Dart and Map

On the overcast morning of June 6, 2003, my crappy temp job finished early.  I became very focused & obsessed with getting my friend, Sara Mattison, out of her apartment. She kept declining because she wanted to write all day. I would not let up and finally she acquiesced.  We went to lunch and then she suggested seeing the movie “Whale Rider.” Not a movie I ever would normally have wanted to see, but KCRW had a segment on it that morning and I decided I just had to see it.  I remember sitting at the lunch table, having a weird moment with Sara and me looking at each other, nodding our heads. It was either the movie or happy hour. Happy hour would have meant going back to her place for a few hours, though.

 While we were in the movie, a cessna plane fell out of the sky and nosedived directly into her Hollywood apartment, killing the napping neighbor in the apartment above hers as well as the 4 people on the plane.  Our phones were off for the movie, so when we turned them back on, we both had dozens of panicked voicemails from friends that knew we were likely together, thinking we perished.  We rushed back to her apartment and didn’t know the gravity of the situation for a while. She was concerned about people seeing her messy place. When the Fire Captain came over to explain the situation; that her apartment was directly hit and there was nothing left, Sara fell to the ground and we burst into laughter. Of course it was! The people that surrounded us all had such grave and serious expressions. They all expected a far different reaction.

The bodies of the 4 people on board the plane plus her neighbor were all in and below Sara’s apartment, so she was not allowed inside to take a look. The only things recovered were her car key (her car was unharmed, too), and childhood diaries, charred from the fire.

Sara had to live in my tiny studio apartment with me for a while. The first night she obviously didn’t even have pajamas. Fortunately, I had one single pair of pj-type pants that were long enough for her legs.  Soon, the Red Cross gave her some vouchers for clothes and even for a small bed. Generous people had been dropping off clothing for the displaced tenants at the building next to where hers was. Our friend Karen took Sara on a shopping spree, where it hit Sara that she did not even have any underclothes. Not even one single sock. Just absolutely nothing.

One guy saw Sara on the news talking about being a writer and gave her his extra computer. Her computer burned. When asked if she backed up her writings, she had to point out that the backups also burned.

There were other residents home at the time of impact, with one guy jumping out of his window. Someone was burned. People lost belongings. Some lost nothing. Some residents got nice financial settlements. Sara got almost nothing, though she was the only one that lost everything.

For about a year before this event, I was convinced something would fall from the sky onto us, often keeping my eyes open, staring up, while on the beach. I obsessively watched Donnie Darko. The day of, I was borderline obsessed with getting Sara out of her apartment. I wouldn’t stop bugging her until she agreed to leave it with me.  You could say I knew and had been planning without realizing it.

We went to the burned building multiple times over the next few weeks.  The sight was surreal.  Sara and I were eventually allowed inside to bear witness to a giant hole in what was once her apartment.  

We thought this was some crazy sign that great things were to come.  Sara, and sometimes I, spoke to the media, convinced we would maybe be discovered for a tv movie of the week or something like that.  A talk show called Sara, asking if she was interested in being on their show.  But they, like most everyone else, had expected drama and tears. Sara and I were in comedy. The fact that the plane BEELINED for her apartment was, and still is, actually hilarious.  

Her friend, Joel Newman, asked us if he can follow us around and film. He made a short documentary (embedded above) that we screened at our improv theater. We laughed, but the audience seemed mostly disturbed.

After something like this, you think it means great change is coming. There was some grand reason it happened to you. Sure, some people do get something out of it. They really do get Hollywood chomping at the bit to make a movie about it. But for most of us, nothing changes at all. All it meant was that Sara lost everything and had less than what she had as a newborn.  It didn’t put a crack in spacetime and change the course of our lives. But, alas, a rolling stone gathers no moss, so we reluctantly moved on.

Trivia: The camera person that was in the helicopter that first arrived to the scene is my neighbor.

More Trivia: One of the people on the cessna worked on the movie “Mothman Prophecies.”  Look up all of the far-reaching supernatural things people wrote about that movie. They thought it was cursed.

One More: I met Gary Jules, whose cover of the Tears for Fears song “Mad World” that appears in the movie Donnie Darko, and told him about this incident. I recall him saying he had a surprising number of people that had weird stories they associated with his song and/or the movie.