The Racer

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I don’t know when it started. In the first few years of my life, my family made frequent trips by car from Houston, Texas to Wichita, Kansas. Maybe it started then. But for whatever reason, as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved cars. When I was young, we took frequent road trips, often in rental cars, and I was always fascinated to see what model the rental car would be and take note of how it differed from other models. 


I started spending the bulk of my allowance on Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars. Matchbox cars were way better. I only bought Hot Wheels when they had a model Matchbox didn’t. I lined them up perfectly against the wall from my favorite to my least favorite. As a kid, I was sketching car designs and schematics for new types of engines and transmissions that I imagined. I always told everyone that my goal was to be the CEO of General Motors, back when I thought that job had anything to do with designing cars. Mary Barra is the CEO of GM today. A girl beats me to EVERYTHING!


Around seven or eight, I started buying the major automotive journals, Car & Driver, Motor Trend and Road & Track. In later years, I bought subscriptions. Later , when Automobile Magazine debuted, I added it. I read them cover to cover every month and kept all the back issues. I wrote them letters and got a few published as a teenager. I could quote you the price, mechanical details and performance statistics of just about any vehicle, from exotic sports cars to minivans. 


I’ve always been a nightowl. Sometime in the late 80s, I discovered Formula One racing on ESPN. I was never much interested in American racing as I associated it with redneck culture, a bunch of White guys with Southern accents driving souped-up versions of crappy American cars. But Formula One had a diverse collection of drivers from all over the world, the highest technology cars manufactured by the best automakers, and challenging road courses that were more interesting than watching a bunch of good old boys make left turns. And the diversity of the drivers and manufacturers led to constant soap-opera drama off (and occasionally ON) the track. 


Formula One races were held on Sunday mornings in Europe, so they came on ESPN at 3 or 4am on Saturday night (to me, days don’t change at midnight, they change when the sun comes up). While I was interested in sports as a kid, I never idolized athletes. Race car drivers were the closest thing to sports heroes that I ever had. While sports were to me ultimately trivial entertainment, auto racing was important. Race car drivers pushed boundaries to learn how to make cars safer and better. They were like earth-bound astronauts, and their tragic deaths saved thousands of lives by teaching us how to make cars safer. 


I’d read many articles in the car magazines about racers who had been killed. I stared at their dirt-streaked faces in old black-and-white photographs, helmets in their hands, in the hours before their deaths. I remembered moments from races the way other guys remembered Super Bowl touchdowns. Nigel Mansell’s 180 MPH outside pass at the 1990 Mexican Grand Prix, a race that I always remembered as being in England, because I thought only an Englishman driving at Silverstone could do that and live. The Alain Prost-Ayrton Senna rivalry was better than Magic Johnson and Larry Bird for me, especially given the added intrigue of the fact that they were for a time teammates.  And Senna’s death at the 1994 Italian Grand Prix was as tragic as the death of anyone that I didn’t know. Perhaps the greatest driver of all time killed by a stupid mechanical failure, not making a daring pass like Mansell did. But that’s the thing about Senna—he was so good he made the OTHER guy have to do the daring thing. 


I watched racing and learned everything I could about cars with the goal of being the safest driver possible. Car accidents took so many lives prematurely. When my mother was fourteen, she and her fifteen year old sister Vera were riding in a car with some boys and the car was struck by a train. Vera was killed. I often thought about this, and I vowed that no girl would ever die in my car. When I had passengers, I drove like the most careful chauffeur. But when I was alone, on twisty roads through mountain passes, on streets clinging to hillside cliffs, and on isolated stretches of desert highway, I thought about the racers I’d watched growing up, and I practiced. 


My first job was working for Budget Rent-A-Car.  My first car of my own was a 1995 Chrysler Sebring Coupe. In keeping with the fractured fairy tale nature of my life, I saw a picture of it in Car & Driver when it was released and I said, “I want one of those!”. And I got it, exactly like the picture in the magazine, in the same white and gray two-tone color. 


About a week later, I got my first speeding ticket for going 90 in a 55. I’d been going 115 a few seconds earlier. My first ticket was issued by a smoking hot girl. She was so cute, and so friendly, with no “cop attitude” whatsoever. She wasn’t much older than me, and in retrospect, I would say she was flirting. More smiles than I’ve ever seen from any cop, and what a nice smile. I was very tempted to ask her out after she gave me my ticket, but two things deterred me. First, I didn’t think a White girl cop in Kansas would date me (especially knowing I was a profligate speed criminal), and second, back then, I still believed the widespread myth that all female cops were gay. I probably dropped the ball on that one, as I have so many times. She was so cute!


Wichita, Kansas is mostly flat, and the streets are laid out in a perfect one-mile square grid over the old Lewis and Clark survey lines, as is the case with many Middle America cities. So there was really nowhere to practice performance driving. I never engaged in the idiocy of stoplight derbies and after getting that first ticket, even though the girl that gave it to me was smoking hot, I didn’t want to get another. 


But when I moved to Los Angeles several months later, it was a different story. I could regularly be found zipping through the twisty roads in the hills surrounding LA. Mulhollland Drive. Kanam-Dume Road. Cleveland National Forest. And when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area a short while later, there were even more great twisty backroads to practice on. By the age of thirty, I’d driven more than a quarter-million miles in every imaginable weather condition and terrain, and I’d driven more than one hundred different car models. I was prepared for everything, down to the fact that I always checked what kind of tires were on any car I was driving, so I would know how that would affect its performance in an emergency situation. 


I knew the streets and traffic patterns so well that when I was going places with my friends, I would tell them when we would get there to the exact minute, and I was usually right within a minute or two, even on thirty or forty mile drives. My father was the only driver I ever really trusted, and I tried to transport my passengers with the same feeling of comfort and safety that he made me feel. It probably baffled my passengers because I always had sports cars, but I never drove fast with passengers in the car except if trying to make a flight or something like that. But even then, I took no chances. I took all my chances when I was alone. 


