Days I didn't Die

Names have been changed due to consideration of some participants who might have family members that can read.

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Hood Surfing.
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We are all in 11th or 12th grade on a Friday night and a whole bunch of us are over Joey's house drinking in his front yard and sitting on cars. Gerry takes an emptying swig at a bottle, then says "Get off my car" to Karl and me because he wants to go home to get more beer and we are sitting on the hood of his car. "I need to go home and get more beer" he says. "Go ahead" we reply. "Get off my car first". "Fuck No. If you want to go home, then go home. We're staying where we are". Who blinks first. Finally, Gerry shrugs, gets in the car and starts it up. Karl and I aren't going to back down either, so we just stay on the hood, laying our backs across the windshield. What could go wrong. Soon, the three of us are barreling down through the residential streets with Gerry driving, and Karl and I each holding a beer sitting cross legged and enjoying the hood ride. Toasting and Coasting.

We actually made it to Gerry's house in one piece, and he got his beer. On the way back to Joey's though, Karl says to me "Wow. Put your legs straight out like this". Later on, we realize this might have saved us. No sooner had we put our legs straight out, we come into an intersection, and in slow motion, this girl in a Camaro enters the intersection from the right. Of course Gerry didn't see her with us sitting across the windshield. And then what any thinking person would have told us would happen, happened. The sickening collision as the two cars smashed together, with Gerry's car hitting the Camaro across its hood.

I remember the impact, and then starting to fly into the air. I don't remember being in the air. I don't remember landing, but I remember being on the ground and coming to. I felt ok, but then soon had my first experience of my body going into shock. everything closing in around me. Our friends had heard the crash and were soon surrounding us. Penny crying. Then the ambulance showed up and they took Karl and me to the hospital, but we just had minor bruises. We credited the beer for making us relaxed enough to fall without significant injury. We had flown through the air with Magical Beer Motion.

In the end, it was just another accident for Gerry. He had lots of tickets and accidents back in those days. I think he drove more on a suspended license than he drove legally back then.

That same night a kid from our high school died in a boating accident out in the bay. It was all over the news.

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Casey Jones, you better
watch your speed.
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So I used to hitchhike a lot between Oswego where I was going to school, and back home to Long Island, about two hundred miles through Upstate New York, mostly on Rte 17. Down to see Penny, and my other friends on a Thursday or a Friday, then back up to school on Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday, depending on how much I was paying attention.

One Saturday night we are all drinking at the Bonner’s house, and there is a blizzard scheduled for the next day, a day that I have to hitch back up to school. I’m bitching about it all, but then Brett Suller says that his dad is away for the weekend, and that he’s got his dad’s blue Pinto, and he can drive me back up if I want. It can be an adventure. Well, yeah. Then the two Panner brothers, Bart and Kerry, say that they’ll come along as well. What makes the prospect even more appealing beyond the fact that I don’t have to freeze my ass off on the side of the road, is that Bart has a fresh ounce of weed for the ride. Everything was suddenly looking up.

Well, 8am the next morning, the four of us pack ourselves into the blue Pinto, and head up to Oswego in the light snow. Bart lights up the first joint. For some reason, we only had one cassette tape with us, the Greatful Dead’s Terrapin Station. Our theme music for the ride.

We made it through Long Island just fine, but when we started to get into upstate, the ice and snow got a little nastier, and that is when the true events began to unfold. About 60 miles out of NYC we began going through the mountains on Rte 17, “Casey Jones” comes on, and Brett hits a patch of ice and suddenly loses control of the car. We slide toward the edge of the road, and skid toward the drop side of the mountain, when a guard rail saves us, and the car instead just slams into it and bounces us back onto the road. The car comes to a stop and we all get out and look at it. The passenger side is all crunched in. “Shit, Brett, your dad’s gonna kill you”. But we were stoned, so it was all like a dream.

They don’t want to abandon me on the side of the road at this point, so the decision was to keep going. We pointed the car forward again. We were getting kind of toasted, when “Casey Jones” comes on again. That song. We skid into a ditch and had to get a guy in a pick up truck and a chain to pull us out. The front of the car was kind of beat up by that one, but – again - by this time, we had decided we were on a quest, and kept going.

The third time “Casey Jones” comes on was the big one. We were coming out of the mountains, and hitting a stretch of about a 12 mile downhill into Binghamton, NY. We are going about 40 when we hit another patch of ice. Ice Patches and Downhills are not a good combination, as their dark companions Gravity and Luck join then in for good or ill. This is what I remember of the moment. The four of us in the Pinto, all stoned out of our gourds. The car spinning downhill, and all of us looking through the front of the windshield like we were watching a movie. Complete quiet in the car, except for Casey Jones playing. We all just watched it to see what would happen. At one point, I remember the car careening toward this rock face in the mountain. I felt sure we were going to slam into it, but then just before impact, the skid took us away from it, and sent us in another direction across the road. There were no cars coming the other way. We ended up in a ditch again, unscathed. I don’t know why. Dumb luck.

