Guardrail

I was almost 19 in December of 1972. I had just finished my first semester of college and was more than ready for an evening of fun and adventure.

There was a plan to meet some fellow students at one of the bars. There it was decided after several beers that going to the Pacifica radio station was a good idea to see if we get on the air. The station broadcasted from somewhere downtown. We managed to find it and the door was surprisingly unlocked. Once in we found the control room which was also unlocked where for some reason the DJ welcomed the four of us inside. She was broadcasting a Grateful Dead marathon so there was time to just talk and get high. After a lot of sophisticated conversation she invited us to a party going on somewhere in southwest Houston. Her shift was just about over and the others really wanted to go, so we set out on the next leg of our adventure. Since I was driving alone, the DJ rode with me. I usually did not want to drive into the southwest part of Houston as it was a long freeway ride back to my house. I also did not know my way around that part of town very well, but the DJ knew the way.

The beers from earlier were making me sleepy plus I was a bit loopy from the weed. However, she seemed totally unconcerned about my ability to drive so off we went. The others were long ahead of us by this time.

We arrived at a small tract house somewhere in Bellaire, a suburb of Houston. There was a low chain-link fence in front and in spite of the full moon I didn’t see that the gate was closed and nearly crashed through it but stopped just in time. Still this did not concern my passenger. We went inside after I turned off the engine and carefully locked the car doors.

There were quite a few people there and my friends were all in the kitchen mixing drinks with whatever was available. The radio was tuned to the Pacifica station where the Grateful Dead marathon continued. 

At this stage of my drug and alcohol career I limited myself to drinking beer and smoking marijuana. But at the urging of my friends I tried the mixtures that they were coming up with. The creative mixing of the drinks spread to the other guests and the kitchen got rather crowded. One guy in particular kept coming in for a drink and banging his shoulder into the doorway as he went back to the other room. He did this several times and it kind of became a thing. Several of us passively bet on whether he’d do it every time he came in; he did.

It was about 2am and I was getting pretty tired and was ready to go home. No one else was ready to go and I had lost track of the DJ that I had brought to the party, so I set out on my own.

I wasn’t really sure how to get back to the freeway so I had to drive around a bit to get my bearings and found the boulevard that I thought would take me back to the loop around the city that I needed to get back close to downtown where I lived.

Houston was very quiet late at night in those days. There were no cars out. I heard some kind of siren but never saw an emergency vehicle. I heard a train whistle and came upon a crossing. The lights were flashing red but I didn't see a train. It occurred to me that I could simply drive around the barriers and be on my way. But since I was so stoned, I was afraid I might scratch my car so I did think better of it and waited for the train which did come eventually. It was the usual freight train which seemed to be endless. Watching it rush by in front of me I became somewhat hypnotized by the sounds and the lights and rhythm of the moving freight cars flashing by in front of me.

After a long while the train completely passed and the barriers came up. I carefully drove over the tracks and came to the road that became a ramp that funneled me onto Loop 610 and into the inside lane. I was pretty sleepy at that point and remember picking up speed and driving with nothing and no one but the road in front of me. It was several miles to the turn onto Interstate 10 east to get me closer to home. I don’t remember seeing any other cars traveling along with me. It was very quiet.

Then I heard it. A loud metallic impact. I came to and was still moving forward but was one more lane to the right. My hands were still on the wheel and I was somehow, going forward, still in apparent control. I went back to sleep. I heard the sound of the tires running over the periodic lane markers which woke me long enough to know I had drifted out of my lane, but was still in apparent control and going forward. I awoke again, this time to the sound of a car horn behind me. I had drifted out my lane again, but was still going forward. I awoke again to the sound of that car horn.

This went on for several miles. I drifted, they honked their horn, I woke up, I continued driving. I could see them not far behind me in my rear view mirror. I got to the eastward exit to interstate 10 but my guardian angel did not follow. They honked one last time and I was on my own.

I have no idea really how I managed to get to my exit, the last one before downtown. I don’t think I drifted out of my lane again but I really don’t know.

I managed to drive the remaining mile or so off the freeway into my neighborhood, onto my street and carefully into my driveway. I turned off the engine and just sat for a while, not really knowing what had happened. I rolled down the window and put my hand out to feel the side of my door. I felt a jagged piece of metal upon which I cut my finger. I rolled the window back up and got out of the car slowly. 

In the moonlight I could see that the side of the car had a narrow cut into the metal that ran the full length of the car. It was as though an old-fashioned can opener had been inserted at the front and run down to the rear, in a perfectly straight line. I had apparently drifted into the metal guardrail and bounced back into the freeway like a pinball. Why I didn’t crash through the guardrail, or flip over it, or crash into another car when I bounced back into the lane, I’ll never know. I must’ve drifted so slowly and almost perfectly parallel to the rail that it tore the front to back hole in the side but launched me back into the lane, still moving. I stared at it for a long time. I went in the house and went to sleep one more time.

A few weeks later I was back in school and in the student center reading the weekly newsletter. There was a story about the death of one of the students over the Christmas break. He had been in a car accident, killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.