As the years went by, and my frustrations with my dating life mounted, I started to feel like I was somehow cursed. Finding love was the most important thing to me and I couldn’t make it work out. I found myself staring at my empty passenger seat and wondering how it could be so hard to get it filled. I became a Hertz Prestige Collection member and rented European luxury cars for road trips. I was always driving nice cars, making regular trips to Vegas and staying in the nicest hotels, dining in the finest restaurants. If anything I’d heard about women was true, girls should have been falling over themselves to try to get in my car. 


Eventually, after my second crash, I developed a mystical theory on my cursed life. Perhaps I’d been a reckless driver who had caused accidents that killed all the girls I loved in past lives, and they were given this lifetime to torture me in retaliation. Perhaps I’d been sentenced to a life driving dream cars and daydreaming about my lost loves with a perpetually empty passenger’s seat. There was something that happened during my crashes that brought this feeling about...


Mercedes-Benzes have always been the safest cars in the world. Mercedes engineers pay attention to little details that other manufacturers overlook or ignore in order to fix things that might only matter in a few rare instances. But it means everything if you are one of those rare instances. 


For example, when advances in plastics and concerns over fuel economy coalesced in the late 1970s, car manufacturers began replacing the traditional metal exterior door handles with small plastic flaps. They were more aerodynamic, made cars look sleeker and more modern, and gave greater styling flexibility. But Mercedes resisted this trend. Why?  


Mercedes safety engineers knew that accident survivability rates are higher when a car has a sturdy door handle that passersby or emergency personnel can grip to pull open a stuck door without waiting for the Jaws of Life to cut it open. Mercedes had even added a rubber strip to the metal handles to make them easier to grip. Mercedes continued making door handles the traditional way, often being criticized for making expensive cars with “big ugly rubber door handles”.  But eventually, the accident data became overwhelming, and if you look around today, almost every new car model has a grip handle on the door. But it took them two decades to come around. How many people died that didn’t have to, if other manufacturers had just listened?


Mercedes-Benz pioneered the use of airbags, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, seat belt tensioners and electronic stability control, amongst many other safety innovations. While other manufacturers had experimented with some of these things first, it was Mercedes that ushered them into widespread use while other manufacturers dismissed them as too expensive or unnecessary. Over the one hundred and thirty five years of the life of the automobile, Mercedes engineers have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. 


I always thought it was so sad that Princess Diana died in Mercedes. For such an amazing woman who inspired so many to die in what was probably then the safest car ever built, it is one of those tragic ironies that makes you feel like God is just an asshole. I admire her sons so much, Harry especially, and I always felt sad for them that their mother couldn’t be here to see the men they’ve become. 


When I was pushing cars to their limits, I was always thinking about ways to crash that would keep my passengers and other drivers safe if an accident became inevitable, even if it meant sacrificing myself. I don’t want to disparage the man who was driving Princess Diana that night. There have already been far too many innuendoes and rumors about it. We weren’t there. Perhaps there was nothing that could be done. But I always found myself wishing that I’d been there to drive her, to try to get her home safe to her sons, even if I didn’t make it myself.  I’m sure Nigel Mansell would have done a better job than me, but if there was no else that good left, I wish I’d been able to try. As a consequence, whenever I had passengers, I always drove like I was driving her. 


Despite my respect for the way Mercedes built cars, they didn’t produce many models that I actually would have wanted to own. I prefer coupes to sedans, and Mercedes coupes were either too small like the two-seat SL or too large like the E- and S-class. I loved the classic 300SL with the gullwing doors, but you had to be a millionaire to afford one of those. But finally, in 1996, Mercedes came out with a car I wanted. THE car I wanted...


In my adult life, the Mercedes-Benz CLK was always my dream car. As a kid, I’d loved Ferraris and Lamborghinis and other exotic sports car, but as an adult, these cars seemed impractical to me, and even if I’d been able to afford them, I’d have been more likely to just rent one for a weekend now and then than blow a quarter-million dollars on one. 


When the CLK was released in late 1996 to long waiting lists and marked-up prices, I said to myself, “That’s the perfect car for me.”. It was the perfect size, and it’s elegant sedan-like styling gave it an air of sophistication that evoked the great coupe designs of the past. I used to cruise by the San Francisco Bay Area Mercedes dealerships at night looking longingly at them.  I checked their used prices regularly. But I could never quite afford one.  Instead, I owned three Chrysler Sebring coupes, which I maintain are spiritually the closest thing to a CLK under $30,000, and an Australian-built Corvette-engined Pontiac GTO, which was a fantastic car, just a little bigger and heavier than my ideal. 


When I was released from prison, I got a check for almost $50,000 in disability backpay for my kidney failure. I set about trying to figure out how to make this last the rest of my life. I needed a car and I intended to spend the least I could for something mechanically reliable, which in the California market means spending three or four thousand dollars. In my searching, I was surprised to see that there were CLKs for sale that cheap. 


Mercedes-Benzes and other luxury cars hold their value very well for a while, but at a certain age and mileage, their prices drop off precipitously as budget-conscious buyers are put off by their high maintenance costs. This combined with the general unpopularity of mid-sized coupes had driven CLK resale values to the floor. 


While Mercedes maintenance is expensive if you go to a shop, German cars are generally built in a modular fashion where you can order parts online and fix most things yourself at a fraction of what the dealer charges, without taking all day or even getting your hands dirty. Mercedes engines and transmissions and most mechanical parts are rock-solid. They have a club of Mercedes-Benzes that have been driven over a MILLION miles!  Most of the problems you’ll have are electrical glitches you can fix yourself. So, I decided that if I could “splurge” a few thousand extra and get the car I’d always wanted, I could justify treating myself to that after spending five years in prison on a bum rap and getting out to find I had no friends or supporters, only my elderly mother and my siblings who hate me. 


I found the perfect car, a 2002 CLK430, the more powerful V8 model, at a dealership in LA.  It was white, my second color choice after the rare special edition Designo Expresso model, and had the cool blue-tinted windows Mercedes used for a while. It looked practically showroom new inside and out, had low miles and was only $6,000. But I couldn’t go to LA because of parole. I had my sister buy it for me and drive it down to San Diego, which would turn out to lead to frustrating consequences. 


