LITTLE ROCK — We’ve all had that moment when time seems to stand still, when the seconds ooze out like drops from a slowly leaking faucet. Most times it’s when the message “Your call will be answered in the order it was received ... your call is very important to us” has drilled its way into your head.
This time it was when I was driving through an intersection.
I looked to my right and noticed a pickup truck. Nothing unusual, but he seemed a little close. The sudden slowly expiring seconds gave me time to calculate the distance.
Hazarding a guess, I would say he was about 12 or 13 inches away from the passenger side of my car.
“That’s way too close,” the stupid, literal portion of my mind screamed.
I glanced up at the face of the truck’s driver, my soon-to-be newest acquaintance. He had an astonished look on his face, as if to say, “This is way too close.”
Of course it was.
Then his truck hit my car.
For a moment, after the crunching sound of our vehicles’ attempt at a metallic mating ritual faded away, I sat quietly. The time slowing-down phenomenon was gone, replaced by the rapid questioning appraisal phenomenon. I call it RQAP because sometimes only an acronym will do.
What just happened? How badly was my car damaged?
Was it drivable? Am I hurt? Was my fellow accident participant going to stick around or would he flee and become fodder for a car-chase video? Did he have insurance? Did I?
I’d recently changed insurance companies. Two weeks ago. Did I have my proof of-insurance card with me?
In the meantime we sat, unmoving, in the middle of the intersection.
Another question popped around like a champagne cork, one that ricocheted off a wall into my eye: Am I angry? How angry?
The answer to the first question was a resounding YES! To the second? Very.
I began pounding on the steering wheel and bellowing epithets that would earn me a slap on the back of the head by any self-respecting grandmother. I did this a few times, then looked up at the pickup driver, who sat a hood length away.
My new friend motioned toward parking spaces on the other side of the intersection.
“Pull over there,” he said quietly. He was near enough that I heard him clearly.
He backed his truck away; I drove forward and parked. He pulled around me and did the same. I smacked the wheel and loosed one more verbal bomb.
Composing myself, I stepped from my car, then flung myself backward as a car sped past, rocketing by at a distance of 18 inches. Simply hilarious ... to be squished by another car;
mayhem on top of anger on top of accident. I’m getting better at judging distances.
Scuttling around my car to the relative safety of the sidewalk, I noticed a young woman standing nearby, looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity. She gave me a rueful smile and a pitying shake of the head. The Matlock region of my brain drawled ... “a witness.”
I twisted my mouth into what I hoped resembled a smile. She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise, then gave me an exaggerated frown, a look you’d give a child who skinned his knee.
I soaked up the pity for a second, then turned toward my antagonist.
We stood face to face. He tilted his baseball cap back with one hand and wiped his brow with the other. He looked distressed.
The first words from his mouth?
“I’m sorry dude.”
An admission of guilt. Excellent. A good beginning. I turned toward my witness ... who was now gone. I was already screwing up. I hadn’t gotten her name.
Dang.
I spun around. No other witnesses. Downtown Little Rock after 5 p.m. clears out fast. I saw a couple of people in the distance meandering this way, but they didn’t look reliable. A good lawyer would take them apart easier than Legos at a day care.
Already I was thinking in terms of the court system, judges and clerks, bailiffs. Seedy lawyers wearing ancient suits shiny with grease from too many late-night trips to the Waffle House. And creaky wooden courtroom floors, shifty-eyed private eyes swearing to tell the truth and nothing but the truth ....
A voice roused me from my dogmatic slumber.
Oh yeah, the other driver.
“I tried to make the light,” he said quietly.
“Yeah. I guess you didn’t make it,” I said sharply. He frowned, sheepishly, much like a sheep, but in a good way. I realized with a swoosh of relief that he was going to be a good person and admit he was wrong. I was still angry but it was refreshing to have someone do the right thing.
So I gave him the gift of a tight smile and turned toward my offended car.
Right front fender caved in, hood a bit crumpled, grill broken, wheel slightly gouged, bumper scraped. I tried the front passenger door; it groaned and refused to open.
I moseyed toward his truck. Lower left side of the bumper scraped and that was it. Not a fair trade, but understandable given that his vehicle weighed thrice as much as mine and was four times larger. Any larger and he’d have rolled over me like a junkyard car at a monster truck rally.
Back on the sidewalk I gave my body the once over. I twisted and turned my spongy body, wriggled my neck and limbs, clenched and unclenched my hands. Nothing. I felt as I did before the accident, except for the rabbit-rapid beating of my heart.
I looked at the other guy. “Are you OK?”
