Epilogue - Death Cheating Maniacs Part III

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.  The autobiographical story to this point.

Chapter One - Boring but Short.
Chapter Two - Death Cheating Maniacs.
Chapter Three - Death Cheating Maniacs Part II
Chapter Four - Sex and the City
Chapter Five - A few more stories

So, I was 15. We all had fake draft cards and would drive from the North Side of Pittsburgh to Pappy's bar in East Palestine Ohio, drink 3.2 beer, and listen to Credence Clearwater Revival on the box. Green River was played a lot there.
Just about everyone else we knew would sit on the wall in front of the high school I was freshman at, that was right across the street from the Police Station no less. We couldn't understand it. This is not what life is for eh.

These were fast times, meeting girls from all over the place, drinking alcohol, driving with the one dude in the group who actually had a license, and we were soon to obtain our own drivers licenses and The Doors were about to break into the scene in a major way. Interesting times were coming. The Doors was the first concert I went to, and I remember Jim Morrison singing Light My Fire at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh and hundreds of girls tossing their panties up on stage. I wondered, Gee what's he got that I haven't ? Course I wondered the same thing when girls swooned over Paul McCartney or Sean Connery...

So, back to the present past. We're all 16 now, getting drivers licenses, some of us getting vehicles, some of us - poor like me, stuck being a passenger a while longer. We all had a taste for alcohol and we ran into a wino who's name was Beansie. In Pittsburgh, you had to go to a state sponsored liquor store in order to buy wine or booze. Beer was only sold through bars and beer distributors, not at the supermarket like the present. Beansie would go into the State Store with our shopping list, come out with two large shopping bags of booze, a couple bottles of which would be his for his trouble and the rest for us.

We'd toss a Doors 8 track tape in and head for the twisting country roads, million dollar mansions and mile long driveways of Sewickley Heights. We'd race the cars and drink booze. Man, nothing like 4 wheel drifting on cool asphalt on a full moon night in the summertime blasting The Doors.

This started a long period of time where I found myself a passenger in several total destruction accidents as well as several motorcycle incidents of the hair raising variety. Following are 7 that I remember that are interesting enough to write about.

The Evil Knievel Jump

So, in the last chapter is where I broke my left leg on the 250cc Harley, and now it's a year later and I'm out of the cast walking normally again, and my older brother Steve and I decide to go see our uncle in Elyria Ohio. It was a fairly cool spring day and we suited up, me with 3 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of pants, couple shirts, jacket and some gloves and took off on that motorcycle. It took a while to get there - 3 or 4 hours as I remember from where we lived in Pittsburgh.

Here's another picture of one.

It got colder as we drove and I was just constantly shivering. Me on the back and Steve up front breaking the wind, I wondered how he was feeling. We're well into Ohio now, off the interstate and on a long two lane road heading toward Elyria. The road was as straight and flat as an arrow and I was so exhausted from shivering that I was pretty much asleep. Not total dead asleep but that level of sleep where you're disconnected from the actual environment. I didn't know how fast we were going for example and was paying no attention like a good co-pilot should. Steve was in the same shape and level of consciousnesses and had the throttle wide open, which equated to 80 mph on that thing with 2 people on the flat. One thing about Eastern Ohio - it's about as flat as it gets. With one exception....

The place were train tracks crossed the road we were on was elevated and so the road began a fairly steep rise 20 feet in front of the crossing and then down again on the other side of the tracks. Like a jump ramp in an Evil Knievel show.

So, we're going 80, both of us asleep and we hit this ramp and were Instantly awake. As in your life passing in front of your eyes awake. As in a cat sleeping and rolling off a 50 foot high roof awake. Time seems to slow down to a crawl when that happens - a single second takes a minute and I remember every detail very vividly.

