As a child, at the age of thirteen or, perhaps, fourteen, I
was hit by a car.
I survived, and that is the reason that this is a funny
story. I’m vaguely aware that if I had been killed there’d be nothing amusing
about it, not least because I would, dead as I would be, not be able to find
much of anything funny anymore, but also because people tend to find stories
about dead children “A bit of a downer.”
So I’ll state for the record that I did not die, at the age
of thirteen or, perhaps, fourteen, upon being hit by a car that afternoon as I
rode my bicycle through a relatively uncrowded residential neighborhood, not
wearing a helmet or indeed protective clothing of any sort, and not seeing the
car as it sped through a stop-light, or I did not pay close enough attention to
oncoming traffic as I went through a four way stop, I don’t remember which. I
do this in the hopes that this will put you at your ease as I continue relating
the story to you.
I recall it vividly, my child’s body sliding across the hood
of the car as my bicycle was thrown forward from it, then up and over the
windshield, over the roof, and rolling down the back-end of the car to find
myself, suddenly much bloodier than I had been only moments earlier, deposited
back upon the pavement of the street from whence I’d came.
It was only as the car was speeding away that I realized how
much pain I was in, and with hindsight I suppose that the vividness with which
I felt the pain was a blessing, meaning as it did that I was probably not going
into shock.
I cannot stress enough the fact that at the time I did not
take the vividness with which I felt the pain as a blessing. I took it as
sudden, shocking, inescapable pain that, had I been able to scream or even to
draw deeper breaths than the shallow gulps I was managing, would have left me
howling loudly enough to let the whole neighborhood hear it.
Which would have been useful, as if the whole neighborhood
heard me screaming, one of them might have come to check on me, to see me
crumpled in a bruised, torn, bloody mess in the middle of the street, and
perhaps take me to a hospital for medical care of some kind.
Medical care of some kind would no doubt have been a useful
thing in that moment, but I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, and anyway
even if I had thought about it I couldn’t properly draw the breath to scream,
so I simply lay there, drawing shallower breaths and exploring the experience
of worse pain than I’d ever been in in my life, and hopefully worse pain than
I’ll ever be in, really drinking the agony in at my leisure, uninterrupted,
until I was ready to get up and examine the damage the impact had done to my
bicycle.
My bones, I learned as I dragged myself to my feet and made
my slow, shambling way to where my bike had been thrown, had not been broken,
and I laughed at this, as I’d broken bones before doing much, much less. It
struck me with a sense of giddy amusement that the worst physical pain I’d ever
been in was happening without a single broken limb, nothing that a thirteen
year old’s mind could register as “permanent” or “serious” damage to my body,
in spite of the punishment it had been put through.
My bicycle, on the other hand, was destroyed, front wheel
and frame bent at odd angles, spokes torn in two, handlebar bent to one side,
seat missing entirely, unrideable, as though it had taken the permanent damage
for me so that I wouldn’t have to, as though it had died for me, for my sins,
or for the sins of the driver who’d hit me. Which was for the best, looking
back at the experience there was no way I could have gotten it home in the
state I was in anyway. It’s not as though I was going to get back on the thing
and ride it.
I never rode a bicycle again, in fact. It’s not until I
write this line that I realize that. Huh…
Instead, I limped back up the hill I’d so recently been
cycling my way so carefreely down, my original destination long since
forgotten, forever forgotten as I cannot now remember where I was headed any
better than I could at the time, toward the safety of my home, to clean the
blood out of my eyes, change out of my now torn, bloody clothes, and hopefully
find bandages for the scrapes and cuts that by that point covered a significant
portion of my body.
Halfway up the hill I started crying, and I was crying still
by the time I got home, though by the time my parents arrived home from their
respective places of work I’d more or less recovered, cleaned up and was a
little bit calmer, the pain having receded a little and my mind being calmed by
the judicious application of afternoon cartoons.
