Sudden, Painful Belt of Reality Persuades Driver to Buckle Up

There was, I suppose, the sound of tires screeching and the stomach-churning thud of metal meeting metal.

I never heard them. I turned my steering wheel, there were several indecipherable noises and the next thing I knew the car and I were on the sidewalk, facing a different direction and surrounded by scattered auto parts.

In an instant, I had become what we all slow to gawk at--an injury accident.

The evening had begun quietly enough. My wife, Leslie, was out of town on a business trip. I had work to do and, rather than fix dinner, I decided to dash out to a popular local hot dog stand.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But, as I turned into the stand’s driveway, I was struck by another car accelerating down the parking lane. Although my car had been hit on the right front fender, the frame was so badly bent that the driver’s door wouldn’t open. I unfastened my seat belt, struggled over a lot of things that had come loose and went out the other side.

A crowd had gathered. A sympathetic couple asked if I were OK and suggested I sit down. My head, they pointed out, was bleeding. I thanked them and sat down. For a few seconds I puzzled over why everything seemed so fuzzy, then I realized my glasses were somewhere back in the car. One of the good Samaritans fished them out, while the other called the paramedics.

A few minutes later, I watched the flashing lights that marked their progress up the street. “Good lord,” I said to nobody in particular, “this is awfully theatrical.”

The paramedics were careful and businesslike. My head injury, though bleeding, was only an abrasion; I had no symptoms of concussion. They would take me to a hospital emergency room, if I requested it, and I would be billed. But they saw no reason to do so.

I thanked them, and they left.

By then the tow trucks had arrived; the police never did. The two drivers cheerily said that, since it was Friday night, they never would. The other driver and I went through the dreary exchange of information. A witness handed me a slip of paper with her name, address and phone number. A man pressed a card into my hand:

“Just in case you need a lawyer,” he said.

“I don’t,” I muttered.

The tow-truck driver asked whether I had money. I said I did, and he asked me where I wanted to go. “Home,” I said, “and I’ll ride with you in the cab.”

He was an ebullient Hawaiian, who repeatedly called me brother. Under other circumstances, it might have seemed overly familiar; that night there was something vaguely comforting about it.

I was, he said, “very lucky. That was a bad one. And you know, brother, those head things are bad news. I had a friend, you know, he had an accident, hit his head, seemed OK. Two, maybe three days. Then, right there in his living room, dropped dead. Jeez.”

The bill for the 2-mile tow was $56, cash. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I’m in the right business. Maybe I should buy a tow truck, get myself a couple of pit bulls and open a wrecking yard.

Back in the house, my head throbbing, I discovered various additional bruises and things. I called my doctor’s service and got one of his associates. He listened to my symptoms, asked me a few questions, then concurred in the paramedics’ diagnosis.

“You could go to the emergency room,” he said. “But since it’s Friday night, you’ll sit around for three hours, they’ll do a bunch of tests you don’t need to protect themselves against legal liability and send you home. If I were you, I’d take some Tylenol, have a hot bath and go to bed. But be prepared to feel worse in the morning.”

He was right; I did.

The next morning, I went out to the garage to take a look at my damaged car in the clear light of day.

Now, I am an occasionally melancholy but not morbid person. I do not habitually look into the future and foresee disasters. I know others do. But I’ve always assumed that envisioning personal catastrophe--what the insurance policies wittily like to call death and dismemberment--is rather like speculating on Richard Nixon’s sex life. It requires a leap of sympathetic imagination of which, frankly, I am incapable.

However, as I stood musing on the crumbled metallic caricature of my car’s former front end, I felt weak in the knees. I shivered not only with a grisly vision of how badly things might have gone, but also with the guilty realization that they might have gone that way through my own willful negligence.

Among my several indefensible irresponsibilities is a casual attitude toward seat belts. The dictates of reason and state law notwithstanding, I hardly ever use one. The reasons are unimportant because they are utterly unconvincing.

Like any average Southern Californian, I made dozens of trips in my automobile last week. I buckled my seat belt only once--at the moment I set out for dinner on Friday night.

Why, I cannot say. It was an impulse. Decision, which implies deliberation, is too generous a word. I only can attribute it to the merciful grace of that weary deity who looks after drunks, small children and the minority of adults foolish enough to retain a child’s illusion of immortality.

Whoever he or she may be--the latter pronoun suggests itself because this deity’s patient indulgence has a maternal quality--I plan to offer novenas of thanksgiving. More important, a firm purpose of amendment being proof of true contrition, I now confess myself a recovering seat-belt scofflaw and promise never to ignore one again. In fact, I’m thinking of having one installed on my desk chair so I can stay in practice.