The first thing I saw was that my hands and fingers had a death grip on my brothers shoulders and my feet were at an even altitude with his shoulders. His hands had a death grip on the handlebars and his feet were about dead even with the seat. My butt had to be 4 feet from the seat. I felt like stage three of a 3 stage rocket. We never fixed the straps on our helmets so those had already shot off our heads and were somewhere above us. It looked like we were about 20 feet off the road, felt like 40, and on the other side of the tracks was a big white Buick doing a more rational 5 mph or so coming up to the ramp to cross over the railroad tracks. The driver was an older guy, had on a red plaid long sleeve shirt and there was a woman, probably his wife, in a blue and white flowered dress. Both of them were leaned forward with their heads twisted toward their backs staring up out of the windshield at us.

I knew were were going to come back to Earth and instinctively braced for impact, especially the part of me that was going to impact the seat as it touched down again. If my feet were on the foot pegs, you could stand on those and break the fall somewhat but my feet were disconnected from the footpegs with no hope of being reacquainted before landing.

We drop back down on the other side, well past the 'ramp' on the other side and Steve's butt hits the seat and he lets out a loud groan. My butt hits the seat and it wasn't that bad. Maybe all the Adrenalin. Or maybe I was somehow able to reconfigure my body parts temporarily for the event..don't know. Now we're going probably 78 mph and rolling down the road. Steve said later he was afraid to touch anything, move the handlebars, pull on the brakes - nothing as long as were were upright and happily rolling down the road. We drifted to a stop about 1/2 mile away from the railroad crossing and Steve turns around and says 'That was Great! Let's do it again!" Ah no. He was kidding anyway. So we drive back and picked up our helmets. The rest of the trip was uneventful.

Good thing there wasn't a train on the tracks.

Not a scratch on either of us.

Tom The Gone # 1

It's a few months later into the summer and this dude I ran around with had a 250 cc BMW, which I would later buy off him and it would be my first motorcycle. It was a neat bike.  20 mph in 1st, 40 in 2nd, 60 in 3rd and 80 in 4th.  Built like a tank with a drive shaft instead of a chain.

We're out riding in Sewickley Heights, no booze, but zipping along down the 2 lane country roads. At one point we're going 35 and halfway through a hairpin turn to the left and he Stands up on the seat and jumps off onto the asphalt.

I find myself on the back of the bike, no driver on a hairpin going 35.... I put my hands either side of the seat and just wrench the bike upright which straightens the front wheel and I head off into the woods. No way I can get to the controls to brake or anything else. I see what looks like a 'soft spot' and jump off myself just before the bike runs straight into a tree and careens off to one side, breaking the headlight lens.

The headlight was a round metal can, with a regular automotive plug in bulb and a glass headlight lens held on the front with a big chrome ring. The headlight lens was the first thing to break anytime we were in an accident with this bike.

So, I pick my head up, move my legs and arms around to see how they feel and not a problem, not a scratch. I got up and walked back to the road where he is looking at some road rash he got on his arms, and he's telling me, he 'got scared' and jumped off.

I personally think he just wanted to see how I'd react. He is that much of an idiot.


Tom The Gone # 2

It's later in the summer and Tom and I and another friend had a job at a gas station pumping gas. The name of the station was Fair Price, and it is long gone now, replaced by a Wendy's. Later when I owned the BMW, I had broken off the aluminum kick starter and so I would go to the far end of that lot and run like hell with the bike in 2nd gear and I'd let the clutch out which would start the engine, at whch point, I'd fly out into the [Ohio River] boulevard, hopefully with my feet on the foot pegs. Once my helmet was attached on the side of the seat and my leg got caught on it as I tried to swing it over the seat and I'm now in traffic laying on the thing like Superman.


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Our friend is working and Tom and I are drinking vodka straight out of a 1/5th bottle and riding the BMW around. We're both fairly drunk and we're coming back toward the homeland, me on the back with a bottle of vodka, and he driving. We get to a point at the end of where that soft left turn ends and we're going straight now. We're on a brick street that still had streetcar tracks in it, even though the streetcars didn't run anymore. We're going 45-50 mph.  


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It's asphalt now of course.