It’s like meeting the love of your life, you never forget it. My first drive in my CLK was the same way. We’d gone to dinner at Claim Jumper, my two sisters, my mother and I. After dinner, we walked into the underground garage and my sister handed me the key. I remember vividly walking up to the car, sitting in it, starting it, getting used to the recirculating ball steering system Mercedes used to use, which is weird at first. Searching for the power window button when I had to pay to get out of the parking garage (it’s on the console by the gearshift). 


The car was in superb condition. It was almost like one of the brand new CLKs I longed for. I’d never driven one before, but as far as I could tell, it drove like new. It had a few minor problems, like that the driver side mirror motor didn’t work and it had to be adjusted manually, but the problems it had were that tiny. It fit me like a glove. It was one of those rare moments in life where you finally get something you’ve wanted for a long time and it lives up to all your expectations. It was just a car, in the grand scheme of things not that important, but it was just what the doctor ordered. 


I was having as much fun as I possibly could under my oppressive circumstances, cruising the streets in the car I’d always yearned for. The only downsides were that my 10pm curfew prevented the overnight cruising that I really loved, and the car’s lack of a CD player or iPod connector prevented me from bringing my favorite music along. I didn’t go into the hills for any performance driving because I was keenly aware of the fact that I hadn’t driven in five years, and I knew I was rusty. It felt like my first few months of driving again. 


A weird streak of bad luck that I have with new cars continued. Only a few weeks after getting the car, I was sitting in the parking lot at the bank after going to the ATM, and a guy backed his pickup truck right into me, breaking a taillight, scratching the bumper and damaging the exhaust system. He was nice about it and his insurance paid for the taillight and the bumper, but they refused to own up to the exhaust damage, which made an annoying rattle occasionally. That upset me, but it still wasn’t enough to break up my CLK bliss. I got used to driving again.    By this point, I’d been driving so much for so long, I thought I’d never crash...


It was a Saturday evening at dusk, December 8, 2018. I had recently started a vegan diet and I went out to Plant Power for a vegetarian burger. Afterward, I decided to take a drive. As I have been most days since my release from prison, I was overwhelmed with frustrations. I was driving north on Interstate 15, through the northeastern suburbs of San Diego. I tried to call my mother and got an all circuits busy message, which worried me because this is what you get when there has been an earthquake. This caused me to get extremely pissed off at the fact that I wasn’t legally allowed even to go see my 80 year old mother. I was thinking about breaking my parole restrictions, and driving to LA anyway. 


And then, something happened. In emergency situations, the brain does something. It takes time to process short-term memories into long-term memories. So it is common to forget the moments that immediately preceded an emergency. So I don’t remember with certainty why I did what I did. I have the foggy memory that it was another driver that I thought was drunk that I needed to get away from.  I’m honestly not sure. but I suddenly had the feeling that I needed to GO. 


Early CLKs have a trick two-stage accelerator that I assume is a safety feature. You can’t go full-throttle by flooring the accelerator in the normal way. If you do that, it goes, but to actually engage full acceleration, you have to change the angle of your foot in a deliberate way, raise your heel up and press your toe down. I had noticed this in my first drives with the car, but I’d never engaged it fully. For the first time, I did, and something unexpected happened...


I’ve driven probably two hundred different car models. I’ve driven cars with powerful engines. In fact, the Pontiac GTO that I owned for seven years had 350 horsepower to the CLK430’s published rating of 275 and had almost identical published performance statistics. But that night, when I engaged the CLK accelerator’s second stage, my car went like nothing I’ve ever driven before. It accelerated so hard that my head bounced against the headliner three times and I felt the front end of the car seem to lift up slightly. Whatever happened, it far exceeded the published capabilities of the CLK430. It went like I imagine cars like the Bugatti Veyron and Tesla Model S must go. The roads were still wet from the recent rains, and I lost traction and suddenly started to spin out...


The first and most important thing is, don’t panic. Time slowed down. I remember it all clearly. I remember being close enough to horizontal that I could look back at the traffic coming from behind me. It was uncommonly heavy traffic for that stretch of freeway early on a Saturday evening. I remember thinking, “So many cars. Why are there so many cars?”. I knew that if I couldn’t regain control, it was going to be a catastrophic accident. 


Every car can do more than what the statistics say it can. You have to find the right vector and you have to time it just right. You never grab the wheel and pull it, not at that speed. And whatever you do, don’t hit the brakes. That guarantees you’ll spin. It’s like a rhythm you play on the wheel, like playing the piano. In my head, I hear this song by Rachel Z. You have to feel the moment, when the front wheels are at the perfect angle, when you feel the rear wheels grab a little traction, and then you punch that second-stage again. The thrust spins you back in the right direction. You scrape against the retaining wall. You’re going straight again. But there is a problem...


You are straddling the line between the far left lane and the second lane. In the second lane, coming up fast in front of you, is a black Chevy SUV. You can’t swerve around it to the left because the momentum of your skid recovery is taking you to the right. You can’t slow down because there are cars coming up too fast behind you. Your only chance is to go around it to the right. That means you have to get across a lane and a half, and there is a car coming up fast in that third lane. There is a little window in time, an instant, but to get to it, you have to accelerate. You mash it, but it doesn’t go like it did before, or maybe you didn’t get your toe down far enough. You see the gold Chevy logo on the tailgate shimmering in the light of your headlamps. It’s going to be close and...I’m not going to make it. 


Now that I know the accident cannot be avoided, I hit the brakes to lessen the impact as much as possible. I see and feel the collision as the left side of my front end hits the right side of the Chevy’s rear end and the car in the third lane zips by to my right. Then I lose a moment. I’m in the middle of the five lanes and I’ve forgotten the impact. I’m just thinking that I have to get my car to the shoulder. I don’t know if the engine was still running or not. I remember looking at the headlights approaching in my rearview mirror and thinking again, “So much traffic...”. I’m trying to remember something my father told me about driving when I was a kid, on our way through the snowy mountains west of Denver. I remember his eyes sparkling green in the rearview mirror. I don’t know what happened. Next thing I knew, my car was skidding gently onto the shoulder of the road. 


