My first dodge dart
was blue- grey. I bought it for $500- during the summer after I graduated from college.
A nice couple that was about to birth their first baby was upgrading to a dart
with brakes. They had named the car “spot” as it was speckled with freckles of
rust. It eventually died a natural death. The second dart was shiny, black, and
sporty with only 2 doors. Stylistically speaking, it was not my thing (too
slick), and also it had some issues, so my father found me the third dart,
which was from New Jersey, and thus was mostly rust free. It was a minty green
and in relatively good working order. I loved that car and drove it south from
Boston one August to camp on the North Carolina coast with my boyfriend,
photographing its gleaming green boxiness against the sand and crystal clear
sky.
One September
morning, after returning to dreary Boston and to grad school, I parked on
Huntington Avenue. While mindlessly filling the parking meter I was approached
by a man. Older, scruffy, clearly disconnected, pretty well crazed. Initially I
thought he’d ask me for money, which of course I did not have any extra, I was
after all a student driving a 20 year old car.
I was therefore confused when he told me to get in the car and give him
the keys; this was before carjacking had become really popular. But he had a
knife and he pushed me into the front passenger seat, took my keys, got in
himself and started driving down the street. Now, if you can picture Huntington
Avenue in Boston, the main thing that you’ll see is the trolley tracks, and
indeed the man turned left starting to cross the tracks, at which point he
decided that I should leave the vehicle. “Get out” he grunted, which again
confused me, as he did not stop the car, so he reached over me, opened the door
and pushed. Somehow I had become tangled in the seat belt and he dragged me
circling over the trolley tracks. I don’t remember if I became disentangled
from the seat belts and managed to fall while he was still driving or if I was finally
able to make my exit when he crashed head on into the concrete trolley
abutment.
This was about 9am
on a Friday morning and there were plenty of onlookers. There were commuters,
students, museum-goers, etc. As I lay on the street, bruised, and bloody,
watching the man slowly loping off toward Mission Hill, I heard conversation
about me and directed toward me. It seems as if people were thinking that I was
connected to the strange fellow and they were witnessing a scene of domestic
violence. Basically the word was that I was his whore and was not behaving.
This was despite the fact that I was dressed in modest art student attire.
Finally though, someone did call an ambulance and I was taken to the nearest
hospital where it was discovered that miraculously, my knee was the only
physical part of me that was busted. And furthermore, all that would be
required to fix it was a few layers of stitches, ibuprofen, ice and some rest.
My live in boyfriend
who worked 24-hour shifts at a teen shelter had chosen this particular morning
to sleep in, and we had quite deliberately muted the phone’s ringer. I felt stressed and alone knowing this, but
the answering machine noise finally roused him, and he got on his bike to ride
to the hospital to pick me up from the ER. (We pretty much shared that dodge
dart). Bill showed up right about the same time as the dean of students from
Museum School, and I felt utterly bedraggled in her smooth, unharmed presence
as she drove us home to Jamaica Plain in her late model Mercedes.
My prim and disapproving neighborhood
auto insurance agent, Mrs. Fowler, became warm and sympathetic upon hearing my
news. She couldn’t fix the fact that I had only carried collision on the car,
but she was able to get the insurance company to pay every cent of my medical
bills.