As the front wheel of the bike apparently drops down into the streetcar track, he turns around to say something to me and Turns the handlebars right along with how far he has turned his body. The front wheel stops dead and the bike literally catapults us off like a couple of rocks hurled at a medieval castle. As usual, my helmet isn't strapped on and it flies off like the 3rd stage of a rocket. Because of the leverage involved in this, with me being all the way on the back of the bike, I'm actually propelled with more force than him and I'm actually flying through the air in front of him. I can hear him behind me literally laughing his ass off. I'm thinking, Geez what a moron, as I toss the bottle of vodka in a direction as far away from where I think I'm going to land as possible and hear it crash on the sidewalk.

I look back and the motorcycle is coming at us looking like a drunken dodo bird trying to fly. It's not going to be able to hit us, so I turn my attention to anything that might be in my flight path.

We are now sliding and bouncing along the uneven brick road, no helmets, and he is still laughing. I slide to a stop, head in the air, moving my butt from side to side as it starts to feel like the jeans are wearing through in one place then the other. The bricks are pretty smooth actually, and I get no road rash, but I slide further than I would have on asphalt for instance. I take a few moments to take stock of myself. No serious damage. In fact, no damage to me. We had to have slid a hundred feet or more.   Not a scratch.

We get up and walk back to the bike. The front forks are bent so that when the handlebars are pointed straight, the front wheel is pointed about 20 degrees to the left. The headlight lens is broken of course but the bulb is still lit, and it's pointed into the sky to the right. So we mount this thing again, and carefully drive off to the gas station where we all worked and the other friend takes look at Tom and tells him he really needs to get to the emergency room. I don't have a scratch, but I hop on the back and we ride the mile or so to the hospital and pull up to the emergency room door. This bike was so bent up, it looked like an old time comedy movie.

This is a small little area called the borough of Avalon, and as there's not much going on and as we pull up, a couple nurses see the bike all twisted up and come out with a couple wheelchairs. I didn't need one of course, but he gets in and they take him in and stitch him up for a couple hours while I sleep on one of the sofas in the waiting room. Seemed like a couple hours, it might have been one or 5, who knows.

This was the old emergency room entrance


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This is 1968 and while drinking and driving could have serious consequences, you'd probably have to injure someone beside yourself to get much attention. MADD wasn't even heard of yet, and so there was nothing in place where the nurses would be obligated to call the police on us.

Tom The Gone # 3

I think it was the following summer, and Tom had a 1965 Corvair convertible.  It looked just like this.

What a death trap that thing was. I think it was the first car Ralph Nader went after. Not so much for us as it happens though. So, there's 7 of us out driving in this thing out on the country roads. Two in the front, 3 in the back, and me and another person sitting with our feet down into the back seat area and our butts on the trunk lid.

Were going about 50 down a 2 lane asphalt road with houses here and there along the right hand side. For whatever reason, probably because he is an idiot, Tom decides to jerk the steering wheel right and left which causes the car to move right and left like its on one of those slalom test tracks. Well, the Corvair, even without 5 people in the back probably would have spun out, but with 5 of us back there it spun out violently, and spun around fully at least 3 times before running backwards into some lady's front yard, going right between 2 telephone poles with maybe a half a foot to spare on either side. Not a scratch of course.

We're like 30 feet off the road into this yard, and this lady came running off the porch with a broom in her hands and she looks like she is going to whack us if she can get to us. Tom hits the gas and puts a couple nice tire tracks into her yard as we head back off into adventure-ville. I'd have stopped and apologized. I mean what's she going to do with a broom..

Anyway, once this kind of thing happened, Tom would be scared enough that he wouldn't do things that stupid again for a couple days, so you didn't really need to worry about hopping out and walking home in an attempt to avoid serious injury. Except today.

As we're driving back home, he decides to work the steering wheel, but let the other guy in the front seat 'work the pedals'. Gas and brake. We're driving along about 40 and he decides to take a 90 degree right hand turn with no notice. As it becomes apparent we're leaving the road we're on, the other guy slams on the brake and we make about a 45 instead of a 90 degree turn and the Corvair runs up onto a wooded hill and gets stuck. We all jump out, find a suitable size hunk of tree trunk and pry the thing off the hill back on to the road. The rest of the ride home was now uneventful. Not a scratch of course.

