Thirty seconds later, I felt my body tense, my hands tightening their grip on the wheel, my eyes wide and alert, my heart pounding. I wasn’t consciously aware of the thing that had caused me to react. It was as if my body, independent of my mind, had seen something or heard a sound above the road noise and radio. I clicked the radio off, and just as I did I was blinded by an explosion of light in my rearview mirror. Those headlights hadn’t disappeared at all. The driver of the car on my tail had simply shut off his lights in order to sneak up on me without me knowing, and when he was close enough, he hit his lights and brights at once. The shock of it almost sent me off the road. I shielded my eyes with my hand, turning away from the harsh light. I flicked the button on the bottom of the rearview that darkened the light reflected in the mirror. I sped up to try and give myself time to think, but the guy behind me just raced right up to the rear end of the Tempest, blaring his horn, flashing his lights. For about a mile we repeated this pattern, me racing ahead and him charging right up behind me. The last time I thought there was no way he wasn’t going to slam into me. I sped up at the last second, and there was no contact.
As I drove, my eyes darted left and right, looking for someplace to turn off or turn around, or for a neon sign from an open store or gas station, but the two-lane road wasn’t lit and there was nothing on the roadsides except stone walls, hills, and drop-offs. There wasn’t even much of a shoulder to speak of. Basically, I was fucked. So I just floored my brother’s Pontiac, wishing it had been a GTO and not just a Tempest. Now I was getting bounced around as I came over the crests of the hills, and getting slammed when the car landed back on the road. Whatever the guy behind me was driving, it was having no trouble keeping pace. Realizing I was never going to outrun him, I lifted my foot completely off the gas pedal. If the pavement had been dry, I might’ve slammed on the brakes, but in snowy, slick conditions that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to make the move after coming over the top of a steep hill and the car didn’t slow as quickly as I’d hoped.
At the bottom of the hill, the guy behind me let me have the brights again. He blared his horn as the nose of his car came close enough to my rear bumper to give it a kiss. Instead of ramming me, he took the opportunity to pull to my left and try and overtake me. When he did that, I floored the gas and got thrown back in my seat. We climbed the next hill nearly side by side, and that’s when I saw a flicker of light ahead of me coming over the crest of the hill in the other direction. I felt the sweat pouring out of me, gluing my shirt to the skin of my back. This was it. I slowed down as we got to the top of the hill to prevent the guy next to me from sliding in behind me. An air horn split open the night as the cab of a semi appeared. Now it was time for someone else to panic. I steered right to give the semi as much room as possible if he swerved to avoid the other car. The guy menacing me tugged his wheel hard left to avoid the cab of the semi. As I came over the top of the hill, I didn’t so much see what happened as hear it. There was a bang as the car smacked into the stone wall that bordered the road, and then there was another sharp bang as the semi clipped the car’s rear end. Air brakes chuffed and tires screeched, and a cloud of tire smoke and radiator steam filled up the air behind me.
If I was smart or brave, I’d have gone back to look, to see who it was who’d tried to get me killed, if not kill me himself. But at that moment I wasn’t feeling terribly smart or brave. Mostly, I just felt lucky, and kept on going. I don’t think I breathed again until hours later when I saw the lights atop the George Washington Bridge come into view.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As I came off the Gowanus Expressway onto the Belt Parkway, I was less than ten minutes from home. I was unaware I was much closer to eternity. One second I was listening to the radio, driving in the middle lane, doing a rock-steady fifty, and the next second horns blared, tires screeched, and I was bouncing up onto the shoulder of the Belt. When I snapped out of it, the car was a few hundred yards west of the Verazzano Bridge. I was slumped to the side, my head against the window, my hand on the wheel only because that’s where it had been when I drifted into sleep. I managed to pull fully onto the shoulder while shaking the sleep out of my head. Pretty ironic, I thought, to have avoided some lunatic trying to run me off the road in the Poconos only to fall asleep at the wheel and almost get killed within pissing distance of my house. The irony didn’t keep me awake.
The next thing I was aware of was an insistent rapping of metal against glass. I held my eyes wide open, shook my head, and nearly had a heart attack when I saw a man standing just on the other side of the driver’s side door. He was staring in at me, tapping his wedding band against the glass. Then I noticed that he was wearing a squashed-down hat with a badge on its crown above the visor. Great, I thought, just what I needed to complete my night, getting arrested and having Aaron’s car impounded. When the cop saw that I was alert, he stopped banging at the window and made a circular motion with his index finger. I got the idea and rolled down the window.
“You drunk, kid? Stoned?” he asked, shining a flashlight past my chin and checking out the interior of the car.
“Just tired,” I said. “On my way back from the Poconos.”
He was skeptical. “The Poconos, huh? Don’t see no skis on your car, buddy.”
“Brooklyn Jews don’t ski.”
He laughed at that. “Funny, kid, but that’s not an answer.”
“I was visiting the parents of a dead friend, a girl I went to college with.”
“How far you live from here?”
“Coney Island.”
“Okay. Get outta here and sleep it off in bed, not on the side of the Belt Parkway.”
“Thanks, officer.”
Two encounters with highway patrol cops in two days on the Belt Parkway. What were the odds of that? Okay, so the first time I wasn’t driving and it was ten miles away in the other direction, but still, what were the odds? At least this cop had given me a break, hadn’t slammed me against the car, hadn’t frisked or cuffed me. Was that because I didn’t have long hair like Bobby’s, or because this cop had a sense of humor? It was one of those questions that would never get answered, like “Did Oswald act alone?” When I pulled back onto the parkway, something was bugging me, but I was still too cotton-headed to make sense of it.
I looked at the dashboard clock and figured I’d been asleep on the shoulder for about a half hour when the cop rapped on the window. Was I still tired? Sure, but now I was hungry too. I’d probably been hungry the whole time, but I’d been so close to unconsciousness I’d just failed to notice. So instead of heading straight home, I went to DeFelice’s Pizza under the el. The Gelato Grotto in Gravesend was the most celebrated pizzeria in the area. I loved their gelato, but hated their pizza. I’d take slices, regular or Sicilian, from DeFelice’s Pizza any day of the week over the Grotto’s. DeFelice’s regular crust was as thin as a cracker with a perfect char on the bottom, and they used fresh mozzarella, not that gummy crap they used at the Grotto that came in blocks and had the texture of pencil erasers. And DeFelice’s sauce was sweet, not bitter like the Grotto’s. My mouth was watering even before I got off the Belt at Ocean Parkway.