Stick-shifts and safety belts and bucket seats have all got to go

I got a phone call from a high school friend a little while back. He wanted me to tell a girl the story about how he and I killed Ramone. I told her the story. Now I'll tell you.

Ramone was an old Datsun pick-up that my friend and his foster brother drove. The name Ramone came from the noise the truck would make when the driver shifted gears. Ramone's horn was too weak to be blown steadily - if honked, the sound would cycle from loud to barely audible and back. Ramone's headlights pointed in different directions. Ramone was very, very rusty. There was a hole in the floor on Ramone's driver's side that would allow water to splash on the driver's foot if Ramone was driven through a puddle or on slushy roads. The remedy for that problem was to place a rubber mat on the floor (of course). One time I hopped over the side of the truck and into the bed only to have my foot continue on through the bed and wind up back on the pavement. Nobody was allowed to jump into the bed after that. Ramone's original color was orange (I think - it may have just been rust), but my friend and his foster brother had painted various designs in white all over Ramone's body. They also wrote Ramone's name across the hood. We loved Ramone. So, you can imagine the sadness we felt on the day he died, especially given that we were at fault.

Ramone's death can indirectly be blamed on another friend of ours who gave me a guilty conscience. I had been asked to a ladies' choice dance by a girl that I didn't think was very cute, so I declined, offering up the excuse that I had a debate meet the next day. This was only kind of a lie. There was a debate meet the next day, but I had told the debate coach that I wasn't going to go. Until the day after she'd asked me out, at which point I told him I'd changed my mind and was going. This didn't sit well with one of my friends, and he told me what a jerk I was for doing that. I decided he was right, so in order to make people happy I decided I'd ask the girl to go on a date with me on another night (since I couldn't reverse course and go to the dance with her or she'd know I wasn't telling the truth about the debate meet - although, you can bet that if I'd been interested in her I would have found a way to make it work).

In those days, nobody in our town actually called people and asked them out over the phone. Instead you had to do something a lot more involved. If it was someone you were really interested in, you had to coordinate with their parents so that you could go decorate their bedroom while they weren't home, or send them on a treasure hunt, or something quite complicated. If it was someone you only kind of liked, you could get away with decorating their locker, or car. For this girl, I decided just to leave a flower with a note at her house. This was all decided with coaching from my friend who drove Ramone, so it only seemed right that he drive me out to her house to drop the rose/note off. She lived on the edge of town, near the cemetery and a cement plant. Her dad (the high school wood shop teacher) answered the door, said that she wasn't home right then, but that he'd make sure she got it. I left, relieved that I hadn't been forced to talk to her, got back in Ramone, and we headed back down the road.

A few blocks down the road, my friend started joking about how I should put the moves on her. As he joked about that he looked at me and said, "This is how you get a girl to come over and sit on your lap." He then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right so as to make me lean over toward him. Unfortunately, he started fish-tailing and lost control of the vehicle. We crashed into the corner of a concrete barrier that was along the side of a culvert. That slowed down the front of Ramone, but not the back, so Ramone's back end slid around and we slammed into the edge of another concrete barrier. The point of impact was just behind the driver's door. The result was twofold. First, Ramone was bent into an unnatural shape. Second, since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt (dumb move, I know), I flew across the cab and slammed into my friend, pinning him up against the door.

Here's a diagram of how it all went down. First impact:



Second impact:



Other than being misplaced, and having a rapidly beating heart for several minutes, I was unscathed. My friend only had the wind knocked out of him from when I flew into him, but he was ok too. We were both able to get out of the truck on our own. We were lucky.

A guy who was working at the cement plant saw the whole thing. He ran over to see if we were ok. I told him I was. My friend, who still couldn't breathe, gave him a thumbs up. He said he was going to go call for help, and that he'd be back. He left, my friend caught his breath, and the first words he said were, "See? It worked!"

Unfortunately, it cost Ramone his life.



Oddly enough, I never felt the need to try that move on a girl. Although, I suppose there's still time.