By M. Snarky

Being a man of a certain age, I have a tremendous amount of life to look back and reflect on, and it occurred to me recently in one of those reflective moments that I can prove—I believe beyond a reasonable doubt—that life has been conspiring against me. In fact, by all evidence, life has been actively cooperating with Mr. Reaper in trying to kill me in one way or another for my entire existence. Obviously, these co-conspirators have been wholly unsuccessful at this point because I’m not dead yet, however, I’ve had too many close calls too many times to casually shrug it off and I realize how lucky I am to be alive.

I’ll attempt to articulate these brushes with death as best as I can (with minimal embellishment) and how death has been stalking me and is perpetually somewhere in my periphery waiting patiently for the perfect moment to smote me down and steal my energy and convert it into something else useful, like a catnip filled cat toy, perhaps.

I concede here that proving this in any scientific way is impossible, consequently it may appear as though some of the following is contrived even though the facts put forth are true. Nevertheless, I‘ll write the events down in chronological order and allow you to be the judge.

1966 – Nearly Falling Out of a Moving Car, North Hollywood, CA.
In 1966 I was five years old, and my parents had a massive dusty pink 1957 Cadillac Sedan DeVille as the only car for the family. One day my entire family (both parents and three siblings) piled into the Caddy to drive to the wonderland of Fedco (an early version of a membership retailer like Costco) in Van Nuys, California. Fedco had everything from guns to groceries, but the seemingly endless toy aisles were the real attraction for me.

I was sitting on the forever-long backseat of the Caddy on the right passenger side next to the massive rear door. No car seat, no seatbelt, no problem. My mom was sitting next to me, and my big sister and littler brother were sitting on the other side of my mom. My big brother was riding shotgun. As we were driving through the streets of North Hollywood toward Van Nuys, my dad made a left-hand turn, which in itself is not anything unusual, however, at the moment I was leaning hard against the car door with my arms resting on the edge of the open window and was gawking at cars and trucks and buildings and trees and people walking their dogs when the door abruptly popped wide open. I distinctly remember holding onto the door via the open window as if my life depended on it (arguable, but I suppose it did) and I instinctively pulled my legs up. I was probably looking like Kilroy to passersby. It felt as if I was riding on some janky, questionably safe carnival ride at a county fair.

I recall looking down and seeing the gray asphalt zooming by underneath my suspended Keds shoes and I may have let out a boyish scream, but I don’t exactly recall. Hell, I may have wet myself, but I don’t exactly recall that either. Maybe both. Anyway, my mom let out a sharp shriek, and while the car was still in motion, she used her quick Supermom reflexes and leaned over, grabbed me by my ankles, and jerked me back into the car, slamming the door shut with a heavy thud. The door was definitely latched now. It’s a good thing my death-grip didn’t weaken. My dad said, “What the hell was that?” as he continued driving.

This could’ve gone very, very wrong, but here I am reminiscing and writing about my Keds sneakers.

1968 – Cutting Through a Live Electrical Fan Cord, Etiwanda, CA.
I was an overly curious kid who got into everything. The world around me always gave me a sense of wonder and I wanted to know how things worked. To satisfy my curiosity, I liked to take things apart, and although my reassembly efforts were sometimes lacking, this was the hands-on way that I learned so much about how mechanical things work.

We were living in a musty old formerly shiny Airstream trailer that was parked in a corner of a 40-acre walnut farm that was surrounded by eucalyptus trees. I found myself bored one day and was looking for something to do. Well, I found a large pair of cast iron Wiss scissors on the worn-out Formica laminated dining table. This was back in the days before protective plastic handles for scissors existed, so this heavy pair of long scissors was solid metal from the one pointy tip (the other tip was broken off, I think, when my mom tried to use it to pry something open) to the bottom of the large finger holes. I wondered how sharp the scissors were and what they were able to cut through.

First, I grabbed a thin newspaper section and easily snipped off the corner. I found this to be very satisfying. Next, I grabbed some of my mom’s coupons from a pile that was sitting on the table and snip: I cut through a half dozen coupons without much effort, unintentionally voiding them in the process. Next, I grabbed the end of my shoelace and cut it off with one snip too, but it took a bit more effort. It didn’t occur to me until after my parents were yelling at me that they might be mad at me for cutting off the shoelace.

Over in the front corner of the trailer in what one might call a dinky living room was an old oscillating pedestal fan. It had a long, black, cloth covered power cord that was just beckoning for me to come over and cut it. I obliged the impulse. I tried cutting it with one hand, but it was too thick and tough for that. Then I tried cutting the cord again, this time with the cord closer to the center pivot point of the scissors so I could get more leverage plus using both hands and WHAMO! The brilliant blue-white flash of the electrical arc temporarily blinded me, and it also welded the two halves of the scissors together.

