Cronin
When I was 23, my friend Gabe and I were driving home at 1:30 in the morning. Driving up the street and there’s a light—a yellow light—and I thought I’d drive through it, and this car drove into me, folded my car in half. The door went through my leg. And let me tell you, if you’ve never felt your internal organs all sort of squished together and moved around, it is a weird fucking feeling. It’s sort of surreal, actually, because you start to think, “Oh God, am I going to die?”
It was sort of terrifying. And if you’ve ever gotten a tattoo or anything, if you’ve ever been seriously injured, your brain does all kinds of weird shit, you get this weird sort of calm, and your focus becomes something you wouldn’t think. I was sitting there thinking, and the first thing I’m thinking is, “Wait. Is this my fault?” I’m looking sideways out of my crooked dashboard, broken-ass window, and I’m like, “Wait. Is that my light? That’s totally my light. This is not my fault.” That’s the first thing I’m thinking. While this door is inside my leg.
Meanwhile, this girl gets out of her car and is sobbing. She’s perfectly fine. I’m not angry, you know—I make mistakes, people make mistakes, and I’m high and full of adrenaline—until she’s standing there a few feet away from me, crying, “Oh my god, my parents are going to kill me.” I might be dying, I can’t feel my legs, I could be paralyzed, and you’re worried about your parents being mad.
Everybody else is freaking out, but I’m just like, “Gabe, I need you to reach into my pocket and take out the cell phone, and I need you to call an ambulance right now. Please. I really need you to call an ambulance.”
We’re at a fairly busy intersection so the cops come, but we call my mom. The answering machine picks up because it’s 1:30 in the morning on a weeknight, and Gabe never hung up. He never hung up and he left this cell phone in the passenger seat, so on my mother’s answering machine, you can hear the paramedics coming on the passenger side—“We need you to crawl across the seat,” and I’m screaming, “I can’t move my legs!”
They reach in and drag me out and I’m screaming in pain the entire time—all on my mother’s answering machine.
