Death Drives a Lambo

                “C’mon, Dad.” I impatiently tapped my foot. We had been “discussing” my plans for celebrating the coming new year for the past fifteen minutes, and I wasn’t making any headway. Josh and some other friends waited, crammed into the small entryway of the house. I was the last to be picked up that night.

                Dad shook his head, frustrated. “It’s not a good idea.”

                I argued back. “Why not? It’s not like we’re going to drink and drive. We’re not going to do drugs or anything.” I felt low playing a line like that, but I desperately want to go.

                My father sighed deeply. Silence passed.

                After what seemed like eternity, he finally spoke again, and when he did, he looked directly into my eyes. “It’s other people’s choices that worry me. The roads are going to be dangerous tonight.” His voice trailed off but then came back more purposefully. “I’ll let you make your own choice, son. Just know that I’ll be disappointed if you choose to go. I just have a feeling that you shouldn’t.”

                A knot in my stomach started to form but not from any hunger pains. Deep within I knew he was right, but how could I explain that to the posse waiting for me?

                I swallowed down the guilty feelings. “Fine,” I blurted and resolutely, stubbornly, stormed out the door, homies in tow.

                “Be safe.” I heard him call over my shoulder.

                “Whatever,” I thought.

                Sliding into shotgun in Josh’s full-size van, I heard someone from the back whisper, “Dude, his dad’s pissed.”

                I turned around and glared into the dark; the back of the vehicle went silent.

                Josh turned the key, and the engine revved to life. I cranked the music to push the disagreement with my dad out of my head, and we pulled out of the driveway.

                We hit Rally’s for a cheap burger and fries before crossing west over the Mississippi, and soon we were cruising the winding spaghetti-like highways and byways of the greater St. Louis area. On and off freeways, we twisted and weaved our way to a plethora of party stops, only staying long enough at each one to see and be seen. It was, after all, New Year’s Eve, 1993, the last one before I graduated from high school, and I intended to celebrate in style, or at least in quantity.

                My buddies and I, floating natural highs, cranked the speakers beyond their capacity until they cracked and surrendered to our demands. Even when shouting in the close proximity of the van, it was impossible to understand what anyone else said. Greasy wrappers cluttered at our feet, near-empty drinks rattled in the molded vinyl cup holders, the piles growing higher as the night waxed on. We dropped in at various bashes and dances; from churches to community centers to private homes, we came, we partied, and we left in search of more.

                Midnight came and went, I recall, and we were hunting for more food before we moved on to the next stop on our list. We were driving west on Highway 40, I believe, away from downtown, and I’d guess we were cruising around 70 or 75 miles per hour—fast for that area, but not fast enough to be pulled over. When out of nowhere, we heard a raucous clamor over the thumping bass of Cypress Hill. I was sitting in the passenger seat. A little perplexed, I silenced the pounding tunes. The noise grew louder—the thrum of an engine. I looked out my window scarcely in time to see a yellow Lamborghini streak by, almost clipping the front bumper of the van. Neon purple emanated from underneath, underlining the blur. With an apparent kick of nitrous oxide, the car hit another gear and rocketed away from us, a fluorescent streak darting through traffic, disappearing into the darkness, like the Millennium Falcon making the jump to light speed.

                “Did you see that?” came a reverent whisper from the back. See it? We felt it as it whipped through the river or cars and trucks. The van now slowed involuntarily. I glanced up and down the freeway; we weren’t the only vehicles pausing to soak in the dangerous beauty of that car.

                “Dude!” Josh exclaimed. “He must have been going at least ninety!”

                “That guy’s gonna kill somebody,” I muttered under my breath. My stomach tightened. “Could’ve been us.”

http://gtaforums.com/topic/618309-vehicle-screenshots-custom-rides-garages/page-502

                Nanoseconds passed before the entire van buzzed with excitement about the Lambo. Tales of exotic sports cars we had seen or sat in or even driven filled the space—typical testosterone-fueled boasting. Even though the run-in with yellow Lamborghini only lasted a couple seconds, THAT was pretty cool.

                Soon we pulled off into some suburb to refuel both our van and our bellies; the entourage needed more sustenance to keep going. The goal to literally party until the break of dawn needed some assistance: caffeine and fast food.