The funny thing about electricity is that it prefers to take the path of least resistance, and if that path of least resistance happens to be through an ignorant young boy’s body via a pair of metal scissors, well, the electrons are going to flow through that body as if it were the filament of an incandescent lightbulb—this is immutable science at work—but that fact didn’t make the experience of getting lit up like a 100 watt lightbulb any more tolerable.

The jolt of 120 volts of alternating current at 60-Hz hit me hard. As my body vibrated at sixty times per second (similar to that of a mid-range cat purr), I wondered if this was how I was going to die…but I certainly wasn’t going down without a fight. With as much mental focus as I could muster up in a panic situation, it took a couple of seconds of intense effort to detangle my convulsing fingers from the energized scissors (now magnetized!) and drop them to the wood floor with a heavy metallic clank. Let me tell you, those few seconds felt like forever.

The scissors were ruined and permanently welded either halfway open or halfway shut, depending upon whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The power cord was nearly severed all the way through, and of course the fan stopped spinning. I survived the electrocution, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive the wrath of my dad when he found out I ruined two things with one, um, “experiment.”

In the end, there was an important life lesson hidden in the experience, which was this: There are much easier and much smarter ways to learn about electricity than by foolishly making oneself a human lightbulb.

1970 – Ammonia Tank, Capay Valley, CA.
My family had recently moved to the Capay Valley, northeast of Sacramento, California. This was the sixth time the family had moved since I was born. My dad found an old drafty farmhouse to rent on the corner of a 90-acre cow pasture. It was okay until the wind blew a certain direction at which time the entire house reeked like a massive pile of manure. It’s funny how you get accustomed to things like this.

Adjacent to the farmhouse was an even bigger alfalfa field. We lived in the house long enough to see several harvest cycles. Since the field was already established, the cycle went like this; growing; cutting; conditioning (drying); raking; and bailing about every four months or so. Shortly after clearing the field of the bales when there was only the stubble of the alfalfa harvest left, they treated the soil with what my dad said were liquid fertilizers.

The farmer injected the liquid fertilizer into the ground through a gigantic rake like device with red hoses connected to it and the whole magnificent apparatus was pulled behind a big green John Deere tractor that also had large opaque liquid tanks attached on both sides directly above the rear wheels. I watched this injection process at the fence line with keen interest. I learned quickly not to be downwind from this procedure because the fumes burned my eyes.

The tractor driver wore a white hazmat-like suit, black rubber boots, black rubber gloves, large black goggles, and a black respirator, and he topped it all off with a straw cowboy hat. I imagined he was an alien cowboy from space. There was a large white supply tank of the liquid fertilizer parked near the field on the same side of the country road that we lived on. The tractor driver would pull up next to the large tank, fill the tanks mounted on the tractor, and then go about his business of soil injection.

After school one day, I decided that I had to find out what was in that delivery tank. Indeed, my curiosity was boundless…and sometimes outright dangerous. I walked down the muddy shoulder of the road, looked at the sign on the tank that said ANHYDROUS AMMONIA (I had no idea what that was) and climbed up to the top of the chalky white metal tank from a little metal side ladder. I kneeled over the lid on the top, loosened a few large knobs, flipped the hinged lid open, and stuck my head directly over the opening of the tank to take a look down.

Those ammonia vapors hit me so hard and so fast that my eyes and my lungs were instantly and simultaneously burning from the chemical exposure. I quickly jerked my head back from the opening and then I collapsed to my right side and almost rolled off of the tank. I could neither see clearly nor breathe for a few moments before the involuntary coughing kicked in.

Somehow, I managed to have the presence of mind not to stand up and run away as fast as I could, which was my first impulse. Running at full speed off of the top of the ammonia tank may have looked comical from afar, but it certainly would have resulted in a much more serious “farm related injury.” Instead of running, I blindly crawled over the top of the tank and groped my way around—which also may have looked comical from afar—until I found the top of the ladder with my hands and quickly scrambled down, misstepped a rung near the bottom, and then landed on my ass in the mud with a wet plop.

As I sat there pondering the consequences of my foolish decision while still relatively blind and coughing my lungs out, my vision slowly started clearing up through my extremely watery eyes and my breathing got a little less labored. Within about 15 minutes I was able to see better, so I collected myself and slow walked my way back home thinking up how I was going to explain all of this mud and tears to my parents.

They believed my concocted story that a bull chased me across the field and that’s why I was all muddy and why it appeared that I had been crying: “I was running for my life!”

