Killer Cars

from here to there and back again, please please, don't crash or run a red

There was that time I was five years old and stood with my mom on the side of the road waiting for the police to arrive and write their report for my mom to submit to the insurance company and every siren in the distance gave me hope that soon we could get buckle up and drive on to the pool where we had been heading when we got hit and despite the dent in the door, my day would continue much as I expected when we left the house. The police took over an hour and afterward we went back home. I think that’s the day I learned to always carry a book, because you never knew how long those with the power to make you wait, would.

In high school, I remember averaging being crashed into at least twice a year. More than once, me and my best friend driving to school were crossing an intersection and someone ran their stop sign and sideswiped us. If the damage was minor, the driver would beg us to shrug it off and because we were young and dumb and distracted by their smile and earrings and hands on our arm, we agreed. Later my dad would ask if I’d notice a grinding sound when turning left.

Another time, heading to work an overnight inventory shift at Blockbuster video, I pulled out of my residential street and someone hit my front axle so hard that my mom’s mini-van spun around 360. The other driver got out, swearing, and punched the hood of his car. I stepped out tentatively, holding my insurance info, waiting for that other driver’s rage striking to subside and my neighbor came up from off his porch and told me to write down the other guy’s plate number, because he suspected he’d take off. The other guy calmed down. Swore he was being chased by another car, that’s why he was speeding. No one was hurt, but the front of my mom’s van was totaled and I was late to work.

There’s more, but they blend together. Rear-ended at stop lights in the rain. Rear-ended on the highway in the sun. I remember when my brother drove to Takoma from Dallas, moving for work, driving on a mountain road through the Rockies, his car rolled into the shoulder and his baby girl laughed from the backseat, hanging upside down and clapping, “Again! Again!”

I’ve got this recurring nightmare. I’m driving and a song comes on the radio that I don’t like and so I touch the button to change the channel but the song keeps playing and I tap the volume knob to turn the radio off but the song keeps playing and this is when I realize that I’m asleep behind the wheel, it’s one of those dreams within a dream, and I wake to another dream which is tires screeching and blinding headlights and spinning, and then I wake for real, in bed, screaming and sweating and unable to go back to sleep.

When we lived in Mexico, on the border of Arizona, the national police would drive past with a massive gun turret mounted on the back of their truck, but I always worried more about being stopped by the local police for a traffic violation. Which, of course, happened when I wrongly assumed I could cross a three-way intersection on a yellow. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to understand the officer, so I called my wife, who spoke to him, and he nodded, and handed me back my phone, and into my ear my wife said, “So, he tells me this muchacho ran a red light and he told me to tell you to be more careful,” and somehow, the officer let me go with just a warning, my guess is the ‘somehow’ was my three cute kids in the backseat.

Back to high school, a couple times driving back from lunch, my friend sped down a residential street, hoping to beat the bell, because she never wanted to rush eating at Cici’s Pizza buffet, and when the officer came to the window, it’d be her older sister, or an officer who knew her older sister, and s/he would shake her/his head, and tell my friend this was the last time she was getting off with just a warning.

Back to high school, and the stupid stuff we did, more than once I rode in the back of a truck without a tailgate, just because I wanted a ride off campus during lunch, and held on for dear life as my friend drove like he was being chased down the residential streets surrounding our campus. At night, we took turns holding onto the top of his hood, as he sped through neighborhood streets. We called it car surfing, but it was probably better understand as grip-tight-prove-yourself-or-die idiocy.

high school me, on my favorite car, wrecked by my brother a few years later in a unsalvageable highway crash

Recently, I found myself driving in a country with unintuitive traffic circles and sudden exits. The local police monitor speeding and erratic lane changing and cell phone using with high-definition roadside cameras. You get texted the fine along with a high quality picture of yourself breaking the law. People from all over the world drive there, from Germany to India, with wildly divergent driving cultures, so a heavy hand with Big Brother style enforcement does make public safety sense. When my wife and I rented the car, we were warned, don’t run a red light, the fine is over $10,000 US dollars, your car is impounded, and you lose your ability to drive in this country for six months. Still, on the road there are drivers from all over the world, some of them very rich, and it’s not like the law doesn’t apply equally, it just doesn’t cost enough to disincentivize everyone’s reckless driving.

And can I complain? You just heard how little losing limb or life affected the decisions of my mostly-formed high school brain. Which might be why in that same country with the steep text message fines, your US license doesn’t transfer if you’re under 21.

It took me three days until I was relaxed enough behind the wheel to play music while I drove.¹

In unrelated news, I received three story rejections this morning, which stings because I thought each was one of my best and I honestly don’t know if I prefer getting three form rejections at once, like swallowing foul-tasting medicine in one gulp, or to have them spread out, where the pit in the gut and confidence that my words will never outlive me like Emily Dickinson takes all week to swallow back down to the depths of my belly where the whispers of quitquitquit echo like a well meaning mother. The upside is the rejections have sent me back to my long-delayed work in progress on ‘Jimmy, The Lifeguard,’ which yes, if you’ve got one, I’m still collecting lifeguard-related stories.

Which, horror of horrors, yesterday at the hotel pool, I rescued my daughter from a panic in the water. High school Lifeguard-me would have claimed it as a “SAVE,” would have said she was drowning. Me-now, observant Dad, wants to say she just got scared and needed a little lift to the edge where she could hold the wall and catch her breath. But… that story I’m writing? I spend half a page discussing how drowning looks like splashing and playing but the tell is in the eyes and my daughter’s eyes were wide and white and afraid.

1. Thanks Thom Yorke for capturing in song how I feel every time I pull out of the driveway.