I’m going to tell you another story now. I mentioned it in a previous chapter, so you may have already listened to it on the “Storyworthy the Book” YouTube channel. If you haven’t, you should, if possible. It’s always better to listen to a story told live.
I’m placing the story here because it serves as an excellent model for the next couple of chapters. I first told this story at a Moth GrandSLAM in New York City. I finished in first place that night, then I expanded the story and told it at a Moth Mainstage in Pittsburgh. It’s since aired on The Moth Radio Hour.
It’s December 23, 1988. I’m seventeen years old. I’m coming out of a record store. As I hit the sidewalk, my friend Pat sees me. He asks me what’s in the shopping bag I’m holding. I tell him it’s a concert T-shirt. It’s a Christmas present for Bengi, our friend, and my best friend. A surprise Christmas present.
Pat looks at me a little funny. He’s only fourteen, but he’s already cooler than I will ever be in my entire life. So when he looks at me like that, I always pay attention. Pat tells me that guys don’t buy Christmas presents for other guys. Especially surprise Christmas presents. He tells me that he’s had girlfriends for six months and never bought them a thing. So for me to buy Bengi a Christmas present is a little odd.
I’m suddenly feeling very self-conscious about the betta fish in the backseat of my car — the one that I bought at the pet store for Pat an hour ago — and the comic books for Coog, and the sweatshirt for Tom, and all the presents I bought for my friends on this day. I know that Pat is right. It’s strange that I’ve done this, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had a good Christmas, and I want this one to be special.
The combination of my unending childhood poverty, my absentee mother and my evil stepfather, and their now failing marriage, has made every Christmas for years a misery. But for the first time in my life, I have money in my pocket. I’m a manager at McDonald’s making $5.75 an hour. I’m working full-time while I’m in high school, and I am the richest person I know. I am going to use this money to buy myself a great Christmas.
I’m heading home now. I need to get my uniform, because I have a shift at McDonald’s later and I need to get these presents into the house. I need to get the betta fish out of the cold. It’s starting to snow out. It’s kind of lovely. I’m driving my mother’s 1976 Datsun B210, a car about the size of a box of Pop-Tarts, through the town of Mendon, Massachusetts. The lawns of each home are turning white. It’s the first snowfall of the year. As I drive by each house, it’s as if I’m passing a picture postcard of Christmas. I feel this might be a good Christmas after all.
I’m coming around a corner and I’m heading down a hill when my car starts sliding to the opposite lane on the snowy road. I look up, and I see a white Mercedes-Benz coming right at me.
They say that in moments like this, time will slow down or even freeze, and it is absolutely true. In the three seconds it takes before our two cars hit head-on, I have exactly three thoughts.
The first is: I’m not wearing my seat belt. I always wear my seat belt, but in the excitement of buying Christmas presents and the rush to get home, I’ve forgotten to put it on, on the worst day of my life to forget.
My second thought is: in moments like this, I’ve been told to steer into the skid, but it occurs to me now that I don’t know what the hell that really means. (I still don’t know to this day.)
My third thought is just one sentence, it’s five words long, and I say it aloud: “This is going to suck.”
And it does. When our cars collide, I’m thrown forward, and my head crashes through the windshield. My chin catches the steering wheel on the way, and the entire bottom row of my teeth comes flying out and into the back of my mouth in one large chunk. At the same moment, my legs come forward, and my right leg becomes embedded down to the bone in the air-conditioning unit. My left leg hits the emergency release brake, knocking the handle off and skewering my left leg. My chest crashes into the steering wheel, breaking ribs and knocking all the air from my lungs. It’s all over in a second. Then shock descends upon me, and I feel no pain or fear.
I climb out of the car. I’m sort of crumpled next to the car, half standing, half crouching, when I see the woman in the Mercedes get out. She’s completely unharmed. Her seat belt and the size of her car have protected her completely. Then she sees me, vomits, and passes out.
The first to arrive at the scene is a pickup truck full of teenagers. A kid about my age gets to me first. He lies me down in the mud and the snow on the side of the road. He gives me a look over, and then he crouches close to my ear and whispers, “Dude, you’re fucked.”
It is the most accurate medical assessment that I will receive that day.
A police officer arrives and puts a coat on me to keep me warm. I’ve got broken ribs, so it feels like a thousand pounds. I’m looking up at a white sky, and the snow is really starting to fall now, so I close my eyes.
When I open my eyes again, I’m in an ambulance. A young woman is straddling my hips and she is pounding on my chest, which is now on fire. There’s a man trying to shove a clear tube down my throat, and the woman starts screaming, “He’s back! He’s back!” And I’m wondering, “Who the hell is back?”
It’s me. I’m back. I’ll find out later that my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing for about a minute.
No white light.
Now I’m in the emergency room, and the doctors get to work on me right away. They’re picking out glass from my forehead with tweezers. They’re getting my legs ready for surgery. Dental surgeons wire that chunk of teeth back down into my jaw. It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever felt.
A nurse comes over and asks me for my phone number. My clothes were cut off at the scene, so I have no ID. I give her my parents’ number, and then I give her the number for McDonald’s because I’m supposed to be working that night. She sort of scoffs at this and looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I kind of am. I was dead twenty minutes ago and now I’m worried about work, but that drive-through does not run well without me, and they’re going to have to get someone in.
Bless her heart. She makes the call.
As the doctors and nurses work on me, I notice that their expressions begin to change. I see it, because I am thinking the same thing they are: Where the hell are my parents?
I’ll find out later that when they heard I was in stable condition, they went to check the car out first. I won’t see them before surgery.
I’m waiting for a surgeon, because it’s December 23, and they’re hard to find. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting, and I’m feeling as alone as I’ve ever felt.
But I’m not alone, because when the nurse called McDonald’s to tell them about the accident, the manager on duty told my friends, and those friends started calling other friends. An old-fashioned phone tree begins, with friends calling friends calling friends, and the waiting room is now filling up with sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids in ripped jeans and concert T-shirts, and one fourteen-year-old boy who is cooler than all of them. And my friend Bengi is the first one to arrive.
They can’t come into the emergency room to see me, because they’re not family, but when the nurses realize that my parents won’t be arriving in time, they roll my gurney to the other side of the emergency room, and they open a door. One by one, each of my friends stands in the doorway. And they wave. And they give me the thumbs-up. The boys say incredibly inappropriate things to make me laugh, and the girls tell me that they love me, and I can hear them chanting my name as I am rolled into the operating room.
None of the presents ever make it into my friend’s hands. Bengi never gets his concert T-shirt and Coog never gets his comic books, and the betta fish is the only fatality in the accident that day.
But it turns out that Pat is wrong. You can give your friends surprise Christmas presents, because they give me the best one I’ve ever received. They give me family, and until I meet my wife fifteen years later, they are the only family that I have. And it turns out they’re the only family that I need.