19. Rescue

In my junior year at the University of Texas in Austin, I refined the art of drinking malt liquor and learned that hurricane parties were The Best. I was from Illinois. We didn’t get hurricanes. Fierce thunderstorms and massive snows, but hurricanes? Never. Anyway, even if we could have had one, I don’t think such storms were allowed in Winnetka. So when the National Weather Service confirmed that Galveston was in the direct path of a hurricane and a few friends suggested we drive to Galveston for a party, I was All In. There were five of us: two 19-year-old boys, two 19-year-old girls, of which I was one, including a girlfriend of mine, and a third girl who was 16 (danger, danger). We piled in a car and headed out from Austin to Galveston for, yep, a hurricane party. Whoo-hoo! What better way to risk a young life than to sit on a Galveston beach and feel 125 mph winds whip through your hair? My recollection of what transpired is somewhat foggy, which is understandable since we set off on our early evening drive with a trunk full of beer.

The hurricane never made landfall. We sat on a beach for an hour, watching the tumbling surf as the swirling sand stung our faces. Sorely disappointed that the party was a bust, we lightened the load in the trunk and climbed back in the car for the 3-hour trip back to Austin.

The 16-year-old girl’s attendance at the failed party was a mystery to me. I never understood why a college student of 19 was dating a 16-year-old high schooler. Her high-pitched prattling during the opening stages of our journey changed to an agitated nervousness as the night made its advance. Sweet Sixteen had secretly escaped from her house for this grand adventure, and she was worried about her parents discovering her absence. Her concern shifted to panic mode, so one of the boys said he knew a short-cut to Austin: a sprawling six-lane highway under construction. After all, he opined, the new road, although not opened, was nearly complete, and we’d get to Austin in no time. 

How we managed to get on this highway-under-construction is beyond my memory. What I do remember is a moonless sky, a vast sea of concrete, six lanes wide and not a car on it except ours, the headlights throwing eery long beams of light that vanished into the black void ahead. Our journey was uneventful until we came to the roadblocks. The Highway Department had placed six barricades across every lane of the concrete expanse, each barricade fitted with a battery-operated red flashing light attached at either end. They were road-blocking monsters. We had a decision to make: do we get out of the car, move the obstacle, get back in the car and drive through, only to get out of the car again to put it back? The four-step process seemed reasonable, but each barricade appeared exceedingly heavy, and anyway, why go through all that effort and trouble when we could drive around the barrier on the shoulder of the road?

Which is exactly what we did. 

The car came to an immediate, jolting stop. All four tires sunk in the deep sand abutting the highway. The car wouldn’t move, we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, and the panic of our 16-year-old passenger escalated to outright weeping. Our two intrepid boys got out of the car to assess the situation, which didn’t look promising. But ingenuity presented itself. The boys came to a consensus on using two of the road barriers as ramps under the front tires.

Upon orders for everyone to get out of the car, the two boys pried from its uprights a heavy, 10-foot red and white striped board, the attached flashing red light, sheathed in a steel box, urging the caution we failed to heed. Testing the weight, the boys determined that tossing the board towards the car would be more practical than dragging the thing. As would have it, yours truly thought it would be wonderful to have one of the flashing warning lights in her apartment. I shouted, “Stop! I want one of the lights!” I stepped directly into the path of the striped board the moment the boys tossed it to the car.

The consequences of my actions happened in seconds. But I’ve always looked back on the event in slow motion. I saw the barrier coming straight for me, as though the only reason for its existence was to take me down. The board slammed into my right thigh, propelled me backward, and as if to fulfill its destiny, the steel-boxed warning light held its path down my leg and ripped it open from knee to ankle. 

Time stopped. Afterward, everything that occurred was like watching a bizarre movie, underscored by wind, sand, and darkness. The boys raced to me, yelling to one another to get me off the concrete, out of the dust. They lifted me to the hood of the car, ripped off their shirts, and ordered the two girls to hold the shirts as curtains to protect my bleeding leg from the wind and whirling sand. We were in a bit of trouble (ya think?). The vehicle was axle deep in sand, and we were on a deserted highway in the Black Night of Nowhere.

I don’t remember much of the immediate aftermath of the accident, except that I marveled I didn’t feel pain. There seemed to be benefits in the over-consumption of malt liquor. Or maybe I was in shock. I knew everyone was in a panic, but I felt relatively calm. I heard the shouting of my friends and wailing tears of Sweet Sixteen. The boys went into overdrive, struggling to get the road barriers under the tires of the car.

