Evening, gang.
I'm totally tapped. Had a massive day at the office, book-ended by a run around the lakes in the morning and a surprise yoga session in the afternoon. I would love to give you an emphatic recommendation buy at this point it would feel false. In the face of failure, I'll throw a bit of honest to goodness fiction in here, one of the first I ever wrote, to be compensated by a double post tomorrow. So, you hang tight and read this short, sad story and check back in for what I ought to have posted today. I'll see you on the weekend...
Keep your cards close – keep your cards close to keep your cash closer. I hated that phrase the first time I heard it. Felt so unloving – who would hold it as a life motto? My grandfather told me that when I was young, and I learned as I grew older that he wasn’t a trusting person.
His wife, my grandma, was just as cynical. I remember being upset as a young boy because it had rained on the day she was supposed to take me to the State Fair, and the lesson she passed on to me was “Nothing in life is certain, save death and taxes.” Sick thing to say to a kid, perhaps, but at least she was leveling with me at a time in my life when the whole world was sugar-coated. It was the kind of lesson you don’t realize you’ve learned until Life already has you bent over and waiting for it and things around you have fallen apart. No one ever sees it coming until they’ve missed their chance.
I could have seen it coming, but it was gone too quick for it to register clearly in my mind. It could have been a dog, maybe a deer in the ditch along the highway. The headlights on my Suburban weren’t on it long, and it was mostly a sandy brown shade, but it was definitely dead. The shape of it had seemed…wrong. And there was blood.
“Eww, dude! Did you see that?” Dusty asked aloud, more hypothetically than to me. He leaned forward off of his seat and swiveled his head around to catch another glimpse, but the animal had already disappeared in the night as we sped along.
We were on 29 East headed for Menominee, coming back from a concert at Somerset, a little festival grounds 40 minutes west. Dusty was, far and away, the closest friend I had ever had. The first kid I hung with in college stuck with me the whole way through, never betraying me, never abandoning me. What better way for two close friends to wrap up a successful four years at a prestigious art school than with a vicious concert? It was a metal show, a bacchanalian destruction of inner ears and morals filled with smoke and leather…but the fun was over and all that remained before we were carted off to sleep tonight was staying awake long enough to make the drive back to Dusty’s parent’s place on the far side of town. Having not yet reached town, we were still on the open highway that would soon slim down into city streets. In an effort to stave off sleep the radio was on 94.1, the local channel for teenagers and their shiny, spend-happy precursors – the tweens. I-94 was the only spot on the dial to go for those jarring new sounds: the newest hip hop collaboration, the latest remix, the hottest new Lolita and the most effeminate boybands; all fresh off the line, slick and glossy and see-through. It was every bit as plastic as it sounded. The DJ, Curt St. John, broke through the sonic clutter to announce just who we were listening to, then let loose another rap song, all off-kilter beats and incoherent shouting.
The pavement rushed beneath us as I lit a cigarette and opened my window, yellow streaks fading together on the dark shimmers of forever. The howl of eighty miles an hour stole the music from out of the car as we sped down the road. I shifted the Camel from right hand to left and reached out to crank up the dial in response. Before my hand had even settled on the knob Dusty kicked his feet in an instinctive breaking motion and bleated out “Shit! Shit! Shit!” The dire tone of his voice made my head jerk and my vision flicked back to the road from the dash.
Thirty feet ahead of us on the highway was an intersection that stopped through-traffic but let main highway flow. The sides of our road and that one were lined with tall pines that my mind (unconsciously) processed as wind blocks. Already pulling out of that intersection was a dark blue Chevy truck, an older model from the late eighties. In the second my mind had to register it, I could see the truck had developed cancer that had eaten away most of the hood.
Either he hadn’t seen us, or had overestimated our distance or the truck was pulling into our lane across the road. Thirty feet at 80 is too short, and I slammed the wheel to the right and felt my brakes lock as I stomped down with full force, meanwhile wondering if doing so would result in broken legs. I thought of my mother hugging me as I left for school, her long black hair swinging behind my back as she held me before my first day of kindergarten.
I don’t remember what happened next, but the EMTs and police were able to piece things together. The man pulling out was Lee Lagese, an auto technician who knew more about cars than any man in the area, and more about God than anyone in his congregation, his wife told the man who later woke her up to tell her that her husband was “involved in an incident”. Lee was driving home from his brother’s house after counseling him on his divorce. His thoughts were of his own marital strife as he rolled through the stop sign on the edge of Highway 29.
§
The accident report stated that Mr. Lagese pulled out in front of me, and that I skidded to avoid him. I guess I had tried for the ditch but had ended up slamming the side of my Suburban into the left side of his truck. The juggernaut momentum of my vehicle sent us rolling over the top of Lagese’s Chevy, finally sliding to a stop, inverted twenty feet past the intersection. The pickup was knocked onto its right side and spun around almost completely by our force.