I think we may need to reconsider our ever more Draconian hit-and-run laws, because in the immediate aftermath of all this, I actually didn’t remember that I’d had a crash. I thought that I’d safely navigated to the shoulder. I was turning the key trying to start my car and drive home, unaware of what had happened.  It wasn’t until I noticed the crumpled hood that I remembered the impact. I sat there trying to gather my wits as a bit of panic set in with the realization that I’d just had a serious high-speed accident. My most immediate concern was for the passengers in the car I hit. I looked around, but I didn’t see any other stopped vehicle. 


If you had been in the car with me that night, there was a man who might have saved your life. He was a Latino man and I remember thinking that he looked like boxer Oscar De La Hoya.  The resemblance was enhanced by the fact that he acted like a boxing referee. He came to my window and gestured in the way boxing referees do to ask me if I was okay. Like a macho punch-drunk fighter, I nodded that I was fine. When I still didn’t move to get out of the car, he asked me if I was okay again. And again, I nodded. I wasn’t being macho. It’s just my nature to never want to be a bother to anyone, to take care of things myself. Even in the wake of a dramatic accident, I was still thinking that way. But he didn’t give up. He walked around to the passenger side of the car and looked in to make sure no one was there. It was the passenger side of the car that caught fire a few minutes later. 


I noticed that the car was filling up with some kind of unfamiliar chemical odor. It wasn’t gasoline or antifreeze—I know those smells well. But whatever it was, it was putting me out FAST. I went to unlatch my seatbelt. It was stuck. I went to open the door. It was jammed. 


Mercedes-Benzes are filled with all kinds of neat little technological tricks. The CLK has frameless windows, meaning there is no metal around the top of the doors, just the bottom part of the door and the window, like in a convertible. This has a lot of aerodynamic advantages and is more convenient engineering-wise in cars that also have a convertible model. But frameless windows tend to leak and have sealing problems over time. To prevent this, Mercedes engineers designed a neat feature. When you close the door, the electric window motor pushes the window up into the roof frame a quarter-inch or so, making a firm air and water-tight seal. Then, when you pull the inside or outside handle to open the door, the window drops back down so you can open the door without breaking the glass. This works whether the car is on or off, running or not, so long as the door isn’t locked. 


I remember this feature and put my face up to the upper edge of the window  I pull the door handle and push on the door until I time it just right and the window drops down a little so that I can get some air. I try my seatbelt and the door again. I’m still stuck. Then a funny thing happened...


The fumes filling the car had made a foggy kaleidoscope pattern on the windshield to where it looked like it was dawn outside. In recent years, I’ve told myself that I’d like to die in the South of France. The hills surrounding the stretch of freeway where I crashed look like the hills in the South of France shown in one of my favorite movies, To Catch A Thief. For a moment, I thought that was where I was. I thought about all the pressures in my life that I didn’t want to deal with anymore. I thought about all the rare experiences that I’d been privileged to have. I’d traveled to the other side of the world twice. I’d met famous and important people. I’d found the scientific answer I spent my life searching for. I finally got my dream car, and I’d finally had a good crash. I almost got my movie made.  Though I’d never found love, I’d spent my life surrounded by amazing, smart,  talented, smoking hot girls.  I saw Scarlett Johansson in Vegas. Princess Diana died in a Mercedes-Benz. It’s good enough for me. I gave up. I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes and waited to die. 


It was the strangest random thought about the strangest random girl that made me decide to try again. One day, I’ll tell her about it. I tried the seatbelt again, and finally I got it to unlatch. I banged my shoulder against the door until it opened just enough for me to crawl free. I saw police lights, and being a Black man, the first thing I thought was, “I’m a felon on parole. I don’t want to walk toward them and get shot.”. So, rather than moving clear of my wrecked car that was shortly to catch on fire, I laid face down on the ground waiting for the police to give me permission to move. 


Moments later, I sat on the side of the road being questioned aggressively by a highway patrol officer. This is mere minutes after I was in a traumatic accident and he’s talking to me like a suspect. He claims that a passerby said I was going 130 miles per hour. I’m skeptical that he could have possibly gotten this kind of report so quickly, and you can’t estimate that kind of speed by sight. I don’t believe I was going 130, but when that second stage of the accelerator kicked in the first time...I don’t know. 


Given this officer’s demeanor, I’d have been very concerned if I’d been alone with him. But I wasn’t. There were paramedics there, and one of them in particular put me at ease in these traumatic moments. This was a guy that I’m sure the girls cruise by the fire station to gawk at him. He was everything that I think girls feel is smoking hot. But there was something about him where, you just couldn’t worry in his presence. If I had to bet, I would guess that he had been a soldier. When my car caught fire, the cop and I looked at it with wide-eyed shock. He turned and glanced casually at it as if it was nothing. 


The scariest thing was that I wasn’t hurt, not at all. Not a single bruise or scratch, not even a bruise from the seatbelt, which is almost universal in a high-speed crash. My clothes still looked good enough to take an Uber to a nightclub. But my heart was racing like I’d just had a gallon of Red Bull and no matter how much I tried slow breathing, meditation, everything, I couldn’t slow it down the rest of the night. 


The paramedics put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital, where they confirmed my complete lack of injuries. But I was emotionally shaken and still worried about the other driver. No one would tell me anything which made me worry more. I was so shaken, I kept asking the medical staff to talk to a chaplain or mental health professional, but they never sent one.  It was a night for smoking hot men, I guess. I was seen briefly by a smoking hot doctor that I’m sure made all the nurses swoon. I was discharged after about an hour. 


My cellphone (and the goatskin jacket I loved) had burned up in the car, so I had to borrow a nurse’s phone to call my sister in LA to tell her what happened. I was so shaken up, I didn’t want to be alone, so I asked her to come get me. This is not the youngest of my three sisters, the one that bought my car, but the middle one. She and my mom came down to take me home, and spent the night at my apartment. My relationship with my sister basically ended that night. She was acting unbelievably insensitive at a time when I needed sensitivity more than ever. At one point, it got so bad that I was afraid that if I didn’t get away from her, I might hit a woman for the first time in my life. I wanted to tell her to leave, but my mom was with her and I didn’t want my mom to leave, so I retreated to my bedroom for the night. 


