Once upon a time, when I was seventeen, my friend Rick and I drove my mother’s car 40 miles to a marching band competition in order to flirt with the girls we had crushes on.

It was a late-October Saturday night with a new moon in West Virginia: very dark, very crisp; resplendent with the odor of Autumn.

The competition was being held on the football field of the local high school. The school grounds were a self-contained plot of land on the other side of a small creek. There was a rickety one-lane bridge crossing the water and there was a state police officer to direct traffic across.

On the excitement scale, “watching high-school marching band competitions” is an activity that ranks right up there with “listening to someone tell you about their level 17 paladin“. Further, they are rather poor venues for flirtation activities, especially when the female side of the equation spends most of its time in lockstep formation on the field.

After an hour and a half the two of us grew bored and decided to seek our destinies elsewhere.

My next memories are a set of fragments:

It’s dark. I light a cigarette, fire up the engine, and drop the car into gear. The lot is packed, the routes through it twisty and confusing. I slowly make my way out to the entry road.

A car approaches from the bridge. Its lights flare into my eyes. I squint and curse. Rick laughs. Practiced fingers flick a cassette tape into the radio (Queensryche’s Rage for Order). Adjust the volume. I look up, and there are things that look suspiciously like

slam on the brakes

motherFUCKER that is a body, rolling over the hood

on the windshield.

The body rolls off the hood.

There is a common turn-of-phrase: “I lost my mind.” I know exactly what that means because it literally happened to me then. There was a moment when I hit a man with the car I was driving and then there was only a low buzzing sound – like being underwater. My vision tunnelled and the lizard-brain activated.

This is what I was thinking:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

This is what I was saying:

ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck

Someone put the car in “park”. To this day I do not remember if it was Rick or I.

Reality

and I discovered that I was out of the car, yelling (ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck).

In all honesty I have to admit that I contemplated escaping in the car.

The body on the side of the road was slowing getting up, groaning, and I realized that I had hit the traffic cop.

He slowly stood up, disoriented, punch-drunk. He stood, searching the ground for something (his flashlight? his gun? all the better to kill me with!). We ask, over and over, “are you okay?” but he isn’t answering he’s just

looking

for something. He took three steps to the side of the road and reached down to pick up his hat from the dust. He brushed the dirt from it before looking up to speak:

“Boy, it’s a good thing you didn’t scuff up my hat or I’d have had to kick your ass.”

He rung up his partner with his walkie-talkie and they called in an ambulance and tried to bring in some Authority. But there was a fun little snag with that: In West Virginia (and possibly everywhere, as far as I know), police officers cannot investigate accidents that involve their own department. This little rule spawned a fun series of calls while we waited in the darkness.

This guy was a state cop, working at a county event, acting in place of a local police officer. So neither the state troopers, the sheriffs, or the local constabulary could handle the incident.

Groups of uniformed people began collecting around the area. At one point there were no fewer than four ambulances parked off to the side.

The local cops were sometimes dicks:

Boy, are you 18?
No sir.
Put out the cigarette. Y’all ain’t old enough to smoke.

After about an hour the real investigative team arrived.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goddamned FBI.

There was a large FBI fingerprinting lab about twenty miles out and they must have been very excited to engage in actual field work because they came loaded for bear.

These boys measured every inch of my car. They determined exactly how fast I was going (fifteen miles per hour). They plotted the car’s position and trajectory in exact minutes, degrees, seconds, and microseconds in latitude and longitude. They took photos of tire marks. They filled out many forms.

They brought a small army of forensic scientists to determine how a pimple-faced seventeen year old boy could possibly drive into someone who walked out in front of a car while wearing black clothing on a new moon.

They were exceptionally thorough. They had a method or device to measure everything. . . except blood alcohol content.

My “breathalyzer test” went down like this:

I was sitting in the back of a federal car, giving my statement to an agent. I liked this guy; he gave me a cigarette and let me smoke while he wrote down everything. At one point he stopped and stared me right in the eye, drawing himself up serious:

Son, you been drinking?

No sir.

And that was that.

After a while they let me go to drive home. While the investigation hasn’t been closed I was informed that I was NOT AT FAULT; the officer was, for walking into traffic. I wouldn’t see the official papers for another several days, however.

The car is a waste: the windshield shattered, hood crumpled, one headlamp busted. The return drive is contemplative at first, both of us thinking about the doom that awaits me when my parents discover what has happened.

Eventually, Rick speaks:

You know, I bet that when he was in cop school and they were teaching the “how to roll across a car hood and not get killed” lesson, he was cracking wise and saying, “what the hell are they teaching this for? We ain’t ever gonna need this shit.”

I started laughing so hard that I almost wrecked the car.