A New Kind of Monster by Timothy Appleby Page B

gobsmacked,” Hope says. “I walked in, I was just amazed.” And as she stared, she turned and heard a “click” noise behind her. An amused Williams was standing there with a camera, recording her moment of astonishment. Unimpressed, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his time, and he replied that he did not.
    Very soon, however, he did. He had resolved to become a pilot.
    Twenty-five years after its release,
Top Gun
may not hold a spot in the lexicon of great moviemaking. Inevitably, the pre-digital simulated air stunts look dated, redolent of a video game. Worse are the tissue-thin plot, cliché-soaked dialogue, garage-band soundtrack and endless close-ups of Tom Cruise’s face, alternately cool and confident and riven with angst. “You’re one of the best pilots in the Navy, what you do up there is dangerous,” a wide-eyed, hard-to-get Kelly McGillis tells the morose protagonist as he nurses a drink and ponders his bleak future. “But you’ve got to go on. When I first met you, you were larger than life. Look at you. You’re not going to be happy unless you’re going Mach-2. You know that …”
    Hackneyed or not,
Top Gun
and its only-the-best-will-do-in-the-military mantra left Williams deeply impressed. “Russ becamea nut about
Top Gun,
” Farquhar recalls. “We all joked about it. He was really hung up on that movie. It was a huge fascination to him back in 1986. He was fixated on it, nothing less. He could recite you the lines forward, backward. He watched that movie so many freaking times, we all teased him about it. ‘Oh, there goes
Top Gun.’
    â€œAnd it went beyond a joke. He really, really soaked it up. And then, when he announced his career as a pilot, I said, ‘C’mon, you’ve watched
Top Gun
too many times. You’re going to join the air force? We don’t have aircraft carriers here.’ I said to him, ‘You took politics and economics—why’d you bother?’ ”
    Tom Cruise’s determination to win the affections of his instructor also seemed to resonate with Williams as he struggled with his breakup with Misa. “I used to joke about that behind his back,” Farquhar says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh shit, he thinks this is going to win her back. He’s going to show up in his F-14.’ ”
    Shortly before graduation, it was an uncle of Farquhar’s who gave Williams his first flying lesson. “My uncle liked to pat himself on the back because he taught Russ how to fly. He used to take me up in his Cessna all the time, and we’d fly over the cottage, fly down to the University of Windsor where my sister was, go out for dinner, come back. And then one day Russ was hanging around and my uncle said, ‘You guys want to go out for a flight?’ ‘Yeah.’ So we went up, Russ moved behind the controls and my uncle let him take over. And I remember my uncle commenting, ‘Wow. He’s a natural. He’s really good at it.’
    â€œAnd [Williams] met him a few more times. He’d go to the cottage and my uncle would be there and they’d talk about things that my uncle would bring up—the latest plane he’d been on down in Florida, that type of thing. And my uncle’s next-door neighbor, when he moved to Burlington, was a current Air Canada pilot. I introduced Russ to him and I remember that had a huge impact on him.”
    Williams also took flying lessons at Toronto’s Buttonville airport. And when he was accepted by the military early in 1987, he didn’t hesitate. Yet in one of the other twists in the early life of Russ Williams, he came close to becoming a police officer instead. At around the same time he applied to the air force, he also applied to the RCMP, and the Mounties came calling first. “He had a telephone call from the RCMP, they’d sent him a letter accepting him, but he was