Riding with Mr. Dumbass

Back in my college days I was Mr. Dumbass. I earned the title one night in the early spring of 1966 when the roads were slippery and my old Chevy sprouted wings.

At St. Joe College Calumet Campus, my third attempt to earn a BA, there were periodic keggers. The party after our spring drama production, as good an excuse as any, was unexceptional. Since I was living back at home while at St. Joe I'd started hanging around with high school friends who were also hiding out from the draft in local colleges and universities. So I asked Tom O'Brien and Mike Walters to go with me to the party.

The party was pretty lame. A keg. Some other libations. Some girls. But mostly the usual suspects just getting drunk and bull-shitting about classes, sports and how crappy the girl situation was at St. Joe. In truth, I'd joined the stage crew for this play to meet girls and that had been miserably unsuccessful.

We headed home about 2:00 AM in my '59 Chevy BelAir 4-door. It was an ugly car from the days of big engines, loads of chrome and steel, and wings. The '59s wings were massive arched jobs and looked like a gull coming in for a landing. On a bird not so bad; on the Chevy not so good. The car was blue but also not in a good way. And there were a few other short-comings: bald tires I couldn't afford to replace and a missing exhaust system. I bought it with the four baldies. But the missing exhaust was another story.

Two weeks before the kegger I had gone drinking with a friend who liked to show off his Corvette. So he drove. This guy was also about 6' 7" and well built, so he was a good guy to walk into a seedy bar with: one who wouldn't be asked for I.D. and who the locals wouldn’t hassle. We got back to his house from a Cal City dive about midnight. His driveway was very long, curvy and flanked by huge trees; he liked to whip the Corvette through those trees to show how it handled. He could do it too because with his massive size he also had a hollow leg so even heavy drinking didn't affect him noticeably. So "Slim" gets us to his folks’ house OK but I'm pretty much passed out in the rider's seat. He roused me and said "See ya." I fumbled with my keys and got the blue Chevy started and headed out the drive. This is before "friends don't let friends drive drunk" and I had to work early, so I crept down that drive with one-eye open to halve the number of trees lining the way. I’m pretty sure I stopped for a traffic light at US 30 where I was turning left. That's probably when I went to sleep.

West of the country road I was on, the highway was a construction zone. The state highway authority was just preparing for a big concrete project to replace the road surface. So far they had put up lots of barrels, excavated the median and installed deep steel forms held in place by iron pegs where they intended to create crossover lanes. I'm not sure what woke me up: the orange barrels sailing over my hood, my forehead whacking the steering wheel, the extremely rocky ride, or the blasting exhaust. I grabbed the wheel and steered that big blue box to the right and out of the crossover that wasn't there yet. Then I was fairly sober all of a sudden so I just kept going, slowly, another mile and a half to my house. Then I went in and went to bed.

In the morning I assessed the car before leaving for work. The left front baldy was flat and the wheel was cracked. I got it jacked up to replace the tire and noticed metal hanging from the frame--the remnants of an exhaust system that I'd ripped off from the header pipe all the way to the tail pipe. The chrome tip was still in its bracket giving the appearance of a faux exhaust from the rear. After replacing the baldy with another from the trunk I let the car down and started it up. It was LOUD. But I looked underneath and saw no hemorrhaging from the oil pan so I figured it was drivable. I babied it to work. Over the next few weeks I kinda got used to the noise.

On the way home from the East Chicago party I took US 41 south toward home. The roads were wet from days of rain; all the drainage ditches were overflowing. We had to go through Highland. O'Brien warned me that the Highland cops had been nailing people along the highway and especially that they had cracked down on loud cars driven by young smart-asses. I idled through Highland as much as possible to keep the blue beast quiet. South of town there was one last traffic signal at Main Street out of Griffith and I got the stop.

When the light changed I eased south and started up the overpass for the Grand Trunk railroad, a triple track coming west from the massive crossing in Griffith. About halfway up the incline the Chevy was bogging down. The winter had been unkind to US 41: the road surface had buckled at its joints. I pressed the accelerator to get some momentum for the climb just as the Chevy's rear baldies hit one of the ridges, and the tires broke loose. The bump was a heavy one adding to my foot pressure on the accelerator and the car skidded out of control. I had been driving in the far right lane. No traffic was around us late that night as the Chevy did a 180 into the left lane, then another 360 across the on-coming lanes, crossed the berm sideways and hit the guard rail.

