After the Crash

One Sunday this summer, a friend and I went to pick up the stuff out of Coach Hahn’s car, which had been totaled as he merged onto the highway by Coney Island. Coach Hahn was my high school baseball coach, and he uses a wheelchair. At the desk of the tow-away agency, I said I’d been authorized to pick up his stuff because he couldn’t; he was in a wheelchair. The attendant went to the back to talk to his boss. He misunderstood, thinking that Coach Hahn couldn’t come because he’d been injured too badly. Está en el hospital. But this was not the case, not this time, though it must have been different 40 years ago when he crashed his motorcycle.

Coach Hahn has this big ugly gray van that we called the Hahn-mobile in high school—a great clunking thing with a lifting ramp and lots of room in the back so that Coach could maneuver out of his chair into the driver’s seat. It used to take him long minutes of waiting outside to get ready to go, looking at our watches, the game starting in under an hour, us still here outside school, in lower Manhattan. We always got there on time, and we always packed in a full starting lineup. There was a PlayStation attached to a television that never worked—somehow unscathed, I would see, when I picked through the glass—and one backseat row with seatbelts that everybody used to fight for. There was a running board that was perpetually falling off that Coach urged us exhaustedly not to step on, and a radio antenna that was half bent to a 90-degree angle. The story goes that Coach’s van had been parked in the handicapped spot on Chambers Street, like it always was, at eight in the morning on 9/11, and somehow the car had come out without a scratch except for the bent antennae that Coach refused to get fixed. He called it his living monument.

The car didn’t look too good when we got to it on South Conduit Avenue in Queens. The agency was called Runway Towing because it was situated right next to JFK Airport. This far out, the cars are constantly flying on the Belt Parkway, the planes fussing overhead.

Inside the junkyard, the Hahn-mobile stood out immediately. It was about half as wide as it used to be, and the entire windshield was just gone. We found it cracked on the floor above the baseball bats. It was out of this gaping hole that the firemen had pulled Coach; someone must be looking out for him because he ended up fine. He came out of the thing with a little line on his cheek. Two days later, when I saw him, you couldn’t even see the scratch. Mind you, the van had flipped. It was completely totaled. But he was so healthy afterwards that we hadn’t even gone to see him, just came straight down here to get all of his junk:

Two extra wheels, one of them bent at the spokes; three wood bats, one broken, but not so badly you couldn’t use it; a cup full of change; three pairs of shoes; a box of uniforms. His driver’s license, school I.D., credit cards scattered on the floor. We didn’t put our knees down so as not to get the glass in our skin. Even still, I was brushing it out of my leg hair as I made trip after trip out of the windshield, carrying crap. Pens, pencils. An old banana we left where it was. One CD, cracked in half: The Beatles’ "Help!" This we found funny. Piles and piles of paper, insurance forms and team stats.

I put the important papers and the credit cards carefully in my pocket. They had the same chalky feel of the 9/11 papers that flew over the river and dropped all over the streets—the ones we’d kept on our washing machine, no one wanting to move them, until someone said they might have anthrax. We brushed aside the dust to see the names on the letterheads, the unsigned documents. The feeling of being lucky; how close, real close.

We separated his house keys from the key ring, not being able to pull the car-key out of the ignition. And we didn’t want to fire it up, blow the engine or whatever. On the outside, some of the paint was torn. I looked around sadistically for blood, like I did on the other cars in the lot, but nothing. Either they cleaned them or this was something that just didn’t happen. The antenna was still bent over in the same pose. I told Coach, when I dropped the stuff off in his one-floor flat, you’re fucking lucky. Thank God, Coach, you’re a lucky guy. When we shook hands he pulled me close, his left hand on my shoulder blades, me feeling his scalp and the thick back of his neck.

It took a while to get off of Conduit Avenue. The planes kept coming in, over our heads, lower and lower, to land. I felt that we drove the car a little jittery on the highway, as if thinking about the accident. One wrong move, the speed, the fall, the planes crashing by.

— Mark J. Chiusano ’12 is an English concentrator in Winthrop House from Brooklyn, N.Y.