Car Crash

Under midwestern clouds like great gray brains we left the super highway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City's rush hour with a sensation of running around. As soon as we slowed down, all the magic of tavelling together burned away. He went on and on about his girlfriend. "I like this girl, I think I love this girl - but I've got two kids and a wife, and there's certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I'm gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives." As he kept on, I felt jilted and sad: "I have a boat, a little sixteen-footer. I have two cars. There's room in the backyard for a swimming pool." He found his girlfriend at work. She ran a furniture store, and I lost him there.

The clouds stayed the same until night. Then, in the dark, I didn't see the storm gathering. The driver of the Volkswagen, a college man, the one who soaked my head with all the hashish, let me out beyond the city limits just as it began to rain. Never mind the speed I'd been taking, I was too overcome to stand up. I lay out in the grass off the exit ramp and woke in the middle of a puddle that had filled up around me.

And later, as I've said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile - the family from Mashalltown - splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamed I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi-truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply.

I'd known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously.
"Oh - no!"
"NO!"

What I remember clearly was being woken up as my wheels caught the grass, a feeling of both bumpiness and acceleration. In its essence, out of control. This is where the evening caught up to me, and where getting into a car and driving a car become very different acts. I swung the wheel hard to the left. The road was dark and windy, my headlights cut a quick swath across the double yellow lines, heading straight to the far embankment. I cut the wheel back to the right, braking, too hard again. For a moment I had the road, but then I lost it and found the trees.

When branches whip against your windshield, and you take little body blows from the left and right, you feel harried. Your body tenses. It's the head on collision that ultimately doesn't make any sense. I found a tree, squarely. I had lit up the high grass. The road was at eye level.

The night is surprisingly quiet after a car crash, and the car is surprisingly hot. No broken glass, no air bags deployed, and no injuries, so I forced my way out, knee deep in the wet scrub. Circling the front of the car, I heard hissing. Leaning in to the headlight, bracing my hand against the hot hood and pushing yielded nothing. I got back in the car, turned down the stereo. Tried the engine. It wouldn't turn over.

Twice I've been in car crashes, both times ending it totaled cars. Once, this time, my fault entirely - and a bad decision I'll never repeat. The first time, the other driver's fault, entirely. Both times, I found myself staring into the well-lit New England brush, with a cracked engine casing and steam coming from the hood. It's amazing how calm you can feel, in the dark of the night.

I spent a night and a day in panic. The consequences of a bad choice could have been so much worse. They were not. I am thankful for that. My parents, also, thankful. So thankful that they drove two hours to the temple in Connecticut, to offer thanks. To whom? I don't know. On the way home, they stopped off at Mohegan Sun to play the penny slots. In this life, I guess you have to hedge your bets.

Three weeks have passed, and it's amazing how quickly a car crash can go from being fundamentally unnerving and potentially revelatory to something that happened. We can only move on.

And you can read the rest of Denis Johnson's excellent short story "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," from the collection Jesus' Son, archived here.