not typical.

Many others come out to do it just once, either to prove something to themselves or to celebrate some major milestone in life, such as a divorce or a birthday with a zero in it. Most of them are nervous but excited, bravely signing the waiver and then going through the training and orientation with the demeanor of someone who is a little scared but mostly eager and enthusiastic. They maintain this attitude as they get manifested for the next load, as they put on their gear, as they board the jump plane, as we take off and as we climb up to jump altitude. They are smiling but fidgety, cheerful but restless.

Until the door comes open. “Door,” I yell, warning the jumpers to protect their handles. I rotate the latch, and the door flies up, held open by the strong, cold wind.

That’s when the reality of the situation hits them. The view is breathtaking. I never got tired of it. Very few non-skydivers ever get to look out an open door and see the landscape from two and a half miles up. And that’s the moment when the student’s face goes blank. This is actually happening. They revert to sensory overload mode. The computer is running, but it’s not saving to the hard disk. The next few seconds are a wild blur that they will not clearly recollect, if at all.

Different exits are used depending upon the student’s training level. For a first jump, the student climbs out on the step along with two instructors, clinging to the wing strut. The instructors are hanging on tightly to the student. The initial climbout can be surprisingly challenging: most students are truly shocked at how powerful the wind blast is, even though I throttle back to idle for this part, and the airplane is actually in a gliding descent. Once in position, the student checks in with the instructors, who signal that they’re ready. The student screams out a count choreographed with an up-and-down body motion: “ready, set, GO!” And then they’re gone, speeding towards the Earth.

As soon as the students and instructors exit, I bank the plane over hard, entering a steep descent, keeping them in view as they drop away. It’s fascinating to watch jumpers in freefall through an open door from the pilot’s seat of an airplane. They recede into specks with amazing swiftness. It’s another one of those remarkable sights that few people ever get to witness, another thing I never got tired of. I close the door by kicking the plane sideways with a stab on the rudder pedal, interrupting the airflow and allowing the modified door to fall. I reach over and latch it, and then continue my descent to the airport.

The students tend to open high, and I generally beat them to the ground. So after landing and shutting down the jump plane, I get to watch them as they come back in, their canopies bundled up like laundry in their arms, their sloppily daisy-chained suspension lines dragging in the grass, grinning from ear to ear, so full of joy and cranked up on adrenaline that they can hardly contain themselves. That was my favorite part of the job: I got to see people having one of the best days of their lives.

Well, maybe not always the best days of their lives. Once in a while things would go awry. We never had a serious accident, thank goodness, but from time to time the jump would not conclude with the usual proud and triumphant march back to the packing area, quivering and high-fiving. I remember one poor young man who either got overloaded or overconfident and did not follow the radio instructions he was being given. (The students wear a receiver attached to the rig’s chest harness, and an instructor on the ground tells them to turn left, turn right etc.) Instead of landing in the nice big friendly green expanse of mowed grass with the huge red X and the handy wind indicator, he wound up high in a pine tree. His canopy was stretched across the branches above him, causing them to bend under his weight and shower him with pine needles. He hung there in his harness, that oversized helmet on his head, those plastic goggles over his eyes, twisting and swinging slowly, his arms and legs limp with helpless despair. Calling down to us, his voice low and cracking, he inquired what to do now. We told him to remain calm. So he just dangled there, 25% scared and 75% embarrassed, waiting for the fire department to arrive with a ladder truck to rescue him. To this day, when I hear the words “forlorn” or “ignominious,” I think of that kid.

As much fun as it was, dropping meat bombs didn’t pay the bills. Eventually I got a job as the manager of pilot training for a cargo carrier. That company had a fleet of about one hundred small airplanes that they used to haul light packages short distances. They followed an on-demand business model rather than having a fixed flight schedule like the airlines do. Their clients were mostly medical labs and banks. The cargo was blood samples and checks being transported to Federal Reserve clearinghouses. (This was back in those quaint days when people still wrote checks.) They had bases all over the United States, north as far as Minnesota, west as far as California and south as far as Miami. I spent thirteen years with that company, and during that time traveled almost constantly. It was a great way to see America. On the down side, it was stressful and dangerous. (Four pilots were killed in crashes during the time I was there.)

Being a freight pilot means spending long periods of time hanging around airports with absolutely nothing to do, so I wrote. It was a fairly prolific period for me. Boredom, while a poor motive, is an effective motivator. I wrote essays and short stories and published half a dozen magazine articles. I wrote several novel manuscripts. Some I wisely set aside. Others I even more wisely threw away.

