How I Got the Nickname “Crash”
Cypress Hill’s 1995 album, Black Sunday, hasn’t necessarily stood the test of time in hip hop lore, but at the end of that year it was my absolute shit — our shit as a crew — as goes the collective brains across the cults that are teenage inner circles. Raekwon’s album had dropped earlier in the year, but after playing it literally every morning while smoking blunts in the car on the way to school, I craved something new. By Christmas, every time I got in the car it was me and B-Real, Hits From the Bong, and an idiot driving too fast.
Appropriately, I can’t recall what was on the docket for this December Saturday night, though I’m sure it involved marijuana and the homies, which is just about all a simple 17-year-old requires. There has always been something about the week between Christmas and New Year’s that warms me with excitement and optimism, across all stages of life. Everyone’s off from school or work, in a good mood from Christmas but still looking forward to New Year’s, it is the Saturday morning of winter.
I was on punishment, per usual, relegated only to going out with my then girlfriend, who my mom loved, and I guess didn’t figure I’d regularly employ to leave the house with, only to part ways a few minutes later so I could link up with the homies. On this night she happened to have a babysitting gig in town and needed a ride anyway, so it was perfect. We said we were going to dinner and a movie, one of the things “normal kids” were inclined to, I’d drop her off, go out, and get high.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d already been high that day. I think I’d smoked either once or twice, most recently around 5pm, which for that time in my life was about as far-removed and sober as I got. I’d been guilty of driving high, a few times even incredibly high, which I regret, but this was not one of those cases. If anything, I was closer to some degree of low-grade withdrawal that made me eager to get to my destination. When I reflect on my adolescence, I am convinced there is no species less intelligent than teenage boys. Just the consistent miscalculation of risk/reward, the prioritization of satiating the psychological id or some adrenalin rush at the expense of all other parties, is a pathetic instinct that in my opinion, merits greater examination.
Just past Route 303, on Hickory Hill Road the street curved sharply enough to merit those series of bright black and yellow arrow signs alongside, warning drivers which way things were going. Obviously, locals were familiar with how it turned, and that familiarity encouraged certain adolescents to test or show off their driving skills around the bend. My older half-brother was killed in a car accident six years prior, and it was supposedly determined that had he had his seatbelt on he would have been saved. Despite this fact, I was not wearing my seatbelt.
No one else was in the car. There was no one to show off to or posture for. It was just me, B-Real, and Sen Dog, and they were there only virtually, the narrators of a fantasy that fueled my own senseless adrenalin up to an irresponsible speed. As I approached the corner, I was excited for the night. I learned of a house party where I’d smoke weed, rap in freestyle cyphers, joke with friends, and bathe in the confidence and social adoration known by (high school) seniors.
About a third of the way into the turn I lost control. Skidding on black ice across the double yellow line it happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to panic or mechanically react at all. In a flash I smashed at full speed into a tree off the side of the dark road. I opened the car door immediately, to get out as quickly as possible, flee the scene of the crime, as I’d done so many other times in the commitment of actual crimes. I climbed up the short hill of cold, wet leaves, bushes, and shrubbery, and saw a woman — a mom type — standing above me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I replied, hoping to convince both of us of its truth.
She’d pulled over to the side of the road, probably having witnessed my accident while driving in my direction, just a bit too far away to have killed us both.
Before I knew it, I was being ushered into an ambulance by EMT workers, with the nice woman’s assistance.
“Did the airbag deploy?” they asked.
“No, it didn’t,” I said, and I was acutely aware of the gratification I felt in my answer. An airbag deploying would mean I’d been in a very serious accident. It would force me to reckon with the humility of my life having been saved, plus acknowledge severe damage to the car. I was holding out hope that this was a fender bender, and the car was as fine as I was. But I couldn’t ignore the pain on the right side of my chest. I’d fractured my clavicle.
One of the EMT workers jogged down to where the car was literally wrapped around a tree. With the headlights still on it was easy to get a clear view of the scene that I was beginning to accept was worse than I’d hoped. The young man yelled back to his partner: “It deployed!”
Apparently, I’d blacked out upon contact. The airbag had in fact deployed, fracturing my collar bone and saving my life. They closed the door behind me in the ambulance, hit the sirens, and whisked me off to the hospital, and I remember thinking how preferable this was to the police sirens I was more accustomed to. I’d watched enough movies in my life to be not 100% sure I was alive, but I was fairly confident that I was. Goddamn, was I lucky.
Seated in the hospital bed with ice over my collar bone, watching TV, I remember being scared that my parents would be mad at me for totaling the car. But when they showed up their parental instinct outweighed their indignation with my dysfunctional frontal lobe. Mom and Dad came over and hugged me. I assured them that I was okay, and they both had tears in their eyes.
