Everyone Needs A Car Crash

This story begins in 1994 as do most of the more unbelievable stories in my collection.
 
Hit play and read on.
 
A few months earlier I had returned from following the band Phish across the country and now was living back with my parents. I managed to secure a strictly manual labor job at a fastener packaging warehouse. Huge barrels and cases of screws, nuts and bolts would come in by the truckload and leave in tiny, nicely labeled boxes and bags. My duties included operating the box-making machines and dumping barrels of fasteners into hoppers for the nice ladies to sort, count and package. I can’t remember exactly how long I was stuck in this job. Tedium tends to overpower all sense of time and relativity.
 
It was a clear autumn day. Five o’clock came like an alarm clock, shaking me from the fog of labor. I drove away in my ‘78 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, heading home to wash off the smell of cardboard and metal. Rush hour in the suburbs would be an exercise in patience and anger management as usual.
 
I pulled into the left turn lane on Lake Street and waited through the green. As soon as the light turned yellow, I would turn across oncoming traffic, down the ramp and on to southbound Kingery Highway. If traffic was kind, ten minutes down the highway would find me home.
 
The light turned and the one car ahead of me in the turn lane gunned it. I followed right behind.

This is the point in the movie of my life where the viewer would be subject to an agonizingly long montage of slow motion scenes paired with a deafening lack of sound and music.
 
As I turned left, I noticed the grill and bumper of a large red Bronco moving at 50 mph, pointed squarely at my passenger window and only feet away. It seemed to pause for a moment, pondering the possibility of passing through my car like a grinning apparition.
 
My mind exploded with escape plans, checklists and preparedness strategies. My body stiffened and both hands gripped the wheel like the safety bar of sketchy roller coaster. My mouth did it’s best to help by letting out a long and strained “shiiiiiiiiiiit”.
 
The Bronco’s bumper came plowing through the passenger window and sidled up to my shoulder. Glass filled the air like crystalline snowflakes and the windshield came crashing down onto me head. My car was shoved sideways over a median and into a third car.
 
The real world rushed back in and my ears were filled with the cinematically cliché post car crash sounds. The tinkling of glass like soft wind chimes. A moist hiss from some place between where my car ended and the Bronco began; an area that was now much harder to define than it was only moments ago. Slowly voices came.
 
My hair was shoulder length and as my head hung down, it covered my face from the group of concerned people who were gathering outside.

“She’s bleeding!” the man with wire rimmed glasses yelled as he pressed a hand to my still intact driver’s side window. I looked up hoping that my facial hair would amplify the look of death that I planned to lay on him. My look was cut short by blood streaming into my eyes. I reached up to feel the shards of glass embedded in my scalp and tangled in my hair. I took a moment to wipe away the blood and consider what had happened to the cigarette that I had been smoking.
 
This may have been the first time in my life that had the chance to perform well under duress. I tried the door but it was pinned against car number three. Instead I rolled down the window and purposefully climbed out as the group around the car cautiously moved back. I found that my keys were still in my hand as I moved to open the trunk. My dad had given me a box of paper towels to put in my car “for emergencies.” I believe that this qualified.
 
I grabbed the paper towels, closed the trunk, seated myself comfortably and began to blot at the blood. My thoughts were like a slideshow. How bad was my head? Has anyone called the police? Should I find my insurance information? Voices floated through. “Are you ok?” “There’s an ambulance on the way.”
 
Traffic whizzed past on all four sides as the world continued to spin without me.

The same douche who had blundered my gender earlier came trotting over with a diaper held aloft. “Here, this might be more absorbent.” I shook my head and mumbled. In a world of higher clarity I might have told him to fuck off but the sunlight of purposeful thought that had guided me earlier was fading to a foggy twighlight.
 
The ambulance arrived and packed me neatly up in a neck brace and stretcher. Most of the ride, entering the hospital and transferring to a bed in the emergency room were all lost in the fog. I do clearly remember the EMT in the ambulance asking me my name and if I knew who currently held the office of president. George Bush had relinquished control to Clinton less than a year earlier and in my confusion I manager to meld the two into “George Clinton”. We all got a good chuckle out of that one.
 
The few stitches ended up being just into my hairline so you would never notice the scar these days. The car was totaled. I called my girlfriend later that evening and finally broke down when I realized that if she had been in the car…
 
Ever since that day, I always wear my seatbelt.
 
Related:
Getting Plowed In (same car, same year)