Crash

Abstract

Crash Jesse Lee Kercheval (bio) It is 1966 and I am sitting on a stool at the Burger King on Merritt Island, Florida, eating French fries. My view is Highway 520 and the cars speeding up to the rare stoplight just beyond where I sit. My father, my sister, and I have been to Cocoa Beach to swim and are on our way home. I always beg to stop at the Burger King. I am always famished after swimming and there is nowhere to eat on the beach. Also, we are not a fast food family so this is a treat, something my mother, who never goes to the beach, does not know about. I love how, after being at the beach, the French fries taste doubly salty. Then a station wagon with a surfboard on top smacks into the rear end of a long, low convertible with its top down, which is stopped for the red light. There is a tremendous noise. I feel it in my body, metal on metal, and the surfboard goes flying off the top of the station wagon, through the air. It decapitates the driver of the convertible. Just like that. I remember this. I can close my eyes and feel that metal on metal in my body. Right now, I am living in an apartment in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a side street, Joaquin de Salteraín, crosses the busy Bulevar España. The nearest light is several blocks away, over a hill. There are terrible accidents at this intersection. I hear them. Brakes squealing, glass breaking, that awful remembered metal on metal. Cars flip. Suitcases, purses, all kinds of personal belongings are scattered across the pavement. Ambulances arrive. Even now, when there is hardly any traffic because of the coronavirus quarantine, there are accidents. This week a car hit a guy on a Pedidos Ya! delivery bike and the rider went flying. I heard that. I saw that. And I remember the accident in front of the Burger King. What I can't remember is the head. In my memory the head is just a round empty circle, like a speech bubble in a cartoon. It rolls back along the surfboard and then off one side, onto the road on the far side of the car and out of sight. But there is no blood. No hair. No face. Does this mean the accident did not happen? That my memory is a lie? How could I not remember a severed head? How could the head be missing? I can close my eyes and see the surfboard flying forward, gleaming, freshly waxed. I have a good memory of its size, its color. In 1966, it would have been a long board, heavy, with a wicked pointed nose. I look up photos. Like this one, I think. Or this. At least ten feet long, weighing maybe fifty pounds. Enough for [End Page 181] the impact to cut right through a neck and send the head rolling back along the surfboard. But I doubt myself. I have told this story over the years. It is not, as they say, "a story to dine out on." But I have told it. I thought I had written about it in my memoir Space, which covers this very part of my life, starting when I moved to Cocoa in 1966 when I was ten and stretching through all those years spent growing up in the shadow of the space program, of nights lit by rockets to the moon. In my apartment here in Uruguay, I don't have a copy of Space with me, but I use Google search to look inside the book. I search for "car accident." Nothing. I search for "surfboard." I search for "head" and find several mentions, but none of them about ones no longer attached to a body. I search "Burger King." Zip. I could have sworn it was in there. But I published the book in 1998, twenty-two years ago. And the problem with a memoir is it is never big enough to include everything that happened in your life. I know I thought about including it. I remember asking my...