                It wasn’t long after we had returned from our pit stop to the freeway that the world, or at least the traffic, slowed to a crawl, almost like a slow-motion scene out of a bad action movie.  A collective groan from the seven of us rose above the bass groove. Bumper to bumper the cars inched forward, stuck like concert-goers going through a turnstile, bunching, maneuvering to get ahead but going nowhere. Josh pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Horns blared around us, dissonant and piercing; they cut through the slow jams fuzzing through the cracked speakers, putting a damper on the night’s revelries. I lowered the window to catch a better sense of what was happening up ahead. A wicked sharp wind caught my breath and carried it away in the night, leaving my throat frozen. Lights flashed—red, blue, and the amber of emergency vehicles.

                “Wreck ahead,” I announced and silenced the music again. Impatience stirred.

                Incident management trucks, police cars, and fire engines blocked most of the view. Forty-five minutes and half a mile later, we reached the bottleneck. A lone officer directed the clogged artery of traffic. Emergency personnel moved back and forth. Glass littered the freeway. Some of it, we noticed, was tinged red. Several inspector-looking people flashed cameras. On the shoulder sat three or four cars, twisted and bent, forming a heap of metal usually only seen in a junkyard. As we soberly rolled by, we noticed along the cement barrier was a streak of yellow paint about the length of a school bus. And then we saw it. A heap of metal and glass and purple neon sitting by itself: the Lambo…or at least what was left of it. The only recognizable semblance that this mound had once been a car was a solitary yellow door, sticking straight into the air, a monument to this symbol of extravagance that not even an hour earlier had whipped past us without a care. The twisted scrap pile looked like the Terminator and Wolverine got into a wrestling match inside the Lamborghini and decided to rip it open like a giant aluminum soda can and spill its guts onto the pavement. Spots on the concrete were dark and wet.

                We watched in a horrified silence as an EMT slammed the back doors of an ambulance, pounded twice, and walked away. The ambulance drove off: lights on but no siren. I noticed that it fell in line with two others, who also flashed lights but no sound—a signal that there was no rush to get where they were headed. A nagging thought filled my conscience. A couple of inches, and that could have been us. Dad had been right—someone else’s choices ruined more than the night.

                All of us sat stupefied by what we had just seen. Josh kept driving west. The only conversation the rest of that night was when I suggested we turn around and go home. Josh only nodded. I think some of the others fell asleep.

                A contemplative mood fell over the van as we returned to the Illinois side of the river. Scenes flashed before me as the streetlights drifted past, shedding their own blurred orange-white light on the night’s events. All I could do was shake my head and try and shake the image from my mind.

                When we pulled up to my house, I noticed that Dad’s car was gone—already off to work, so my admission and apology would have to wait. “Dad, you were right,” I said remorsefully to myself as I stumbled through the front door. It could have been me. The slick red spots twisted into the silver and yellow could have been me. I might have wiped out my future without even having one. Splat. Over. Not my choices.

This is the last of the four personal narratives I wrote with my students this year. Somehow it got shuffled under a pile and forgotten until a few days ago. Some of this piece has been fictionalized for the sake of continuity and artistic license...and the fact that I don't exactly remember who was with me on this adventure. I can say that even though at times I was a butt-headed teenager and didn't listen to my dad all the time, I can say that now he is one of my best friends, and I always seek out his counsel. I'm not sure who coined the adage, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now, but I agree that the older I get, the smarter my dad gets.

Catching Air and Almost Dying

Would you look at this! Two days in a row with a new post. I haven't done that since I posted twice in one day last September (2015). Well, this piece is based on something I've never told my mother, a topic I have taken from Jack Prelutsky’s “A Day at the Zoo” found in Guys Write for Guys Read on many occasions. I’ve been using this prompt so long now that it’s getting harder and harder to come up with ideas that Mom doesn’t know about. I’m sure if I could spend a few minutes with my brothers, though, something will spark a memory.
                  My students had been asking about near-death experiences lately, so here's another one...that I don't think Mom knows about unless she's reading this right now.

