Velociworld

Turning the Tables

My reminescences on my childhood, and the old man, took a weird turn in the last few days, but here's a Senator story any person with a grim sense of schadenfreude or cruel recompense can appreciate:

1968 or thereabouts. 1969? The Senator was late, very late for dinner. A long drive from Savannah to the farm, and no cell phones of course. But he should have called by then, and so he was MIA. He finally showed up at 10:30 or 11:00 pm, with a bloodied forehead from a nasty gash, and a bleary but defiant look in his eye.

There was a long stretch of two lane between Meldrim and Pineora called the Nine Mile Straightaway, or more properly Midland Road. It is dissected and truncated now, but it was a long straight bit of nowhere then. Where the Senator taught me to drive the following year at 13 years old, because you really couldn't fuck up a 9 mile stretch of straight road.

But he did. Coming home from work, doubtless after a few pops and some to be repaid later legal advice at the bar at Pop Edwards' Lounge, and I'm certain mixing a road cup betwixt his knees as he drove, the Senator ran into a fog patch on the Straightaway. He surely didn't care until he ran into the back of a tractor trailer stopped in the middle of the road. Ran up under it in his Karmann Ghia, saving his head from the fate of so many kings.

Now, even in a state of fugue and fungus the old man was quick on his feet. The rest of this story is apocryphal information from my brother, who took great glee in extracting details from the Senator about his exploits over the years, and what I cobbled together from that night.

It seems the old man crossed the street to the solitary house there, had them put coffee on, then called the cops. Seems the ICC Law, or Mansfield Law, had just been passed, demanding trucks put low bumpers across the rear so people did not run underneath them and get decapitated. Long story short, that poor bastard truck driver got arrested, and cited, and my father got a blue light special ride home.

And knowing his great sense of impropriety when he had gotten away with something, the impulsive cockcrow in him, I am certain he played with the siren all the way home.