Abio 2: Crash, Boom, Bang - December 17 2024
Autobiography Part 2: Crash, Boom, Bang
When my Simca with its bald tires began spinning, I remember thinking, “Holy crap. I’m having a car accident. Is this the end of me?”
Not knowing was to do, I slammed on my brakes. The rear-end of my car crashed into the first of a string of steel guardrails and I came to an immediate halt. I banged my head against my driver’s window, but was otherwise unharmed.
Then I noticed that I was soaking wet. The whole interior of the car was wet. I looked between my bucket seats and there was the guardrail. My car was bent into a V. Then there was a whoosh! The wet ignited. It was gasoline, and I was on fire head to toe inside an inferno. All I could see were flames.
Luckily, I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. The buckle was crushed against the guardrail. I pulled the door lever, certain that it would be jammed and I would burn to death, but it popped open.
I jumped out, still on fire like a stuntman in a movie. My hair was sizzling. I began running down the middle of the highway, but then I remembered my driver’s training. “Stop, drop, and roll.”
The black bituminous macadam roadway looked scalding hot. I did not want to lie down on it and roll around. To my left, over the guardrails, was a steep bank. I ran to it, dived blindly over the guardrails, and rolled down the grassy bank, into a muddy stream.
Ssssssssss. The water put the fire out, and I climbed out, covered in mud.
I heard a woman scream on the highway who had come up behind my inferno, glass popping. At the same moment, my friend Ron in his Duster, had been looking for me in his rearview mirror and saw the column of black smoke, so he turned around, hurried back, and parked directly above where I was clambering out of the stream, flailing in the mud.
The woman cried, “There’s somebody in there!”
It was my poor dog, Roach, in the back seat. He didn’t make it out and was writhing on fire.
Ron jumped out of his car and began running toward the burning wreckage, thinking it was me in there, and he was trying to save my life.
I had to scramble up the hill to stop him before he burned himself. He’d taken his jacket off and was holding it over his shoulder, reaching for the red-hot door handle when I came up behind him and grabbed his shoulder.
He spun around. saw me caked in mud with all my hair and eyebrows burned off, and the brown mud looked like seared skin. He screamed and fell backwards. I had to grab him by his shirt and pull him back or he would have fallen onto the burning car.
A firetruck and a state police car showed up. The firetruck said that no ambulances were available and that they would take me to the Andrew Kall Memorial Hospital. The state trooper said he would follow along because he needed to file a report.
Ron followed me over as well, and came into the emergency room while I was getting one butterfly stitchover my left eye. The state trooper was sitting down the hall in the waiting room. That’s when I realized: Oh, no! I wasn’t wearing my required glasses. Fear ran through me. What if that disqualifies my insurance?
A brainstorm hit me. “Ron, listen,” I whispered while the nurse was busy. “Go get your car and drive around to the back of the hospital and wait for me.” He took off. When the nurse released me, I walked down the hall toward a big window showing the waiting room and the waiting trooper.
When I reached the window, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled past it unseen. They I ran like the dickens down the hall, turned left through the laundry room with big driers tumbling sheets, and out the back door. I dived into Ron’s Duster and said, “Go. Go. Go.”
We raced back to Ridgway and stopped at the park where all my hippie friends hung out. Muddy and bald, I ran into the crowd and begged if anyone had a pair of glasses I could borrow. Ceily Allegreto, a dear friend, said, “You can borrow mine.”
I grabbed them and Ron drove me up Boot Jack Hill to the state police barracks. Ceily’s glasses were black horn-rimmed with silver stars all over them. Also, she was far sighted and I was near sighted. When I put them on I couldn’t see a darn thing. Still, I went to the counter and said I was here to fill out an accident report. I’d left the trooper waiting at the hospital. I apologized, claiming I left in a daze.
The clerk handed me the form. It was so blurry I couldn’t read a word of it, so I slid Ceily’s glasses down to the tip of my nose and filled it out. Whew. Done.
It never dawned on me that I could have claimed my glasses got burned up in the car, but they were wire rimmed, and I was afraid they’d look for the rims.
Nevertheless, I got my insurance check for $1,700 and caught a ride with Ron to Erie. I was intending to buy a pound of weed, but I didn’t know anybody, and the black guys on the corners looked at me like I was crazy.
Instead, we passed a pet shop and I bought a squirrel monkey and named him Stanely. He came with a cage.
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