They were accounts from the same incident but the police report provided an offensively stark contrast to the coroner’s report. The “Year/Model” of the damaged vehicle was a hateful slur against the “Name” of the autopsied; the “Type of Collision” routinely typed up by a sleep-deprived policeman, a pointless fact that could never dispute the “Time of Death” called by a doctor who’d witnessed many of these tragedies in the hours when the people involved should have been dreaming in bed, his sympathy always arising for whoever they were.
Yet “whoever they were” may actually apply to David, even if, almost three years ago, at the intersection of Julia Vargas and Lanuza, it was someone else who’d lost their life. As typical as the circumstances were, a party had been underway and David had taken a tremendous part in it. By the time the bottles of scotch had been emptied, he’d lost count of his refills and was using the same nine-ounce plastic cup for the vodka, abandoning it when even those had been disposed of and he was on to fishing the ice chest for beers. Nothing seemed to matter at this point, ‘cause at 4 p.m. that day, he’d finished the last of his exams, completing his 3rd year majoring in social sciences. Another year and he’d be on his way to law school.
The stretch of possibility from this point — a year of endless papers and research, now just a memory — seemed to stimulate his indestructibility, especially that which just overflows when you’re 19. Maybe everyone, in the thick of celebration (mostly jeering at one another) felt the same, which was why there seemed to be no protest when David, following some inner and corrupted sense of quit-while-you’re-ahead, decided to get into his car, head home, and call it a night.
Blaze Of Sorry
David would be the receptacle of your rage in this story; the atypical moron deserving of every verbal pummeling and scorned look one would most probably cast if they’d ever see him behind the wheel; the drunk driver with blood on his odometer. And he knows this because he harbors the same — if not, harsher — sentiments towards himself. “The worst things, people have said. And I take it all because the guy who was driving that night has to. To keep myself sane, sometimes I have to feel like that guy isn’t me,” he says, lips quivering and eyes glazing over as he trudges through his words. “I lost most of my friends, things have never been the same with my family — I’ve killed whoever I was since then. And I think it’s ‘cause sometimes, I wish I could have joined her.”
Her name was Sara. She had just, herself, punctuated the last sentence she had to write for an exam; indeed, the last sentence she’d ever have to write for a professor’s perusal. In exactly one month, the 20-year-old major in early childhood education would be filling in as nursery teacher at her family’s preschool in San Juan. In a year, she’d be applying for a kindergarten teaching position at an international school. Yet in the five minutes after she decided, at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, to satisfy her craving for Chicken McNuggets, she’d be dead. Her skull would be lodged into the windshield of her black hatchback; her arms would be gashed and broken, left slack upon the dashboard; the same for her left hip bone and right knee, while archipelagos of bruising from the airbags could be found all along her upper torso.
And perhaps corresponding to the chance whereupon accidents find themselves is the mystery. Why, “a girl of such great responsibility,” as Sara’s father muses, would choose to forgo the seatbelt at this particular instance (“Maybe she thought it would be a quick food run,” her sister Julie tearfully offers). Why, it was David’s pickup doing 120 on J. Vargas that would sustain but a scrunched up fender, bashed-in side door, and displaced side mirror, while Sara’s ride resembled a prune that had been stepped on. Why, even if he had been momentarily clocked out by intoxication and she was sober and cognizant, David would come out of it all with a fractured wrist and Sara would not come out of it at all.
Running On Empty-Headed
It’s been a week since 2 a.m. on the Saturday I regained consciousness, groaning amid airbags I’d been appalled at the sight of, partly ‘cause I’d never seen them up close and partly ‘cause I never thought we’d be acquainted this way. Severe disorientation and voices calling to get out from where I was bore a feeling that I had been unearthed from some kind of capsule. Or coffin. That feeling grew when I’d stumbled out of it, surveying a car that had rammed into steel railing, its rear having swiveled clockwise and smashed against a chunk of highway ramp, dislodging the bumper. For a few seconds, you are a ghost. You feel the only way this could all add up — all that liquid courage, the blurs and loud bangs, the sight of your car as a ravaged carcass — is finding your bloodied and lifeless body on the other side of the railing.
Perhaps that could be the only realization that makes you think twice — or actually think — while you jiggle your car keys in your pocket, waiting for the bartender to slide you your nth drink for the night. All those fleetingly striking posters with forthright slogans (“You Booze, You Cruise, You Lose”), all those family drama episodes you’d seen where another person dies ‘cause of someone’s stupidity, that woman who’d made talk show rounds for getting her once-pretty face torched ‘cause of some wasted teen — you wonder why those images never resurface until you’re at the precinct, cradling your head in your hands, trying to dig out a coherent thought for why you decided to get behind the wheel while your mind’s cogs were lubricated only by alcohol. But really, you can’t ‘cause there is none.
With access to a car and access to alcohol, you’ve got to assume the worst — ‘cause the worst happens quickly and, given your expected state, sometimes without your cognition. You could be one U-turn away from home when everything turns to scrap metal. Even luck doesn’t figure into the equation when the could-have-beens are all-too possible, all-too real. That, on the Saturday I told myself “I’ve made it home before and I’ll do it again,” I could have been David and there could have been a Sara. Or worse, worse, worse.
Wearily, I slide forward the nth account of drunk driving, joining all the others that are tempered down ‘cause of how in-denial we are ‘cause of a ride-to-die culture where swerving is as accepted as swaying the law. But more than the slogans, the ridiculous cliches that are Hollywood DUIs (the Mel Gibsons and the Lindsays, even that Asian dude from Lost) and their mug shots, the cautionary tales you’ve heard from a friend who knew a friend, or the fictional stories inspired by true events, who knows — maybe the worst-case scenario of spending that hangover in the afterlife will surface for someone at the right time. Hopefully, before the arrogance to drive intoxicated sets in.
‘Cause sure, it’s easy to get in your car and turn the ignition, but even easier to step on the gas and lose everything.