                  The first time I ever actually thought I was going to die in a car was late one Friday night when I lived on Scott AFB in Illinois. Jon, Steve, and I were driving away from the base, probably headed back to The Coop via Rally’s or Taco Bell or somewhere else for a midnight snack run. I think we had dropped off Josh at his house, or maybe he was with us. I don’t remember. It’s possible Rob or someone else might have been in the back seat, too, but that doesn’t really matter. For some reason, though, we decided to take the back road that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, a route we normally didn’t take that late at night because there were very few lights, or more importantly, no girls cruising up and down like there would have been on the main roads.

                  About a third of the way down that stretch of lonely road, there was a small rise, a short hill or a bump if you will, not quite as steep as a speed bump like you find in a parking lot or highfalutin gated community, but steep nevertheless. Some of you might see where this is going by now.

                  Jon was driving his little Plymouth Sundance, I was riding shotgun, and Steve was spread out in the back seat. Naturally, the tunes were cranked, back left speaker already fuzzing.

                  I’m not sure if Jon meant to hit the bump that fast, or if he just forgot it was there, but at sixty-five miles per hour, there’s not much you can do after impact.

                  We hit. The Sundance launched. Snowboarders would have been awed at the air we caught. And that’s when time slowed down and eyes bulged in their sockets.

                  Sparks flew upon landing, the underside scraping the hard pot hole riddled asphalt. We jolted twice. Then spun. Counter-clockwise. Once, twice, three, four times. We jerked to a stop in a ditch. The seatbelts had held fast.

                  Tightness in my chest. Breathing suspended. I looked out the window to my right. A cement power pole stood a literal inch on the other side of the glass.

                  The CD must have ended because I only remember silence. The only noise came from my heart trying to thump through my rib cage. Breathing resumed. The three of us looked at each other. Jon put the car in reverse and backed out. We stopped again on the road and jumped out. We circled the car wordlessly, inspecting for crumpled metal or jacked-up fenders. No damage—a miracle—just a little mud and grass clumped into the tire treads.

                  Still without speaking, we climbed back in, I turned back on the music, and we drove silently on. I don’t even think we stopped for food. It wasn’t until later that night that any of us dared speak about what had just almost happened. And being the intelligent teenage morons we were, we later went looking for safer places to jump the car.

P.S. If anyone reading this has a picture of this car, I'd like to have a copy. I can't find any in my stash despite how much we lived in it (and a few choice others).

Taking Down Superman

                I looked down at the Hawaiian Teriyaki chicken surrounded by twenty-seven types of salad situated on my sagging Chinet.  Yuck!  What would have been a typical neighborhood Labor Day feast, didn’t even appeal to my appetite.  Mr. Stomach Knot made sure of that.  I mean, I couldn’t even force myself to try the Italian marinated pheasant or the barbecued elk steaks.  Something was definitely wrong with me, and it wasn’t just indigestion or heartburn.

                My stomach started hurting Sunday afternoon, but at the time I thought it was just hunger pains. For dinner I pounded more than I should have; I had been fasting after all. Then at the Labor Day breakfast that morning, I inhaled enough for three people my size—not bad, but the hash browns tasted like cardboard. I assumed that my pain was an exorbitant amount of carbs nestled in my belly, so I tried everything I could think of to rid myself of that burden, but it refused to budge.

                You can ask anyone who knows me: my pain tolerance is pretty high; but this was an ache like nothing I had ever experienced. It was as if someone was literally grabbing my guts and wringing them from the inside. And although I hurt, I didn’t feel extremely sick, though I tried to force my body to give up whatever remained on the inside. As I knelt on the cold tile of the bathroom floor my geeky English teacher nature cringed even more because I couldn’t come up with one single simile or metaphor to accurately describe my anguish. All that came out, literally, had been hyperbole.

                Bent double over the porcelain at my parents’ house, I hid from the overloaded smorgasbord outside and the curious, well-intending neighbors asking if I felt all right. I didn’t want to see anyone let alone strike up a superficial conversation.

