Body and Blood (memoir)

Car Crash, 2007

In the winter of 2007—when I was 24—my friend Andrew and I barely survived an incredible car crash.

This was in Ventura, California, a couple hours north of Los Angeles, the surfers’ paradise I grew up in. Andrew and I’d been drinking at this old Irish bar near Main Street where people still smoked cigarettes inside and got sloppy drunk and did karaoke.

I’d come down to Ventura from nearby Ojai, 12 miles inland. The plan was to spend the night at Andrew’s place which was just a few short blocks from the bar. You know: Mid-twenties, old dive bar, get blotto, forget all our problems for a while, maybe erase death.

All went fine—the bad Guns N’ Roses on Karaoke, the smell of the rich, thickly lathered butter for free which you could shovel into a small red container, the crack of pool balls at the two tables across the bar—until Andrew met a woman.

It’s always a woman.

She was tall, hot and Goth, wearing all black silver-zippered leather with only a small amount of hyper-pale skin showing. Bright red ruby lips. Dark eyeshadow. Black hair. She looked like a mix between Betty Paige, Courtney Love and Nancy Spungen.

Soon we wandered through the bar and outside—it was cold, I remember that—and we got into her car (a brand-new VW Rabbit, no plates yet; still had that fresh new car smell) and she was driving us out of the lot onto Main Street with Danzig’s Mother on full volume, the windows down despite the cold, she driving, Andrew in the passenger seat, and me in back.

It was one of those late nights—it might have been around midnight—where few cars were on the road. The bitter, biting cold wind attacked me through the open window. Danzig yelled, crooning in his dark shadow voice. Andrew and Amy were talking incessantly up front. Everything around me blurred into the background. I was drunk. We all were.

She took a left onto Victoria Boulevard, passing the Government Center where, I knew from firsthand experience, there was a jail in the belly of that building. I knew because I’d once spent a night there for a DUI when I was 19. One of the worst nights of my life. In a cell with five guys on meth and some crazy fuck who kept eyeing me and talking to himself. A Kafkian nightmare, the fingerprinting and photos and paperwork and signatures and release with the requirement of coming back to court in a month.

For a moment I tuned in to what Amy and Andrew were saying. She lived only a minute from here, she said, and she’d already texted her girlfriend to come over for “your buddy,” which meant me.

Then we went straight along Victoria for what seemed like forever. No other cars on the road on our side or coming the opposite direction. Just emptiness and time and the open road. Would I like this “girlfriend”? Part of me was excited, another part of me just wanted to be alone, drink more, be in the darkness, listen to The Doors song The End, be sensitive and deep and reflective and just listen and lose myself.

Just before the crash, I remember she weaved once, badly, to the right, a hard jag real quick because she’d inadvertently drifted to the left and almost hit the central curb dividing our lane from the lane going the other direction.

And then everything went black.

~

I don’t know how long I was out but when I came to I was sideways. Or, rather, as I came into more awareness, the car itself was sideways. I smelled fire and smoke. There was no noise other than one wheel, in the air, still slowly spinning, as if it thought it were still on the road.

I was in my seat. I’d had my seatbelt on. I couldn’t move.

I suddenly saw that Amy was trapped in the driver’s seat, pinned between the crushed wheel and mangled dash and the road. The whole thing felt excruciatingly surreal, fake, made-up, out-of-body, as if it were not really occurring, or we were actors in a film doing a fresh take, or as if it were all some big cosmic joke.

Then Andrew was there, gazing at me like some drunken human-spider, perched at the sideway top of the car. His eyes looked wild, as if he were hallucinating.

“You alright, man?” he said, his voice scared and rusty.

I discovered I couldn’t speak. Suddenly I felt like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis.

Andrew carefully climbed down to where I was, gingerly unbuckled my seatbelt with a satisfying click, then lugged me up alongside him using all his thin but muscular strength.

At the top, not knowing what else to do, he basically just pushed me off on my own: I flew from the sideways top of the car onto the cold, hard street which was covered in millions of shards of glass. Thankfully, I landed on my ass.

Slowly, I Army-crawled across the road to the grass off the shoulder. I lay there and looked back at the car. It looked unreal: Fires burning from inside now, smoke billowing. I remember thinking: You gotta get her out, Andy. Get her out!

Our cell phones were nowhere to be found. Then he found his and it was toast. He tried to talk to Amy but I couldn’t decipher what he said. He yelled, Fuck!

I worried the car would explode, I remember thinking that. I couldn’t move again. I couldn’t seem to speak. There was blood and glass all over me but I couldn’t feel a thing. No cars were around. Not one.

Then a couple minutes later there was a car, going our direction. The car slowed and then stopped. Andrew ran over and the window rolled down and the person handed him a phone and Andrew called. The guy drove off, driving by the wreck very slowly. Why hadn’t the dude helped? What about Amy?

