Yahoo Autos The Fender-Bender That Kept Me From Saying Goodbye
The intersection of 186th Street and Biscayne Boulevard is not particularly memorable by Miami standards. A stoplight, a Walgreens, not enough lanes; it’s all basic fare for the city. But for me, that intersection will always be the place that stopped me from saying goodbye to one of my closest friends.
On March 13, 2009, at 186th and Biscayne, I got into a fender bender while I was home from NYU on spring break. It was the kind of crash that probably happens multiple times an hour in this city, what with Miami’s infamously poor drivers and Florida's penchant for afternoon storms every other day. As I approached the intersection from the north, the driver in front of me looked ready to blast through the yellow light. Then he changed his mind at the last second and braked hard. My 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo had always served me well as a teenager looking for freedom. But it had always had poor brakes, and that day, they let me down. Before I could stop on the wet road, I rear-ended him.
It wasn’t a brutal fender bender. There were no injuries, besides my neck hurting a little for the next few days, and the other driver’s car wasn’t too badly banged up. But the Jeep, so often my noble steed as I snuck out to the movies or a friend’s house, wasn’t so lucky. The left headlight fell out of its socket, the fender was completely smashed, and the engine went from powerful to sputtering in one fell swoop.
As a vehicle, it was done for, at least temporarily. I was just able to coax the car ten minutes home. There, I decided to sit and sulk, as one does after—as the police viewed it—causing a few thousand dollars worth of damage to someone else's ride. I figured I’d spend the rest of my Friday relaxing, then suss out how to fix my trusty tank.
Life, it turned out, had worse plans.
Eighty miles north of where I was moping, my friends were fighting for their lives. Mark* and Sachin were caught in a rip tide, swimming off the beach in Jupiter, Florida. A passerby jumped into the water and got Sachin back to land in time, but Mark was too far out. He drowned in the roaring waters.
That's what, through tears, our friend Kevin told me, calling from his own spring break in California. "Mark is dead. He drowned. He's gone."
Mark had always been my favorite person in our group of friends. I was adrift when I'd met them all at the start of my junior year of college, six months earlier, at a bona-fide kegger that Mark, Sachin, and their other roommate Andrew threw on the roof of their Alphabet City apartment building. Aside from Kevin, I didn't know a single person there.
But Mark took a liking to me, and when I sat down next to him by the keg, we ended up talking for hours. Our friendship grew from drunken late-night camaraderie into something deeper. We shared our academic anxieties, watched horrible television (the original Jersey Shore, mostly), and told each other our stories of being young bachelors in New York City.
One of the last conversations I had with Mark was about a girl in one of his classes, Theresa. He had planned to ask her out after spring break. She became one of my closest friends for a while, and it breaks my heart that they never had a shot together. Mark had a great sense for people, and everyone he liked turned out to be wonderful. It was a surprise when he brought me into this amazing group of weirdos, and I’ll never be able to thank his memory enough for that.
So when Kevin told me what had happened to Mark, nothing else mattered but finding my way north.
And yet, this was before ride-sharing. My car had barely made it home after my mishap. No one I knew was in town to give me a ride, and none of Miami’s notoriously ornery taxi drivers would take such a lengthy one-way fare. I ran to my parking spot, hoping against hope, but between the crash and all the bad luck in the world, the Jeep wouldn't start. As Sachin was taken to the hospital, as Mark was declared dead, as his family got the news and made frenzied arrangements to fly down from Michigan, I stood still, trapped by the aftermath of a bad split-second decision by a driver who had no idea what he was about to unleash on my life.
It's almost comical how different this would be in 2019. I could have taken a Lyft the 80 miles north. Could I have done anything to ease the pain of the parents who had just lost their son? Could I have helped with the unforeseen tasks that come with a friend being hospitalized? If I had found a way to get to him then, would Sachin not hate me now?
These are the questions I have struggled with since that March day when a fender-bender became the second-worst thing that ever happened to 20-year-old me.
I couldn’t have prevented the accident. Mark, with his Midwestern upbringing, didn't know that he should have let the rip tide carry him, rather than fight it. Even if I had gotten to Jupiter, I couldn’t have magically made everything better. Nothing could be made better after we lost the best person we ever knew.
But I should have been there. With better brakes, or faster reactions, or simply a dry road underneath me, I could have avoided that crash. I could have loaded myself into my Jeep and driven 80 miles to say goodbye to my friend. Instead, I was stuck, and a minor fender bender coalesced into the darkest day of my life.
*All names have been changed.
Luis Paez-Pumar is a Caracas-born, Miami-raised writer living in Brooklyn. When he's not pondering life's great regrets, he writes about sports and culture all around the internet, most recently at Deadspin.
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