My heart was still racing. I tossed and turned all night, but by morning, I had calmed down to a functional level. But I was still so shaken up that I was contemplating never driving again.  The highway patrol officer had taken my license and given me a paper ordering me to go to the DMV for reexamination. The DMV official I saw seemed perplexed that I’d been sent to him, and said that it was improper procedure for the officer to take my license in any case. Nonetheless, I had to go to the DMV for a new driver’s test, which I of course passed with flying colors. 


Then another frustrating issue arose. Since my sister had to buy my car for me, the car was in her name. I’d always tried to carry good quality car insurance, with more than the minimum coverage limits. But the only insurance company that would insure a car for a driver different than the owner was The General, a discount carrier that I was skeptical of.  I bought their cheapest policy because I was planning to change to another insurance company right away as soon as I got the car transferred into my name. But my sister, in one of her many acts of sabotage, had refused to send me the paper I needed to change the title for over six months, despite my asking her a dozen times or more. 


It turned out that my insurance coverage wasn’t enough to cover the other driver’s car and medical costs. Insurance really seems to operate under Murphy’s Law. Accidents never happen when you are in the best coverage position. I felt terrible that the people whose car I hit had to go through this, and so close to Christmas. 


I could say I’ve met Shaquille O’Neal. He’s probably met millions of people by now, so I doubt he remembers me. But Shaq and I both used to frequent a Beverly Hills late-night hangout restaurant called Jerry’s Deli. I understand it is closed now?  We’ve gotta get that reopened. Anyway, I saw Shaq there a few times. One night, I was coming in, and he was standing on the curb outside, alone, patiently waiting for the valet to bring his green Superman Bentley around. Unlike most celebrities, he spoke to me first, like any Black man greeting another. I remember walking by him and thinking, “He’s not that big at all.”, as if he’d somehow shrunken himself down to my level. 


Shaq is the spokesman for The General, and I know he likes to perform random acts of kindness. I was thinking about trying to get in touch with him to ask him if he would buy the people I hit a new car and cover my insurance shortfall. It would have made a nice Christmas story and it would have been good publicity for Shaq and The General. I ultimately decided not to try it because I’m sure Shaq wouldn’t want everyone in the country expecting him to replace their wrecked car, and The General wouldn’t want people thinking coverage limits weren’t real. Plus, I figured no one would want to be associated with me at all because of my having been accused of sexual assault. 


Ultimately, I was surprised by the quality of The General’s service. They handled my claim quickly and efficiently and paid out a more than fair settlement for my totaled dream car. And the claims agent girl Ryann sounded so cute on the phone! I continued to get letters about my inadequate coverage for the other driver, but as bad as I felt, I assumed from the fact that I never got a bill and was never sued, that they had insurance of their own to cover it. I hope. But still I remember their name from the letters, and if I ever get my life in order, I owe them THEIR dream car. 


The fact that two DMV officials didn’t seem worried about my driving, and some time to come down from the trauma of my first real car accident in thirty years of driving backed me down from the idea of never driving again. But I made another decision. My view was that my CLK had saved my life. I decided that as long as I could afford it, I wouldn’t buy any car except a Mercedes-Benz. 


I couldn’t find another first-generation CLK in the same pristine condition as the one I had, so I started looking at second-generation models, even though I’d always liked them less. But once I’d owned one, I would come to prefer them. The main feature they have that the first-generation CLKs lacked is a feature most Mercedes coupes have: there is no B-pillar. The B-pillar is the strip of plastic and metal that separates the front door windows from the rear door or rear seat windows. Most Mercedes coupes don’t have this, so you can let down the front and rear windows and the whole side of the car is open. Combined with the sunroof, it’s like 70% of what’s great about a convertible, without the myriad hassles that a convertible brings. It’s also safer as outward visibility is much better with the windows up or down. There is almost no blind spot. It also makes getting in and out of the back seat much easier if the windows are down. While the first CLK was designed like an elegant tank, the second was designed like a piece of jewelry. 


I found a 2004 model for under $5,000 at a dealership in LA. Not wanting to trust my sister again, I did what I should have done the first time and asked my parole officer for permission to go to LA to get it. So on another rainy Saturday, the weekend before New Year’s, I rented a car and drove to a small repair shop/dealership in the San Fernando Valley to buy my second CLK. 


As the cheap price for a CLK with low miles reflected, the car had suffered from some neglect. It had a badly worn interior, some missing trim bits, and a few mechanical problems, the most frustrating of which was that the driver’s side rear window wouldn’t go down, preventing me from enjoying one of the car’s best features. But the salesman was a dream to deal with, the only good car buying experience I’ve had out of probably over a hundred trips to dealers. He was totally upfront about the problems the car had and applied no pressure. I knew the price was already more than fair but I asked him if he could reduce it a few hundred dollars to save me having move money around since I hadn’t yet gotten my insurance check, and he did it. I was in and out in less time than it takes for your average car salesman to get back from “talking to their manager”. 


I think of cars like individuals. I was looking forward to the project of restoring that CLK to pristine condition. But believe it or not, just over two months after my first crash, I had another...


It was February 12, 2019. That night, I went out at almost midnight, in violation of my curfew. Initially, I was just going to go a few blocks to the grocery store to get some bottled water and go straight back home. But I was frustrated to find the grocery store had changed their hours and was closed. I had just made a rather provocative post on my public Facebook page that evening, and I felt sure that there would be some response to it (there wasn’t). But I was anticipating that I might have to answer questions, for parole, for the courts, perhaps even the media in coming days. I was furious with the “clinician” that lead my court-ordered therapy group and the upcoming court-ordered polygraph test that had been scheduled for me. I was contemplating doing then what I eventually did decide to do eight months later: refusing to comply with parole and sex offender registration as an act of civil disobedience intended to bring about a review of my unjust conviction. 


I needed to clear my head and late night driving was the most reliable way of doing it. Late night driving was my oasis and I hadn’t been able to do it in six years. So I decided to take a drive. There was something else on mind that night, too, but I’ll save that part for later. 