1972 – Crashing a 10-Speed Bicycle at Full Speed, Sacramento, CA.
My mom was friends with a mom down the street who would come to visit our humble little house on Nimitz Street riding her shiny new fire-engine red Schwinn 10-speed bicycle. It had white tape on the drop handlebars, a brown leather saddle with coiled springs underneath it, and the gear shifters were located on the sides of the downtube. It was a beautiful, glorious machine built for speed, and I absolutely wanted to take it for a spin. One day I mustered up enough courage to ask Mrs. Jones if I could ride her bicycle. She said, “Sure, honey; but be careful—she’s fast!” I took that comment as a challenge.

Although it was an adult sized bicycle and technically much too big for me, I probably…make that definitely…had no business asking Mrs. Jones to ride it in the first place, but I didn’t let that deter me; I was not going to allow a technicality to prevent me from going for a personal bicycle land speed record on Nimitz Street.

I quickly ran outside and found the gleaming bicycle leaning against the house, basking in the sunshine, waiting patiently for me. As I approached, she seemed to beckon me, and the closer I got to her, the bigger she loomed. When I finally put my hands up on the sun warmed drop handlebars, I started to seriously doubt my ambition because it was now crystal clear to me that riding this bike was going to require some finesse, strategy, and determination.

I slow-rolled the bike down the asphalt driveway to the concrete sidewalk, turned left, and aimed the front wheel directly on the line that ran down the center of the sidewalk. So far, so good. Now I had to figure out how I was going to mount the bike because flinging my leg over the frame like it was my Huffy BMX bike was not an option. After a few humbling failures, I finally figured out how to mount it, which went something like the following…

I stood on the right-hand side of the bicycle and held onto the handlebars with both hands, then set the crank horizontally with the left pedal pointing toward the front of the bike. Next, I leaned the bike over to the right and swung my left leg over the bike frame as if it were a horse and rested my left foot on the pedal. In one quick synchronized motion, I used my right foot to scoot forward and push upward while simultaneously pushing down hard on the pedal with my left foot. This gave me barely enough momentum to get rolling, although not without some major wobbling at first which probably concerned any onlookers because it would have appeared that I was either going to crash into a parked car or crash into somebody’s prized rose bushes at any given moment.

The facts were that I could barely reach the handlebars or the brakes when I had my butt on the tip of the saddle and I was only able to peddle the bike with the tips of my toe plus I could barely reach the shifters. I did not concern myself much with these facts, as absolute as they were, and continued with my quest anyway.

After practicing my takeoffs a dozen or two times, I was comfortable enough for the next phase, which was shifting gears. After figuring the shifting out, I realized that I had been in the wrong gear for my takeoffs the entire time, consequently, taking off got much easier after that. Now I felt that I was finally ready to ride down the street as fast as I possibly could.

Like a professional racer, I rode up and down the asphalt street several times with ever-increasing speed and confidence. I made mental notes of where the wide cracks and bumps and potholes were located. I was now mentally prepared for my speed record attempt.

Fortunately, Nimitz Street bordered a large field at the time, so there weren’t any cross-streets or stop signs to interfere with my objective plus there were cul-de-sacs on both ends. The total length of the street end-to-end was about a quarter of a mile.

I set myself up on the southeast end of the street as the starting point. From a dead stop, I started my ride. Takeoff in first gear (small chainring and large cog), settle in. Shift into second gear and pedal harder. Shift into third gear and pedal even harder. Quickly shift up through fourth and fifth gears and then shift to the big chainring and large cog for sixth gear. The pedaling was much harder now. Seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth gear—TOP GEAR—huzzah! I’m out of the saddle now because the pedaling has become impossibly difficult. Everything was a blur. The wind in my ears drowned out all of the other ambient noises in the neighborhood. I’m staring straight ahead with watery eyes but noticeably felt that I was gassing out. I had no way to gauge my speed, but it felt like a hundred miles an hour.

This was the precise moment when a cat shot out from under a parked car on my right and directly into the path of my speeding front wheel. The collision with the cat was inevitable. The poor animal let out this godawful sound and ran off as the immutable laws of physics that it triggered were about to go on full display.

The collision threw me over the handlebars and completely off of the bicycle and I flew headfirst like Superman out onto the gritty, crumbling, hyper abrasive asphalt street. The collision with the cat also bent the front wheel of Mrs. Jones’ bicycle and scraped up the white tape on the handlebars. Now I was in big trouble for sure.

The look of shock on my mom’s and Mrs. Jones’ faces when I came limping home, crying, and all scraped up and bloody with dirty asphalt gravel embedded under the skin of the palms of my hands and my knees and my elbows is forever etched in my memory. I also had a knot on the side of my head the size of a ping-pong ball and I’m still not sure whether it was from my head bouncing off the road or if the bike ran me over.

