Vroom Vroom

1 year ago this week, my girlfriend and I were involved in a terrible accident that broke her pelvis in 7 places and left me physically unharmed but emotionally and mentally damaged. In that year we have been through much and have made our recovery. I've written about it a few times but this is the piece and will also be the last time i write about that incident. I hope you enjoy.

CARS

I was rich once.

I’m not bragging. I really want to make that clear, it’s just a fact of life: there was a point in time when my father had money. So growing up in that environment I’ve seen many cars parked in the family space. There was new car every couple of years to keep up with my dad’s moods: A big black mini-van, a Toyota Sierra we used to go on road trips when my dad was feeling familial. He’d trade that in for a sporty Toyota Celica; silver and curvy, flashy, the kind of car that makes you want to have sex. What he really wanted was Ford Mustang but he wasn’t allowed. My mother and I both thought this was his mid-life crisis. We would learn much later that my father was dealing with his fear of aging, not by buying a car but instead was spending nights in the arms of another woman; who unlike the car was not silver or flashy or sexy.

After the sports car was the SUV with a built in GPS, a car that sat the whole family plus two more. It had a built in TV so those in the back rows could watch DVDs on those long road trips that my family didn’t take anymore. It was a car that I loved and would be the first car that I would drive when I turned sixteen and was given the death warrant known as a “drivers permit.” Four months later the once bright and brilliantly black monster, proof of American superiority had been humbled by rash turns and clumsy parking. The driver-side door was severely dented and scratched from a particularly bad night when I tried to pull into the garage with teenage reckless abandon. From that day on the door wouldn’t just creak but would scream the kind of scream that can only be produced by bent metal dragging along car frame. That strong soldier of a car held on as long as he could until eventually he died the death of most honorable veterans; old and alone it passed away from its injuries sustained during its formidable years. It was replaced by a PT Cruiser, a small car which basically resembles that of a hearse for tiny people. When my mom drove my little brother to school, I would imagine the neighbors watching it pass by their front windows and exclaiming,

“Well Janice, looks like another munchkin’s bit the dust.”

After a few years my parents decided to give the car a paint job. One day I was looking at an ugly car painted a single color. The next I walked to the garage to see an ugly car painted half red and half black with the words KAT MOBILE painted on the side and KAT CRZR as its license plate. Great I thought, people will no longer think we are a funeral home for midgets; now they will think we have become extremely tacky pimps. I wouldn’t dare say these out loud as this was a gift to my mother Kathy. So I just nodded in approval.

All of these cars have floated in and out of my life but only one car has ever truly left an impact on me…That is the car that tried to kill me.

I saw this show or heard this saying, or read a bumper sticker or a fortune cookie somewhere about how someone right now in the world is carrying a gun with a bullet with your name on it and he doesn’t even know it.

I feel like that is true for a lot of things: bullets, knives, drugs, buses, there is a strand of AIDS virus out there someone is carrying around and they are just working their way to giving it to you. The trick being to avoid it long enough so that you can die of old age before any of that stuff finds you. I also find it funny where these things can hide.

For instance I never thought the car that would try and kill me would belong to my girlfriend. The car was a red Chevy Malibu and was actually the reason I found my way into dating my girlfriend in the first place.

In high school after she had unintentionally dented someone’s car with the Malibu she called me. I was actually at a party with my high school girlfriend. I answered my phone and heard this girl’s voice babbling incoherently through her sobs and I had to leave to find out what she was saying. The simple act of calming her down made us friends, and then we became best friends. Three years later I asked her out.

Two years after that and I’ve seen this car many times. It was a dark red brown color like blood that had rusted to bike metal. Everything inside of the car was gray, the seats, the floor, the emergency break. The entire interior was the sickening color of old people. It had a dent on the roof from where a tree branch the size of a bazooka fell during a thunderstorm and landed hard on the Malibu. It had a crack in the side window from where squirrels had dropped nuts on the car and even smashed the back window like how you see in action films.

Despite it’s name this Malibu was no vacation, sleek and cool in the saddest of ways, simple and useful the way a horse and carriage were. This was the car I rode in to four weddings, the car I rode in to meet my girlfriend’s crazy drunk abusive father, the car where our first fight took place.

Stated simply I hated this car. Nothing good ever came from it. But it still surprised me; like how you think the worst thing that annoying weird guy at school can do is talk to you too close, but then he brings a gun to class.

It was six in the morning and we had been up all night. Since 7pm we’d been out and we’d been fighting since 10pm. A hard nail biting, f bomb dropping, you’re a fucking crazy person, fighting and we were tired.

We merged onto Lake Shore Drive, a hint of the sun rising behind the lake. Too tired to talk or breathe I closed my eyes and rocked to sleep…Suzie did the same. Her eyelids were heavy and her body was ready to collapse. Her eyes shut closed like curtains and as we drifted to sleep the car drifted left. As Suzie’s foot got heavier we accelerated from 40mph to 60. The car cut across two lanes of traffic and stayed in the left lane for thirty seconds before it drifted over more. As if it waited for that one stretch of LSD where there is no curb. Where a car can transfer from concrete to grass without disrupting the sleeping passengers so it can torpedo towards a light pole at 65 head on. I wake up when I hear Suzie say…

“Shit!”

I see the telephone pole close as it can get without contact. Suzie has turned the wheel of the car as far as it can go but it doesn’t do much but save our lives.

A direct hit would of wrapped us around 400 pounds of steel pole, broken every bone in our bodies and killed us on impact.

Instead that pole clean ripped off the entire driver side of the car, popped off the back wheel and sent us flying. The car tumbled twice the airbag came out and gave me an uppercut across the face. When the car finally stopped spinning like the dreidel from hell we were facing the wrong way down the LSD, head lights coming at us at 60. When I could see straight I kept trying to figure out when all of this had happened. When I got out of the car I wondered how the fuck I was still standing. I quickly waved down the cars who quickly called an ambulance that not so quickly came to clean up our mess.

The car looked as if God had picked it up and played hacky-sack with it. This would be great except for my previously unconscious girlfriend who was still in that car and who as of right now couldn’t move her legs. The paramedics cut her loose and moved her while she screamed. The firefighters prepared for clean up. A man who was walking on the beach was taking pictures of the crash and of me. I got all of our personal belongings together and wondered why I wasn’t this coherent everyday. I wondered what was going to happen if Suzie couldn’t walk again. A firefighter grabbed me by my shirt and started yelling.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing huh? You ain’t about to steal this shit, put it back and get out of the fucking street.” Confused I could only say one thing…

“But I’m her boyfriend.” The mans grip softened but almost accusatory he asked

“How’d you get here so fast?”

“I was in the car”

Without thinking he let me go. A look I never thought a man like this would make stared me down then looked over to the sheet metal that used to be a car. The backside pushed to where there was no backseat, all the windows busted. Front side of the car gone, along with the driver-side door and the back wheel. The fireman looked at me and I think I saw him find Jesus.

“You were in that car?”