It was near 1am and I was cruising through a residential neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of San Diego.  The radio and CD changer in the car had malfunctioned, so I had only one choice—listen to Disc One of Stevie Wonder Song Review or turn the radio off. I am more a fan of 60s and 70s Stevie rather than his wedding song era, but I was working on my book about Scarlett and driving around listening to Made To Love Her and Ribbon in the Sky on repeat, thinking, “What if it really happens?!?”. 


I was riding along when I heard something snap. My car took a sharp right turn and veered off the road. I was on a four-lane divided street running through a residential neighborhood. I was only going about forty miles per hour, if even that. But unlike my first accident, my reaction time was slowed, possibly by the late hour or all the things on my mind. But I had no time to react at all. Like many streets in suburban San Diego, there was a cement block retaining wall lining the road on either side. My car bounced over the curb before I could react. 


Time played strange games with me in this crash. It must have been the curb that set off the side curtain airbag. My vision went black and then time did slow down. I felt the airbag scraping along the left side of my face for what seemed like a full minute. It felt like someone was dragging a hot knife across my cheek, scraping the skin off. Unlike the first crash where I never was panicked and never felt pain, this time I felt the sensation of my body being physically destroyed and for one of the few times in my life, I was really scared...


Even after watching the scene in Lucy that almost seemed to reenact our encounter, and the following scene where she looks on-screen like the girl I saw, I still had some doubts about whether the girl I’d seen really was Scarlett Johansson. I had considered a myriad of possibilities for who she might be, from Greek EU Parliament member Eva Kaili, to a girl named Hope who worked at a Nevada-based recruiter that had been e-mailing me about jobs.


But my favorite thought was that she was an engineer for Mercedes-Benz. She looked like an engineer—the precision of her movements, the way she was talking, her simple but elegant ensemble, the air of utter seriousness.  And this girl, if she was an engineer, would obviously be one of the best, and so she’d be working for the best. What could be a better match for me than a smoking hot girl who built Mercedes-Benzes!


When I was sitting in my car waiting to die after my first crash, I remember hoping that she would be passing by, and that she would come and know some special trick to get the door open and save me. Seeing only a sea of blackness and feeling like my body was being torn apart, I told myself, “I’ll be alright. That girl I saw in Las Vegas built this car.”. 


Just then, the sea of blackness was replaced by an image. What is it people say? “Realer than real”?  That’s how it was. I was driving a car with a futuristic interior design composed of silver metal with diamond-shaped designs. I assumed it was a car that I had designed. The girl I’d seen in Vegas was sitting in the passenger seat, but now, up close, I knew she was Scarlett. She was wearing a silver dress not unlike the one she worn to the Oscars a year later, but like the dash and door panels of the car, it was covered with diamonds. I looked put the window past her at a velvet blue night sky covered with brilliant diamond stars. I realized that our car was hanging in midair. I’d just driven us over a cliff. I felt unspeakable horror that accompanied the realization that I’d just killed us both. But she was sitting there looking at me so calm as if to say, “It’s alright.”. 


It felt as real as anything I’ve ever experienced, more real than the most vivid dreams, as if I’d really met Scarlett, actually been in that car with her. The image seemed to linger frozen in that moment for so long. My only defense against the fear was the serene expression on her face. Then I was sitting in my car crashed against the wall.  The radio was still on. Superstitious was playing. I sat there for what seemed like five or ten minutes. No police, no sirens. I got out of the car and walked into the middle of the street. It was dead-quiet. I wasn’t hurt. I thought, “I must be dead this time.”. I thought that I was a spirit now, and that this must be what death is like. I could just walk away into the forested hills and leave the problems of this life behind. But I was afraid to do it. I walked back and sat in my car and went on listening to Stevie. After what seemed like half an hour, the police and paramedics finally came. 


That was an ordeal I’ll recount later, but after a frustrating interaction with the police and doctors at the hospital where I was taken, I was discharged at around 2am and took an Uber home. The Uber driver shook me down, calling me and claiming he couldn’t find where I was (the emergency entrance to the hospital!) until I promised him a big tip at which point he said, “Oh, I see you!”. 


A few months later, I was reminded of something I’d long forgotten. Years ago, I’d driven by an exotic car dealership in La Jolla and I saw a beautiful car that I’d never seen before. This is a rare event as I thought I knew every car in the world. I got out to look at it. I couldn’t see a name on it but I saw the airplane propeller logo and with some Google searching, I found it. It was a Spyker, an obscure Dutch-made sports car. I liked it so much, I put a picture of one on my computer screensaver. Reminded of it suddenly a few months after my crash, I went to look to see if they had released any new models in the last decade. I saw a picture and my mouth fell open. The car that I was in with Scarlett, in that haunting image during my accident, was a Spyker C8. Spyker, now defunct, was a Dutch company, but the night I saw Scarlett in 2012, it was Swedish-owned. No matter what happens, I’m never EVER getting in a Spyker with Scarlett Johansson!


Just like the first crash, once more I had thoughts of never driving again. But then I looked up some statistics, and even after two crashes in two months, I was still well below the average accident rate. I had driven more than half a million miles, more than many people drive in a lifetime. In an average lifetime’s worth of driving, I’d had two accidents, none resulting in serious injuries (I assume that if the injuries the other driver had in my first crash were serious, I’d have heard more about it). I knew people in their twenties who had already totaled two or three cars. I was a safe driver. 


So I was sitting in the Fashion Valley Mall, and I decided to search again for CLKs for sale. And I found the perfect one.  It was a 2009 model, the last full year they were made, in a rare color combination that I had never seen, gold with a cream and beige interior. I took an Uber to the dealership. The car was in such pristine condition that apart from a worn driver’s floor mat, you probably could have sold it as a new car to someone who didn’t know CLKs bad been out of production for ten years. I bought it. I paid too much, and the dealer, part of one of those national used car chain networks, was a crooked pirate. If it wasn’t one of the last best CLK examples left, I’d have walked away. But you can never pay too much for the thing you really want. 


