The One Track Song Man (eBook)

Ch. 1 - Angel on my Bike

April 12, 1979 - I had had the Yamaha 250 Enduro for three weeks and was just getting good and comfortable on it. It was my senior year of HS, I’d just finally taken up a high school sport being tennis, and had been commuting to school on the Enduro and to tennis practices on it when not finding trails to ride on. It was a sunny spring day and Holy Thursday before the Easter weekend, and I had been riding around Young’s pond and woods having a blast, really feeling the angles, gearing and handling of the dirt bike while classmates and older graduated young people hung out, played Frisbee and had a kegger at Young’s Pond/Field in the main field. I wasn’t drinking beer, especially with my new enduro biking and tennis every day, and my stimulant of choice had always been Cannabis/THC. I hung out with the kids who smoked it and were musicians, comedians, rebellious, smart, on soccer or swim teams and communal in nature. Exploring on my 10-speed bike and discovering and then selling the Cannabis, had taken the place of baseball my entrance into high school and Freshman year, and just continued throughout. My dad had divorced my mom and split for Mexico when I was 11 and my Mom had re-married a drunk Irish train man/collector, so I had made all my own decisions - how to spend all my non-school time and with what friends, ever since. When I started selling the motivational and fun seeking bud in the late 70’s and becoming a very good and well liked salesman of mother nature’s best, there was basically no going back to sports teams or to my favorite game of baseball, for sure. It was my last spring in high school before heading out on my own to college in the Fall, and I had stopped smoking and selling weed for the prior weeks since returning from a late March spring break trip in Ft. Lauderdale with a fellow dealer non-friend that had ended quite poorly. I was psyched to continue getting better at tennis, leave my most derelict and drug selling only friends behind soon with college, and was especially psyched to get good with and go everywhere on my sweet Yamaha 250 Enduro that I’d bought from Eddie Vick, who had raced dirt track on it. It was getting sweet keeping up with my graduated older buddies Ron and Beman who were awesome dirt bike riders who loved riding all their motorcycles, especially off road in their backyard accessed trails and marshes.

After all my fun solo dirt riding at Young’s in the woods, I headed over to the party and keg in the field. As soon as I pulled up, a really cute girl I had always liked who was a year younger than me but went out with a 20-something musician and singer who wasn’t around for once, asked me for a ride. With her arms around my waist and with everyone watching her hop on and take off with me, I started to punch it like I had just been doing myself on long straight-aways, while feeling quite pumped to have her arms around my waist for the adrenaline ride.

But I quickly let off the throttle and leveled off at a medium RPM as the faith and

trust she had put into me, and concern for her a little, hit me. So I then just cruised her around the field and then around the woods at a mellow speed, and at the slower speed we could also talk. I told her how much better I was getting on the bike and at tennis (#5 on the team with sights set on #3 next match) and that I was getting psyched about heading off to college and out of town after the summer. Too quickly our loop was up it seemed, and I dropped her back at the party and field with her girlfriends, smiles on both of our faces. I told her I’d be back in an hour and took off to find my two biking buddies who I figured were tearing up the trails, woods and marshes just a couple miles away.

Sure enough I found them half-way down Pleasant Point Road, and just coming out of a trail with Ronnie leading in front. I had always just hoped not to get totally dropped by them and then lost in their maze of woods, marshes and dirt trails when I rode with them. When I met them this time where the trail meets the road I said, “There’s a cool party at Young’s with lots of girls and a keg, wanna go there now or after we ride a little?” When they both looked at each other, smiled and said “let’s go now”, I spun around and started heading down the road and back to Young’s, with Ronnie behind me which felt a bit strange. They both had much bigger and faster Enduros than me, had been riding many years compared to my three weeks, and would blow by me and show me the real trail riding when we hit the dirt later after the park, girls and party.

On the approach to Young’s field on the winding road, there was a right, left, right curve sequence for me and I was cruising along leading at 30 mph or so while taking those 3 sharp turns in a row. On the last sharp right hand curve and with the low 3 foot stone wall of the field to the right of me, suddenly out of nowhere there was a crotch-riding street biker at a 45 degree angle smack in front of my right lean and turn, and I made the split second decision to lean left as he creamed into me head-on and on my right side.

All I could remember after that and about the accident scene when I briefly had consciousness, was trying to look and get up and having my torso pushed back down while being told to “stay down and don’t try to look” by some lady who hovered over me with lots of people on the periphery. In the one brief glance I had gotten, I saw my fore-arm bone sticking out of my skin and a big pool of blood underneath it before I passed out again. I only remember briefly regaining consciousness one other time – in the ambulance, when I saw worried faces on the paramedics working on me and I had asked them “Am I going to be OK?” In a low but also confident voice I heard back “I think you’re gonna make it. You had a good Samaritan and paramedic show up moments after the accident. We’re almost at Yale-NH Hospital and they have the best doctors in the world.” My mind clicked on all she had said, but then shut back down, as I lost consciousness again… and basically “woke up” from my sedatives and surgeries induced “sleep” again two weeks later in Yale-NH’s ICU. For those two weeks I had had incredible, fantastic, morphine dreams of flying through the air often and in crazy plots and sequences, mixed with blue masked faces staring down all the time, elevators and automatic doors opening when I wasn’t dreaming.…or was I dreaming them too? One of my recurring dreams was of my Dad standing over me with hands folded, never speaking a word and with an expressionless solemn look which I had never before seen on his usually very animated face. The one of my Dad hovering over me had not just been a dream, I found out later.

As I came back to painful life, consciousness and reality one day in the ICU, my mom and sister Regina gradually filled me in on what had happened 2 weeks ago. As I came back to consciousness and reality, I soon noticed when I looked down past all the big orange sutures coming out of my chest and stomach, that my last nightmare dream of my leg being amputated and GONE, was not just another dream. My mom did most of the talking as she told me - the first hours at the hospital and then all through the first night, the family was told by the doctors and chaplain that I probably would die, as the injuries were just too severe and they could not stop all the bleeding and from the femoral artery. My quite religious grandfather prayed continuously, while I amazed and inspired the world’s best surgeons who performed first-time procedures on me as my heart kept beating as I set one day and one week pints of blood used records for Yale-NH, and they kept pumping it into me as fast as it drained out. After all the life-saving surgeries and procedures and on the 10th day when my near death and serious condition had slightly improved, the decision was made to gamble on finally amputating the leg. After the amputation, my vitals and prospects immediately began improving and the docs told my family, “Well the leg’s gone, but the good news is that he’s definitely going to live.” My Dad down in Mexico, had immediately flown in after the accident and stood at my bedside in ICU between all the life saving operations. But then mom also mentioned how he had left and returned to Mexico...