Harley and Me (10 page)

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CHAPTER SEVEN
    
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TOTALLY HOSED

Anything that is successful is a series of mistakes.

—BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG

I hit a ninety-one-year-old man Saturday night. There's no other way to say it but to spit it out. I hit a ninety-one-year-old man with my car and the guilt and shame of feeling wrong and flawed to my very core do not want to leave. The words, the images, keep repeating in my head.

I was driving down a dark street just a block away from a bustling urban area when, out of nowhere, no crosswalk in sight, he was in front of me, tottering across the street with a cane. I don't think he even glanced in the direction of my headlights. I slammed my brakes and yet, the nightmare still unfolded. His body slammed against my windshield, starbursting the glass. The smell of brakes filled the air. He tumbled to the asphalt where he lie unmoving, almost in a fetal position, before me.

I flew from my car with a howl of a banshee.
Help! Someone: Please. Help!
In that instant, I believed I had killed him. And that my life, as I'd known it, had just ended. One moment, everything's fine. The next moment, nothing will ever be the same again.

Bystanders gathered. A young Armenian man came to help and put a jacket under the older man's head. A woman called 911. I couldn't do a thing but stand there and twitch. I had completed a Red Cross course only days earlier and knew what I was supposed to do: identify myself as someone with first aid training and ask the man if I might help. But I could not even approach. I walked back and forth between my car and where the man lay, unable to do anything but shake and cry. The young man caring for him stopped his ministrations long enough to tell me that I needed to calm down and breathe slower. Sirens wailed, red and blue lights filled the pitch-dark night. One of the bystanders brought me a bottle of water. “It's going to be okay,” this nameless, faceless person told me.

A female police officer approached.
What happened?
I told her.
Was he crossing left to right or right to left?
I had no idea. I was just driving and suddenly he was there.
Using your phone at the time of the accident?
I had the earbuds in and was listening to Pandora, and if the truth be known, I had glanced at a text message only a few minutes earlier. But at the time of the accident, the phone was pumping out music by the Gaslight Anthem. She brought me a second bottle of water and asked for my license, registration, and proof of insurance.

A male police office took photos of my windshield. He measured my skid marks.
How fast were you going?
I didn't know. I'm not a speed demon, was not in a rush to get anywhere, but odds are I may have been going over the speed limit. The male officer put his hand on my shoulder.
You must have good reflexes. Your skid showed you tried to stop
. Both officers told me the same thing.
This is why they're called accidents.
And while I appreciated their desire to help me feel better, I needed something else entirely. I wanted to be told unequivocally that it wasn't my fault.

The paramedics, meanwhile, moved the old man onto a backboard, attaching a cervical collar, asking him if he knew where he lived. He was alive. One of the officers told me that he didn't seem hurt. No blood. No broken bones. He wanted to go home, not to the hospital.

How can a ninety-one-year-old man suffer a trauma like the impact of a 2,500-pound car and not be dead?

Come to think of it, what was a ninety-one-year-old man doing alone at night in the middle of a dark street? A sizable crowd had gathered, but no family members appeared. No one seemed to know him. I answered more questions, called my friend Kitty to ask her to come and be with me. I still could not stop shaking and repeated to anyone who would listen.
I thought I killed him.

The paramedics put him in the ambulance and took him to L.A. County hospital. How could I find out his condition? The female officer gave me her card with a case number handwritten on the back. Since tomorrow was Sunday, and Monday would be a holiday, the police department's communication's staff wouldn't be in until Tuesday. I could call then and learn his status.

We see this all the time,
she tried to reassure me.
We had one of these just earlier tonight, a few miles from here.

She said I could leave. How could that be? Surely, they needed to arrest me. But I got into my car and tentatively pulled away. I had driven less than a quarter block when she pulled me over.
Please get out of the car and follow me
.

I didn't smell alcohol on your breath, but for protocol's sake, I need to give you a field sobriety test
, she told me.
Please, test everything you can,
I wanted to say. I was shaking violently, but I was sober. She instructed me to put my ankles together and follow her pen back and forth with my eyes.

I was guilty. Of what, exactly, I didn't know. But I waited for her to pull out the handcuffs and take me away. Certainly, you can't plow down a ninety-one-year-old man and not be guilty of something. But she finished the sobriety test and told me for the second time I could go.

I went to Kitty's house a few blocks away and called my insurance company and felt the guilt building. Maybe I hadn't been on the phone at the time of the accident, but how many other times had I used my phone in traffic? Surely, that was evidence against me.
Only days earlier I'd bragged to a friend that I had a perfect driving record—no accidents and one moving violation in twenty years. Maybe this was divine retribution for that hubris. Plus, I'd been stupefied by grief in the days and hours leading up to this accident.

Four days earlier, I'd passed my fiftieth birthday. A pathetic mantra had taken root in my head.
Fifty and divorced. Fifty and alone
.
This is not how I thought my life would unfold
. Other recent events put that self-pity in perspective. Last week, I'd learned that friends had lost their twenty-year-old son to suicide. Erik had struggled with depression and mental illness for years and the pain had finally become too much. I'd spent the previous Friday, the day I'd learned of his death, in quiet mourning, canceling all appointments to hold him and his parents in my heart. And then, the next morning, I'd gotten the text I'd been dreading from my friend Emily. Her precious son Ronan, whom I'd held and carried and fed and loved, had just died from the Tay-Sachs disease that had started to consume his neurological system before he was even born. He was a month shy of his third birthday. A mutual friend was en route from Phoenix to be with Emily in Santa Fe, but I was stuck in L.A. So I'd spent another Friday, the day before the accident, at home, stopping life long enough to feel deeply this second loss, to be with Emily in my heart.