I’ll also never forget the scrubbing and digging administered by my mom, the 24/7 on-call triage nurse. Despite the guilt of accidentally hurting an animal and crashing Mrs. Jones’ bicycle, and the extremely painful road rash, the exhilaration of going blisteringly fast on a 10-speed bicycle was absolutely worth it.

1977 – Motorcycle vs. Chevy Malibu, North Hollywood, CA
My friend Alan Flaata had a 1973 Yamaha RD350 that was all tricked out for café racing. I was fitted with clip-on handlebars, aftermarket oversized Mikuni carbs with aftermarket reeds, a milled head, aftermarket FMF expansion chambers, Koni shocks, and fat track tires. It was a screaming 350cc two-stroke monster, and I loved it. It was also an extremely quick, twitchy, and unforgiving motorcycle that had the notoriety of being a widow maker, which, being the reckless teenage youth that I was, was all part of the allure. The ongoing joke about the motorcycle name was that RD stood for “Rapid Death.”

After several increasingly fast rides on Mulholland Drive between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon boulevards, I thought I was pretty good on the RD even though I almost crashed it a few times. These out-of-control and back-in-control near crashes had the effect of making me believe that I was better than I actually was. I previously wrote about my Mulholland Drive exploits with Alan’s older brother Mark here. Naturally, I foolishly convinced myself that I was a great motorcycle rider. Overconfidence like this can be a dangerous thing. I also miss that youthful hubris.

It was a brilliant Southern California day in North Hollywood as I was traveling eastbound on Burbank Boulevard and coming up to a dicey, super-wide three boulevard intersection. This intersection consists of Burbank Boulevard going east-west, and Lankershim Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue going diagonally north-south, crossing like an X, and that particular intersection was notorious for speeding cars and fatal crashes. I lived in NoHo at the time and knew the intersection well, notably, there was a water runoff dip at the east edge of Burbank Boulevard that was famous for bottoming out speeding cars and launching motorcycles into the air if going too fast.

I had the green light and slowed down below the speed limit as I entered the intersection. I made eye contact with the old man driving a pale green Chevy Malibu sedan westbound who was waiting in the intersection to turn left. I was completely under the impression that we had acknowledged each other, but apparently not, because he turned left anyway…directly in front of me.

I was so close to the car that I barely had time to react—I hit the brakes hard and swerved left to avoid colliding with the Chevy and barely missed hitting his rear bumper, but then I found myself down in the dip and in the path of an oncoming midnight blue Plymouth station wagon that was traveling westbound, so I swerved hard right as I grabbed a handful of that café bike throttle and accelerated quickly out of danger, but then I found myself careening toward the side of an orange VW Beetle convertible that was traveling eastbound, which forced me to swerve left again to avoid colliding with him, but this time the turn was just enough to split the east west lanes as both cars passed by me at the same time while I was rolling down the solid double-yellow lines. I almost became a motorcycle sandwich or a sandwiched motorcyclist or just a dead motorcyclist.

I was still rolling eastbound at this point, and after checking that no one else in a car was trying to kill me, I pulled over to the curb on my right and parked the Yamaha. I was shaking like a leaf because my adrenaline was off the charts. I also checked my shorts to verify whether or not I had pissed myself. Fortunately, not only did I not piss in my shorts, but I also miraculously avoided getting killed three times in succession.

I often wonder if the old man in the Malibu was trying to kill me because it did appear intentional, but then again, maybe he was partially blind or simply didn’t see me at all.

Then again, it was probably my guardian angel intervening that ultimately saved my ass.

1977 – Pistol Firing While Cleaning, Agua Dulce, CA
I grew up around guns. I shot my dad’s .44 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk when I was seven (with his assistance of course). I also shot targets with his Remington Model 783 30-06 (also with his assistance). I was taught gun safety early in my life, and also how to dismantle and clean and maintain a firearm. Heck, my dad even loaded his own ammo (with my assistance, of course!). These early experiences around firearms made me very comfortable with them. Maybe too comfortable.

My parents had divorced in 1972, and by 1977 I was living with my mom and in full-blown ultra-belligerent juvenile delinquent mode, you know, The Adolescent Boy From Hell. Going through adolescence was hard enough, but I made it ridiculously more difficult for myself by making a bunch of really bad (yet purposeful) decisions in succession. It’s a long story that I won’t cover here, but I did write a memoir about my difficult journey through juvenile delinquency and juvenile incarceration that I’m currently editing.

