There are things you never tell your parents. Over time I dated 2 artists who also happened to earn their living as strippers in the Melody in Times Square. Admitting [bragging about?] this was heresy, akin to scooping feces from the toilet & hurling them at their TV – that dumbfounded gaze of why. I never told them of my near-death encounters, hoping to spare them the shock & dismay of hearing how close they’d come to losing me. Or maybe it simply spared me from the humiliation of having to admit that, yes, I was stupid / careless / inattentive / heartless / reckless.
My mother & father are now both dead, so I can tell you that I have almost died a dozen times. Maybe more. Although if it was more you’d think I’d remember them.
I used to tell my daughter comforting, funny-illuminating stories about when I was young. Feel-good instants where I could seem fun, heroic or human: saving box turtles during a flood, building a treehouse, having to compete in sprints during school lunch hour to prove I was still the fastest, how “Spotty,” my spotted turtle used to kiss me on the nose … But never about almost dying.
I remember my father with great glee recounting his own near-death story on the operating table after a car accident, when he described how his soul followed a column of ants wearing small lit candles on their backs to a dark hole in the wall.
I sometimes entertained thoughts of confessing: ‘By the way mom, I forgot to tell you; I’ve done some stupid things …’ But, in August 2018, I watched my mother die right before my eyes. How slender, how brittle is that boundary between death & life.
- 1962: Sandy Hook, NJ. Almost drowning in the undertow at the beach. Somehow as if by magic, I washed ashore, delivered, gasping, dazed. I’d been dragged down the beach so far by these mysterious currents that I could not find my parents, their beach umbrella. The lifeguard stood high up in his chair, lifted me up on his shoulders & blew his whistle so that all eyes could suddenly be fixed on me. My father came to retrieve me, which was good because he did not yell or blame me for anything for he too – I only learned much later – had almost drowned in the North Sea as a teen. Although I don’t think he used the word “drowning.”
- 1969: Finger Lakes, NY. My father decided to pass a truck going up a hill in our red Rambler Classic station wagon filled with camping gear & the whole family. He did not anticipate the engine not having enough HP-oomph to pass on a hill & halfway past the truck a car came at us head on, with my father veering off the road onto the shoulder & into a gulley at the last moment. My mother was unconsolable, crying, screaming, flailing arms. To remind him of this incident to score a point always seemed senseless.
- 1972: Richland Center, WI. I worked 6 months in a foundry & at the end of the summer I bought a 10-speed Trek bike, $129, expensive at the time. On the inaugural ride I took it down a hill just past our house built in a pasture, not properly gauging the steepness & speed I’d built up. Before I knew it I was braking so hard I bent the front aluminum wheel & found myself in the middle of the 2-lane highway, having just barely missed being hit by a passing car by a spookishly choreographed micro-second.
- 1973: Middle of nowhere Ohio, winter. I was hitchhiking on the interstate. It’s illegal, but I needed to get to where I was going, & the Staties picked me up, intimidated me, roughed me up, escorted me way out into the middle of some anonymous nowhere & just dumped me there, chuckling as they sped off. The echoes of sinister cops hooting & howling …
- 1976: Outside Detroit. Hitchhiking, I was picked up by out-of-their minds longhair rednecks listening to loud, speaker-rattling radio as they pushed their souped-up 1970-something Malibu to a quivering 110 mph, swerving, side-swiping, passing everyone on this 2-lane road, yahooing out the side windows. I wrote the poem “hard bleeding (in) detroit (speeding & weaving thru town) 5/77” about this harrowing episode.
- 1979: Times Square. Working as a foot messenger, I was passing through on my way to a delivery when a limo shot through a red light, so I banged the side of his car in protest. The guy slammed on the brakes – dramatic screech – leaped out & aimed a pistol at me. “Bang,” he yelled, “If this was loaded you’d be dead.”
- 1980: Union Square, NYC. Drunk, unable to find my way home, I pass out among the bushes in the park. I imagined communicating with the squirrels. When I come to I see I am not kicked to a pulp & that the world, spun faster by thousands of purposeful commuters is whizzing & whirling by a prostrate clump of pathetic/enlightened me on their way to their offices. Yes, a blackout either leads to another or it leads to awareness of the potential glory of survival.
- 1981: Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Attempted mugging by a teen robber wielding a knife on Vanderbilt just south of Myrtle Ave. I confounded the kid, threw him off his schpiel when I began lecturing him on stealing from the rich & not someone poor like me with nothing more than $1+ in my pockets. He took the dollar [not the loose change] & ran.
- 1984: Ocean Grove, NJ. Escaping NYC to live on the Jersey shore, body surfing became an irresistible summer activity. But sometimes riptides, extremely unpredictable undertow, arrived from nowhere & it felt like the ocean was sucking you up to feed itself… & there I lie on the wet, hard sand just out of water’s reach, out of breath, glorying in the sun, the gleeful sound of kids at play on the beach.
- 1985: Greenwich Village. Yuppies ascendant near Laguardia Pl. & Bleecker. 4 guys with loosened ties were pummeling a homeless guy with foot & fist for having the gall to beg. They wiped bodily fluids from their oxfords with paper napkins & continued. I intervened, & suddenly they turned on me with full force. I thought: I will end up an unrecognized martyr death with nobody the wiser … Enter this feisty young punk gal, who, through sheer attitude & vehemence, forced them to back off & retreat. & so, yes, I was rescued from eternal vegetable-tude by her.
- 1988: Garden State Parkway, NJ. I was coming home from an overnight, 6-hr radio show on WFMU, doing as many of these shows as possible [addiction?] before moving to Paris. I fell asleep behind the wheel & woke up in a gulley in the center median, staring at the rising sun, slowly realizing how serendipitous this thing called life was. I’m pretty sure I’ve never told anyone this before.
- 2003: Amsterdam, near Rembrandtplein. Riding my bike with Paloma on the back kid seat when a [getaway?] car comes screeching & careening at me, missing us by a centimeter. I’m pissed, so I bang the side of their BMW with my indignant fist, swear & ride off. This incenses them & they give chase for a harrowing forever 5 minutes, with them yelling in some Eastern-European-accented Dutch & broken English, swearing they will ‘keel’ me. After some time of chase-scene weaving, I discovered a narrow bike path between buildings & suddenly I was free & realized that righteous indignation is not always valued – or understood. I rode home via a perplexing labyrinth of back bike path manoeuvres, expecting them, despite my efforts to dodge them, to pop up behind me [unreasonably so, like in movies when suddenly the criminals are miraculously on your tail again]. But they never did find me. 2 days later my heart & thoughts were still racing. I avoided this part of town for a long, long time.
- bart plantenga, LIST FULL: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021)
Picture Nick Victor
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