♦
Silence.
Throbbing temples.
Pressure. Pressure on my waist.
I don’t know how long I sat there, still strapped in. Sometime after the cars had come to rest I had come to.
My eyes didn’t want to open at first, swollen with blood as I hung upside down. I reached back to my neck with my right hand and felt for damage. Felt good to me, but then I realized I didn’t know shit for neuro-surgery. I felt over the rest of my body with both my hands. My shoulders were sore from being thrown around like a rag-doll, and my forehead had a heavy slash over my left eye. It was bleeding heavily, but I remembered hearing that they always look worse than they really are. There was blood smeared across the deflated airbag hanging impotently in front of me. Lotta good that did me I muttered in my head. My right leg must have gotten pounded on the steering wheel more than once, because it was tender to the touch.
All right man I steadied myself, you’re hurt, probably not seriously, but this car is not safe. And why the hell can’t I hear anything? I was unable to pick anything up but roaring silence. Burned rubber and engine fluid hung heavily in the air, and something else, something copper.
I rolled my neck slowly and cautiously, then turned to check Dusty, but Dusty wasn’t there. My stomach dropped from the ground floor it had sank to all the way into the basement, somewhere near my ankles. I had had my seat belt on, but Dusty had neglected to put his on. Now it hung there, mocking me. Where’s your idiot friend now? What a fucking genius!
There was no windshield for him to put a hole through, but there was blood on the dash on the passenger side as well as the door. It might have actually been mine, but I couldn’t be sure. The night had become a slurry mix of reds and blacks cast by the moonlight reflecting onto broken glass in the street and the unmistakable glow of a streetlight’s orange radiance on the pavement. I couldn’t see the truck from where I was stuck, so I eyed up my surroundings instead.
Once I had my bearings, I braced one arm firmly against the roof of the cab and reached up to the seat belt buckle. I held my breath and winced at a pain in my ribs, then hit the release. I thudded down awkwardly, and had to rotate around to kick the door open.
Slow and cautious, I crawled out of the Suburban and stood up. My back ached, but didn’t give out. My leg held equally tremulous. I turned around, blood-shot eyes widening, and faced the wake of my life.
I dropped to my knees and threw up.
Lagese’s truck was on its side in the intersection, twenty feet west. Glass lay in the expanse between the us, surrounding part of an arm severed two inches above the elbow. It had part of a green flannel shirt still covering it, and I could tell it wasn’t Dusty’s. The accompanying relief was met with equal dread as I realized that it was an arm, an arm, a fucking arm, and people don’t just walk away from that.
Panic finally started knocking on my door, and my mind cowered away from it. No no no! Need to find Dusty! I spun around, eyes searching frantically. In the distance I became aware of ambulance sirens approaching, then realized I could hear them approaching. The explosion of the airbag saving my life must have deafened me for a bit. The wooden streetlight pole between the two trucks that illuminated this sick spectacle had a crushed and cracked spot six feet off the ground, and my mind didn’t want to put the puzzle together, to just close my eyes and sleep and pretend none of this was happening.
I walked over to the side of the road, where the pavement gave way to gravel, which relented to thigh-high brush, walled in by trees ten feet further in. In the ditch five feet from the road was a hole in the brush, and I ran to it.
Dusty was lying in it with his back and legs protruding in angles that made me sick to my stomach. The shape of his body was distorted, alien and grotesque. His eyes were still open, and so was his mouth. It looked like he wanted to say something. My face tightened and my throat swelled with anguished tears. I fell to my knees, sitting on my legs with my palms open limply, and sobbed.
For the first time the concept of finite was clear and it stood out with horrible, sickening, unwavering stubbornness. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair that he could just go, just simply wink out of existence. My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the end of my friend, my compatriot. I refused to accept the perverse notion that I had to let Dusty die, that he was dead. Not possible.
The ambulance was growing louder and the sirens became banshees, stealing my love and memories away from me. I was losing my grip on things, folks, seriously losing the control. My mind wanted to squirm out the now-clotted hole in my head and fly away. I stopped crying long enough to breathe, and in that little opportunity I seized back control. I bit down on my tongue, hard, and the world came back into focus. I could taste the copper now. Wiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt, I looked around. I hurried up the embankment to meet the ambulance as it arrived.
±
Only one ambulance arrived. When they saw I was the only one to walk away, the responding crew cancelled additional assistance and instead called the wrecking crew. There were three paramedics with me, all though they couldn’t do anything for me. Other than minor whiplash and a banged up knee, the only concern was the wound on my forehead, but it had already stopped bleeding by the time they arrived. Two of the men were busy gathering up the bodies (what remained of them).