Alone for the moment, I mused: a new thought burrowed into my thick skull and nestled into my brain: where I had previously thought that nothing could stop me, this Superman just got hit by a truckload of Kryptonite; some extraterrestrial substance had brought me to my knees. I’m not sure if you want to call on Karma, hubris, or just gold ol’ irony, but just the previous week I had bragged to my students that I never missed school. I had only missed one day of work due to illness in my life, and that had been in college when I commanded the back of the house at Brick Oven. I only missed eight days of school (from illness) from Kindergarten all the way through graduation. I did not want to get a sub, especially since missing a day as a teacher requires more effort to prepare for and clean up after a substitute, no matter how good she is. So I tried to walk it off, rub some dirt on it, take two Tylenol, and see what the morning would bring.

Sometime between two and three o’clock the next morning, my body popped itself out of bed, not even my usual sloth-like roll out. It was toaster-action popping.

“My appendix,” my brain tried to tell me. I don’t know where the thought materialized from, but immediately I knew that that spindly, superfluous organ was the cause of all my pain. I trudged downstairs to the almighty Internet to confirm my suspicions. Yep. Well…maybe. There were about 47 different possible prognoses with my symptoms according to Web MD. But somehow I knew it was my appendix. Just to be sure I wasn’t fooling myself, I read Amy’s big, thick, how-to-treat-yourself/ home remedy thingy book.  It said to go to the hospital.  Duh!  I already figured that out.

So I typed up some simple lesson plans—students were to read “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell—and emailed them to a colleague, knowing I was not showing up that Tuesday morning.

I then showered and got dressed before I woke up my wife. When she saw me standing there, she knew something was wrong.

“Provo or Payson?” she asked simply, knowing that when I request to go to the emergency room, something was seriously wrong.

We quickly bundled the kids into the car and headed north. She drove me to UVRMC, where she dropped me off so she could take the kids to Carol’s while I was examined and such.

                The triage nurse was unbusy, so it took no time at all to get me in. The actual nurse was pretty ditsy, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m stuck with her?” She flirted with just about every male nurse or doctor in the joint.  I was placed in an isolated part of the ER where they were making a few renovations.  I don’t think they were staffed properly; it took a little while for anyone to even remember that I was there. Then Ditsy nurse led me to a room the size of a cubicle and gave me a hospital gown, something I had never put on my body before then, so it took me a while to figure out. And when I finally did, the faded pastel print cotton was almost long enough to cover my nether regions, so she had to bring another—an actual adult size.

                Somewhere between thirty and three hundred minutes later Ditsy brought me this sick, chalky, supposedly mint flavored milky garbage to drink.  I think the thick, white goo was supposed to act as a painkiller and check for ulcers or something like that, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was a SuperTums! All I know is that it was like trying to gag down liquid Styrofoam or coagulated Elmer’s glue.

At this point, I guess the insurance finally cleared or maybe an actual non-flirty, non-ditsy nurse came on shift and paid attention to her patients, but I was able to get an x-ray. I was CT-scanned, too.  All the preliminary tests came back negative; finally a think tank of eleven or so medical personnel decided that my appendix was about to rupture. Duh. I could have told them that when I first arrived, but what does the patient know?

Surgery was imminent.

“I guess I’ll need a sub for tomorrow, too,” I joked with my wife and dad, who had sat with me for an hour or six.

The rest of that day was a blur except one distinct memory. I was shuffled onto an icy metal table-bed thing after I had taken out my contacts before being wheeled into the OR. Once through the doors, a hive of green-scrubbed surgeons and assistants teemed about, prepping instruments, reading charts; a couple even jammed to the radio. I knew that they weren’t going to do much slicing, that my appendectomy was going to be performed laparoscopically, but my mortality, the frailness of my flesh, began to make itself manifest in my mind. I was no longer invincible. Superman had met his match. Tuesday, September 7, 2004, would go down in infamy as the first surgery I remember, my first hospital stay since infancy. A small, pencil-shaped blob that had swelled to the diameter of a toilet paper tube had called out my invincibility.

With these thoughts swimming, a trio of nondescript masks surrounded my head, and one doctor slipped the anesthesia mask over my mouth and nose. Another had me start counting backwards. I knew I would never make it to zero, but as I started sliding into La-La Land, one of the assistants from across the room shouted, “Hey, Boss, listen to this.”

I heard Nickelback wail from the crackling speakers, “Something’s gotta go wrong ‘cause I’m feelin’ way too damn good!”

Like I said, I don’t remember conking out, but I do remember chuckling to myself and contemplating the irony of the lyrics.