In summary, I was in and out of juvenile hall and in and out of court a bunch of times and ended up getting placed in a boys home named Ruscelli’s Boys Ranch in Santa Clarita, California. That’s when I went AWOL and how I ended up living on the lam in a block walled one room shack in Agua Dulce, CA, with my friend Jerry and his girlfriend Gail and their mean Great Dane dog named Spike. Indeed, I was flying all of the red flags of a rebelling teenage loser who was destined to end up in prison…or six feet under.

Back then, Agua Dulce was a sparsely populated area north of the city of Los Angeles with lots of open space…and a reputation for being a haven for crank labs (an early form of meth), drifters, gold prospectors, Desert Rats, and now fugitives from the law, although I’m certain that I was not the only fugitive laying low out there. There were even rumors that Charles Manson and his “family” used to hang out in the area in the ‘60’s.

My room & board living arrangement at the shack was uncomplicated. Being that the property was on the outskirts of civilization, it was vulnerable to daytime burglary, theft, and vandalism by the usual suspects as listed above, so I was designated as the caretaker and was appropriately armed with a .25 caliber semi-automatic Saturday Night Special, a two-barrel .12-gauge shotgun with 00 shells, and a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle.

After some weekday target practice with the Saturday Night Special, and after letting it cool down, it was time for a good cleaning. Jerry had a gun cleaning kit with everything needed for good firearms maintenance, and so I got down to business by first breaking down the pistol on the coffee table in my usual workman like manner. Spike was lying on the floor on the other side of the table, drooling and I suppose he was smiling a little.

I released the empty magazine from the handle, then I pulled back the slide to unclip and remove it when the slide slipped out of my slightly oily fingers and snapped back into position…and that’s when the pistol fired a round across the room, over Spike’s head, and into the lower corner of the white enamel O’Keefe & Merritt oven door! It scared the living daylights out of me. Only moments before this happened, I was looking down the barrel inspecting it.

I sat there a long while thinking deeply about this event and how I barely avoided shooting Spike or shooting myself in the face instead of accidentally shooting the old stove. But now I had to explain to Jerry why the stove had a hole in it, and my old friend Jerry had a hair trigger himself and might just shoot me anyway and bury my body somewhere on the property. If I had accidentally shot Spike instead of the stove, the foregoing sentence would have been true.

So, I decided not to tell Jerry about it, and he never noticed the hole in the oven. I had convinced myself that it boiled down to survival by dishonesty, but ultimately, it was an act of cowardice.

1977 – Being Shot At, Agua Dulce, CA
Agua Dulce was normally uneventful, but over several successive weekends we had some run-ins with a group of local dirt bikers who were blatantly trespassing over the property even though there were signs posted that said, “NO TRESPASSING,” and, “TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT!”. Maybe this was because they didn’t go to school and never learned how to read.

The ongoing trespassing eventually escalated into a highly charged nose-to-nose verbal altercation between Jerry and one of the biker bros. It didn’t go well. Jerry finally leveled his shotgun at the chest of the biker and yelled, “GET OFF MY PROPERTY NOW!” And with that, we fired warning shots over their heads. It’s amazing how quickly they rode off in a swirl of dust devils after that. Neither Jerry nor I really wanted to shoot anyone anyway, but we did want to put some fear into the minds of the trespassers, and by any measure it appeared that we had succeeded because they stopped riding over the property.

The Santa Ana winds in Aqua Dulce are unbelievably powerful, and they were blowing harder than usual for an entire week. During these Santa Ana conditions, the gusty wind sweeps up the long dirt driveway and toward the front of the shack, which was situated near a hilltop. On one windy weekday not long after the warning shot incident, Jerry and Gail had gone to work, and I was splitting wood in the dirt driveway for the pot belly stove that was used for heating the place. This was an old timey heating system that was hazardous on a multitude of levels because there were always the dangers of a) getting severely burned, or b) burning the place down, or c) dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. There were exactly zero warning labels about these or any other potential hazards.

I was facing down the driveway with the wind in my face and swinging an axe when I heard a bullet whiz by my left ear and immediately saw other bullets hitting the ground in puffs of dirt in front of me, then I heard the delayed repeating pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop sound of a semi-automatic gun behind me. I immediately dove into the open side door of the shack with my newfound catlike reflexes. I jumped up and ran across the room and grabbed the Saturday Night Special and then I ran back out of the door and up the hill as fast as I possibly could, extremely angry, and with ill intent on my mind.

When I got to the top of the hill, I saw the same biker bro that had the confrontation with Jerry speeding off down the dirt road in a cloud of trail dust. I didn’t fire a single shot. I couldn’t believe that the biker had ambushed me and tried to shoot me in the back. Clearly, he was a coward and was trying to kill me, but he was a terrible shot and missed his target or you wouldn’t be reading about this. Maybe the Santa Ana winds had something to do with it, or maybe it was because I was moving around too much while splitting the logs. It was pure luck that I didn’t get shot (or killed), or maybe it was my guardian angel, intervening on my behalf again.

