The Accident

I haven’t been able to sleep in a car since the accident.  Some 50 years later even momentarily closing my eyes in a car initiates fast shallow breathing and prickles of sweat.

It was a typical early summer night in the suburbs of Denver. We lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of 60’s ranch style homes. My mother had designed and built ours in 1960, and we moved in in 1962. The local elementary school (Fallis Elementary (Phallus – yes)) was 5 blocks away and we walked whatever the weather. The biggest cemetery in the city 3 block from home. All the neighborhood kids rode their bikes in the cemetery and pushed leaving until the last moments until the gates locked at sunset. Everyone had stories about kids caught overnight and bloody knives in the road. When they were 8 and 9, John and Spero got into a hard physical fight after watching The Three Stooges. In that particular episode Moe slams Curly’s head into a wall several times to “boing boing boing”, so John chased Spero down the hall with a sock he was going to shove down his throat – “I’m going to cram this so far down your throat you WILL shut up” - and Spero stopped when he slammed his fist into the drywall at the end of it. He put a cantaloupe size hole in my mother’s prized raffia wallpaper. The Three Stooges was banned in our house from that point on. John and Spero shared a room but would not speak to each other directly again for 25 years. At the dinner table John would say to me “have Spero pass the salt” and Spero would say to my mom “does he have to eat so loud”?

My aunt and uncle had come over in the evening to help my parents get us all get ready for the big trip. Never On Sunday was showing on one of the 4 TV stations available. Aunt Irene kept asking “don’t you think I look just like Melina Mercuri” and sucked her cheeks in. My uncle Soc (Socrates) kept yelling “Opa” and slapping the floor and wasn’t much help at all.  Soc and Irene couldn’t stand each other.

My parents were taking me and 2 of my 3 brothers on a 4-week trip to Greece, to expose us to our inherited culture and history. My mother was born in Denver to two Ellis Island immigrants and didn’t speak English until the first grade. She developed her pretense and vanity after she married a doctor. She also learned to spend a lot of money. She loved Old Hollywood and ball gowns. My father was a Fulbright Scholar from Athens, came to Denver to practice medicine with a focus on childhood asthma. He had wanted to be a pediatrician or a psychiatrist but opted for a more research oriented lucrative path. He met my mother at a Valentines dance at the church and never left.

We flew Pan Am and got silk eye masks, dinner, breakfast, slippers and blankets from impeccably dressed female flight attendants. They looked as perfect at the end of the long flight as they did at the start. The Olympic Air flight to Athens from Munich was very chaotic, hot and filled with cigarette smoke and yelling.

When we arrived in the madness of the Athens airport, we were missing a bag in the arrivals area. My mother decided to leave Chris with my dad and took John and me to the missing luggage desk. A short, stocky man was on his own and the line was about 15 people long. It moved faster than expected as he dismissed person after person. When we got to the desk he disappeared for about 15 minutes and came back reeking of cigarette smoke. My mother told him we were missing a soft suitcase that looked like a shaggy Turkish carpet, mine. “Excuse me sir but my family is missing one bag of the flight from Munich. He looked at her claim ticket and said, “no it’s not here”. Looking behind him and to the right, my mother easily spotted the bag. In Greek, there are many words for what there are only one or two of in English. For example -love. Another word with many choices is stupid. My mother pointed and said in Greek “there it is right there” and launched into a chain of select examples she could remember for the latter in very loud Greek “manure dog, toxic animal, I’m going to boil you”. All remembered from her parents yelling at their kids. He fumed and refused to look at her and gestured to John to go and pick up the bag. He flipped the “closed” sign up and promptly left the desk again.

When we got back to my dad and Chris I said, “I have to use the bathroom”. My parents looked at me in horror. “No, you don’t” my mother said. “You really don’t”.  I held it until the hotel.

After a few searing and smoggy days in Athens tromping around the Parthenon on dirty, sore feet, my family rented a very small four door Fiat to tour the country in. The car was a manual transmission diesel with no seat belts or air conditioning. After having a bottle of wine at lunch my father packed the five of us into the car, and my mother crammed her large, hard cornered jewelry bag under her feet in the front. As a middle child I was stuck in the middle of the bench backseat between the two boys, Chris who was 8 and John, 18. Dressed in short shorts, sweating on the vinyl seats, thigh to thigh. It smelled like boy. We were too hot to fight. And slightly nauseous from our father erratic driving. He learned to drive at 35 and could never find the right speed or negotiate lane lines.

The Doctor (as my mother Electra preferred to call him) took the wheel and we set out for Corinth. He was dark and thick set but not heavy, with glasses and a perpetual bemused smile. He was prideful of his intellect and had a somewhat disorganized scientific mind. He had a very heavy Greek accent which I could only hear in recordings of his voice. He read philosophy for fun and never swore or watched television. Electra was quite beautiful, a combination of Jackie Kennedy and Ann Bancroft. She had the Slavic/Greek features of hazel eyes, light brown hair, perfectly arched brows and a very square jaw. She dieted constantly and was vain about her looks and weight. She wore a jaunty scarf around her neck every day and was obsessed with food. My “American” friends would come to the house and see an octopus in the sink, or a lamb’s skull on the kitchen counter.  She wore the same oversized Jackie O sunglasses that were the height of fashion at the time. She was never without her gold bangle bracelets and light pink lipstick. The sound of the bracelets was always comforting to me.

My father was fixated on getting souvlaki (kebobs) at a roadside stand. The end destination for this day was Sparta. All I wanted to do was swim.

