CHAPTER FIFTEEN
While I was still living in Seaside, I was invited by some friends to an upscale evening party at one of those fancy houses in Pebble Beach. It was a gorgeous, rich, fairy-tale place, surrounded by trees. I was not a materialistic person, but as a young guy in those days I certainly remember feeling attracted to nice homes and fancy cars.
I was working a long shift the day of the party, different than my usual swing shift, and feeling very tired. Dominic had also invited me to dinner at his parents' house that evening. His mother cooked a delicious meal, and after I ate, I felt even more tired, but I still really wanted to attend the party.
I hardly had any kind of social life to speak of, since I didn’t really have any close friends, only my coworkers. So when the rare occasion arose that I was invited somewhere, I was usually very eager to go. Barbara was nice enough to let me borrow her brown Toyota Tercel to make the twenty-minute drive out to Pebble Beach that day.
The roads near Pebble Beach are a maze of tight curves, and I can never forget what happened that night, as many of the details are still with me to this day. I had Supertramp’s Breakfast in America in the cassette player and was listening to "Child of Vision” as I passed the entrance gate. As the road started to curve to the right, I had one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. My eyes never closed, but somehow as I watched the road curve in front of me, I lacked the ability to turn the steering wheel in order to stay on it. I drove straight over the cliff.
I don’t recall the moment of impact, and I am not sure how much time passed, but when I woke up, I found myself sitting in the Tercel’s passenger seat, with the upper right quadrant of the windshield smashed to bits, curved inward only inches from my face. I was not wearing my seat belt.
I called out for the driver, although I can’t imagine who I might have thought that was. As my mind refocused itself, I looked around and saw a group of people, most likely firefighters and paramedics, twenty or thirty feet above me, making their way down from the road to rescue me.
I began to drift in and out of consciousness again, and the next time I opened my eyes, I was at Monterey Peninsula Community Hospital, and the emergency room staff were cutting me out of the beautiful leather jacket my mother had bought me as a birthday gift. I tried to tell them to stop, that I could take it off myself, but no one listened.
I spent three days in intensive care. They told me that I had fractured my right clavicle (the bone that runs between the neck and shoulder, above the chest) and multiple ribs on my right side. I had pulmonary contusion (bruising) on my right lung, a cerebral concussion, and multiple facial lacerations. I was also struggling with a fever that wouldn’t subside.
The doctors and nurses, who were extremely kind and caring, told me I was very lucky to be alive. The car had glanced off a tree on its way down the hill and, looking back now, I believe that if I had hit that tree head-on, I would not have survived. I was also lucky that the car didn’t fall even farther down, making it invisible from the road.
To this day I don’t know who called 911, and I have always wondered how long I might have stayed pinned in the wreckage if it hadn’t been for that person. Would I have been able to get myself out of the car? If I had gotten out, what kind of state would I have been in? With all those broken bones, not to mention the impact on my lung and brain, would I have been able to climb back up? It seems doubtful. And if I had made it back up to the road, would I have been so disoriented that I would have staggered into the path of another car?
Or would I have been found dead on the passenger seat? Would I have been just another tragedy that my idol, Clint Eastwood (who was living in Carmel at the time and had even served as the city’s mayor for a couple of years), would read about the next day in the local paper? What a tragedy it would have been for my mother. She had tried so hard to talk me out of moving to the States and, after failing in that attempt, struggled financially to get me there. The idea that she might have had her only child delivered back to her doorstep in a body bag was almost unimaginably awful. Knowing her, she wouldn’t have lived long after that. My life might have simply depended upon some headlights that stayed on after the crash and somebody driving by and noticing me down the cliff.
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