To Purgatory And Back

Dundalk, Maryland

5 January, 1995

Twelfth Night of Christmas

Thursday, 21:00 hrs

My God. Was it ever cold. Freezing. My car didn’t like it. I’d been having trouble with it, and just had the distributor replaced by a scambag garage on North Point Boulevard. I couldn’t pay the bill right away by delivering pizza, and some part of me mused that they’d slim-jimmed the door, popped the hood and put the old one back in. If so….I had it coming. I was a true asshole then. Seeing a married woman. Always argued with her, and so I was that night. But the cold…as she drove away from me and crossed Merritt Boulevard, at a median crossover, I tried to catch up. Traffic was clear which meant that the light at the top of the hill on Wise Avenue was keeping it back. I began to cross. I made it one lane toward the crossing but the engine was misfiring. She wouldn’t move but at a slow, jerky pace, my 1984 Mustang. Stupid to have a car that old much less a Mustang with a 4-cylinder. What a piece of junk, faded metallic burgundy-red and all. It was ugly.

She stopped, engine running but barely so, and I looked to my left. The light had changed. Traffic was heading down the hill fast, and I was straddling the left lane!

I saw two headlights. Coming up so fast I remember thinking I’m not going to make it, and my eyes remained fixed on those lights, but for some reason, they got smaller, my sight tunneled, and I saw two tiny pinpoints of light.

It’s funny, what led to that moment in time. I was so down on my luck that I’d been reduced to delivering pizza. For the past week, I’d gotten into my car to go to work and the radio was on a religious station. I never listened to that stuff. I would reset it to FM 104.3 The Colt, more or less a classic rock station. And the next night, it would be set to the same religious station when I got in. I tried to think of who could be doing this to me. It wasn’t possible. No one else had an ignition key. Even the scamgarage guys couldn’t be responsible. I was living miles away. And I had a shitload of enemies, so I always watched my mirror. No one ever followed me.

I don’t remember the impact. An eyewitness said the full size van had struck me so hard that my car went airborne and spun around three times before coming to a stop. When I became aware of anything around me, I was surrounded by darkness. I could move, and I was on my feet, but I was alone and surrounded by a darkness so black that I was aware that it was a bad place I was in. I looked down. Either I could see my feet or I sensed myself standing upright, and there was nothing under me. I could tell the dark emptiness went deep below me: I was standing on nothing. Before me, the same. All around me, that same black emptiness. And that was how I was gonna stay. This was punishment. I’d been a loner most of my life. Even when I was married. When I did choose to get close to someone, it was always dirty rotten scummy stuff. Adultery, I knew that one all too well. Ghost hunting. Stuff I knew better than to do, but did anyway. I had been headed here all my life. It was despair. A place I couldn’t get out of. I heard nothing. I couldn’t speak. I was all alone, so very alone. And remembering that feeling now scares me so badly I can’t describe it.

Then I heard sirens, close by but fading. Stopped emergency vehicles. A jaws of life worked the passenger door open. A voice said, “My name is Paul. Can you hear me?”

Everything hurt. Everything’s broken, I thought. Why am I here? Why am I back if it hurts so much?

My face was wet. The cold air made it unbearable. I didn’t even know it was blood. My eyes opened. Well, one did. One had blood in it. And everything hurt so much. I’d known pain. All kinds of it. Pain of my golden mommy, who made me feel so loved when I was tiny, mounting me every Saturday night while dad watched. “Teaching” me. Turning me instead into a fucked-up dysfunctional freak who knew no boundaries when it came to sex, causing me to question my sanity and whether the whole universe was really Hell. Had I died the night my father knocked me out twice and threw me down the steps, the night I found blood in my ears and on my pillow later, and didn’t know how serious that was? Was I already in Hell, tormented by an imaginary life, a life that would never make any sense?

“Paul,” I whispered, desperate with panic and terror, “Don’t let me die.”

“You’re not going to die,” he said simply. I couldn’t move. Never saw his face. My left arm dangled, bloody and cold, out the window. Wait. Where the hell was my window? My married mistress screamed my name. I heard her running. She’d lost me, gone up Wise Avenue and realized I was not behind her. It must have taken fifteen minutes to backtrack and find me. Long enough for paramedics to get there first.

“But I already died,” I told Paul. “I was in Hell.” He didn’t believe me. I never even saw his face. But I could tell.

