LEFT FOR DEAD

Scars faded now into oblivion. Once they were blood red and stretched across the upper part of my nose to over my left eye. Here’s how it happened….

I was seventeen and had dropped out of high school but was attending after hours studies at the school in the next town in preparation for my GED exam. There was a older[25] guy there named Al and we used to drive around with him making jokes about his driving between us guys. So, one day after class he asks me if I want to go to with him into Queens to pick up some girls he knows who work for the Bohack supermarket. I quickly say yes and later that day off we go. Well, here is where it gets fuzzy. Al had a souped up car [which as it turned out was lent him by his boss] and somehow we got into a race with another car. We were hurtling at breakneck speeds by the elevated trains. At some point something happened and Al lost control of the car. We crashed into a concrete railroad support. The car was totaled and Al being of good conscious left me for dead while he went off somewhere to try to sell the car for parts. Anyway the guys from the place that were getting the parts freak out when they find a body in the front seat. They were nice enough to pull me from the wreckage and somehow I ended up in a UPS truck whose driver was driving around building up his overtime. I am bleeding profusely and the driver gives me a rag to help stop the bleeding although he explains that he can’t take me into the hospital because he is off his route. He lets me off in the parking lot and I stagger inside pretty much freaking everyone out. By a stroke of luck there is a neurosurgeon on call in emergency. They work on me for 2 and a half hours. The good news is I won’t lose the eye It’s 121 stitches and the worse headache anyone ever had.

Al was given a choice join the military or go to prison. i never knew what happened to him.,

I still recall my first trip outside of the house after my accident. I went to the corner store to buy some comic books. A little kid starts pointing at my face and yelling to his mother about my scars. I had just worked up the nerve to go outside and now I knew what to expect. I can’t blame the kid, I looked like the Frankenstein monster. That was my first head injury, I’ll follow it up with another within a two year span.