1980 – Losing the Brakes of a Car on Kanan Road, Agoura, CA
My brother Scott had a cherry, two-tone powder blue and white 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 sedan that we used to tule around the Valley in. It was called The Land Yacht. One hot Santa Ana windy Friday night in September, we planned to drive out to Zuma Beach from NoHo with a bunch of other friends to get out of the oppressive Valley heat. There were four cars in our little caravan, and Scott and I were the caboose. We drove CA 101 North to Kanan Road and turned left toward the coast.

As we drove down curvy, hilly Kanan Road toward the beach, the cars in front of us were driving faster and faster…and we were just trying to keep up with them. As we were coming out of a sweeping left turn near Mulholland Hwy, we heard the sound of the left rear tire screeching up against the metal fender and then smelled burning rubber. This was not something normal. This is when Scott cooly said, “I have no brakes,” as he was pumping the brake pedal to the floorboards while we were careening down the road. This is not something that you want to hear coming from the driver of a 3,881-pound car going 60 miles an hour and gaining speed! Then he calmly said, “I’m going to have to ditch the car to stop it,” and with that he downshifted and steered the massive hunk of Detroit steel slightly to the right and first onto the dirt shoulder of the road and then slightly into the dirt embankment of the road cut.

At least we were no longer accelerating. Scott continued to gently nudge the right side of his car further and further into the dry dirt and rock embankment which made the car tilt slightly up and down, all the while he was scraping the side of the car against it and losing some paint, a hubcap, some chrome trim, and finally detaching the mirror. He downshifted again and after approximately a quarter of a mile of using the car as a snowplow, the Ford finally stopped in a huge cloud of dirt that was quickly taken aloft by the Santa Ana wind as we could see in the headlights. As the newly dislodged rocks rolled slowly past us, we looked at each other without saying a single word and just started laughing. Adrenaline makes people act in the most peculiar ways.

It was dark and Scott was groping around for his flashlight which was formerly conveniently located in the driver door pocket but was now lodged under my seat where I found it. I couldn’t get out of the right side of the car because the door was against the embankment, so the both of us exited the car on the driver’s side and into what can be described as a NASA wind tunnel.

We walked to the back of the car to assess the damage and determine if we could do a bush repair and get back home. In the wide beam of the flashlight, we could see that the rear tire was definitely out of place by several inches. Scott then looked under the car and could see that the brake shoes were fully exposed and dripping with brake fluid. For an unknown reason at the time (it was a bearing), the entire rear axle slid out about four inches from the housing. If not for the top of the tire being slightly under the sheet metal of the fender, we would have lost the tire/axle assembly down the canyon somewhere and the car and us along with it.

1982 – Pistol Whipped, Valley Village, CA
This was a period of time when Keith Doran and I were inseparable. We were in our early twenties, and we did everything together like meeting girls, going to parties in fancy homes in the Hollywood Hills, drinking, and generally hanging around NoHo.

Keith was a huge martial arts fan, and he had a set of nunchucks that he practiced endlessly with in his pursuit of emulating Bruce Lee. He did look impressive, but I had no idea if he was doing it right. I don’t think he did either. His nunchucks went everywhere he did, and he liked to show off his skills in front of girls.

One night we dropped into the local 7/11 at the northeast corner of Moorpark Street and Tujunga Avenue in Valley Village to grab a 12-pack of beer. As we were driving out of the parking lot and turning right onto Moorpark, a car full of girls who we knew were pulling into the 7/11 parking lot. They yelled out for us to come back, and we yelled “Be right back!”

We slowly crossed Tujunga and Keith pulled into the driveway of a local dive bar behind Henry’s Tacos named the Starlight Room to turn around. He was backing out of the driveway and onto the boulevard when he abruptly stopped the car and asked me, “Did you see what that guy in the parking lot just did?” I replied, “No; I wasn’t paying attention.” “He pulled a gun out and pointed it at me.” “Really, Keith? Are you sure it was a gun?” “I’m f*g sure!” And with that, Keith whipped out the nunchucks from under the seat as he jumped out of the car.

The thing is that Keith had never, ever, been in a fight with his nunchucks, but here we were. I was still sitting in the car trying to get Keith to disengage, but it was too late because he was already fully engaged and enraged. I also didn’t think that nunchucks versus a gun was a fair fight, but common sense was no longer applicable at this time.