In my capacity as training manager, I found my niche. This was a job that involved an enormous amount of writing. I wrote standard operating procedures, checklists, manuals, guidebooks, training curricula, classroom handouts, tests, instructional supplements, self-study reference materials and anything else that needed to be written, thousands of pages’ worth, from internal memos to letters to the government. “We need a new training module for this new financial regulation,” management would say, or, “we need a new training module for this new piece of equipment we’re going to start using.” So I’d spend some time with my best friends Google and Wikipedia, do the research, and write a brand-new training module on that topic completely from scratch. I loved it. Although the writing was very technical in nature, it required a surprising amount of creativity and it was satisfying to use my language skills in a meaningful and useful way. Looking back, it’s clear to me now how I was redefining the role to bend my career trajectory back towards what I really wanted to do: be a writer.

When the company was absorbed in a merger with a former competitor, I took it as my cue to leave. I resigned, and my wife and I moved to the west coast of Florida. At this point, I began doing contract corporate technical writing and project management work, which, although inconsistent, was much more lucrative than being a freight pilot. I also published my first novel.

I have a friend who is an artist. That’s what she does; that’s how she defines herself, and rightly so. She has always been artistically inclined. She went to art school. When people ask her what she does, she answers, “I’m an artist.” But instead of asking about her art, she complains, many people ask next who she works for. When she explains that she’s an independent artist, they want to know how she supports herself. Do you sell your art? Or does a gallery pay to exhibit your work? She supports herself by working behind the counter at a coffeehouse, she tells them. And then they nod, with that haughty posture and smug look of condescension, as if they’re thinking, “Oh, so she’s not really an artist. She’s a barista.”

Thus the seemingly simple “so-what-do-you-do” question is fraught with social significance and all the traps and baggage that accompanies it. I can no longer say that I’m a commercial pilot, so now I always struggle with how to answer. I enjoy being able to say, “novelist,” which is technically correct, but then again it’s not my primary source of income, so it doesn’t feel entirely honest. My contract writing assignments provide me with most of my money. So I could answer, “I’m a writer,” which is also technically correct, and is more broadly accurate, since it covers both the books I write and the corporate stuff I generate. But then they want to know, “what do you write?” This is a reasonable question, but one that has exasperated writers since the dawn of written language. If I’ve had more than three beers I’m likely to respond, “Mainly adverbs, sometimes random participles.” If I’m trying not to alienate people too early in the conversation, I can factually report that I write fiction and also do technical and business writing and editing on a temporary and part-time basis, but that sounds so dull that I can hardly even type it without losing interest in what I’m saying. Moreover, it’s not quite right anymore, because on my last project, I ended up working for about three months on something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with writing at all. People are funny about fishing for details. How many books have you sold? Are you on the New York Times Bestseller List? Is it being made into a movie? It’s like they’re thinking, “Oh, so he’s not really a novelist, he’s an office worker who just happens to have written a novel.” The right to self-identify as a novelist, it seems, is a privilege that must be earned fiscally. I feel like I ought to be carrying around a copy of last year’s tax return to show them. “No, look!”

“So, what do you do?”

“I’m a novelist.”

“Really? Like a published novelist?”

(Sigh.) “Yes.”

“Wow! That sounds legitimate! I’ll let it go for now, but I’m going to ask a few sly questions later in an attempt to figure out how much money you’re making.”

“Fair enough.”

I make a conscious effort to avoid asking people the “so-what-do-you-do?” question. I know that if they’re proud of what they do (or how much money they make), they will find a way to slip it into the conversation. Frankly, I don’t care what you do. If you’re smart and/or funny and/or interesting and/or you have a nice boat, we can hang out and enjoy each other’s company. Our employment doesn’t necessarily need to enter into it, unless (for example) we’re talking about the publishing industry or something else directly work-related. Sometimes I meet people — at the drop zone, for instance, where our common interest in parachuting provides an instant bond — and have hours-long conversations with them without our jobs ever coming up. I like that. I’m always just a little bit disappointed when the other person stops and says, “So, what do you do?” I feel like the authentic, organic part of our interaction has ended at that point and can never be reclaimed.

And while I do relish the confused looks I get when I reply with things like, “armadillo sexer,” “pediatric botanist,” “blimp camouflager,” “administrative taxidermist” or “confetti appraiser,” there are occasional situations where I don’t want to be annoying or evasive. At such times, I find myself wishing that I could make a real living as a novelist, just so I could stake my claim to an easy and accurate one-word answer. My 10-year-old self would like that.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

Answering the Inevitable Questions