Then, out of the distant darkness, coming straight at us were the headlights of a car. Behind the steering wheel was a Texas Highway Patrolman. Uh oh. He stopped, assessed our situation, and with his arm casually resting on the door frame through the open window of his patrol car, said, “Well, you guys got yourselves into this mess. I guess you’ll have to figure your way out.” He smiled and winked — and off he drove. My friends froze in amazement as the cop departed, and as I lifted my head to watch the taillights disappear into the darkness, I thought how odd it was that the cop refused to rescue us. I don’t recall how much time passed as the boys continued to dig around the car tires, their voices of worry echoing in that ebony night before we once again saw hope. More headlights were approaching: this time, a gleaming, white pimped-out Cadillac with what looked like huge angel wings adorning the grille. It turned out the angel wings were the horns of a Longhorn steer. Texas!

The boys waved the car down. In the driver’s seat sat a silver-haired man, his neck draped in gold chains. On the passenger side sat a young woman, probably not much older than we were. She was a bit pimped-out herself: big blonde hair, lips slashed in red, and, as I recall, not much fabric covered her ample breasts. What these two were doing out in the middle of nowhere was a mystery, but we were fairly confident they were not father and daughter. Be that as it was, the elderly gentleman, dressed in a white suit that matched the Cadillac and reminiscent of the movie Stayin’ Alive, got out of the car to hear our story of woe. He informed us that we were closer to Galveston than Austin but still some distance from medical assistance. And then, out of the blue, our sniffling 16-year-old piped up with, “Hey, my uncle lives on Galveston beach, and he’s a doctor!”

Thus, I was lifted from our car’s hood and carefully placed in the back seat of a white Cadillac. I apologized for bleeding on the white leather. The old man drawled, “Ain’t no problem, Sugar.” My girlfriend and the boys stayed behind with the stranded car. Sweet Sixteen sat in the back of the Cadillac with me; she had stopped crying and seemed to gather an inner strength as she told me everything was going to be okay. For some reason, I kept my eyes fixed on the blonde in the passenger seat before me. It was the first time I noticed she, too, was dressed in white. She never looked at me and never spoke a word; her eyes focused on the road ahead. With Sweet Sixteen providing her physician uncle’s address, the Cadillac made its way to a beach house on stilts. I don’t remember the drive, except for the colors of the night: deep, red blood dripping in ribbons off my leg and the startling whiteness that had rescued me in the black sky. 

It was 2 am when upon being rudely awakened by the incessant knocking on his front door, Dr. Uncle, dressed in a plaid bathrobe, white socks, and slippers, feasted his eyes on the rag-tag group standing on the porch: his niece, an old guy draped in gold chains, a blonde bombshell (still in the car), and bleeding me. I’ll never forget Dr. Uncle’s response when asked to assist my banged-up leg. He stared in astonishment at his niece. “I’m not a physician! I’m a dentist!” We all turned to Little Miss Sixteen as though she were from Mars. Nevertheless, Uncle Physician-Turned-Dentist agreed to bring me into his house to do whatever came to his dental mind. In my slight delirium, I watched the Cadillac Couple in White, who I thought might be angels, wave us a fond farewell. 

Uncle Dentist muttered a lot, trying to figure out what to do. After some thought, he decided to place me in a bathtub and pour an entire bottle of isopropyl alcohol over the gaping and bleeding wound. He wrapped my leg in…I don’t recall. Maybe a torn-up sheet. Uncle Dentist then piled us all in his car and drove to Austin. I have no memory of the trip, although I do recall Uncle Dentist was pissed off at his niece.

The searing Texas sun was bearing down by the time Uncle Dentist dropped me off at my apartment. Nancy, my roommate, was floored by the story and concerned about my leg, but I declined medical attention. I was exhausted and slept until the following day. Upon awakening, I noticed my deeply scratched thigh was black with bruising, and my swollen calf had taken on a rather peculiar color. Nancy drove me to the University infirmary, where I was met by a physician-not-dentist who stared open-mouthed at my leg. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked. Upon hearing the story, he shook his head in what I took as resignation (are all college students this stupid?), told me it was “too damn late for stitches,” stabbed me with a tetanus injection and advised me to “hang on”: he was going to lance my wound wide open to drain the infection. Holy Red Warning Light! Bandaged from thigh to ankle, I hobbled to my roommate’s car, where we discussed my injury. Nancy determined that it would be best to tell people I had been in a motorcycle accident: getting slammed by a highway road barricade was a ridiculous story.