Keith yelled out, “Who do you think you are pulling a gun on me, mother****r—this is my neighborhood!” and at this point, Keith was fully channeling Bruce Lee and twirling his nunchucks around like an airplane propeller and switching hands with them, which I thought may be a bit too showy for the situation. I said, “C’mon Keith, forget it. Let’s go; the girls are waiting to party with us!” Then the guy in the parking lot started walking briskly toward Keith. This is when everything went off the rails, or went off what rails were left, that is, if there were any rails to begin with.

I rolled down my window and yelled out to the guy in the parking lot something along the lines of, “Take another step and you might get hurt!” His reply was a curt, “F**k you!” and he kept his pace toward us. I opened my door and jumped out of the car and left the door open in front of me then I leaned over and ripped open the 12-pack of beer and grabbed a couple of bottles.

By now, Keith was taunting the guy, which was comical because Keith weighed maybe 120 pounds dripping wet and the guy in the parking lot was much, much, bigger plus he was buff. The guy in the parking lot didn’t stop walking, so I let loose the unopened beer bottles with as much fury as I could…and completely missed my target. That’s when the guy in the parking lot sprinted up to me in two strides and pulled out a snub nose revolver from the back of his belt—you know; the one that I didn’t truly believe he had—and while I stood there frozen like a 5th century Greek statue, he pointed it directly to my face and pulled the trigger…twice…CLICK-CLICK, and then a quick crack against my left temple and now there was blood all over the place.

I’m not sure what Keith was doing at the moment (maybe he was hiding underneath the car?), but he certainly wasn’t beating the s**t out of my assailant with his goddamn whirly twirly nunchucks as was my expectation. Naturally, I was genuinely disappointed by Keith’s lack of engagement with the bad guy, but this inaction ultimately revealed a sad truth about himself…he was a total chicken. He was all show and no go. An actor, a poseur, and a fake. This event created an irreparable rift in our friendship.

A trip to the ER and twenty-seven sutures later to close up two lacerations, I found myself being intensely interrogated by the LAPD about the incident while my head was pounding with a major headache due to an oncoming concussion.

I’ll grudgingly concede here that this outcome was definitely better than a bullet to the head, but in my defense, I honestly did attempt to avoid the entire situation by talking Keith out of it, but Keith didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason and felt compelled to protect his, ah, turf, as if he were some legitimate street thug.

The cops never caught the guy with the gun in the parking lot, but sooner or later guys like that end up in jail or dead anyway, which is the single consolation that I could conjure up.

1984 – Stepping Off a Twelve Foot Ledge Into Oblivion, Studio City, CA
I wrote about this in my July 2025 Bluffside Park post, so I won’t repeat all of it here. In summary, there was a crowded house party at a swanky hillside home in the Hollywood Hills. The large pool and pool house were carved into the hillside and situated above the house and was accessible only by a flight of steps from the back of the main house. There was a good live rock band in the cabana playing cover songs of the era.

From across the pool, I recognized Tom and Duke, a couple of troublesome friends from the old neighborhood who were apparently conspiring to throw me in the pool. You might be asking yourself how I know this. Well, they were standing together looking at me when Tom said something to Duke and then they both looked at me again and both of them quickly walked in opposite directions around the pool toward me.

I spotted some Italian cypress trees at the far edge of the pool deck and decided that I was going to hide behind them. The thick crowd of people slowed the guys down considerably and I bent down as low as I could while winding my way through the thicket of people toward the cypress trees hoping they would lose sight of me.

When I got to the edge of the slate pool deck, I briefly glanced back to see them closing in on me. I took a step beyond the deck thinking that it was a planter bed where the Italian cypress trees were growing, but it wasn’t a planter bed: It was the ledge of a concrete retaining wall. I stepped off the ledge and fell down about twelve feet into the darkness and almost landed on a couple who were making out on a bench below. I hit the packed dirt hard on my right side. It knocked the wind out of me, and I was sure that I broke my right arm and maybe some ribs. The guy on the bench jumped up and said, “Dude—are you okay?” I couldn’t talk yet because I was still struggling to catch my breath, so I just nodded my head, slowly stood up, and limped away holding my arm as I headed back toward my car to drive myself to the emergency room.

On the way back to my car which was parked way up the road, I ran into my good friend Mark Flaata who had just arrived. By then I had recovered considerably in the miraculous way that one recovers quickly when one is young. My arm and ribs were definitely not broken, but my confidence definitely took a major hit. When I told Mark what happened he started laughing and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t land on you head!” Indeed, it was a moot point, but now that I had backup, we walked back into the house party and never saw Tom or Duke again and stayed until the cops showed up at around midnight and shut it down.