When we ended up in the ditch again, and got pulled out again, at least we had balanced the car out because it was smashed up pretty much all over at this point. But drivable! The Quest! Forward we drove.

I remember the 3 of them dropping me off in Oswego, and heading back down to Long Island, and being the twenty year old unthinking being that I was, I never wondered or found out what happened to Brett and his car, of what happened between him and his dad.

Brett, wherever you are now, thanks for the ride.

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8 track tapes
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Jonno and I have been hanging out with North Massapequa friends for awhile, but now we have just been invited to a 3 day long planned party at Gerry’s house, as his parents are going to be away for a long weekend, and him and his friends are planning on getting 10 cases of Heineken beer for the party.

So we show up and the promised beer is there, with lots of pot and girls as well. Good times. On the second night , we meet Danny, who has some sesamillion weed and invites us out for a walk to smoke a joint he has. We take a walk with him, passing the joint back and forth, and we end up out on the end of a residential street that snaked out to the end of a peninsula. On our way back its me walking down the middle of the street, with Jonno next to me on my right, and Danny walking along the sides of the cars. Then Danny reaches into a car that had its driver side window open, and pulls out a big black box of something. “Holy Shit. What’s that?”. “I think it’s a box of 8 tracks” he says. “Just keep walking”.

Jonno and I had never experienced anything like this before, but we only get about 100 feet down the road when we hear the “clump-clump” sound of two car doors slamming behind us. As one, we look back, and see the headlights come on of the same car that Danny took the black box out of. Then we hear screeching tires and see the car speeding toward us, and we all take off running. I am scared shitless. I break for the house to my left and dive under the hedges and remain motionless. Jonno is about 20 feet up from me inside the hedges as well. We don’t know where Danny went.

The car screeches to a stop on the street near where we all split from. I can see two guys getting out of the car, each carrying a baseball bat. I am praying to God. Please, please , please, let me get through this. Please please please please please. My life is passing before me, as I am realizing that I could have just majorly fucked it up completely.

The baseball bat guys walk around the yards and are talking to each other about what they are going to do to us if they find us, but miraculously they don’t see us. They eventually get back in the car and head towards the base of the peninsula.

After a while, I whisper to Jonno “Do you think we can get out now?” We consult and we agree to try to get out of there. We get on the sidewalk and head back out of the residential area. When we get to the beginning of the street we see the two guys standing by their car with their bats, but maybe they were looking for 3 guys instead of two, or just didn’t think we were the ones, but we just kept our heads down and they didn’t challenge us, but we were shitting bricks the whole time. We made it back to the party, and Danny was already there, saying that he had found a dinghy in someone’s back yard, and had rowed over across the canal to another street to get away. Fucking Danny.

Later that night we went back in Gerry’s car and got the box of 8 tracks that Danny had dropped in someone’s side yard.

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Stop signs
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We used to race our cars through stop signs, just for the hell of it. No one ever died, or even got in an accident. I don’t know why. Now – at age 53 – I often wonder if one night I or one of my loved ones will drive into an intersection and never make it to the other side, only because some 17 year old and his lit friends thought it would be fun to race down the street to see who could get there first.

Who I was at 17 fills me with both shame and wonder.  

Ghost Bike

This is a ghost bike. For anyone who doesn't know, if you see a bike all spray painted white and non functional chained to the side of a road, it usually denotes a bicyclist who died at that location. This particular bike was on san tomas and winchester when I rode by today. It was not there last month.



I do a lot of riding. If not daily, then at least every day. I ride down the road, and a thousand cars come up from behind and pass me, and I know that any one of those drivers can suddenly cough, or sneeze at the wrong moment, and it will all be over for me. It will be that simple and that fast. I wonder if I would never know what hit me. Thats the best scenario. What are the odds, the chances? Tomorrow? Never?



Ive always told my kids that the safest way to ride is that every moment you are on the bike you have to expect that you can die in the next two seconds. Eyes and ears open at all times, even if you think you have the right of way. What I don't say is but even then that wont protect you from the drunks and the idiots. Then they ask Then Why Do You Do It then? Well, Because I love it. I get on a bike, and I feel free.



There are probably 5 or 6 ghost bikes that I ride past regularly within 10 miles of where I live. I say a silent prayer every time I go by. Like my dad used to say, There but for the grace of god go I.

Drugs, Alcohol

Drugs, Alcohol

By the time I reached MHS in the fall of 1970, we were already drinking beer on the weekends. 14, 15 years old, one of us would stand outside a liquor store with a puppy dog face and wait for a dad to walk in, hand him the 10 bucks we had all scraped together, and get him to buy us a cheap case of Rheingold or Pabst.

