I woke up with a splitting head ache.  I didn’t really know where I was, all I knew was that my head hurt a lot.  I got up,  the room was unfamiliar, as was the entire house.  I walked into the bathroom, feeling dizzy and faint I turned on the light.  I soon found the source of my pounding headache.   I had numerous cuts on my forehead with blue stitches holding them together.  I still didn’t know what had happened.  I walked out of the bathroom and tried to go down the stairs to find out where I was, but I was too dizzy and then I became very tired.  I tried to find the room I was in, but I couldn’t remember where I had come from.  I tried to retrace my steps from the bathroom.  I opened one door, then another.  A closet.  Finally I found the room with the blanket on the floor.  I laid back down on the floor and went to sleep.  I dreamed of being in a car accident.  I saw my friend Anthony sitting in a wheelchair next to me, his head bandaged and his leg in a brace and propped up.
        I woke again later.  My head still hurt, and I still didn’t know where I was.  Then I heard a voice, presumably talking on the telephone.  I recognized it.  It was the voice of my best friend’s father.  I managed to make my way down the stairs, still very dizzy.  I sat down at the table and he made me dinner.  He told me I was in a car accident, that much I had figured, but I couldn’t remember anything.    The last thing I remembered was being at the airport, returning from a six week trip in Mexico.  He told me that was about five days ago.  He said that my memory was improving.  About six hours earlier in the night I couldn’t even remember going to Mexico…that meant about two months I couldn’t remember.  He gave me the details of the crash, actually several times.  I couldn’t remember anything that he said.  I asked him several times who was in the crash and where they were.  I asked how long I had been there, and if my parents knew.  When I went to bed about a half hour later, I didn’t know anything more than I knew when I initially going downstairs.  I couldn’t remember anything.
        I woke early the next morning.  I called a friend and she came and got me.  I returned to my house, my cat was hungry from not being fed in over a day.  My boyfriend returned home, he had spent the night with friends.  He only had minor injuries.  He told me what happened in the crash again.   Apparently we were on our way to my house, coming from shopping and we went through a light that just turned yellow.  A girl in a bronco ran the red light and hit the driver side of the Ford Tempo that I was in.  We skidded across the road, hit and plowed over the huge silver utility box on the opposite side of the road, then skidded to a halt about three feet from a house.  My boyfriend and I were in the back seat.  I hit a side window with my forehead, and some how hit my elbow.  The passenger, Travis, got wrenched around in his seat and was taken to the hospital for internal bleeding.  The driver, Anthony broke the steering wheel with his forehead and was trapped in the car because the steering column and the door trapped his leg.  After he was cut out of the car we were all taken by ambulance to the hospital.
        I got 17 stitches in my forehead and neck from the glass of the side window and fractured my elbow.  Anthony got 40 stitches in his forehead, several in his wrist where a piece of glass went through it, and a brace for his leg.  Travis spent 2½ days in the hospital for internal bleeding.  Gordon was just bumped and bruised.
The next week was just for recuperation.  Anything that I did, I got tired.  I walked the block to the accident from my house and I felt like I had just run two marathons in a row.  We talked to numerous insurance people and lawyers, all of them telling us about Florida’s no-fault law where neither driver is a fault and your insurance pays most of the medical bills and then it goes to the "at-fault" insurance and then back to yours or someone else’s, or they come after you, as is Travis’s case.  His insurance people have been calling him day and night demanding that he pay his $2000 deductible, even though he was just a passenger in the car that got hit.  Florida no-fault at its best.   The other day Anthony got a bill from the City of Gainesville for $7000 for the replacement of the utility box that happened to get plowed over when his car veered off the street from the impact.  My medical bills came to over $2000, Travis’s to over $6000, and Anthony is still accumulating them.
        The insurance people called me today to try to settle the case, give me a little compensation for the trouble, and the permanent scars on my face, that their client, actually their client’s girlfriend, inflicted upon us.  I’ve been told numerous stories ever since the accident of how people with lesser injuries than me have gotten $7000 to $30,000 in settlements.  I always saw the commercials for accident lawyers and thought how could someone sue for money from an accident.  But now I realize that the money is there for you.  That is why you pay insurance.  So the money is there, so why don’t you take the opportunity to get a little money out of it.  My dad says that this isn’t a money making opportunity, but I figure that a little extra money for a poor college student is never a bad thing, especially if they are just willing to give it to you.

Accidents
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status—all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
J. G. Ballard (b. 1930), British author. Interview in Penthouse (London, 1970; repr. in Re/Search, no. 8/9, San Francisco, 1984)

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