These losses all started to become too much, the pain of the divorce, the loss of my children in my living space, even the loss of my little dog, Sami, since my rental didn't allow dogs. My heart was shattering into bits too small to ever piece back together.

Not an hour before the accident, I had attended the memorial for Erik. He was the same age as my own children. His buddies spoke so eloquently of him, and I held my friends, his parents, as they shook with their own grief. Had I been too addled with heartache to be driving?

Worse, still, was the simmering old guilt. I was oblivious to its presence until Kitty pulled me up short. As I blathered on about how I must somehow be to blame, she cut me off.
You are no more responsible
for this accident than you were for your mother's illness.
She wouldn't let me look away. Kitty, like me, shares a history of maternal mental illness with traumatic institutionalizations, violence, and suicide attempts. She knew exactly what the voices in my head were telling me.

Later that night, another friend did me a similar favor when she, too, spoke firmly.
You cannot afford to give these voices room in your head. You simply cannot let them take over.

I lay in bed that night, seeing the nightmare images over and over again. And then the words of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace—who also suffered from mental illness and committed suicide at the age of forty-six—came to comfort me. In a commencement speech at Kenyon College, he told graduates about the power of thought. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

So I began to construct meaning, separate from the feelings that were flooding me. The accident had taken place in a heavily Armenian neighborhood where people are joined tightly by culture and stand up for each other. I was clearly not Armenian and had hurt one of their own. Yet, not a single person from the gathered crowd accosted me, yelled at me, or in any way challenged me. Rather, they brought me bottles of water and told me it would be okay.

Every time the words and images provoking guilt intruded—
I hit a ninety-one-year-old man—
I countered with a piece of evidence.

It's Monday now and I still don't know the condition of the man. I pray he was released that night and that, if he suffers cognitive impairment that would have put him in the middle of a dark street, this accident helps his family seek the help he needs. I pray that he's still alive because a part of me is convinced I killed him. And I pray that I may be free of the guilt I cannot seem to shake.

But I'm not there yet. The sound of sirens in my neighborhood sets off flashbacks. The red-and-blue police lights spin in my head. I know there's no one who can tell me what I desperately long to hear—that I'm not to blame—so I guess I'll have to settle for knowing I am powerless to stop bad things from happening.

I did not have the power to stop my mother's mental illness. I did not have the power to stop this accident from occurring. But I was given the power to arrest my own nascent alcoholism. And thanks to friends, I'm learning to stop the destructive, guilt-focused thinking that tries to pull me down.

But the whispers are still there. I still don't fully believe I couldn't stop my mother's illness. I cannot completely embrace that degree of powerlessness. How am I to make peace with a world filled with such random horror? I'm trying but cannot fully let go of the what-ifs—what if I'd taken a different way home, what if I'd not stopped to visit Kitty instead of going straight home that night? Because if I admit I'm
that
powerless, then I also have to make room for the tragedies that happen to others—babies who die of neurological disorders, and young men who kill themselves because the pain of living is simply too great. And I have to acknowledge that such things may visit me, too. So the choice of how to think about this accident, how to construct meaning from it, is mine alone. If I'm not in control of accidents and mental illness, then bad shit can happen to me and the ones I love at any moment. And if I am in control of such things, I'm hosed by guilt. Which will it be?

In the days following the accident, I learn more. The man was hospitalized for five days with a contusion to his skull and two broken ribs. My insurance company interviewed me and came to the conclusion that I had not been at fault. But then the police department issued its own report: I had been driving too fast for conditions and was at fault. Their decision stunned me. Hadn't the man been dressed in black, crossing the street in the dark, no crosswalk or intersection in sight? There was no way I could have seen him until the last moment. The report did not claim that I was speeding.

Meanwhile, calls and letters from an attorney hired by the man's family started to arrive. I was being sued for damages that exceeded my policy limits.

I ended up talking with the officer who'd investigated the accident. In a clearer state of mind, I clarified what I knew and what I suspected about the man's state of cognition. She did a deeper investigation, and though she shared none of what she learned from that investigation, she eventually amended her report to say that no fault could be assigned. There's relief in that, but I still want to be told flat out that it's not my fault. I want the officer's vindication, as if it will also hold me not at fault for the demise of my marriage, my mother's illness, and all the other horrible, sad things in life.

This is the meaning I construct from these events.

Sometimes life goes incredibly well and we're filled with light and joy. And sometimes, the loving of each other becomes painful and fraught. We struggle on. We try to love each other as a response to depression and illness. We try not to hit each other with cars. We try not to create additional damage. We fail to live up to our own ideals. Yet we succeed, every so often, in being fully human and alive, even when the pain of living feels as if it might destroy us. And with so much stacked up against us, sometimes all we can do is hit the open road. For me, it's time to pack up and see what's out there in the big, bad world.