Scariest moment of your life

I dare say. I have been born under a lucky star. But it needs some shining right now.

 

No one is temporarily unemployed... until they are employed again.

 

Whatever. You know what I mean.

 

Automotive department: Not really super-scary, except for what might have been. I'm in an 88 Olds 88, a tank of a car. He's in a rented Geo Prism. I'm going about 35, the road bends to my left and the light is yellow, with no time to stop. He's waiting to turn left. I remember thinking: this dumbass isn't going to turn in front of me. Until he does.

Intertia and good ol' fashioned American engineering are on my side. He goes flying. I bounce off of him, and into the island where the traffic light is. When the world stops shaking, the engine is roaring, and everything is jammed up. I kill the engine, and since the fire dept is only a mile away, they're on the scene before I clear the cobwebs. Luckily I'm wearing my seatbelt, and come away with nothing more than mild whiplash.

Non-automotive dept: The boy scout troop I was in always goes skeet shooting for one monthly campout. I go, and bring only a box of .20 guage shells... because that's all my small-never fired a gun self can handle. Last day there, one leader loads up his semi-automatic .12 gauge with three shells and tells me to give it a whirl.

He should've known better when I could barely raise the damn thing. I should've known better. Fire the first shot, and it kicks like a bastard, but I keep my feet. The second time I wasn't so lucky. It knocks me backward, I lose my balance. Lucky me, my finger is still on the trigger. It goes off about six inches in front of the guy's nose. I was thaaaat close to blowing his head off in front of everybody.

I land on my ass, and it takes me a second to register what happened. His life is still flashing in front of his eyes too. I look at him, he looks at me, I drop the gun and start blubbering, telling him I'm sorry, etc. He says it was his fault handing me the gun. I haven't thought about that in a while, and I don't want to anymore. Yeesh.

 

About 10 years ago, when I was living in Miami, it was the day of the finals of a hoop league that I was playing in. I was at a client meeting about 1/2 hour outside of Orlando and I was running behind schedule to make my flight to make the game. It's raining and I'm going too fast in an unfamiliar rental. A curve comes up on me and I cut the wheel too late and too much. I did a 720 skid from the right lane of a three lane highway into the center grass median. No reason why I souldn't have been in an accident.

About 12 years ago, pulled out of a parking lot and began going straight on US 1 in Miami. The light behind me was red, so I was the only car going my way for 200 yards or so. At the next light, which was green, from the other direction, a guy made a left turn and obviously did not see me coming straight at him. I swerved and hit my right front into his right rear door. I jumped out of the car to see if the guy was hurt and saw a car seat split into two pieces where my car made impact. For about 10 seconds, I thought that I had killed a child in the carseat, but soon realized that the seat was empty.

The first thing that the other driver said to me was that I better have a good lawyer. I actually punched him through his open window and tried to pull him out of his car through the window before bystanders broke us apart.

 

Two moments for me ...

Mother's Day, 1977. I'm 6 and I'm across the street at our neighbor's house when I hear the ice cream truck coming through the neighborhood. I run across the street to get some money ... and wake up two days later in the hospital with my leg elevated, a cracked pelvic bone, cracked wrist, major contusions to my head and more.

A man with his in-labor wife in the back was tearing down my street at 40+ and hit me head on, launching me in the air, bouncing me on the street three times and the thing that stopped my was the front fender of a parked truck.

Two weeks in the hospital, two more in bed and I was fine, although to this day I have problems with my pelvis. But it could have been much worse.


The second moment was January 21, 1991. I'm a Stinger missile gunner on the USS Wisconsin during the opening days of Desert Storm and we go on immediate alert because an unidentified plane has entered our sector. I'm standing there, in the open, with a missile on my shoulder when we get the word that the plane has gotten missile lock on us, so we're free to fire.

We finally see the plane, just a speck on the horizon at first, but coming in fast and we lock on. With our fingers on the trigger and, maybe, five seconds away from firing, we get a frantic hold your fire order.

It was an American plane who'd lost his communications and IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe) system and had acted stupidly by locking onto us.

I was quite a bit edgy for several hours after that.

 

My best bud and I were driving back from a bowl game a couple years ago, cruising about 85 mph on the interstate, which this dude in an F150 going 90 or so decided he wanted to be in our lane. My bud was driving my car, and he swerved. Fortunately, the lane to our right was empty. I do remember thinking this was it for the old Novelisto. It took about 15 miles before my heart rate dropped to two digits. Traffic slowed down ahead of us, and we could see the guy giving the riot act to the woman in the cab with him.