So, my first day with my beautiful new car, what did I do? I went to the mall, of course. One of the downsides of San Diego to me is that most of the malls are the outdoor-type. I don’t mind an outdoor mall on a good weather day, but as nice as San Diego weather is compared to the rest of the nation, a great many days are too hot, too cold or too wet for an outdoor mall. San Diego only has two decent indoor malls, North County Fair, and Plaza Bonita, which is barely decent. But North County Fair is rather far from where I was living, and having just bought a rare car with incredibly low mileage, I was counting every mile, intending to break my past habit of driving 30,000+ miles per year and limit myself to 10,000. So I went to Plaza Bonita. 


I was walking through the mall and a smoking hot girl standing in the doorway of a cosmetics store stopped me. She was one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in my life. Normally, I politely walk away from these salespeople, but in my post-prison life, I had decided never to turn down an opportunity for social interaction. I’m not sure I could have walked away from this girl in any case. She was so gorgeous. She was like Scarlett in that she had a very unique and unusual look. I wouldn’t have been able to guess her ethnicity from her appearance, but I knew from that adorable accent that she was Israeli. 


She leads me into the store, and has me sit down in a high-rise chair. She sits opposite me, so close that out knees are touching. She takes my hand and starts to rub this cream into it. She says it contains diamond dust. Diamond dust!  


She tells me her name is Mor.  Sucks to come to America and be named after a furniture store. I ask her where she is from, already pretty sure of the answer, and she confirms my guess that she is from Israel. I ask her what city she is from and she says, skeptically (and smoking hotly), “You know cities in Israel?”. I boastfully assert that I can name ten cities in Israel. 


Under ordinary circumstances, sitting here on my bed alone, I can name probably twenty or thirty cities in Israel. And most of the ones mentioned in the Bible I’m guessing are still there, so in that case, maybe a hundred. But with this girl rubbing diamond dust cream into my hand and staring at me with her beautiful dark brown eyes, I can only come up with Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. I’m the son of a Christian pastor and I couldn’t even come up with Bethlehem and Nazareth under these conditions!


She doesn’t say the name of her town, but goes on to describe a kibbutz. Wanting to show off how knowledgeable I am about things Jewish, I say, “There is a word for those towns...”. I’m thinking the word kibbutz but I don’t say it because I’m not completely sure I’m remembering correctly, and I’m always super-cautious about not accidentally saying something offensive in a foreign language. She says some other Hebrew word I don’t recognize, and then she says, “They are also called kibbutzes.”. Then I realize, she’s being evasive because she is from a West Bank settlement, and she knows it’s controversial over here, so she’s trying to avoid me knowing it. 


Then she tells me she just got out of the IDF. Until you’ve had a smoking hot Israeli girl who knows how to fire an Uzi rub diamond dust cream on you, you just haven’t lived. It’s like meeting Gal Gadot or Bar Rafaeli and having them rub diamond dust cream on you...except this girl is hotter than Gal Gadot and Bar Rafaeli. Well, I think. I’ve never seen them in person that I know of. I ask her if the “Women of the IDF” photos I’ve seen on the internet are for real or if they are models. I show her one on my phone and she says its real. Military service there is compulsory, so apparently, nine out of ten girls in Israel are SMOKING HOT!


Mor notices the small cut on the bridge of my nose from my latest CLK crash. She asserts that the diamond dust cream will help it go away. I tell her that I have unusual healing capabilities and that it will go away on its own. She is incredulous and offers me a bet. She says that the cream will make it disappear in thirty days and if she’s right, I have to come  back and bring her a box of Godiva chocolates and eat them with her. Now, as a rule, American Jewish girls don’t flirt. At least they don’t flirt with me. They just smile like they know something I don’t and then look down at their Converse sneakers like they’re shy or something when I know Jewish people are hardly ever shy.  But maybe Israeli girls are different, because this girl is really flirting with me, beyond what women trying to sell stuff ever do. It’s been like ten minutes and she’s still holding my hand. I have butterflies. 


However, being the savvy gambler that I am, I immediately recognize this wager she has offered as a sucker bet. The bet assumes I buy the diamond dust cream. If it helps the scar go away, she gets the sale AND the chocolate. If it doesn’t, she still sold me the cream anyway. Plus, maybe her return ticket to Israel was in three weeks and if I came back thirty days later, she would be gone (it wasn’t—I saw her there again more than a month later). 


I was going to walk away. After buying my car, I really couldn’t afford to blow $50 on some ridiculously priced cosmetics that I would never use. But then I looked at it another way. My interaction with this girl was by far the most pleasant thing that had happened in the year since I’d been released from prison. Men pay for sex, and this interaction was better than a lot of sex I’ve had.  Better than most of it, actually. And I’d taken up a bunch of her time that she could have been using on other customers. So I let her sell me the diamond dust cream. 


Earlier that day, I’d been riding around in my new car thinking, “Scarlett Johansson would look so cute in here.”. When I got back to it, I was thinking that Mor would look pretty cute too. I put a note in my phone to come back a month later and bring her chocolate. But then I got another idea...


What I love most about Jewish girls is not that they’re smoking hot...although they are SO smoking hot. What I love most about Jewish girls is that almost all of them are smart, well-educated and interact with the world in a direct and authentic fashion. Jewish girls (and men) are usually great conversationalists, and the NUMBER ONE thing I need in a relationship is great conversation. I’ve been interested in the Israeli-Palestinian issue forever, and I was a little surprised when I read that Scarlett had made a statement in support of the West Bank Settlements. This girl Mor apparently being from one of them, I thought, “How smoking hot would it be if I could get Scarlett, Mor and Natalie Portman to go for a ride with me and debate this issue?”.  These are the kinds of fantasies I have. 


So why didn’t I go back to see Mor and take her some chocolate?  There is only one reason. It wasn’t that I was waiting by the phone for Scarlett Johansson to call, I can tell you that!  If I’d been able to get together with Mor, my answer to Scarlett would have been something like this: “Sorry, Scarlett. You’re amazing and talented and you looked super-cute in Vegas and all, but your cousin beat you to the post. She’s almost as cute as you, life-size, and she doesn’t have the disability of fame. She doesn’t have half a billion dollars either, but if I can find a smart girl to go all-in with me, making money is the easy part. You’re smoking hot TOO LATE!”.


