return of the mack

baby, now I got the flow
'cause I knew it from the start
baby, when you broke my heart
that I had to come again
and show you that I'm real

-Mark Morrison, "Return of the Mack"



On a fateful night in the fall of some otherwise forgotten high school year, I crashed my parent's red Ford Taurus wagon into a tree.

The temperature was just above freezing. Later I would learn from my Oceanography teacher, the great and wise Clay Good, about dew points and the science behind why the road had patches of ice despite the few degrees of temperature buffer that I thought I had.

Coming into a long, doglegged turn, I steered too far into the oncoming lane and in correcting the heading of that oblong, jellyfish-looking automobile that represented the nadir of American car manufacturing back into my own lane, the black rubber of the churning tires met black ice.

I had no seat belt on.

I was going about 75 or 80 miles an hour.

I was way out the road, a good few miles from any kind of civilization, on the border of where the tenuous city of Juneau becomes genuine Alaskan hinterlands.

In that instant, I felt the asshole-clenching sensation of imminent death and the shower of prickly adrenaline secretion washing into my veins.

The car spun an awkward half pirouette and slammed into a tree trunk that instantly halted the massive momentum of everything. The tree trunk caved in the passenger side at about the midpoint of the car. I had been listening to the classic club mega-hit "Return of the Mack" during the accident, but the music stopped with the impact.


I can't hear that song now without feeling like my life is reeling off before my eyes. In a way, that indelible link has made that song a sort of touchstone for me. Reading the lyrics now, it seems almost prophetic.

It hits a little too close to home, really.

I know that this all might seem like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not. There is real meaning in that song for me even though it's a one-hit wonder piece of shit that time and good sense has left for dead in the purgatory of '90s dance compilations.

Sometimes, truth comes from the strangest of places. I can attest.

I was amazed even at the moment I walked out of that wreck that I had nary a scratch or ding or ill-effect from the impact. The car, impaled on the tree like a badly aligned corndog, did not fare as well. I tried to start it and drive off, but the Taurus wasn't budging, so I began the trek to DeHart's where there was a payphone a few miles yonder down the road.

Calling my parents and having my dad drive out in the old Ford LTD that served as the family's back-up ride was far more terrifying than my brush with eternity. My dad, Paul, was not a fun person to be around when he was pissed. Those occasions were rare, which made them all the more distinctive and etched in memory.

Maybe one other time, when my sister Patrice and I were kids, did I see him get so fumed. I can't even remember what that was about, probably my sister and I fighting for hours on end, but I just remember he got his belt and the blood veins along the ridges of his temples seethed and he gave me some good licks that time.

For months and what seemed like years after my car crash, our family had to drive that old LTD everywhere. It was a classic Helmar family piece of shit car.

My dad always said when you buy a used car, you're just buying someone else's problems, which is ironic and sort of funny in a bittersweet way looking back on it, because all we could ever afford were old beaters and my dad always insisted on buying American autos, which severely limited the pool of cars he could consider in a town that must be like 50% Subarus. The nicest car my parents ever owned growing up was a 1993 Ford Tempo that had all-wheel drive.

When my dad died, after I was out of high school, I would have the pleasure of driving that Tempo into the ground while my mom defected from the long-held family stance on auto buying and got a new Subaru Forrester.


The LTD ran like an aged pack mule and it was always burning oil.

I always see it in my memories enveloped by a cloud of caustic smoke. My mom would drive me to school in the mornings in the LTD and the heater wheezed on the frosted windows with all the gusto of a stage 4 emphysema patient, which caused a vicious cycle of condensation where the damp interior of the old Ford would never get all the way dry and the windows were always terminally foggy and we had to wipe them from the inside with jacket-sleeves just to see the streets and byways of God's green earth on the way to school or wherever the destination was.

I would ask my mom to drop me off a few blocks from school so I wouldn't have to bear the shame of being part of a family that drove shitbox cars, which was partly of my own doing, of course. Self-inflicted wounds always cut the deepest.

In summation, I am a very lucky person and the universe seems to have an idiosyncratic way of doling out my fate. There have been many incidents in my life like walking away from that car crash that defy logic or the immutable principles of the cosmos.

One time I was sitting on a couch with my friend Jake Good, son of the aforementioned Clay Good, Oceanography teacher extraordinaire. As an aside, Clay is also the main reason I got out of high school because he passed me in Oceanography with the old D-minus stamp of approval even though I didn't show up for the last half of the semester and everyone needed that class to graduate. I thanked Clay for his grace a few years back, and he said something to the effect of, "Don't mention it. Getting through high school here is based on the buddy system."

God bless that man.

So Jake and I were sitting on a couch in the upstairs of my parents house, watching TV and smoking dope and I had a basketball in my hands and I was sitting with my feet out on an ottoman. Without even the germ of a thought and while looking at Jake, I threw the ball hard up towards the heavens and it bounced off the ceiling and came down on my feet at the perfect angle to roll right back into my hands where it had left an instant earlier.

I know that this basketball incident seems like small potatoes, but I'm sure Jake still remembers after all these years because it was a moment of wondrous and sublime energy that just came through me at that particular moment and vector in space and time. I'm not saying that I have some sort of special power, because like I said, I didn't even think about it and I wasn't even really controlling my body at the time.

It just happened.

Things just happen to me sometimes.