The guard rail was substantial. There were ten by ten posts in the ground and galvanized steel rail attached to it about the height of the middle of the Chevy's doors. They didn't want cars going off the overpass. But the Chevy had a mind of its own at that point: I was behind the wheel but no longer helping, O'Brien was riding shotgun, and Walters was slumped in the back right seat, barely awake. Yet the three of us howled like Goodman and Forsythe in "Raising Arizona" while doing the pirouette across US 41. Until we hit that guardrail. The back of the right rear door impacted one of the ten by tens, which acted like a fulcrum, and flipped the car's front end over the guardrail so the Chevy headed straight down the embankment without rolling over. The three of us were silenced.

I woke up with a heavy pressure on my abdomen and lap. It was O'Brien. The impact had thrown him between me and the wheel like an airbag. When he woke up we were practically nose to nose. He slowly realized the outcome and said, "You dumbass, Govert." O'Brien never got very angry, even at opposing teams that kicked our ass in football, so he wasn't angry now. I took his comment as a completely legitimate critique of my driving.

O'Brien worked his way out of my lap, saw the water and said "We're in the ditch," matter-of-factly. Then I looked over my right shoulder and said, "Mike, you OK?"

We just heard a low groan from back there. The ten by ten hit the car right where Walters had been slumped against the back door. He took the full force of the impact on his lower right back and he didn't sound very good.

We were not sinking in the water so it seemed the excitement was over and only the aftermath had to be considered. Some beers were floating around by out feet. "O'Brien," I said, "See if you can heave those across the ditch toward the railroad. The cops might be coming." O'Brien rolled down his window and chucked them into the brush. O'Brien had a cousin with a junk yard. I started thinking we were way down from the highway and nobody may see us. We could get O'Brien's cousin to tow the Chevy out of there and disappear.

Walters was still kinda moaning but had joined the conversation--starting with "You dumbass, Govert." He said he wasn't hurt bad so we hatched a quick plan to get up on the highway, hitch a ride home and then bring back the tow truck before daylight to see if it could winch the car out of that ditch and past the end to the guardrail. It wasn't very likely--we were 25 feet below the roadway and over 100 feet from the end of the guardrail--but clear thinking was not our strength at that moment.

We clambered out of the car and pulled Walters out the left side door that wasn't stove in. He was really rocky, not sure if it was the drinking or the crash. O'Brien and I seemed pretty sober by then, adrenalin will do that. We helped Walters up the embankment to the guardrail. It was fairly simple for O'Brien and I to scramble over the railing, but Walters' legs were wobbly and he really barked his shin on the top of the rail. Blood started soaking through his jeans. O'Brien and I looked at each and said at the same time, "We need some help."

There wasn't much traffic but I flagged down a northbound car and explained our problem to the driver. He took us into Highland and dropped us at the police station. We went in and they rushed to give us help. O'Brien and I were still supporting Walters who looked the worse for wear. But all of us were dirty and wet, and shivering from the cold.

They got us blankets and hot soup came from somewhere, while I told the duty officer the whole story. They checked Mike out closely but, revived by the warm soup, he came around and actually wasn't hurt bad. Even his shin had stopped bleeding. I called home and my older brother Ken took the call. He drove to Highland and picked us up. Ken was no stranger to late night mishaps involving alcohol. "Did they test you for alcohol?" was the first thing he whispered to me. I told him they hadn't so he said, "Let's get out of here quick before they change their minds." The duty officer cited me for "failure to control" and let us go. On the drive home we passed the Highland squad car that had been dispatched to investigate the scene. The officer was standing behind the rail shining his beam down the embankment but we couldn't see anything.

Ken dropped off Mike and then Tom. When we got home he told me to be quiet and just go up to bed. The call hadn't awakened the folks so we let them sleep.

By the following afternoon the Highland police had had the Chevy winched up out of the ditch and towed over to Christianson's Chevrolet. Ken took me over the take a look at the wreck. He told me to bring the title along. After a few minutes looking at the car we could see that the impact bent the frame and the car was useless. He advised me to sign over the title to Christianson's to pay for the tow. They accepted the offer and said they'd junk out the Chevy.

I had another hurdle to cross. The court date for my "failure to control" ticket came up. I had to go the JP over in Dyer. The JP knew about my high school sports and talked to me mostly about that. Finally, he said, "So, you lost your car? It was totaled?" I nodded. "Well," he said, "I guess that's enough punishment. You've probably learned your lesson. I'm gonna write off the ticket." I thanked him, and using my brother's advice again, got out of there before he changed his mind.

O'Brien was fine after the accident. And so was Walters it turned out. And the worst that happened to me was I lost my car and got a new nickname.

I moved away and lost track of the guys after that. Everyone went different directions. Walters finished college first and right away lost his draft deferment. He was drafted into the Army, trained up real quick, and sent to Viet Nam. This was 1967 so they were in a hurry. I heard he didn't last three weeks in Nam. What I couldn't do with a gull-winged airborne Chevy a year before, the Viet Cong accomplished with a booby trap.