The car was mutilated. When we drove by the metal yard to see it the next day it looked like the kind of vehicle a drunk driver had died in. I chose to smoke more weed to avoid being confronted with my stupidity and good fortune. Dad’s insurance got us a new car, a sleek 1996 Nissan Maxima, and life went on, miraculously.
There would be more accidents. Many more accidents.
Once in the middle of the night, with my parents out of town, I tried pulling out of the garage while my friend, Richie was still getting in the back seat and hadn’t closed the door yet. I almost took his legs off in the process, unable to hear him yelling to me over the music blasting. It’s possible hip hop owes me as much in reparations as I owe it for how much joy I get from it. The door got bent back in the wrong direction — we were able to get it fixed and back in the garage literally minutes before my parents came home for the weekend.
In 1997 I was following a friend in his car on a quiet suburban block. When we got to an intersection, looked, and saw no cars coming, I presumed continuity, hit the gas without looking, and slammed into his bumper. This was a true fender bender.
Finally, and most fantastically, one morning I took Mom’s oak green Jeep Grand Cherokee out to get breakfast for us from the bagel spot. Always determined to set the scene on my rides, as I pulled out of the driveway I found a tape to pop in the deck, reached for a cigarette, and accidentally dropped the pack on the passenger side floor. Still proceeding slowly, still in front of our neighbors’ home, I reached down to grab a smoke, and suddenly heard a thunderous crash. The car stopped. No! Despite my thus far lifetime of very competent athletic abilities, had I actually been so careless as to turn the fucking wheel in the direction I leaned in? I looked up and saw smoke rising from the hood, as if out of a cartoon — somehow at 14 mph I’d wrapped the jeep around our neighbors’ tree. It was totaled. It was after this incident that one of my mom’s coworker friends nicknamed me “Crash.”
There was a lot wrong with me as a teenager, maybe no more than there is now as a grown-up, but our younger flaws are generally less comprehensible. I owe my parents a lot of money and even more apologies, with little explanation for my motives. I suspect part of my problem was constitutional. Certain types of people are more drawn to adrenalin. Arbitrary excitement or danger to pull us out of the everyday triteness and help us to feel alive. Maybe this is one manifestation of depression. Maybe depression coupled with curiosity, add a dash of courage, and what Chinese medicine simply labels, “fire types.” I enjoyed graffiti and shoplifting, even though I didn’t need to shoplift for financial reasons. I loved to steal. I was good at it, and if I got caught the worst that would happen was a criminal slap on the wrist. I wasn’t quite out of my mind, but we can call it that for the time being.
As a new dad, I am now finally becoming my father, hopefully in only select respects. I drive more carefully, I de-stress with a quiet drink at the end of my work week instead of taking fast corners while smoking blunts in the car. When idiots like my former self speed past us on the highway I just watch them and shake my head, the way I do at people who cut others in line, get into bar fights, attend Trump rallies, or eat fast food. Then a moment of worry passes through my mind, for the safety of my daughter, presently and in her future, as one of the greater risks of raising a suburbanite is that she and her inexperienced, less coordinated cronies will be independently operating these same machines, sans supervision, smothered in a decoction of similar insecurities and unprocessed emotions that I once suffered from in the nineties.
I know not what the answer is. I suppose it doesn’t make sense to withhold drivers’ licenses until we turn 18, 21, or even 25 when our frontal lobes are finally developed. Although wouldn’t this bear logic? I think when it comes to potentially harmful desires that are directly or indirectly prompted by neurological defects, we must offer alternatives. To my patients with sugar addictions, I suggest eating more nut butters, more dark chocolate, fruits, coconut yogurt with maple syrup and cinnamon, red dates with goat cheese and salted nuts — ANYTHING, to avoid refined sugar! For the instinct to drive recklessly I recommend boxing or the martial arts, mosh pits at punk rock concerts, skateboarding or some X-game sports, obviously exercise or any form of creativity, as my own delinquent proclivities weren’t healed until I discovered my love for comedic performing. I went on to a 15-year career as a stand-up comedian, travelled the world, performed on several TV shows, and only “died” many times metaphorically, as we said in the business as another synonym for “bombing” on stage.
As often as possible, drive carefully. Merge slowly. Don’t text, or drive high or drunk. Don’t presume continuity or caution in others, and surely don’t try to make the light. It shouldn’t matter whether kids live on the block or there are babies on board, because even if they don’t or are not, their parents are, whose lives aren’t much more expendable. Automobile transportation is a dangerous luxury, not an entitlement, and the risk/reward ratio is infinitely bigger than most other behaviors. Punctuality or fun are not worth dying for, and many of us would even prefer to die than kill someone else to satisfy such senseless needs. I should have died in 1995 on that black ice, listening to Black Sunday. A few seconds later and I’d have killed myself and that kind mom-type and whoever was in the car with her. For whatever reason I got luckier than Tommy had in ’89.