Is it? 

I don’t remember how those we left behind on the highway got home or how they got the car out of the axle-deep sand; I imagine parents got involved. Interesting discussions, I suspect. In any case, one week later, I limped to the apartment from class, and what did I find? A purloined Texas Highway Department flashing warning light propped on a shelf. For weeks, Nancy and I enjoyed a red rotating signal lighting up our apartment until the battery finally failed. I loved the boys for presenting me with that medal of valor and rescue. 

Today, the scar remains—a faded slash from knee to ankle, a reminder of youthful folly, of a kind man in a gleaming white Cadillac searching for his lost youth in a blonde girl, half his age. And a dentist who was not a doctor and two boys who brought me the gift of a flashing red light, which eventually became the brunt of jokes about Amsterdam. 

The Texas incident wasn’t the only time I needed rescuing. Did I require a rescue from my childhood? Not physically. My parents took excellent care of my brothers and me; we were never physically abused. My parents were screwed up, and I believe if they could have viewed their children through the gaze of occasional sobriety, they might have noticed our wounds. No one came to rescue my brothers and me. We had to rescue ourselves. 

When I spent a solitary month in Scotland, where I did my best writing and began the journey of my restoration, I came to the conclusion I had to be the First Responder of my life. I had to charge into the fiery stories of failure, of self-doubt, of self-deprecation, and crippling insecurities and anxiety that I wore like badges of my victimhood. Certainly, I understood that there was no knight in shining armor or white Cadillac coming to save me from myself, although it would have been nice. 

The calling on my soul to rescue itself had its dilemmas. I may have determined that I was on the right path, but my steps were hesitant, and I was afraid. I suspect First Responders are afraid, too. Risking their lives by charging into a burning building to save others. But they do it. And I knew deep in my heart I would have to be brave and find the courage to charge into my burning soul – to save myself.

I haven’t been all that successful. I have grown to accept these inner road-blocking critics as life partners, despite how they have cut me open as I fall under the weight of their soul-slamming and shaming. I find an odd and unhealthy comfort in their presence, providing me excuses to be less social and avoid situations that might challenge me. Unfortunately, as familiar as I was and am with my inner critics, they are barriers that have kept me isolated on the vast expanse of life’s possibilities. 

It occurred to me recently, and I mention in my last blog post that I needed to stop listening to the old tapes of my life, now upgraded to digital and therefore readily accessible. It was essential to say New Words to and about myself. I presumed I had a handle on my internal rescue by saying kind words about myself, like “survivor,” “resilient,” “brave.” I thought that was enough; I thought I could go it alone. 

Then my writing group of amazing women asked me to step out of the safe place they had provided me, a move that challenged my self-rescue. My inner critic had a celebration convincing me I would fail miserably at the new venture, and it came at me like that Texas road barricade, knocking me so far down I couldn’t breathe. My friends knew I had fallen, and, I know, out of love and commitment, they chose to pick me up even as I was emotionally bleeding in fear. I heard their voices calling me “Sugar.”

Floundering as I was, shocked as I was at my internal screaming, better known as a full-blown anxiety attack, I understood – finally – that I had delayed long enough. I had to rush into the fire of lies I’ve told myself and stop accepting as truth words that have wounded me. And kick my inner critic in the teeth, better known as “getting a grip.” I needed to repeat and repeat New Words. It took a while for each new word to play its part in dousing the flames and help me find peace, but I’m breathing and stronger now for my efforts. I’m okay. 

Rescue from our doubts and fears, the roadblocks that keep us from moving forward require a community effort. I am indeed the First Responder of my life, as are you, but it’s the community of others committed to rushing into the fires alongside you that secures your soul. They’ll arrive in your darkest moments, maybe in a white Cadillac with Angel Wings. They won’t care if you bleed a bit here and there; they’ll lift you out of the wind and sand, wrap you in bandages of love and say, “Sugar, you’re okay. Get in the car, and let’s get you back on your Highway of Dreams”. 

You know who you are, my angels of white and gold.

Thank you.