My current car is the
first car I’ve owned that has an airbag. And to be honest, I’m terrified of the
thing. The thought of it exploding out of my steering wheel at about 200
m.p.h. and coming in contact with some fragile body part, doesn’t exactly make me feel relaxed
when I’m behind the wheel. In fact, I find myself sitting up straighter and not
slouching at all when I drive now, just to prevent my nose from potentially being
flattened.
Not that I ever plan on having an accident anyway. I’ve had two in my life, neither of which was my fault (but I guess most people say that!). Which reminds me of my friend Bobby, who was hit broadside by another car not long ago.
“Well, yeah, I went through the red light,” Bobby said, “but if the guy coming in the opposite direction hadn’t been driving so darned fast, he wouldn’t have hit me!”
Anyway, my first accident happened back in the mid-1980s. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the Allenstown town hall, waiting for the members of the zoning board to arrive for a meeting. The building also housed the police department.
As I sat there, looking through some paperwork I’d brought for the meeting, something suddenly smashed into the back of my car. Even though my car's engine was turned off and the gearshift was in “P,” it was propelled forward, right off the asphalt and onto the grass adjacent to it. When my car finally came to a halt, I turned around to see what had hit me.
It was a police cruiser, with a very red-faced young rookie standing next to it.
“You weren’t parked there when I left earlier!” he accused me.
I figured if that was the best defense he could come up with, then he was in big trouble. And as it turned out, he WAS in big trouble. The cruiser he was driving was brand new and being used on patrol for the first time.
I later heard that the poor rookie was teased mercilessly about it for months and was nicknamed "Crash" by his fellow officers.
My second accident occurred just three years later. I was on an assignment for work and was driving through a town near Framingham, Massachusetts when I stopped at a red light at a busy intersection. To the right of me, a young woman was strolling down the sidewalk. She was wearing the shortest, tightest mini-skirt I had ever seen…like about a quarter-inch from getting her arrested for indecent exposure. However, (and it pains me to admit this) she did have the perfect body for it.
Not surprisingly, she became quite a distraction as she walked along. SO distracting, in fact, the driver of the car that came up behind mine didn’t even notice the stoplight – or my car sitting at it.
The impact sent my car sailing through the intersection. But by some miracle, the timing was perfect – the light had just turned red in the other direction. In my panic, however, I did something really dumb. Because my foot already had been on the brake when I was hit, I got confused and stomped on the gas pedal in an effort to stop my out-of-control car. How or why I didn’t plow into any cars or pedestrians as I sped along still baffles me, because I traveled about two blocks before I realized my mistake and finally switched my foot back to the brake.
The moment I pulled over to the curb, another car pulled up right behind me. A tall, young man about 20 jumped out and rushed over to me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “ I saw everything! It was a blue Dodge Colt that hit you! The guy zoomed right off, though – and with his whole front end smashed in! Crazy!”
“I’m fine,” I said, even though my heart was racing so fast, I thought I might do a face-plant on the pavement at any second. “When the police get here, can you do me a big favor and tell them everything you just saw?”
“Police?” the guy repeated, visibly paling a shade or two. He jumped back into his car and took off so fast, all I saw was a cloud of exhaust and some skid marks.
So much for my eyewitness.
Seeing that cell phones weren’t something people carried around with them back in the 1980s, I walked into a beauty salon near where I’d parked and used their phone to call the police. I then went back outside to assess the damages on my car. The rear end was dented and the frame looked bent. One of my tail lights also was smashed.
A half-hour later, a very bored-looking police officer arrived. He asked a few routine questions, and seemed about as interested in my answers as if I’d been telling him about the latest shade of lipstick I’d just bought.
“Here,” he finally said, handing a blank accident-report to me and yawning. “Take this home, fill it out, and mail it back to me. I don’t have time to bother with it right now.”
“Exactly!” I said. “You have to go catch the guy who hit me! He’s driving a blue Dodge Colt!”
He shrugged. “If you don’t have the plate number, we’ll never find it. He’s long gone by now.”
“But the whole front end of his car is smashed in!” I said. “That should narrow it down a bit, don't you think?”
He shrugged again. “Just call your insurance company when you get home and they’ll handle it. And if you later feel some delayed pain or an injury, we have no-fault insurance here anyway, so your insurance still would be the one to handle it."
“But my rates will go up!” I protested. “That’s not fair.”
He disappeared without another word.
Muttering under my breath, I drove to the nearest garage, where I explained the situation to a mechanic and asked him if he thought my car still was sound enough to make it home to New Hampshire.
“Do you expect me to just drop everything and check out YOUR car?” he snapped. “Make an appointment like everyone else!”
“Make an appointment?" I snapped back, picturing his image in the form of a voodoo doll with me sticking pins into some particularly painful spots. "I just told you I live in New Hampshire!"
I was so frustrated by then, I asked to use his phone and called AAA for a tow. I then rode shotgun in the tow truck all the way back to New Hampshire.
I’ll admit I was tempted to be creative when I filled out that totally blank accident report. I mean, for as much attention as that police officer had paid to me, I could have written down just about anything and he wouldn’t have known the difference. I thought of a few witty things I could write, such as “A convoy of ice-cream trucks 'creamed' my car” or “A motorcycle stunt-rider succeeded in jumping over 12 vehicles, and mine was number 13.”
But in the end, I just wrote down the truth…that Robert Redford and I were sitting in his brand new Mercedes at the red light when the guy in the car behind us was so busy staring at a hot chick in a mini-skirt, he smashed right into us.
Simple.
# # #
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