If I had landed on my head instead of my side, I surely would have broken my neck, and someone would have had to call an ambulance (or the coroner) and the landscaper would have needed to fill in the crater left over from the impact of my hard head.

1988 – Flipped Out of a Moving Truck, Woodland Hills, CA
Mark Flaata was dating a woman whose father owned a large moving and storage company in Northridge, CA. Four times a year the company held a blind, cash only auction for abandoned items left in storage. Think of it as a low budget version of Storage Wars. Mark, Brent Hensley, and I attended one of these auctions together hoping we would score something of great value that would catapult us into wealth and allow us to quit our blue-collar jobs and live a life of travel and leisure.

The company set up rows of chairs in the parking lot for the bidders—maybe two hundred chairs in total. They wheeled out large wooden bins with lot numbers attached to them. They also handed out spiral bound catalogs with vague descriptions of the contents of each bin to the bidders. Listed items included home and office furniture, musical instruments, appliances, automotive parts, magazine collections, tools, toys, light fixtures, lamps, suitcases, tires, sporting goods, outboard motors, jewelry, and cameras of all types. Almost everything under the sun was represented.

We all heard the story of a guy who bought one of the bins a few years back and inside the bin was an old tin coffee can that was full of rare gold coins worth $250,000. We all wanted to be that guy!

When the gavel dropped to signify the start of the bidding, it was pure chaos. People were hollering from every corner of the parking lot, and sometimes the bidding got a little heated between bidders which was highly entertaining to witness.

It was June and it was uncomfortably hot. Mark sneaked in a Coleman cooler with Giamela’s Italian sandwiches and Bud tall boys, and as we sat in the baking sun, we drank beer and ate our sandwiches as we waited for our chosen lot numbers to come up for bidding. Ultimately, all three of us were outbid because our budgets were simply too modest to compete with the professional buyers who had wads of cash.

By the end of the auction in the late afternoon, we were sun-burnt and slightly buzzed but we still had to run some errands, so Mark and Brent jumped in the cab of Brent’s lifted 4×4 2-door Silverado, and I jumped in the bed of the truck. Yeah, they used to let you do that back then. Brent pulled into the driveway of a strip mall in Woodland Hills and stopped in front of one of the shops that we were going to visit. I stood up and went over to the passenger side of the truck bed, put my left hand on the top of the bed to vault myself over…and then Brent drove off quickly while I still had my hand firmly planted on the truck bed and my body in mid-flight, if you will.

Like a cat falling off the top of a Christmas tree, I was twisted around and inverted and barely had time to react. I managed to extend my right hand outward just enough to break my headfirst landing and I hit the concrete sidewalk my fingertips first (breaking three knuckles in two fingers), and the momentum carried me over and flopped me flat on my back, fracturing several vertebrae in my lower back. It knocked the wind out of me, and I was unable to answer the passersby who were inquiring if I was okay, to which the answer would have been, “NO, I am certainly not okay…get me a doctor, dammit!”

Only catlike reflexes prevented me from landing on my head, which would have had a bad outcome for me and the concrete sidewalk and the gawking passersby.

1994 – Electrocution, Burbank, CA
I wrote extensively about this accident in a December 2024 post titled Anniversary of a Near-Death Experience. This was by far the closest to the other side as I’ve been because this was the only time that I saw the white light. In summary, I was electrocuted by a 277-volt A.C. circuit and this industrial accident absolutely had the potential to kill me. When I arrived at the ER, my heart was in a-fib, and I had a 3rd degree burn about the size of a nickel on my right forearm, and second degree burns across my upper back, but miraculously, I was still alive and conscious.

My doctors were completely surprised that I had survived the ordeal. One of them said, “Mr. Freeman, that 277-volt shock you received has a nasty reputation of being fatal. The ones that survive are usually in such bad shape that we’re just trying to find out what’s still working. You, on the other hand, not only survived the shock, but you are also apparently in pretty good shape, considering the circumstances, and we’re going to find out what, if anything, is not working for you.” Lucky me. Just another day in the life of an electrician.

So, at this moment, this all adds up to an even dozen times that I have escaped the cold clutches of the hands of Mr. G. Reaper.

I definitely owe my dear guardian angel an apology for making him/her work so damn hard.

I suppose that only a truly lucky man can count the number of times that life has tried to kill him and casually write them all down, whereas an unlucky man cannot avail himself to this task for his luck has already run out and he is no longer of this earth.

Being that I’m still alive—for the time being anyway—I will continue to write because I do love it. In other moments of reflection, I sometimes entertain the thought that writing is the reason the universe has allowed me to survive all of this…but then I remember that I’m still unpublished and laugh at myself for my hubris.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a little Latin for consideration: Carpe diem quia vita brevis est et memento mori.

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