Frozen. Suspended in grave danger I was frozen, hanging outside of the door of a speeding gold-on-gold 1993 Saturn with gold interior and the street below. The loose scattered rocks and black asphalt waited callously to embrace me below while smiling faces turned to horror inside the car. When the car had swerved my shoulder-length brown hair had whipped about like a comet’s tail as I was flung into the world whizzing by.
I was on a collision course with Mother Earth--- and there could only be one victor. The scientific formula for force is f=m*a (force equals mass multiplied by acceleration). At a weight of about one-hundred and seventy five pounds traveling at around forty miles per hour and falling a distance of nearly 4 feet—what would the force of my impact be? I dunno…but the vernacular term is splat.
Whilst I hovered in the air I had time to pontificate upon my current situation. The hang time between lift-off and crash-down seemed to me to span several prolonged hours, and therefore I had much time on my hands for self-evaluation. Using this seemingly endless period of time I came to two heart-felt considerations. The first was “Holy Shit!” and the second was “How the hell did I get here?” The first postulate is self-explanatory and self-exclamatory and, as such, requires no further discussion. The second requires some deliberation and exposition.
It was a lazy summer’s day in 2002. I had just graduated high school. It was one of those summers in which I accomplished very little and felt very accomplished in doing so. I had deferred my route to higher education in lieu of some ephemeral sense of world experience. As part of this effort I secured for myself a highly stimulating and prestigious position working clerk and cashier at CVS. I was navigating my days through an ambient fog of THC. There is a joke somewhere in here about not being able to see the smoke from the trees, but its forced. Just know that I thought of it.
The summer I turned 18 is a slippery beast. By that I mean that any actual recollection of it is a Herculean feat. I remember this day, though. I had just completed a rigorous day of hardening a boy’s hands into manly claws by arranging adequately fine-smelling soaps and rough and tumble baby diapers. The cash register’s siren song of “Can you double bag that?” and “Can you break a $100 for this newspaper?” somehow fit beautifully, to me, with Lee An Womack’s “I Hope You Dance (the Right Way)”.
I had once thought of myself as a people person; but that was until I met people. Cash registers tend to suck the humanity out of your perspective. Now, I was a hard workingman, dammit. I had earned my conspiratorially illegal vices! I clocked out with my social security number and hailed a cab headed my way. The little hand was on the eight and the big hand was on the twelve.
The cab was comfortable enough. The worn in and springy grey leather seats hid some deep shame---some secret that neither they, nor the Israeli cab driver and his moustache would ever share with me. They silently hid midnight rendezvous and underage drinking. They hid domestic squabbles and plans to rob the bodega. They hid unclaimed farts from bad Mexican food. All they hid mattered nothing because I was home, now. I tipped the man two.
My buddies were outside waiting for me. It was time to burn the pain away; the only obstacle left was to figure out who had cash to burn for it. “Antes” is a slippery beast. Not all potheads have jobs---shocker! Money has to be tallied and bums have to be carried. Twenty-four dollars was arranged: one-sixth for “Rollins” and five sixths for “bud”. Our brokest party provided beer procured in his home. We were super cool.
The street was a humidor. Whilst I cannot speak for my compatriots, I can say that the heat was so very sweltering that my balls were stuck to both of my legs. Besides being grossly uncomfortable this also makes it difficult to saunter about, as teenage boys tend to do. In response to this we walked to the end of my dead-end street, by the bay, to partake in our dead end activities. Several other friends showed up with their own stashes and stakes in a gold-on-gold 1993 Saturn with gold interior. We knew they were coming because we heard the weirdo pothead hip-hop of Hieroglyphics, Saul Williams, and the like arrive before they were in sight.
The down side to being by the bay is the mosquitoes. The bay breezes alleviate the general heat but these bloodsuckers have been mistaken for vampire bats on steroids vandalizing the streets in roving gangs. I remember as a child being more bite than boy for many summers. They were in full effect that night as dutches were cracks and their guts were discarded in storm drains and bushes. The stars were blotted out by Manhattan’s ambient light, or perhaps my clouded mind tinkered…shut closed?
As our session of beers, blunts, and bullshit drew to a close the witching hour drew near. Our ranks diminished and our stamina faded by chemical inducement. Longevity was a slippery beast. The remaining soldiers of misfortune had decided to call it a night. The little hand was between 12 and 1 and the big hand was between 9 and 10.
The owner/operator of the goldbound Saturn had decided to drive his car up the block to our adjacent houses. As the car slowly rolled off I had just commenced my relief in a nearby bush. Not wanting to walk 150 feet I hopped into the open shotgun window of the car.
Had I not decided to straddle the passenger side seat of the gold-on-gold 1993 Saturn with gold interior the afore-described day would be just another forgotten day. Had I walked the 150 feet to my house this story would be pointless as well as trivial. Had I not taken a leak in the bush I might have simply been able to sit in the car. Had I not decided to work in a pharmacy that summer for some double retarded reason…well that actually doesn’t change the outcome. Regardless, there I was striving to grab the “oh shit bar” like some kind of brass ring. The “oh shit bar” turned out to be the slipperiest beast of all--- there wasn’t one.
“So you wanna big Willie it?”, my friend shouted
“Uhmm…”
Before I could actually respond to that he had swerved the car. He described what happened next as “the scariest moment in my life, when I realized I could have killed you…followed by the complete comedy of when you weren’t dead”. My legs could not withstand the whipping motion at some forty miles an hour. With nothing to brace myself on, out the window I went; and there I was. Frozen. Falling from Saturn (or a Saturn) suspended in the air pontificating upon the “Holy Shits!” and “How the hell did I get here’s” of my current situation.
Then years and years of comic book reading paid off. Spiderman was about to save my life. I remembered from an issue of Amazing Spiderman that if I were to allow my body to go limp the force of the impact would be evenly distributed throughout. The odds of injury, or rather serious injury, would be greatly decreased if this were, in fact, real science and not the kind of science that would allow for a Spiderman to exist in the first place. I attempted.
The world around me swirled like a psychedelic tornado. Cars blended with trees, trees with night-sky, and night-sky with fast approaching street.
CRASH.
After I hit the ground I allowed myself to roll knowing, also from comic books, that motion would exert the excess energy of the impact also decreasing my injury.
Blackout.
“Wake up, Brandon…” I said to myself. “You’ve been down far too long.” I popped up.
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!”
I was running around like a chicken with his head cut off from surprise, happiness, and…pain. My friends, at once concerned and laughing hysterically, told me that my “blackout” lasted less than a millisecond. For me fall to flight had taken hours. I had some bruises and cuts and the point of impact but I was relatively unscathed.
...and that’s how Spiderman saved my life.