What seemed like instantly but was probably five or seven minutes a red emergency vehicle with EMTs showed up. Then the cops.

As one group of them spoke with Amy two others focused on me. They asked me questions and soon realized I was in shock and couldn’t speak. My head was pounding. They cut off my jeans and shirt and felt around my body, up and down, left and right, and then suddenly I was lifted onto a gurney and was in the back of the emergency van. Before they left I watched as they successfully pulled Amy out with the Jaws of Life.

At the hospital several doctors looked at me. Andrew was there. He called my mom. She was frantic. An ex-nurse. Terrified. She jumped into her car in Ojai, 20 minutes away, and headed down.

They weren’t sure what was wrong with me initially. Many cuts and bruises. Some stitches would be required. Possible concussion or worse on head. They sent me up to Intensive Care to await X-rays, Cat Scans and more.

I felt panicked.

Safely in my room, after talking briefly to Andrew and listening to the nurse, I realized I was lucky to be alive. We all were. Andrew said Amy was OK, thank God, and she was here in the hospital, too. He left for a while to check on her. I was still drunk, hazy, and in a lot of pain all of the sudden.

~

The room I was in was small and divided into two beds separated by a baby-blue curtain. I was able to piece together the story of the guy behind the curtain. Mid-thirties, originally from Boston, had left a bar earlier that night and had been hooted at by some kids. The kids turned out to be 13, 14-year-old little Latino gangbangers, probably trying to get into a gang. They drove (probably illegally) a huge, old blue Ford Explorer. Coming out of the bar, no one else around, the Explorer pulled up to him. The window rolled down, and a kid jutted his arm out and fired a pistol at him, he thinks about five times. Three shots landed: Chest, leg and shoulder.

The doctor came in after a while and told the guy he had about a 50/50 chance of survival. He told the guy he’d lost a lot of blood. The bullet had nicked his heart and hit his trachea. He was in bad shape. They would do what they could for him, the doctor said.

My mom arrived in a total panic. I calmed her down. I still couldn’t speak. She held my hand. She cried.

~

The next morning they did the X-rays and Cat Scans. No serious damage. I was fine, miraculously. They stitched up my hand and cleaned me up. I saw myself in the mirror for the first time: I looked like I’d gotten into the ring with Muhammed Ali: Two gnarly black eyes, purple juicy bruises everywhere, blood splatters omnipresent. But it was almost all superficial. I was even talking again, very slowly and rustily. I’d just been in severe shock. I discovered I could walk. Thank Jesus.

Andrew came and stopped by again. Amy, he said, was in worse condition than me but she was going to be okay. I was glad. Andrew himself was fine; three cracked ribs and a broken nose. We were all miracles; lucky to be alive. Andrew and I laughed, crying a little, shaking our heads at our dumb blind luck. It could have gone a very different way. We hugged and he left.

The doctor came to talk with the Boston guy again. Same thing. Lost a lot of blood. We’ll see what happens. Then a police investigator walked in, sat down to the side of the guy and asked him a series of questions, about the bar, about the Explorer, about the kids. The cop agreed that it was almost certainly kids paying their dues to join a gang. Then a priest came in in full black garb and prayed with the man. I was hung-over and still in pain and it all felt profoundly bizarre and surreal.

After the priest left the Boston guy asked that the curtain be pulled back. I finally met the guy.

“I can’t believe they fucking shot you, man,” I said.

The guy looked alright but had tubes going in and out of him and his eyes were sleepy. “Fucking worst night of my life,” he said.

“I relate to that.”

“What happened to you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Car crash. We were all drunk.”

The man shook his head. “Be careful out there, brother.”

I don’t know why I said this but I said, “You think you’ll make it?”

He looked across the room at me, his eyes soupy and almost black, half closed, and he grinned and said, “It’s all up to God. The Big Man upstairs.”

I nodded and said, “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

~

Three days later I was let out. The Boston guy was in better shape and was expected to pull through. His mother had flown out from back east and had visited him. I laid there during the days and let the sun hit my blanched face and I smiled because the gods had spared my life.

You’d think I’d have stopped drinking after that. Amy, I later found out through the rumor mill, had to do serious jail time because she got hit with not only DUI but Reckless Endangerment. As a result of the jail time she lost her job. Because of that she lost her apartment. Her car, brand new, had been of course totaled. And I ended up filing a claim against her insurance because they didn’t want to fully pay out.

But when I met up with Amy in Ventura many years later to do amends with her—at this point several years sober—she smiled and hugged me and said that she was sober, too, that the crash had completely upended and changed her life for the better, that it pushed her to get sober and move in a whole new direction.

It hadn’t done that for me. The crash was in 2007. I didn’t get sober until 2010. But I’d gotten there. We both had. It was a beautiful moment and we both held it close. Survivors. Sober. We should have been dead.

But we weren’t.