But then, I could see why my heart had stopped. On my way to hitting my head on the windshield, I’d struck the steering wheel with my chest. I looked at it in the unfeeling wonder of shock. I’d never seen anything like that. The steering wheel was bent up and at an angle to where it was almost on top of the dashboard.

I was put on a short spine board, loaded into an ambulance. I could see my car as I was elevated into the meat wagon. Every inch of glass was gone. It turned out that the van had hit me a second time, from the rear while I was coming back down. Witnesses thought I’d surely been killed.

About 00:00 hrs.

How long I lay in Bayview Hospital, I don’t know. I could not walk. The pain in my back that was so excruciating turned out to be a strap buckle from the spine board under me when I was cinched tightly to it. With crutches, I made it to the latrine, where I pissed blood. I almost passed out, seeing that. I reported it to a bitchy nurse who couldn’t have cared any less than she already did. She ignored it. My youngest brother showed up with his wife and took me to stay in their spare room.

Aftermath

I languished in bed for days, barely able to move. Two things bothered me the most. The first was my hip. Intolerable pain was moderated by nothing. The second was worse. Bruised ribs. To turn myself in bed, I had to reach across my body to grab hold of the mattress, then pull my body over on the opposite side.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why the radio changing channels like that? Why the dark plt? I knew it wasn’t Hell. Had to be Purgatory. But I was raised and taught in such a way that Purgatory didn’t figure into my concept of spiritual realms. In hindsight, I believe my teaching to be mistaken.

I’ve often asked God, why me? Why did he save me, spare me? I’m nobody.

And a lot of people better than I had lived shorter lives. How was I supposed to feel about that? I know the blow to the steering wheel stopped my heart. The deep and painful bruising alone couldn’t be more proof to me. Yet before the medics got into my car, I was back. Can’t explain that one. Except for God sparing me.

It was weird. But it didn’t change me. I continued to be an asshole, and sometimes, a dick. I got a new used car and a union job at a gas filling plant. I totaled my car three times, the last one (actually none were my fault but my record was against me) definitely not on me because a wigged-out dickhead on some fucking awesome drugs stole a pickup truck and ran a red light. And because he was in some gooned-out state of mind, he fled the scene right in front of a Baltimore County Police officer sitting in his car at the Merritt Boulevard fire station. Oddly, the station dispatched to my accident of 5 January, 1995. This was October, 2000. When the guy hit a curb and flattened a tire, he couldn’t maneuver the truck and he bailed and fled on foot. That was a really bad move, because he was off Dunmanway, in Merritt Point Park. In fairly deep darkness as it was cold and rainy, he managed to run right into Bullneck Creek. An officer stayed with me. Kept me at the scene. My car had extensive damage but was legal and capable of being driven. It was totalled because the insurance company just refused to fix it again and gave me enough cash to put down on another car. But standing around with the officer, who was cool and kept asking if I was alright and if he could get me anything, I could hear the chatter over the radio. The pursuit officers were frantic. They could hear someone calling for help but even with spotlights saw nothing. I felt an awful dread come over me. A K-9 unit and a chopper with a bright light responded, but the cries for help had ceased by then. They called off the search. I went home. Three weeks later, near Thanksgiving, a pilot spotted his body floating. Why he was still a floater I never understood, but he had never left the creek, regardless of what the tides had done.

I get why he died. I wasn’t happy about it, but it was drugs and a mind unable to reason under their influence. It hasn’t been any easier to understand death no matter how many times I should have died. And didn’t die, but others did. Oh, the list goes on.

Now I’m faced with the same existential puzzle. Why am I still here while so many people are dying all around the world?

Well, my time will come. I don’t believe in predestination. When people die, they just do. I don’t think God cherry picks souls, and if I did believe that, I’d likely be an atheist. But I’m a believer. And sometimes, God says it ain’t time yet. The why of it isn’t for me to know. But I still feel horrible that so many have left us during this time, never to return. Some never to be missed nor mourned. They were homeless, or had no family, or came from a nursing home, long since forgotten by family. It breaks my heart.

I think it’s a horrific time in history. People better than I am are gone. People who fought the coronavirus, who had the courage to keep doing essential jobs. I’m not playing the “why not me” game. While I breath, however long I do so, I have to keep trying to make a difference. It can be small; that doesn’t matter. It just has to be something that helps the fallen rest. Maybe to show or remind one person somewhere that they taught us something.

That they cannot have died in vain.