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| Not my vehicle |
Chilcott’s
Mechanics, Route 32, north of New Paltz, NY
I’d driven down two friends, and while I remember their faces, I don’t remember their names. When we returned to New York from Florida, I also gave a ride to Shelley, my occasional friend with benefits (although we didn’t call it that back then). The four of us left Florida, where the retreat had been, and drove the east coast home, dropping each person off on the way. One lived in northern Jersey, one in Brooklyn, and Shelley was staying in Riverdale with her mom. It was a long drive, and only two of us, Shelley and me, had driver’s licenses. I don’t remember how often we changed drivers but at one of them Shelley ordered me to drink a full cup of coffee.
Now, here is the place to talk about my complex relationship with coffee. Growing up, my parents had regularly downed cups of what they called coffee each morning, and it wasn’t for decades I realized what they were drinking was Sanka or sometimes Kava. The liquid smelled terrific, but the actual taste was like a brown crayon dipped in tepid tap water. I vowed never to become a bean head like them. To reinforce this, the coffee Shelley had me drink was from a pot of late-night percolated stuff on the back shelf of some station where we gassed up. It went down like moist grit.
Years after this, I was at a Rainbow Gathering where I was introduced to Cowboy Coffee at an off-trail kitchen called The Mud Hole. [Kid to the guy hunkered over a pot on an open flame: “You got any water?” The guy, from somewhere in the recesses of his gut: “Nope, got mud.” Kid: “Oh, I get it. You got any coffee?” Guy: “Nope, got mud.”] My reaction to drinking this black distillate was like The Simpson’s Barney Gumble chugging his first beer: “Where have you been all my life?” And by now, I am a fully confirmed java-head, whose father was unable to drink more than a quarter cupful generously laced with water when I made it.
Anyway, it may have been the effects
of that cup that made me refuse Shelley’s offer of a nap at her mom’s place,
telling her, “I’m an hour from home, I can do this.” It was also bravado, which
I had in great supply.
The retreat was in mid-winter and
while we were south, New York had a couple snowstorms, none very heavy, but
there were a couple inches on the ground. I was renting an apartment in New
Paltz then and was kinda anxious to sleep in my bed. Most of my drive was
uneventful, I was holding steady at about 60 on the Thruway, a little slower
than most traffic because there were patches of black ice here and there. But I
was a New Yorker, had driven in snow and sleet all my life, and I knew how to
avoid them.
Up until between the exits to Newburgh
and New Paltz. I passed a car going slower than me and fishtailed, first to the
right, then left, then careened out of control, between two other vehicles, and
over the embankment rear-first, sliding through about ten feet of snow, ice,
and slush to come to rest at an angle where I had no choice but to look at the
sky.
My first impression was amazement
that things I knew belonged in the back seat were on the dashboard. My second
was that the music, in the silence now of snow and my car rattling like a tin
toy slowly dying, was all too loud, so I switched the car and the radio off. The
tune was Sting singing “Russians," a song I was familiar with from dozens
of anti-nuke rallies. It’s funny to me when I think back how clear like window
glass this memory is.
I was unharmed. I had a car with no airbags but my seatbelt held firm, and in the sudden quiet, when I turned to discover my window was broken—for days I was shedding glass shards from my long hair—I could hear the wet snow landing on the car and the drifts now beside me.
The woman whose car I’d careened past stopped and called from the side of the road to me, asking if I was all right. I’m certain the first words out of my mouth were “I’m all right!” This is a thing for me, that when I am in an accident where I ought to be hurt, I hurriedly assure whoever is around “I’m okay!” It’s a way to convince myself of my own safety, my ability to survive.
I disengaged my seatbelt and trudged up the bank to the woman’s car, my sneakers and pants cuffs soaked. This part is outside my memory: I’m certain we spoke for a while and she was very helpful to me, but I genuinely can’t remember what we said to one another and, in this decade before the first car or cell phones, can’t remember how she contacted the state troopers so quickly. Because, in my memory, a patrol car was there within minutes. I suppose I was in shock, because really the rest of my memory of this incident involves my car being pulled out of the snow and then towed, with me in the cab, to the next exit and eventually to the mechanic’s shop, a nondescript block of connected garages along the highway between New Paltz and Kingston.
Shortly
after arriving I made several phone calls to find someone who could pick me up.
I found someone who could do so several hours later. In the last moments of
this memory, I settled on the lounge couch, an old, overstuffed, dusty thing
that reminded me of the couch in the three-season porch of the home my family
moved to in the early 70s, where I spent most of my summers reading yellowed comic
pages and pulp novels from the 30s and 40s. Despite my uncertainty about whether
my car was repairable and how I was going to pay for it, and despite the
commotion—many others had been sliding off the roads—going on around me, the
couch was familiar and calming and I fell into a deep, comforting sleep.
