At 12:01am this morning, a drunk plowed into the back of my car at 40 mph.
Actually, it was my father’s car. And I don’t actually know how fast he was going, but that’s about how fast we (the nice policeman and I) figure he was going.
I’d just finished up interviewing Devon, who is recording a new album out at the Dave Matthews Band studio. I had the story mentally written, a belly full of Indian food, and I was feeling good, when I got into town and went to turn from the 250 Bypass onto High Street. I stopped at the red light, waiting to turn left, and tried to decide if I wanted to drive all the way up to Barracks Road to drop off this film so that I could have the pictures of the studio tomorrow. Halfway through this thought — WHAM.
I knew immediately that I’d been hit, but I couldn’t tell from what direction. I could feel the car give around me, and my head went back and forth, back and forth, making my neck crunch a little. In my rearview mirror I could see, quite literally on my bumper, a Jeep. I could quite plainly make out the horrified face of the driver, and I realized that I’d been rear ended at a rather high speed. I was worried that he’d think I was dead or something, so I (with some difficulty) opened my door and indicated to him that we should pull over into the parking lot of CVS, across the street.
But before I got back in the car, I paused and memorized his license plate number. I felt a little guilty for doing it, as if I couldn’t trust the poor fool that had just run into me. I also took a quick mental snapshot of the driver, and surveyed the vehicle: a red Jeep Cherokee, late model, with a few passengers. The driver was a white guy, late 20s, bearded, brown hair, medium height and build. Like I said, I felt bad memorizing this, but I did it anyhow.
So I slowly drove the car (which was chug-a-chug-ing along, the rear axle obviously bent, the engine obviously no longer functioning correctly) over to CVS, when I saw, in my rearview mirror, the Jeep take a left at the light and peel out of there. A hit and run.
I was pissed. I called the police and gave them the relevant info. An officer showed up a few minutes later, and he took a report. We drove over to the site of the collision, and there was glass from the Jeep’s headlight on the ground. We looked at the Volvo, and it was in rough shape. The frame was obviously bent, the side paneling had buckled, and only the front right door would open without some effort. (In fact, the rear left door wouldn’t open at all.) Based on the rather-glaring bumper marks, it looks like they hit me more on the left than the right, which explains the sides that various damage was on.
Anyhow, as we were finishing up the report, the officer got a call: they’d found the Jeep. He tossed me out of the car (I’m not complaining) and hightailed it out of there. A few minutes later, another officer drove me down High Street to a convenience store across the street from Virginia Arts Recording. There was a wagon there with a couple of drunk guys in the back (one of them sobbing). For no reason that I can determine, two vending machines had been knocked down into the road, and the Jeep was nowhere to be seen. Several other police cars had descended on the scene, and at least half a dozen officers were there. Unfortunately, neither of the guys was the guy that I saw. That doesn’t mean that one of them isn’t our man, just that my memory is bad. They were driving the car in question, and didn’t appear to be putting up much argument about things.
They didn’t keep me there for more than a few minutes before driving me to Martha Jefferson Hospital. After being dropped off there at 1:00am, I spent a couple of hours going through tests and x-rays. They told me that I had whiplash, and that my neck will probably hurt a lot, and that’s that. But at least I got checked out.
The collision itself keeps coming back to me in bits. What I just now remember was this acrid burning sensation in my mouth, nose and throat. It was dry and toxic. It tasted like pain, and danger, and…bad things. I think I bit down on my cheeks. My neck — I was worried it would snap. And I remember hitting the brake, hard, to keep from colliding with the car in front of me. And I even recall wondering how badly I’d be hurt, if the car would be crushed, and I along with it. But it didn’t cross my mind that I could be killed. I don’t know why. I just knew that I didn’t want that taste in my mouth. I wanted my mouth to go back to tasting like Indian food, to tasting like my mouth.