Monday, May 7, 2018

Teenagers wrecking cars


We were out of high school due to a teacher's strike. There were substitutes, but I wasn't about to cross no picket line. The cops came down and roughed up the teachers for some reason.

A couple of friends of mine were driving down the street unsupervised. They were in a Volkswagen Fastback. The guy driving began weaving between the lines in the street. He explained later that he was pretending the Volkswagen was a Porsche. The car tipped over onto its right side. The window was open and his friend in the passenger seat was fearful his face would be scraped off onto the pavement as the car slid to a stop. They got up and walked out through the windshield that had fallen out. Striking teachers from a grade school came running to help. I don't know if they saw they acting like morons before wrecking the car.

Then, perhaps a year later, the passenger in the car (I'll call him "J") tried to get a driver's license. He went to take the driver's test. He borrowed a car from another friend's mother because it had an automatic transmission and was more like the car he used in Driver's Ed. The woman giving him the test told him to turn around in the parking lot and he ran into another car and put a big dent in the fender. 

That evening I got a phone call from J. He asked if I wanted to go out and do something with him and the Volkswagen guy. I said okay. They'd come and pick me up.


I was surprised when J pulled up in front of my house. He was driving an old rear-engine Fiat coupe his mother bought for $800. 

I told him I thought he failed his driver's test. He said he did. He was driving without a license. 

Headlines flashed in my mind. Teens perish in fiery crash. But----I got in the car with him. I had never ridden with him driving before and I was surprised at how bad he was. He had no confidence at all.

We took a back road through a park. It was a very narrow, winding one lane road in the side of a hill. As we drove there was another car coming at us, so he turned off onto an even narrower, more winding road that was even higher on the side the hill. There was a ditch on the right and a steep drop-off on the left. We drove along at ten or fifteen miles per house, and that turned out to be too fast. We were going around a curve. He started going off into the ditch. I thought, well, this won't be so bad. It would be a relief to get out of having to ride with him.

But J over compensated. He swerved to the left away from the ditch and the car rolled over twice as it rolled thirty or forty feet down what was sort of a cliff. I assumed I'd be killed or horribly injured, but no, I was fine. I sat there marveling, but J asked if I was okay and I said yeah, then we climbed out. I just wanted to walk home, but J got out his flashlight and wanted to inspect the damage.

I don't know why I paid for the tow truck. J had a job. But I had money on me. The driver shined a light down the hill and said, "You did THAT?"

He hooked a cable to the car and pulled it out.

J had it towed to the parking lot in student housing where he lived. His mother and stepfather were both going to college.

I wonder if he ever paid me back. I remember going the next two weeks without any money.

I walked back up there the next day. There were rocks with red paint, chunks of Bondo. I looked down and there were J's glasses. I picked them up. The frames were ruined but the lenses were fine.

"Here, I found your glasses," I said later.

J and his parents were terribly poor and I didn't know how expensive glasses were. They were very happy and invited me over for Kentucky Fried Chicken to celebrate me finding the glasses.

A few years ago, J was declared legally insane after stabbing and slightly injuring a postal worker and is now in the State Hospital. 

After his parents graduated, they moved to Chicago. They attached a tow bar to the Fiat, loaded it with their stuff and used it as a trailer. Which is weird. 

I only bring this up because I just saw this commercial for auto insurance where a teen comes in his parents punish him for wrecking the family car. Does this seem right? Is a car accident a deliberate act? 

A TV commercial is a film of sorts. It's cinema related.

I paid for J's car to be towed because he was afraid to call his parents.
I was slightly acquainted with this other guy in high school. He totaled his parents' Volvo. I had some friends who parents were friends with his parents. They hated him and thought his wrecking the car was sign of what a jerk he was. He's now a playwright, director and a major figure in Jewish theater. 

I knew several women who were outraged that a woman didn't punish her daughter for surviving a serious car accident. "There need to be consequences!"

A few weeks ago, I was driving down this street on the edge of town. There was a small SUV crashed into a tree and a larger SUV parked there. It looked like the wreck had happened some time earlier, but I stopped. Other than having a cell phone I could be of no help to anyone, but I got out and walked up there.

There was no one in the wrecked SUV. The airbag had deployed. 

The power window of the bigger SUV rolled down and a skinny teenager waved and said, "It was me!" His mother said everything was fine, nobody hurt. 

Forty years ago, that kid would have been killed. I guess now with the seat belts, airbags and crash tests, being in a car wreck is no longer its own reward.

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