Gremlin Totaled. 1975

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In 1975  I worked for the Atlanta Post Office.  I worked from midnight to 8:30 am.  One beautiful morning, while driving home I had a wreck.  Then we lived  near the corner of Hicks and Hurt Road.  On my homeward route on Gordon Road I crossed Bankhead Highway.  That morning, going under the green light at that intersection I was suddenly t-boned by a pickup truck, running into me at full speed.

My side of the car caved in, knocking me to the other side and at the same time knocking the whole car, with  me in it, into a vacant lot next to a McDonld’s.  The Gremlin was turned over with me dangling out the side.

“BLOOD ON THE TRACK” by Bob Dylan was playing on the radio (true)

People from McDonald’s ran out to help and/or to gawk.  I felt a need for a cigarette.  I somehow fished out of my pockets a pack of Winstons and my lighter.  I lit one up.  About the time I had my only inhale out of it the Medics had arrived.  One of them yanked the cigarette out of my mouth.  They took me to Cobb General Hospital.

The hospital called Anna and she was too nervous to drive (she was also pregnant with our first bon) so her co-worker Darlene took her to Cobb General’s ER.

I had glass in my hair, a few cuts, bruises, and a terrible headache.

After Anna was sure I would live she and Darlene went back to work.  She told me she called her mother Marie to come to the hospital and pick me up and carry me home.

A nurse wheeled me to the waiting room to wait on Marie.

While waiting an elderly lady who I think felt she had to give people a helping hand asked could she help me.  I told her I was waiting for someone to pick me up.  She sat down, and shortly, a tall young man, probably a teenager came in the waiting room looked around and sat down.  The lady who asked me if she could help me walked over and asked the young man could she help him, said he was there to pick someone up.  She said, “Here he is!” and let him over to me.

He said he didn’t know me.  I said I didn’t know him.

Then she tried to explain herself and sat back down.

The young man got behind the chair she was sitting in and made faces at her behind her back.  Then he pretended to be bending over pecking the top of her head.  I thought I would burst a gut holding back  giggling.  A comic relief is what I needed.

The man in the pickup truck who hit me was on the way to the drug store when he more than likely blacked out because he needed his medicine.  He went through his windshield and it killed him.  That single wreck is an argument for and against seatbelts.