I was about a block away from our house when, after stopping at the corner, I looked both ways and proceeded through the intersection. A flash of light caught my eye, I turned to my left, and noticed a camera crew filming about half-a-block away.
This was very exciting. Movies were just beginning to be made in Montreal and the sight of camera crews was still a novelty. Of course, it could have been a TV crew shooting a piece for the six o'clock news. I couldn't be sure which it was and, as I was trying to recall what exactly I had seen, my still moving car came to an abrupt halt in the back of the aforementioned station wagon.
The right-front quarter panel connected with the left-rear quarter panel: fender to fender, panel to panel, crumple to crumple.
Shit.
What happened next is a bit of a blur: the police came, forms were filled out, information was exchanged and, eventually, I was able to get the car the remaining short distance to our house. It is a sad commentary on my nascent skill as a driver that I was almost an old-hand at accident protocol by this time--although I had never hit such an obvious and stationary target as a full-size station wagon.
What I do remember is having to make "The Call."
I had to call my father and tell him what had happened.
Shit.
I had to own up to my stupidity and start the clock--the angst-o-graph--that measured the increasing amount of stress over the reducing time until my father arrived home.
You have to remember, this was a very different time: a time when parents, well my parents, were less interested in whether or not I had been injured than in the impact on their insurance rates and the access to the family's second car.
This was long before relativism entered the parenting skill set. A scratch and an accident resulting in debilitating, or paralyzing injury, were treated the same way.
I called my father at his work and told him that I had had the accident and his reaction was devastating: he said almost nothing except the dreaded "We'll talk about it when I get home."
SHIT.
That was worse than yelling; it was worse than corporal punishment. It was like the opening of A Touch of Evil: you know there's a bomb in the trunk of that car, you know when it's going to go off, you just don't know where.
(I think about movies a lot.)
By my reckoning, I had about six hours to kill until the bomb went off. Six hours to contemplate how he would react, what he might do, how I would be punished. And, as each of those three hundred and sxty minutes wound down, my anxiety ratcheted up.
I remember killing some of the time by going to a movie, Robert Altman's A Wedding--I was a weird kid.
I was experiencing dread even as I tried to watch this movie. I chose it because it was within walking distance of the house and I needed to be somewhere else--somewhere where my father was not.
It's not because I was specifically afraid of him or how he might react. It was more about the unrealized potential of his reaction; the anticipation of his anger. It was a negative space that was irresistible to all of my anxieties about the accident and the self-loathing resulting from the stupidity of hitting a parked car.
I am definitely a product of the "Just You Wait Until Your Father Gets Home" generation, although, truth be told, it's probably more like Just You Wait Until (Insert Name of Authority Figure Here) Gets Home."
I deserved the anxiety--maybe not the Altman film--but I certainly deserved to be strung out for having done something so stupid. This and similar experiences have informed my life and made me very aware of the Ripple Effect. There would always be consequences; every action causes a reaction as permanent as the crumpled metal quarter-panel.
Accidents can be repaired, sheet metal can be replaced, but there will always be evidence of the trauma. Wear and tear is no longer uniform, there are scars, tool marks and the fit is never as tight as when it came from the factory. Every human error leaves fingerprints. No matter how many times you click your heels; Kansas will never look exactly the same after you have been attacked by flying monkeys.
I remember walking home after the movie and thinking that maybe the damage was not as bad as I first thought. Even though the police had had to pry the fender off the right front tire so that I could drive the remaining block to my house, I thought, perhaps, my dad might not even notice.
So, I am hallucinating about how he'll react when he gets home and how much trouble I will be in and I have given my father an extra six hours to imagine how bad the damage was before seeing it. With one shoe already landed, the size of the second one was getting larger the longer we waited for it to drop.
When I got home, I still had a few hours to kill before my dad got home, and so I paced.
I walked the floors of our home--upstairs and down--stopping every few laps to look out the dining room window at the car. Not content to fantasize about the impending trauma, I also had to periodically go outside and re-ink my mental impressions of the damage.
It's only as I write this--almost forty years later--that I fully understand the genius of Anglo-Saxon guilt as a teaching method Like our Northern European brethren, we believe in the volume of that which is not said: it last longer.
I remember the fear, the stress, the irrational thinking. I remember the dramatic scenarios that I concocted around what my father "might" do when he got home.
I remember not wanting to re-live that experience ever again.
And it is that fear that informs much of my adult life. How will people react? How upset will they be? How disappointed? What will be the impact of the choices I make? The ones I don't make?
What I no longer remember from that experience is how my father actually dealt with it.
I know that the car got fixed. A few years later, I drove it away to graduate school in Indiana where it served me well....
...Until I had an accident.
Until Someone drove their car into the back of my stopped wagon.
I was stopped at a light and some guy who had come to Bloomington the night before to s Supertramp concert, got distracted and plowed into the back of my car.
It's tempting to think in terms of karma, but all I can think about is how much trouble he was going to be in when his father found out.