Ducktales, I believe, followed by Darkwing Duck, and then
Astro Boy. Though I may have misremembered the order in which I watched them. Not
that their order particularly matters to the flow of this narrative…
I told my parents that I’d flipped my bike over while going
downhill, but not about the car, and while they expressed some small amount of
annoyance that I’d left the expensive bicycle behind, when I assured them that
the wheel and frame were bent beyond my ability to get the chunk of now
useless, twisted metal back up the hill and home in the state that I was in,
they mostly took me at my word, offering to take me to see a doctor if I
thought I needed to but not pressing the matter when I told them I did not,
though frankly taking the word of a thirteen or perhaps fourteen year old on
the matter might not be the greatest bit of parenting that’s ever been. Still,
without my mention of the car it sounded like a simple accident of the sort
that the young are constantly finding themselves involved in. Kids live hard,
after all, and they bounce back much easier than they’re traditionally given
credit for, we really do forget how resilient the little buggers can be.
But the resilience of children to the sorts of injuries they
cause themselves, interesting and important though the topic might be, is not
my point.
My point is this: I am probably somebody’s night terror.
Because the motherfucker behind the wheel of that car hit a
child of thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, on a bicycle, in the middle of a
residential neighborhood, mid-day and sparsely populated at the time though it
was, then watched that child’s body bounce off the windshield of his car, flip
over the top and fall into a crumpled heap, bleeding in a pile in the middle of
an empty street, before driving off, passing the child’s destroyed bicycle as
he went, without even stopping a moment to go back and find out if the child
was dead or alive.
And that’s the kind of thing that would give anybody with
even the faintest hint of a conscience nightmares, even twenty years later.
It’s the kind of thing a person might never recover from, the sort of profound
moral failing that you spend your life trying to put behind you only to
discover as years go by that you never properly can.
It’s the kind of thing that would cause a person to wake up
screaming. And you know what? I hope it does.
I hope that doesn’t sound petty or spiteful of me, but in my
own defense, that evil fuck hit me with his car and left me there like I was nothing
to gather my wits up and walk, to fucking walk, back to my house. He didn’t
know who I was, or how badly I was hurt, or if I needed to go to the hospital,
and he didn’t know if anyone else would be by to offer the aid he refused by
driving off, which NO ONE did if you recall, and he drove off like I was
nothing, leaving me to die, for all he knew.
I hope he wakes up screaming every fucking night for the
rest of his life, if that’s all the punishment he gets he’s gotten off easy in
my opinion. I wasn’t badly hurt, so this is a funny story with a bitter tinge,
but that’s not relevant, he should have stopped to check.
Anyway, in the time since then, I’ve had a rich, full life.
I’ve done a lot of things and impacted a lot of people, some of you were there
for parts of it, some only know me through my work, but yes, I have lived. I
have the same number of stories as any man my age, and I’ve left more than my
share of impressions on the people around me, but I suspect that in terms of
the most vivid impression I’ve ever left, there’s some chance that it is the
impression I left on the psyche of a man who’s name I never got to learn, who
left me in the street to die and more likely than not to this day doesn’t know
for sure if I survived.
I at minimum left a person-sized impression on the hood of
his car.
I don’t know him, I can’t remember his face, I don’t even
know for sure that it was a he, but if there’s anything resembling justice in
this world he remembers me, and this day is burned as deeply and vividly into
his memory as it is into mine.
Because all through my life I’ve struggled against my own
fear that I’ll be forgotten, and I honestly would take some weird, sick comfort
in the idea that this one man, much though I do hate him, will never forget me.
That’s a weird thing, I know, and likely an emotionally unhealthy one, but
there it is and I don’t apologize for it. I’m the one who was hit by a car;
after all, I think I’m entitled to let my own weird private issues into the
matter a little.
And, if the man who was behind the wheel of the car that hit
me is by some strange coincidence reading this: You’re mistaken; I’m some OTHER
kid. The kid YOU hit is definitely dead. Though he’d have survived if you’d
just gone back to help him…
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