A DELETED SCENE

My 1st Car Accident...

MY BOOK COMES OUT AT MIDNIGHT, So I picked this little passage I edited from JOYFUL RECOLLECTIONS OF TRAUMA about my 1st car.

But before I get to that.

Some of you have already gotten a copy early; see the Pre-Orders work. I love the responses. THANK YOU.

It will be a nerve-wracking two weeks on my Press/Book Tour. I hope I see some of you out there. I’m equally excited and terrified as this book comes into the world. I thought doing a video substack this week would be fun, so leave me a question, and I’ll answer some questions.

If you haven’t seen this piece on CBS SATURDAY MORNING, I thought it was great yet surreal to watch

If you haven’t RSVP’ed to an Event or Purchased the Book, DO IT! (Thanks, Sorry for the Hard Sell)

Now, here is a deleted chunk from ODE TO A MINIVAN

….All these bad moments with cars made it feel like I was living in some sort of rejected Stephen King novella about a Car that didn’t kill; it just bullied. So when picking out my 1st car, surprisingly, it was an easy choice. I didn’t lust after anything; I didn’t have a dream car. So, I just picked a car from pop culture. One that permeated every aspect of my life at the time, I wanted a WHITE FORD BRONCO. Yup, I wanted O.J.’s car. That was nixed, and instead, I was given a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass that cost $800. The car was exactly my age, and I thought that was a good sign. It was in pretty good shape, but it needed a paint job, so I brought it to Earl Scheib. They offered a service where they would paint your car for 99 bucks in 30 minutes or less or something like that. When they asked me what color I wanted, I didn’t care. I asked the cashier, an older woman who seemed like she was over EVERYTHING what color she would pick, she tapped her long heavily decorated fingernails and said, BURGUNDY…with Sparkles. I didn’t know Sparkles was an option, so I was all in. My car looked great, especially if it was in a 1970s crime film and this was the villain's car. The paint job peeled in certain areas after the first rainstorm, and I never attempted to fix it. But I loved that car. It smelt like old cigarettes, but in a good way. Like the cigarettes smoked inside were before a time when we knew about smoking’s correlation to cancer. My car smelt like it was seasoned with the golden flavor of tobacco and not the burnt dead butts of a smoker who smoked two packs a day. It's a subtle but important distinction. Now, was it a perfect car? Absolutely not. Sometimes, when the A/C came on, the car would fill up with white smoke as if poison gas was flooding a room in a James Bond film. I needed to fill the gas tank every 3 days, the cassette player (which was already outdated) didn’t play tapes as much as eat them, and after 4 months, I had to replace the engine. But it was my first car, and I had protected it for my whole life. I bought something called a COLUMN LOCK. A GIANT metal brace that easily weighed 10-15 pounds would go around the steering column and then be secured by a padlock. This made the Club look like a child’s toy. Now who was going to steal this hot piece of shit? I don’t know, but I secured it every time I parked. I think the car took great care of me because I took such good care of it. I once skidded off the road during a snowstorm, we flew down a snow covered ravine and right towards a large tree. At that moment, I didn’t remember if I should steer into a turn or steer out of it. So I did both, violently and quickly. My passenger decided the safest place for him was on the passenger seat floor, tucked under the glove compartment. We both were very bad at preparing for our inevitable demise. But as I jammed the brake for one last time. KLUNK! We stopped. We hit the tree, or so we thought. We got out to inspect the damage and were amazed there was nothing. The car stopped merely a hair before hitting the tree. It was my first accident, and I had avoided any damage. It was amazing. Then as I was celebrating, I heard a screech, another white car hit the same patch of ice that I just hit. It followed the same trajectory, and like a cue ball heading to a sparkling burgundy-colored 8 ball to finish the game, it squarely smacked into the back of my car. The driver was fine, and we went to survey the damage. It wasn’t that bad. My steel behemoth took the hit, but it wasn’t worse than having a moderate fender bender. Again, we were amazed. Until we heard a familiar screech of a skid on the ice, this time it was a school bus (Don’t worry, it was EMPTY) that hit the same patch of ice, slid off the road on the same trajectory, and sent the white car into my car which then pushed my car through a tree, the white car into the trunk and then in a last ditch breath of effort the bus toppled over. The driver was fine, but the car was dead. It took 1 car, 1 bus, and a tree to kill it. I had the car equivalent of a Highlander, The Sean Connery one, not the Toyota. The saddest moment was going to the junkyard, taking the plates off, and saying goodbye for one last time. But in all the damage, the hood ornament is still intact and in my possession.