Because of the long lunch we approached Corinth in the late afternoon. The smell of salt water, diesel fuel and fish at the canal preceded our arrival on the main, congested road through the small city.  My father pulled over across oncoming traffic after seeing an open-air grill with a large mustachioed man tending it. He hit the brakes hard just a couple of feet from the grill. “Dino!” my mother semi shouted. The cook behind the grill was visibly irritated and almost started a fight, his hands were balled into fists. Leaving the car first my father called “Hello good sir” in his native Greek accent and immediately ordered two shots of Ouzo. “My family is starved for your world-famous souvlaki. I have been able to think of nothing else since we left the US”. The cook was big and sweaty, and his undershirt stained with charcoal, grease and blood. The two men drank together and swapped geological and antiquity stories in Greek.

After ordering souvlaki, soggy fries and Coke we all sat at a butcher paper covered table under the faint shelter of a clear plastic tarp and waited for our food. The food was delicious – perfectly seasoned and grilled, crispy on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside. The added lemon juice after the kebabs came off the grill was perfect in the summer heat. Ice cold Coke cut the grease and our bad moods. After everyone had eaten The Doctor ordered another two skewers and continued to drink and hold forth with the cook and any other customers who happened by. He was oblivious to anyone else’s discomfort.

It was getting dark, and Electra was growing more and more irritated and anxious. She doesn’t drink and isn’t very interested in other people. “Your father” she said with a period on the end. A few terse words to her husband, (polite, cold, and passive aggressive “do you think you’ve had enough” and “another one?”) we all got back in the car (which was more like a tin can) and proceeded at a crawl through the city. Dino was pouting and Electra was fuming. He usually held his rage until it exploded in an over reactive way at noise, play, a barking dog or slurping soda through a straw at the bottom of a glass. But not that night. She muttered “God damn” under her breath over and over. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind that he shouldn’t drive. The kids were almost catatonic. “Shut up, move over, you’re hogging the seat, roll the window down, I’m so full” and “it’s so hot” was all we could muster.

I was in the middle again and put my head back against the top of the bench seat and closed my eyes. It was dark and the noise from the road pronounced. The ride jerked and swerved. We approached the turn to Sparta and stopped to make a left turn. When the tires under the car went silent, I registered an intense bright glare cross my face. I saw sharp white under my eyelids.

I woke up alone in the car, and it was upside down. I was kneeling on the roof desperately searching for my glasses in the dark, which I’ve needed since the second grade to see anything at all. Feeling around in the glass and dripping fuel, I found them intact right behind my back. It was silent. It smelled like burning rubber and diesel fuel. Kneeling in broken glass I became slowly aware of where I was. Fear began to creep through the numbness. I was alone, in danger in the dark. Looking through the broken passenger window I saw my older brother John standing 20 feet away with his hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth. This foreshadowed the kind of man he would become. My father was10 feet away from John and stumbling towards a small group of people standing outside a tour bus. My mother was holding Chris to her side and screaming in American accented Greek at what appeared to be the bus driver. Mostly select curse words and insults. A similar but more varied choice than at the missing baggage claim. Variations of “fat immense idiot”, “dog brain” “swine ball sack” “huge asshole moron” and “sister fucker” (which was a very rare one). I slowly crawled out the broken window. I remember it as the only option. But confusing. As I slowly stood a few feet away from the upside-down shell of the Fiat warm blood was streaming down my leg from a large piece of glass stuck in my knee. Again unsure, I walked slowly towards my family. I was joining them from a lack of other options. If I had been an adult, I would have probably kept walking. No one said anything. Someone from the bus handed me a paper napkin for my bloody knee. I was cold and shivering it the hot summer night.

Later, at the hospital, we were patched up with remarkably few injuries. My gashed knee and cut hands, Chris a mild concussion and Electra a contusion on her calf and a nasty black eye from the hard corner of the jewelry bag. My father and John didn’t have a scratch. Their shirts weren’t even untucked. A woman who fainted on the bus got to the hospital first. We were told that the Fiat had been rear ended by the bus and had flipped three times. We were told the bus driver had been drunk. My father had been drunk too, but that has never come up in the many years that followed. This remained a pattern throughout the rest of his life ridden with bad behavior. Unspoken serial womanizing, hard drinking and a 20-year addiction to self-prescribed Vicodin.

Stranded with no bags except the jewelry case, no one was thinking. We moved like we were sleepwalking. It was very late, around 3 in the morning. A doctor called his brother, and he came to pick us up and took us all to his home. We silently made our way into a meticulously clean white basement with cots already set up. The only light was an overhead bulb. The sheets were cool and crisp. No one said a word. We all slept through the night except Chris, who woke up hourly crying.

In the morning the wife of the man who picked us up brought fresh orange juice, strong coffee, tea, warm Greek milk (which no one touched) and homemade toasted bread and butter, and local honey. My father offered money which was refused. I don’t think anyone got their names.

After spending the morning trying to find a driver, my father finally secured a scrawny chain smoker named Bobby, who arrived to pick everyone up in a late 60’s VW diesel van. He was mid-30s with bad teeth and dirty hair. He wore a constant expression of a mild smile that masked intense resentment. “Hello, I am Babby, I will take you” he semi-sneered. The flip side of my father’s smile. We went back to the accident site to retrieve our bags, and nothing had been cleaned up yet. None of the kids wanted to look at the car. Electra was still fuming. I was fighting an encroaching panic; All I wanted to do was swim in the sea and read.

Bobby was with us all for the next two weeks, driving curvy mountain roads in the heat. And smoking.