Tom The Gone # 4

Tom's got a plain Jane 1970 Camaro now and we've been downtown Pittsburgh carousing and drinking.

It's late and we're headed home on a two lane main residential road with plenty of telephone poles, parked cars and all that other stuff that might be in a heavy residential area. I drank a good bit and so I'm asleep, and apparently, at one point, so is he. We must have been going about 50 because after we ran into the telephone pole, I woke up to find the thing literally right between my legs as the passenger side of the front of the car just caved in and wrapped around the pole. I don't have a scratch on me.

I notice he is turning the ignition key on and off, and he's blabbering about 'Why won't it start'. I get his attention and get him to look at where the telephone pole is.
I honestly can't remember how we got home that night. We must have walked. He had a pretty good bill to pay in that telephone pole besides totaling the car. That's all I remember about this one.

Tom The Gone # 5

Tom has a 1960 Ford now.

It's late, and we've had a couple drinks but not much and Tom is displaying his lack of race driving ability once again as he motors down Mt Nebo Rd.  This is the road but I can't take you to the spot because the road is closed up ahread  Probably fell off the cliff.


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It is a twisting 2 lane with a cliff on the right side and guard rails and steep drop down a cliff on the other. We get to a section consisting of a set of hard S curves and he is apparently going too fast because the car spins and over-correcting, he careens across the road to the left and starts bouncing off the guard rails. As this is happening, I am reaching across pulling the now hot cigarette lighter out of its receptacle so I can light my cigarette. I mean, this kind of stuff was old hat now and I wasn't even concerned about what was going on, and remember just thinking about how Tom has ruined another car. The car careens off the guard rails as the road now turns from a right hand turn to a left hand turn and he goes to the other side of the road and bounces off a tree.

Not a scratch on me of course. This time I'M laughing.

Now Tom has a 1969 Z28, all souped up, probably 500 HP. I take a ride in it on a residential street from his parents house down to my parents house, all of about a quarter mile, where it would be impossible to go more than 40 mph. I never got in that car again. I was starting to get some sense and also starting to feel like I was getting close to the end of my 51 lives so I started to slow down as far as driving with idiots went. He never wrecked that one, and we went our separate ways for a while so I really don't know what sort of luck he had with the roads after that. Talked to him years later and never saw him since. We were living in different cities now anyway.

There are plenty of Tom stories, more than plenty but these are all the car destruction things that involved me. And there's no sense trashing the guy, but what a loose canon as an understatement.


Rick's 66 Chevelle

It looked exactly like this.  Isn't the internet, Google street maps and all this stuff Cool?

One winter night I'm out with some guys I played poker with. I supplemented my income playing poker with some guys I mostly worked at McDonald's with, and after the game one night, one of the guys says he knows where we can get some beer. It is at a friend of his who is working on his car in the alley behind his house. A 1966 Chevelle that because of an earlier accident, had the frame all twisted up and they were putting a new frame under it. The body was jacked up and they were in the process of putting a new frame under this thing. Another guy was there, Bob, who later, he and I would be great friends.


It's 100 degrees below zero, and the beer these guys were drinking was freezing as the cans sat on the ledge between sips. The guy who owned the car was Rick and we later palled around for a good while. Bob, Rick and I later becoming room mates in a party rental house. Anyway, by summer this thing is ready to go and he had one of the local shops put all the steering components together, and align the wheels and such.

We are out one night, Rick and his girlfriend in front and another guy and his girlfriend in back and me. And a case of beer. And a large garbage bag for the empties. So we stop at McDonald's early in the evening to grab a bite, and there is a girl in there who looks kind of nice and so I ask her if she wants to ride along with me as we cruise around that night. She does and so she gets in the back with me and the two other people. We drive around drinking beer and making out. After a while, we drop off the girl I picked up at home and we head off toward the other people's homes to drop them off.

We pull up to the light just before this bridge and stop.