The man who checked me over was burly and gruff, and I couldn’t pull any sympathy out of him. My heart sat where it lay, in the bottom of the lowest hole, unable to climb out. I was inconsolable, unmoving and near silent. The EMT finished his routines and closed up the back of the ambulance. I was sitting on the concrete against the side of it with a blanket wrapped around my slumped shoulders. The man looked down at me and shook his head. He brought out a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his pants pocket and removed two. Lighting one, he held the other out to me. I took it and stood up.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. He handed me his lighter and we both stood there quietly for a moment, facing away from the accident, out into an open field. The stars were all shining brightly, a deep midnight blue with sparkles looking like breaking waves above us. After a minute, the man spoke.
“You know,” he began, his heavy accent already apparent, “I saw many accidents like thees one back in Minsk when I was a young man like yourself.” He took a drag and blew it out. I looked at him, expectant. “After I came here in the 1970’s I took up this career because I knew I could handle the trauma, the mental anguish because I had seen it when I vas younger. Here, I see people respond to death in a way that only further illustrates the fact that…they are American.”
My brow furrowed, and he must have noticed because he reconsidered. “Well, not necessarily American, but definitely a naive perspective.” I still couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to tell me. His accent was thick and rolling, yet very intelligible. It was his message that threw me. I inhaled and blew out a line of smoke that continued with my breath. It was cold, but until now I hadn’t noticed.
The man continued “It seems that a lot of people here are so concerned with how everything affects them. Not the big picture, only what happens to their stake in life.” He coughed and cleared his throat, then:
“People here do not appreciate life enough to justify their reactions to death. They plan and work for the future, but never live in the moment, never take joy in spontaneity.” He looked at me to see if I followed. I more than followed.
“Are you kidding?” I said quietly, waking out of my trance. My face grew hot. “Are you serious? I just lost the closest friend of my life, and you’re telling me I’m overreacting?” I stood in front of him, challenging, but lost the will to fight. “Ah, fuck it. I’m sorry, I don’t….I don’t know how I feel….lost, I guess…” I trailed off. Every minute that passed let my heart sink deeper and deeper into the depths of pity and remorse. My mind was exhausted, and I felt confused and overwhelmed. I felt like I could see the strands of the moment, holding time together. We were connected in some bizarre way, this spot, time, it all held for a moment, and I saw the fabric of time operating, but I lost it as soon as it appeared. I tried to focus on it, but I couldn’t overcome the drowning feeling in my chest, that life here is nothing but one little random moment after another, that there is no big picture, no cosmic karma, just a mess of biological wiring pumping blood to my brain and if it shuts off, then I simply end.
Reality felt harsh.
The Russian cleared his throat and waved his hand dismissively. “Let me clarify. You have had something bad happen to you tonight, yes? It will haunt you, no doubt about that, but it is only natural. Every man has demons. You will most likely fear commitment, being close to people,” he smiled grimly at me, “but the thing that will help you is to remember that nothing in life is certain, except for death and taxes.” He smiled again. He made me sick.
I tried to avoid looking as offended and hurt as I was, on top of my grief. I swallowed, my throat thickening. “Yeah, uh, I’ve heard that before. My grandma told me that once, I think.” I laughed incredulously. I wanted to shoot him, teach the fucker a thing or two about appreciating life.
My weakness held me in place. Destroyed me, almost. I couldn’t stand up for my life, for my friend, or that man I didn’t know. I felt so hollow, so dejected. The loss was overwhelming. I didn’t want to sleep because I didn’t want to wake up. I was at a loss of action.
I looked up at the sky and prayed for end, reversal, something, anything but this. No, this was too much. I waited for a response from God, but none came. Maybe He wasn’t listening anymore. Maybe he never was. I turned back to the Russian. “No, there’s more out there. I know there is, I just don’t know what….love maybe, who knows. I’m no philosopher; I just want to go home.”
He looked surprised. “Really? You don’t want to see a grief counselor first, maybe get your cut stitched up in my van quick?” He gestured towards my forehead, which now had a large band-aid on it. Something turned over in my mind, and a sly smile touched my lips.
“Actually, could I get some pills to help me get to sleep tonight? Can you do that” I asked, coy. He considered for a moment, then acquiesced.
Sighing, he said “Normally I would not do this, but for you I will be kind.” My mind rejoiced at his acceptance. He one of the back doors to the ambulance and opened a drawer. After rooting around for a minute, the Russian backed out of the van and handed me an orange pill jar. ‘Valium’ was printed on the side in small block lettering. I slipped the jar into my pants pocket. “That should be sufficient I think,” he said, bemused.
Oh indeed, thank you, this will be more than I need to get over this, I thought, and smiled at the man. Nothing is certain but death and taxes, you bet. Just coast along until it’s smooth sailing.
