A new kind of high - Trapeze School

I don’t do drugs because I have an addictive personality. I know this about myself, so I’ve always been immune to the sales tactics of conventional drug dealers. But flying isn’t a drug in the conventional sense and Jonathon Conant of Trapeze School New York isn’t a conventional drug dealer. Still, I should have known something was up when I met him. He had the same knowing grin on his face when he shook my hand, smiled, and said, “you wanna fly?” that Harvey Keitel had on his face when he warned Robert DeNiro not to go with Jodi Foster in “Taxi Driver.”

By itself, the TSNY rig is simple, yet formidable. Located on the south side of the Santa Monica pier between the Playland arcade and the food court, it looks like four thirty-foot-tall croquet wickets connected by a series of ropes, cables, and wires with a safety net suspended below. On one end is the twenty two-foot-high launch platform and there is a trapeze suspended from each of the two center wickets. The nearest one, the white trapeze, is the one everyone swings from. The other one, the blue trapeze, is only for the professionals. It’s so far away as to be practically in Malibu. You can fly on the white trapeze, but to reach the blue one, you have to soar. It mocked me. I still hear it laughing.

I was there with my friend Joey, a talented acrobat and silk dancer, who is friends with Jonathon and his team, Valerie and Dean. Once I had signed the waiver and strapped on my safety belt, Jonathon walked me through the basics. “Dean’s gonna be up there with you. Put your toes over the edge, hips out, bend your knees, then when he says ‘hep’, you just give a little hop and you’re flying.” I was ready.

Just finishing her flight was a woman named Nancy visiting from Baton Rouge who told me it was the most fun she’d had during her stay in Santa Monica. Unable to contain her smile, she said, “I can’t wait to tell all my circus friends, they’ll be so excited. Look at me, I’m shaking.” I know from experience that when a woman is still shaking and smiling afterwards, she’s never going to forget what she just did.

The basic flight happens in three phases. Phase one, “hep” off the platform with your hands on the trapeze. Phase two, invert and hang upside-down from the trapeze by your knees. Phase three, hands back on the trapeze and dismount. You can also take classes and learn to back-flip into your landing or even (and this is the part that haunts me) launch yourself off the white trapeze and “get caught” by someone hanging upside-down from the blue one.

Joey clipped the safety lines onto my belt and I climbed the two-and-a-quarter stories to the platform where I met Dean. “Hold on to the platform with your left hand and the trapeze in your right hand. Toes over the edge, hips out – I’m holding your safety belt. Put your left hand on the trapeze and bend your knees. When I say ‘hep’ give a little hop.”

Staring out at the pier, the beach, and the sun setting in the late afternoon sky while dangling precariously from a platform twenty-something feet above the ground, I realized that once I “hepped,” I’d be on my own. With a big exhale, I jumped. The drop was severe, but the rush was intense. In one big whoosh, the safety net below me almost instantly became the sky above me. For a split second, I hung suspended in mid-air until gravity kicked in and pulled me back down. Before I knew what I was doing, I had pulled my legs up above my head and was hanging by my knees. As I swung, I arched my back and looked up and thought, “wow, there’s the beach. How weird that it looks perfectly normal, despite the fact that I’m upside-down.” Before gravity kicked back in, I caught a glimpse of the blue trapeze. I flipped back over and dismounted safely, but I’ve been thinking about reaching that blue trapeze ever since.

As it turns out, it’s not just me. Once you fly, all you want to do is climb back up the ladder and do it again. Nancy stayed to watch for a while, Joey had to be dragged away, and a woman named Thu from Redondo Beach who only flew so she could have a good story to tell at work on Monday is now planning to take the classes.

And just like them, I was still shaking afterward.