So why didn’t I go after Mor? My legal situation is the only reason. At that point, I was on parole, had that ridiculous device that I had to charge for two hours a day strapped to my ankle. I had a parole officer that I was supposed to inform if I went on a date with any girl and provide her contact info, and what parole officers routinely did was call the girl and give her their version of what a scumbag you are, and often try to pick up on the girl themselves. There was no way I could bear trying to explain all of this to her. A rich girl like Scarlett wouldn’t care, if she liked me, because one of her lawyers could solve all my legal problems in about an hour.  But for an everyday girl, these were insurmountable obstacles. Suppose she wanted to take me back to Israel with her (an opportunity I would have leapt at)? I couldn’t go. Jewish girls don’t put up with bullshit, and thanks to parole, my life was nothing but bullshit  Things are different now because I’m fighting, and Jewish girls have always been fighters going all the way back to Queen Esther so I think they would respect what I’m doing now. But this was before I got the courage to fight. So as alluring as Mor was, I never went back to try to talk to her. 


But I couldn’t forget about my idea of filling my car with Jewish girls. Since the CLK only fits four people, until I can get my five-seat CLK built, I replaced Mor in my fantasy with Amanda Seyfried. I don’t know her position on the West Bank settlements, but my guess would be that Amanda is one of those American Jews who opposes the settlements and the generally right-wing orientation of the Israeli government. Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in my Mercedes CLK arguing with Amanda Seyfried about Israeli government policy: How smoking hot is THAT!?!  That’s way hotter than the three of them making out.


I allowed myself to indulge in this little fantasy for a while, but then I thought, “What if one of them doesn’t want to get in my car?”. There are a few Jews, mostly older ones, who won’t drive German cars to this day because of the relationship that the German car companies had with the Nazis. I knew the story of how Mercedes-Benz got its name, and if any of them objected to German cars, I was going to promise them that if they came on the ride and let me tell them the story, by the end they would feel better about it. Since, to my surprise, the story is not well-known, I didn’t publish it because I wanted to be the first to tell it to them if they haven’t heard it. But since my hopes of ever getting together with my girl heroes feels so distant, I’m going to tell it now...


I always thought it was funny that no one ever asks how a German car company got a Spanish name. The founder of Mercedes-Benz, Karl Benz, was actually the inventor of the automobile. Many others were working on similar ideas around the same time, but the vehicle Benz produced in 1885 is generally agreed to be the first car ever built. One of those others working on similar designs was Gottlieb Daimler. In Germany, the Mercedes parent company is Daimler-Benz. 


It is often wrongly reported that Benz and Daimler were the founding partners of the company, but in fact, they were rivals who didn’t particularly like each other and reportedly never actually met. Daimler started his car company only months after Benz started his. Their separate companies merged in the 1920s, long after Daimler’s death in 1900. 


The most important early Daimler vehicle was built to the specifications of a man named Emil Jellinek, a flamboyant entrepreneur and one of the world’s first racecar drivers. Jellinek had a contract to sell the Daimler cars he had commissioned, but there were legal issues with the Daimler name, and Germans not necessarily being popular around Europe even before starting two world wars, Jellinek wanted a name that sounded less German as the elites of France and England to whom he intended to sell the expensive cars thought of Germans as low-class. 


It just so happens that Emil Jellinek was Jewish. In fact, his father, ironically named Adolph, was a prominent Austro-Hungarian rabbi. Emil Jellinek met his wife, a Sephardic Jew, on a business trip to Spain. He decided to name the car after their daughter. So, the cars we all know and love today were named after the granddaughter of a rabbi, the daughter of a racer, a Sephardic Jewish girl named Mercedes. 


I believe names mean something. What we choose to name something, whether it is a company, a car or a child, reflects our hopes for it. Emil Jellinek named his car after the thing most precious to him, the thing most important to protect, and I believe that fact plays a role in the culture of safety Mercedes-Benz maintains to this day. It should be no surprise that this company has always built the safest cars. Emil Jellinek said, “I don’t want to build the car of today or even the car of tomorrow. I want to build the car of the day after tomorrow.”.  It’s the day after tomorrow now. 


Mercedes-Benz may have worked with the Nazi government. They had no choice. But the models that made Daimler famous were built to the orders of a Jewish businessman who named those cars after a Jewish girl. And Karl Benz was the kind of man who put that Jewish girl’s name before his own on the machine that he had invented, and Mercedes-Benz was born. 


Maybe I’ll get to take that magical ride with my MAT Pack girls one day. You don’t have to worry about my accidents. In reality, cars are so safe if you don’t do anything stupid, and I’ll be SO careful with you. I’ve never forgotten what happened to Grace Kelly and Princess Diana. I could never let that happen to you. Like them, like my last CLK and the little Jewish girl for which it was named, I CAN’T crash you. You are too beautiful...


Because I know what transpired in Europe in subsequent decades, I’ve been afraid to look to find out what became of the Jellinek family. The odds are so high that the answer is tragic. Karl Benz died in 1929. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to see where his country was headed. But Mercedes lives on. 


The name Mercedes means “mercies” in Spanish, and that’s what these feats of engineering performed by Mercedes-Benz are—tender mercies that excuse drivers for their errors and give a second chance at life after accidents that would have been fatal in the past. When I dreamt of starting my own car company, I had as a goal that no one would ever die in one of my cars. Every day, we inch closer to that goal, thanks to the brilliant engineers at Mercedes-Benz and elsewhere, and the racers who push the boundaries at risk of their lives. 


Mercedes isn’t gone. She’s on highways and in garages around the world. She’s still here, every time someone pulls a door handle to rescue someone from a crushed car, every time an airbag fires to save someone’s life. She’s still here, every time a man sits on the side of a highway at night, looking at the flaming wreckage of his dream car, and wonders, “How did I survive that?”.  


Like the saint for which she was named, Mercedes still watches over us, forgiving us for our mistakes and guiding drivers through the night to find their way home. Her story is not over. Like Maggie Simpson, Mercedes never died.



Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern


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