Pot was everywhere, and a bag, an “Oh-Zee”, an ounce of Mexican went for about 10 bucks, and was just a mild stimulant compared to what Marijuana is now. You would walk into the high school in the morning, and pass through a fog of kids toking up in the parking lot or out in back of the school out by the bleachers. You worked some shitty job at the mall or mowing lawns for 2-3 bucks an hour, then went to an Allman Bros or Grateful Dead concert at the Nassau Colliseum or Madison Square Garden in the city for eight bucks a ticket. It wasn’t that expensive. General Admission meant that you cut school, and stood in line all day to get in, smoking and drinking, so that by the time the doors opened, you had already passed out once or twice. You’d finally go in, the place would go dark, and joints would be moving up and down the rows. You wouldn’t know where they came from, and you wouldn’t care.

Parties were at any house where the parents were gone for the weekend. We could only have sex with our girlfriends in our cars, so any parentless house meant that you could get an hour in some kid’s sister’s or brother’s bedroom. Don’t mess it up. You’d walk in the party, and the drinking would be in the house, mostly beer, but some kids would be drinking vodka or tequila. The pot smoking would be out in the back yard. Sometimes there would be windowpane or blotter acid around, and you would walk in a dark room with spacey music and kids laying on couches motionless, and you knew that’s what was going on.

Sometimes, some kid would show up with pills, white, blue, brown, long or short, and tell you and your friends it was speed, or thc, or whatever else, and you would all just take it cause fuck it. It was fun. Sometimes the pill would take you places you didn’t want to go, but most of the rest of the time it was a pleasant night drifting through the scattered lights and shifting sounds.

I am not proud of any of this, and I probably could have done better if I had not been involved in any of it, but all of these things were around everywhere when I was in high school, and it was the way we all lived.

Now we are all over 60 and have all lived fairly successful lives, meaning that we have gotten to the other side, raised kids, had mostly good paying jobs with wives and family, and gotten good things out of life. Somehow, most of us have seen it through in one piece. Surprising, seeing where we came from, but a lesson learned that growing older sometimes has a way of working itself out all on its own.

I don’t know. That’s my memories of it all. It was a different world back then.

This is me and you at about a week old

This is you at about a week old.

When you were first born, your mom was exhausted all of the time, between feedings and diaper changes every two hours, but would manage to keep it together during the days while I was at work. The first 3 months of a baby are hard on a mother. At night, however, mom would need to sleep. We lived in a very small house at the time, and I remember many nights picking you up and holding you close and carrying you around in the dark, roaming the buildings and parking lots on the campus across the street, talking to you in a low voice about anything. The rhythm of those dark walks under street lights always seemed to calm you.

Those were my first private moments with you. You won't ever remember them, but I always will.

On Buying a Vacuum Cleaner Together

On buying a vacuum cleaner together

You see her in the library, scrawling furiously with her pencil in the margins of a book. You smile at her, and she smiles back at you so you venture a hello at the checkout counter and she says hello back. You walk her to the T stop and she seems nice so you ask her if she wants to talk more over a beer or a coffee or something. She replies beer, which surprises you. Years later she tells you she said yes only because you included coffee in the request.

You find that you can both laugh at the same things, even at the absurdities and subtleties, at the nuance of things, so you agree to meet at Downtown Crossing one day to walk around, and you find that you can both be like five year olds together, just walking and talking and exploring. You can walk with a stick in your hand, or pick up a rock and throw it at a tree and she doesn't laugh or criticize you for it. Instead, she eggs you on. You start to see her for who she is. She is the girl who can climb a tree with a book in her hand and see the world from afar, and up close at the same time. The girl with a pencil always in her hand, or in her mouth, always reading, always taking notes in the margins. The one who can see things that everyone else has seen, but then point out shadows and light that everyone else has missed.

You begin to meet regularly because its more fun than anything else you can think of to do. Then comes the sharing of small expenses. Endless coffees and movies, and daily adventures. And then its not really so much being with her all the time that is important, but more being able to talk to her about anything and everything and seeing what she thinks.

Then you are together all the time, and your stuff is at your place, but also at her place too. Her apartment mates are used to waking up in the morning and finding the two of you in the kitchen having a coffee. Your names become synonymous with each other to your friends. You both become part of each other's furniture. Your lives become more and more tangled up together, like two strings left alone in a drawer. Entanglement is the natural way for certain things. Strings. People.

Then you move in together and buy a vacuum cleaner, then a couch, then all the rest, and then you both go into fast forward trying to hold onto it all together, but your lives flash by in what seems a matter of weeks. The houses, the cars, the kids, the dogs, cats, chickens and goats. The years. OMG the years. Like water through your hands. Then one day a storm shows up on the horizon, and it feels like only a couple of months after you first met. The kids are grown, and you are getting ready to spend more time together again, but she tells you she needs to be on her own from here on in, to take shelter from the storm.

Then its 33 years later and you are sitting in a coffee shop 500 miles away, writing this exact sentence and wishing you could talk to her again, the girl in the tree with a book in her hand, and wondering what she is thinking about right now.