The following week I was out of work, unsure about anything. A phone call from my old boss was not them begging me to come back, but rather an interview regarding the accident. There was some question as to whether the event had occurred while I was “on the job” or not, and then several queries about the fate of the dictation machine, of all things. No worries about the old guy, or how my video production was faring, just wondering if the little machine had been delivered or not.

It was late September, and I remember thinking a lot of the dreams I’d had for my future were washing out; Film School at USC, the perfect foot-in-the-door job at Disney Studios, my own production company. I’d failed at all of them, and here I was behind the wheel of a beat-up old Honda, dooming hapless, aged pedestrians. I felt like a menace, to myself and the world at large. I took some solace in the fact that I was not yet 21. That I was still young, and with several years left to really mess things up before the success would, inevitably, come. I was still going to conquer the world -there was plenty of time- it just wasn’t going to be today. Maybe next week.

Which was when I got a phone call from an old high school buddy telling me that Susie had been killed in a plane crash. It was a stunning piece of news. She was the first person I knew from high school who had died, and the truth of the event hit me with a blow powerful enough to mature me on the spot. She’d been the girlfriend of a close friend, and one of the girls in our close-knit group of high school buddies. And you’ve heard it before, but Susie was one of those people who was so perfect; young, happy, innocent, pretty, never wronged another soul, never said hurtful things, and always never did anything less than cheerfully look forward to what life had to offer.

There was a service that week, and a thousand people were there. It was hard to believe she was gone, this lovely little woman, and all us young college students reemerged from wherever we had abandoned to in the world, and came back home to pay our respects -whatever that meant. She was gone, but we were the ones who felt like ghosts. There was a palpable sense that the sheen of all of our youth had been stripped away a bit, and that an end for us was out there, and that we would one day have to reckon with it.

It was us in the church, and all the parents, all who loved her and her family. And while the parents mourned, the teenagers were in shock, still feeling like maybe we’d bump into Susie next week somewhere, at the gas station, or at a party. And I was feeling some strange guilt about it all, because I remembered the last time I’d spoken to her, and the last time I saw her.

It was the previous New Year’s Eve, and we were driving through Pasadena on the Rose Parade route. She was following me in her white Volkswagen Jetta, and I was in my new (used) Honda Civic hatchback, which I had just acquired a couple weeks before. I stopped at an intersection somewhere, and without warning she had plowed right into me from behind. Everyone was fine, and her car had nary a scratch on it, but mine was pretty bent up as a result. The back was dented, the sides were crunched, and my rear bumper nearly dropped off. We didn’t call the cops, or anything, and I was going to let it go, but for some reason I called her at college a few weeks later and asked her if she’d had any insurance or could offer me any help in repairing it. She told me she’d been under the impression that I was fine about it all and had let it go, and why was I calling her now? Which embarrassed me, and made me indignant.

And here now I was ashamed of myself, and from there I did let it go. At the service for Susie, a friend pointed out the old dents, and recalled the New Year’s Eve. “You can

never fix it now,” he said. “The car’s a legacy.” Well, the car was something. It was really all I had, and now, here, we had a history. But the car was just going to be whatever it was. I never washed it, never worried about scratching it, hit a few other things with it, and then recently, the old man crossing the street. And that was life. Life. So much of it was so embarrassedly unintentional.

And the next day I got in it and headed east on Interstate 10, the “Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway”. I figured I’d just drive for a few months. See if there was anything out there that wasn’t here. I didn’t take much with me. But I had my leather jacket.