He nodded perfunctorily,as if the question wasn’t pertinent. For him, I realized, the physical impact hadn’t registered. To him it probably felt like hitting a grasshopper or a large June bug.
So there it was. My Toyota - squashed like a June bug.
We all know the aftermath of (luckily) minor accidents such as mine. Phone calls, waiting for phone calls, missed phone calls and long tedious phone calls. Appointments, paperwork, missed appointments and more paperwork. And waiting and waiting and waiting.
Whither my battered but still proud white Toyota? It spent three weeks in a body shop while I spent a month in a tiny rental car. The mileage was great, but most people expected clowns to pour out of it every time I unfolded myself from its rental-smell interior. The only clown exiting the car was myself.
According to the Little Rock Police Dept., from January to Aug. 30, there were 7,700 traffic accidents in the city. After I recovered from my swoon, I eyeballed the breakdown of those numbers. Only 2,700 or so list a contributing factor. The largest official category was “careless or prohibited driving,” 1,765 accidents. Wow.
My favorite? Disregarding traffic signal, 128. The fifth highest total. This means, I have decided, running red lights.
Several other categories would easily encompass red light infractions. Failure to yield (487), sure. Disregard stop sign (40). Improper left turn (31).
And back to the biggie ...careless or prohibited driving, because running a red light is careless and prohibited. And stupid too, although that’s not listed as a category.
Those 5,000 unknown contributing factor accidents? I have arbitrarily decreed, given what I’ve seen driving around Little Rock, that most of those were from running red lights.
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you a story about close calls at red lights. I see near-misses, egregious violations and barely averted death every day ... and that’s just the elevator ride at my office.
At Little Rock’s traffic lights I see mayhem and chaos that make Mad Max look like a fairy tale.
A familiar scenario: Sitting at an intersection. Light turns green. I hit the gas. Proceeding slowly through the intersection, as if the red light he was running was merely a casual suggestion, was a soccer dad in a huge SUV. The vehicle was littered with kids, all of whom were staring at their phones, listening through ear buds and oblivious to their father’s traffic violation. I pulled forward and gave him my arms-raised what-the-hell gesture.
He who was illegally proceeding through the intersection stopped and yelled something at me. I loosed some self-righteous gibberish, while my girlfriend sputtered something about crop circles. Or maybe it was traffic circles.
The kids realized something was up. They seemed frightened, as if their Internet connection had been dropped. They glanced around just in time to see dad flip me off. Shoot me the bird, as they say; extravagantly, smiling savagely, as if he’d invented the gesture on the spot and was triumphant at the discovery.
I blew him a big wet kiss, a response I’d learned would overly enrage most men. Petty but satisfying.
He stuck to his guns, gesturing away as his kids did double and triple takes at their transformed father as they crept through the intersection.
The Monday morning after securing my minuscule rental, a mere block from the scene of my accident, time slowed down again. The driver on the other side of the intersection decided to turn left as I entered the intersection, on a green light. My heart sped up ... not again, I thought. Another wreck, three days later, in a rental car. More paperwork ....
But, say what you want about the smelly rental. It had great brakes!
If an extra coat of paint had been applied to my car in the factory, I would have hit the offending driver. I pulled over and ran around to the front of the car, sure I’d hit her. Nothing.
I decided to have a word with the other driver; I’d watched her pull into a parking space. But by the time I ran around the corner, I watched her disappear down the street.
As I turned back toward my car, a woman on the sidewalk, who’d obviously seen the near-accident, commented in a slow drawl, “That scared me to death.”
Stifling the urge to make a wise-acre remark I walked toward my car. In time to see a parking enforcement officer writing me a parking ticket.
After breathlessly explaining my circumstance he looked me up and down, and without saying a word, pursed his lips and gave me a magnanimous shooing gesture and let me off the hook.
That same day, in the early evening, driving down a moderately busy street flanked by sidewalk runners on both sides, I blearily noted that the woman in front of me wasn’t slowing down. We were approaching a red light and she wasn’t decelerating.
Two runners took advantage of the red light to lope through the intersection and were nearly squished by the driver, who blew through the light without slowing down.The runners leapt toward the opposite sidewalk. I pulled up to the light and looked over at them. Both women looked at me, wide-eyed and terrified. I gave them my patented arm raised what-the-hell gesture. They returned it and smiled weakly. We commiserated ... mostly me, though. They were in shock.
Then the guy behind me honked and I saw him gesture in my rear view. I threw up my hands. He pointed up.
The light had turned green.
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Style, Pages 27 on 11/13/2012