When I was about six, I remember walking around the neighborhood to play with a friend. He wasn't home, and as I was walking back, some bigger kids stepped out in front of me and blocked my way. They started threatening to tie me up and beat me. I don't recall seeing them either before or since, but I do recall running all the way home screaming my head off. Hope someone pissed in their drinks in the drive-through.

Now, I have scary moments virtually every day, when I let my kids go outside to play, then I walk outside and can't see them. Knowing what I do about the world, I get a cold feeling at the base of my stomach whenever I don't know where they are, and it doesn't go away until I see them.

 

9:03 AM EDT September 11, 2001

 

2nd grade -- Accidentally stabbed (myself) with a steak knife about a 1/3 of a centemeter above my eye. Damn near became a cyclops.
7th grade -- hit by car. That wasn't the scary part, although them strapping me to the board and rushing me through the city was pretty frightening.
11th grade -- get t-boned in an intersection and have my leg pinned between the steering wheel and door of my CRX (think that's funny, well, I was fat, too). Have to be cut out of the car with jaws of life. Same ambulance treatment as above.
Fr. year in college -- cokehead roommate comes after me with a 3 1/2 foot samarai sword. Even scarier, cops tell me we're being childish. Oh, cops in Lawrence, kan., they know a good gag when they see one.

 

Swimming in Waikiki a few years ago I managed to drift off of the shelf that runs quite a ways out from the beach in front of one of the hotels. I'm a hell of a long way from the beach in water well above my head. I'm not a real strong swimmer and the current is pretty strong. I start swimming for shore and begin to realize that I'm not going to make it. tread water a little, swm a little, repeat, beach isn't getting any closer. Now I'm pretty damn scared as well as getting a little tired.

Finally, this japanese couple floating on one of those big inflatable rafts spots me and I'm able to grab hold of it. We're kicking in towards shore when a lifeguard paddles out on a surfboard and takes me the rest of the way in. I got real drunk that night. Real drunk.

When I was in college my roommates and I were cutting through the back of this apartment complex to get to our complex. A guy starts yelling at us from his apartment to keep it the fuck down. Next thing we know, he's coming out the window with some kind of shotgun. I wind up on the ground with the barrel of the gun pressed against my skull thinking I'm about to get my brains blown out. Luckily the guy doesn't shoot. Fucker was the dirtbag son of the slumlord who owned the place.

 

I've had a gun pulled on me, a knife pulled on me, was spinning through a median after hitting a slick spot onto oncoming traffic (but managed to plow to a stop in the grass), was sure I was going to die when I tried to swim out too far to a sandbar at the beach by myself while hungover.

Really was more calm or angry than scared through all of that.

Scariest was when Mrs. Ace woke me up in the middle of the night to say that someone was in the apartment. Looked around. Didn't see anyone. What do I do? If I was alone I would have stupidly gotten up and confronted the burglar.

But what if I get whacked over the head and can't protect my wife?

So I quietly call the cops and we wait for them to come. They came pretty fast. Vey professionally looked all through the apartment. Turns out no one was there. She must have been dreaming. So my scariest time was also my most embarrassing.

 

I was the powderman's helper underground in the salt mine where I worked. For years we had set off our charges electronically. This one particular day, however, we were trying a new blasting cap that burned, much like a fuse. We're 900 feet below ground, and as is customary all the other miners had left for the shaft while we went and did our thing.
We had powdered about eight rooms that day. The blasting caps had delays on them that should allow us sufficient time to get the fuck out of Dodge before they started going. It was the fourth or fifth room, can't remember which, and I couldn't get the damned blasting cap lit. Powderman had to go back for a new one (in the golf cart we used to go from room to room). I'm there by myself, hoping he hurries the fuck up. He finally makes it back, and he tries to light the blasting cap and is successful.
But, we've burned, so to speak, a lot of precious time. He looks at me and says we have to light the other three or four rooms. We bust our asses doing so. After I light the last one he screams "COME ON!!!" I get my ass on the golf cart, he floors it (like all golf carts, it has a governor in it), and we head as fast as we can away from the face of the mine.
The explosion blew my hard hat off my head, put the golf cart on two wheels, and my exposed neck was bloodied a bit by the pieces of salt that had pierced it (rubbing salt into the wound, as it were).

I hate doing phone interviews. You can't read lips over the phone.