COLUMN LEFT : Fate’s Dagger Gives Scribe New Tilt : A leftist lefty’s sinister encounter with a shard of glass.
Like all other left-handers, I was pretty upset by that much-discussed letter in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that, on the basis of a sample of deaths in Southern California, we left-handers had a mean life expectancy of 66.
This meant me. Instead of being a white male in privileged circumstances looking forward to an average stretch certainly not less than 75, I was now in the same boat as black men, who, according to the latest survey from the government, are ahead of the average if they get past their mid-60s.
I tried to figure out how to beat the Reaper. This year I’m rounding the final curve toward my 50th birthday, and it seemed wise to plan ahead. The literature suggests that lefties are particularly accident-prone, since can openers, corkscrews and slot machines are all designed for right-handers, otherwise known as ordinary long-lifers. Lefties also perish in proportionately higher numbers in traffic accidents, so the slur goes, because in emergencies they tend to yank the steering wheel down with their left hand and thus plunge under the wheels of the truck coming in the opposite direction. I practiced driving with my right hand and yanking toward the ditch.
Filled with such thoughts and plans, I approached a 1968 Dodge Dart GT I’d bought last summer and that had been sitting in a canyon 10 miles south of Carmel Highlands, left there for me by the previous owner. I unlocked it and, reminding myself to steer only with my right hand, swung into the driver’s seat.
At first I thought I’d sat on a bared spring. Then, aware that something seriously damaging had scythed its way into my left buttock, I looked down and saw a piece of glass on the seat. Half an hour later, trundled face-down on a gurney into an emergency room at Monterey Community Hospital, I endured Dr. Robert Keller’s amiable badinage as he put several internal and 12 external stitches in my backside. That being the weekend of the Laguna Seca races, Keller was waiting for a tide of mangled bikers and saw me as comic relief. He asked, was it a domestic quarrel?
Meanwhile, I was wondering. How had this substantial dagger of glass been wedged into the seat of the Dart? Had the previous owner left it there as a lagniappe? Did someone out there really hate me enough to have fixed the seat in this fashion, perhaps months ago, raptly anticipating the howl of anguish from a lonely canyon in the Santa Lucia mountains?
I told Keller that this same night I was due to give a talk in Santa Cruz in support of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of ecology founded by Prof. Jim O’Connor of UC Santa Cruz. Keller advised me to speak sitting down, since if I stood, all the blood would rush to my backside. The talk went OK, though I was glued to my seat by seeping gore and had to submit to the remonstrations of a Christic Institute fanatic without hope of escape.
The next day I went back to the canyon. The glass on the Dart’s seat twinkled and shone. It was a mirror. The previous owner had installed one of those wraparound, multi-pane rear-view mirrors you occasionally see in taxis. At some time between August, 1990, and 5 p.m. Saturday, April 20, the left-hand pane had dropped out, bounced off the steering wheel and wedged a tip into the middle of the driver’s seat. If it had lodged three inches to the right, things would have been much worse. The man in the Graham Greene story who was killed by a pig falling off a balcony would have had nothing on me.
A friend with whom I discuss accidents and coincidence (ever since a pigeon flew in his car window while he was driving across the Bay Bridge, striking him in the eye) reminded me of an acquaintance who, once in a while, would suspend all activity for 10 seconds, just to throw predestination off track. Had I engineered my own fate by popping the trunk before I opened the driver’s door? Maybe the thud of the closing trunk lid had sprung the mirror free of its last patch of glue. And why was I opening the trunk? To retrieve the car’s license plates, No. 666, the sign of the Great Beast.
After hearing my report of the mishap, my brother Andrew in Washington reported a fresh letter in the New England Journal. It was from the American Academy of Actuaries, suggesting that the statistics on left-handed death were screwed up because the authors had ignored overall mortality rates, concentrating on a finite number of deaths in one sample.
Tilted on my right buttock, I drove north toward Watsonville. Coming over the hill and looking down into the Pajaro Valley, I pulled over for 60 seconds, hoping to throw destiny off in whatever plans had been laid for me up the road. My ass hurt but I was glad to have that lost decade back.