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The light turns green and Rick floors it. We are going 60 by the time we get to the bridge, and I'm kind of tired, so, I'm leaning on the interior of the right side of the car just half looking at the road out the back passenger window. At one point, the curb on the right keeps getting closer and closer and all of a sudden WHAMM ! We had hit a metal light pole with the right side of the front of the car. The old kind of light pole that doesn't budge.  If you want to click on that street view and double click to the end of the bridge, the first light pole you see beyond the end of the bridge is the very one we hit.  Still standing.

I was literally looking out the windshield of the car at the road because the back of the car was a few feet off the pavement. The car pirouetted around this light pole and I remember seeing the battery explode as the car danced and spun around a couple of times coming to rest in the far right lane of the boulevard.
The doors fly open and Rick's girlfriend immediately hitches a ride home. I grab the garbage bag full of empties and toss it over the side of the cliff to the right. Traffic stops behind us and the cops appear. Some dude is squealing to the cops that we threw something over the bridge as we deny and look at him like he's cracked.  we've been telling him he's seeing things for 5 minutes or so. The cops want to know if we're drinking, and as we all say no, an empty beer can rolls out from under the car heheh.  We say that must have been there already.

Drinking and driving still wasn't a huge deal but surely there would be more consequences for the driver if it was established that he was. No breathalyzers,and really not even field sobriety tests in those days. That I can remember. No one ever got one that I knew of anyway.

Well, drinking and driving Was a huge deal, there just wasn't a lot of legal avenues for the police to pursue unless you were literally falling over drunk, in which case you'd probably be dead when they find you anyway.

So, apparently whoever it was that put the steering together on the car, either left out the cotter pin that keeps the nut from coming off the arm that runs from the steering box to the rest of the steering components or never even put the nut on. As we hit a little bump in the road the steering rod that connects the wheels to the steering wheel were no longer connected. The way Rick tells it, the car started to drift right and as he made that little adjustment in the wheel he noticed nothing happened, then as he turned the wheel and nothing was happening, he realizes he no longer has control of the steering. He panics, and he is afraid to brake as the car might have careened left into oncoming traffic which as you can see in the picture are not even separated from you by a turning lane. So, we just happened to keep drifting right and hit the pole as opposed to going into oncoming traffic or potentially up over the curb and over the cliff where we'd have gone 150 feet to the railroad tracks below like a Thelma and Louise move.

The car was on the road a week.

Oh yea, Not a scratch.

So the tow truck gets there, and the police offer to ride me to Rick's Mother's place as that's where the tow truck is going to deliver the thing, and Rick is going to ride with the two truck. Nice policemen they were. The policeman asks me to go through what happened and I recount is just like this without Rick's girlfriend or the beer. I get there, and his Mom opens the door and I start explaining that Rick had an accident and would be along shortly with the tow truck and car. She is convinced he is dead and she wraps her hands around my throat choking me and screaming at me to tell her the truth. I thought I was going to die. Seriously. She had me good, and I was running out of oxygen. I wasn't going to punch her or anything, but she finally let's me go as she realizes she is going to kill me I guess. Rick shows up after a while and borrows his Mom's car to drive me home and that caps this particular evening.

Never wore a seat belt, never strapped the helmet on, to this point anyway, and never got a scratch. Anyone know an incantation to keep from calling the Gods down on myself? I knocked on wood and all that.

Well, that's it for the interesting stuff. Another friend and I resumed our high speed driving up in Sewickley Heights PA. Never a cop, never a pedestrian, sometimes a Ferrari that would play with us for a couple minutes on our superbikes before saying goodbye in a thrust of exhaust.

We never had any more accidents now that Tom the Gone was out of the picture, and the other friend - Cookie - is the dude that taught me how to do 4 wheel drifting in my Dad's 65 Chevy Belair, as well as some of the other fine points of driving and for that Cookie, I thank you.

I sure loved those days, but that stuff has to come to an end sometime I guess.

All true, every word.

Well, I'm flattered if you read all 6 chapters.  Personally I think it's a riot and it doesn't even seem like I'm writing about myself sometimes, as in Who Was that guy?  ;-)

A section of Blackburn Rd in Sewickley Heights


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The whole playground area


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