Holiday Hell: Days 4-8

🎶 All I want for Christmas is to wash my hair...to wash my hair...to wash my hair...

This story starts here: BLAM. - My Dance with a Drunk Driver

Fade to black-and-white

🎄 Holiday Hell - Day 4 🎄
December 24, 2000

For Christmas Eve, the car lot guy gave me a gift. He made a special, super generous trip back into town so we could try to arrange getting my hunk of crunched metal out of his hair. Unfortunately, my friends were late picking me up—"What's the big deeeeeal, man, chill!” The guy wound up being even crabbier with me than he already was, which made dealing with him for the next month supremely UN-fun.

Because it took until January 30 to finally have my car towed away.

And why is that? Oh, you know. The insurance company was backed up from...what else? The holidays.

Sidenote: Can I tell you how much I HATE having to rely on the assistance of impolite people who don't value others' precious time? Trying to be grateful for desperately needed help while getting blamed for their rudeness, and hacking off a stranger who's doing me an even bigger favor on a holiday?

NOT COOL. Made it hard to keep that Attitude of Gratitude foremost in my Christmas Spirit Heart.

Moving on...

I couldn’t have prepared for what happened the first time I spied my car to save my whiplashed neck. BLAM! My knees hit the icy dirt of the car lot because I’d just been catapulted off my driver’s seat and slammed against my seatbelt.

WHIRL! Midnight stars and streetlights with the Uintah Street bridge looming-looming-looming as the repair shop, other crumpled vehicles, and the electricity wires over my head all swirled in the gray afternoon sky.

KA-BLAM-SCREEEEEEE across the black pavement as my gloved hands hit the dirt, nearly into a frozen puddle. Almost made a puddle of my own down there in that car lot as my breakfast considered reversing gears. Instead, I only vomited tears and sobs. I tried hold them back. Not possible. It all spewed across the ruts gouged into the frozen muck beneath my hands.

The manager softened then. Said he saw that a lot.

That made me feel a little better.

So did the good, hard bawl.

Incidentally, I lost my favorite ZaZa CD to that car wreck. The car could never be turned on again, not even to get the CD player to come on for two seconds, so there went one of my favorite albums, laid to rest with all those vehicular pieces-parts.

I mourned that CD. Stupid, I know, amidst everything else.

Upon seeing my beloved Mazda again, that song flashed back through my head.

“Words of wise men ring in my head.
Words that will haunt me until the end.
Where lies the answer?
Who holds the key?
What of our soul once it's set free?”

I wound up re-buying the album a few years later, which really hacked me off to have to do. Hearing that song again for the first time?

Hair: standing up on end.
Ka-BLAM!
Whirl…

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One of the worst things about my season of Holiday Hell: asshole-frosted assholes driving like jackasses. Tailgaters. Lane-cutter-offers. People racing up to stop signs—EEEEK—as the big-ass white truck plows into the side of my friend's car to completely finish me off this time. BLAM!

Blink.

Blink?

We continue through the intersection.

Once we’re past, the white truck pulls sedately out behind us like any run-of-the-mill, law-abiding vehicle.

But the damage has been done. Flashback. Panic attack. Gasping—sometimes screaming. Jumping so hard I wrenched my back and neck. Every time, my feet would fly up onto the dashboard and my arms would shoot out toward the windshield to brace, because I didn’t have properly functioning muscles in my back, neck, abs, and hips anymore. They’d been too torn apart.

“You know, you really need to stop doing that,” everybody chastised from their driver’s seat vantage point. “If that airbag ever goes off, you’re gonna break your legs and…”

Yeah.

Thanks. I’m aware.

Welcome to the wild, wild world of PTSD where we eat hallucinations for breakfast, while longing for the days when we had any semblance of control over freaking-out animal-bodies.

Remember this one. It’ll be super important later when I tell you about whatever became of that googly-eyed romance that had just blossomed two days before my wreck.

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Speaking of romance in a neck brace—rawwwwr—I was finally back in the safety nest of my apartment on Christmas Eve. I hadn’t washed my hair for four days because it hurt too badly to lift my hands that high. In fact, I didn't bother even brushing it most of those days.

That's how my brandy-new boyfriend and I celebrated becoming an official, exclusive couple: he kissed me for the second time, and helped me wash my hair in the sink.

Sidenote: I don't actually have the memory of that. I only know that this happened because my journals and emails tell me so. Sometimes these things dredge up snapshots of their corresponding memories. Sometimes they don’t.

During those first few weeks, I needed so much help—emergency help as well as assistance with the most simple daily tasks. With the little bit I could get, everyone had to go so far out of their way, leave their holiday gatherings to bring me to doctors, make special trips, open offices that were supposed to be closed.

They did.

Some of them held that over my head like debt invoices. To this day, I still occasionally get reminded about how much people had to go out of their way to help me. Feels incredible, I'm tellin' ya. Makes it hard to feel as grateful as I am about that.

Needless to say, I don’t call those people “Friends” with a capital F anymore.

For all the rest, the help I was given ranks among the most wondrous gifts I have ever received in my life. Reading page after page of the way people rallied behind me for those first two months...

Most of them were near-strangers who barely knew me from my restaurant shows and workshops. One of them was the husband of a student who wanted to Pay It Forward after the way strangers had been there for him when he had double shoulder surgery.

When a bunch of the people I had considered my closest companions before the crash either fled the ship or actually tried to sink me while I was already dead in the water, a flood of these strangers rushed in to fill the vacuum.

They would become my new friends. My new chosen family, since my parents lived 22 hours away. It still blows my mind and makes my heart melt with awe and gratitude.

🎶🥰🎶 Somewhere in my youth or childhood...
🎶🥰🎶 I must have done something good...

That's how these things go. Up, down...wonderful, horrible...kindness, cruelty...enlightenment, rage... Every day’s doings drew a continuous wave pattern on the graph—sometimes it was a jagged polygraph scrawl. At times, those polar extremes existed simultaneously in the same breath.

That's how I became Persephone's Grrrl, by living in such extreme dichotomies for so long. And by learning how to paint blossoms while trapped down in the Underworld. 🌸☠️🌸

But that's how Life is.

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🎄 Holiday Hell - Days 5-7 🎄
December 25 - 27, 2000

Know how my parents spent their Christmas Day 23 years ago?

Separated from their child when she was supposed to be home with them. Thanking God that she was still alive. Worried sick and unable to sleep because, after talking to me for a few minutes on the phone, they realized that someone else was inhabiting their daughter's body and speaking with (sorta) their daughter's voice. At 3:00 a.m. on the 26th, my dad awoke to find my mom packing a suitcase because she just KNEW something was drastically wrong with me.

I was too messed up to have a clue.

They bombed across the country from Minnesota to Colorado through a blizzard to get to me.

To this day: BEST. CHRISTMAS. PRESENT. EVER.

When they arrived, we couldn't get any information until after the New Year about what I was supposed to do as the Victim in the criminal case against the drunk driver who had hit me.

Wanna know who DID communicate with me copiously throughout that Most Blunderful Time of the Year?

The drunk woman's insurance company.

More like they harangued me multiple times a day.

Ohhhhh, how they wanted to talk to me while I was concussed and in agony and desperate for money and clueless how I was going to pay for my rent and groceries while having no idea what sorts of medical bills my own insurance company would authorize and pay for. They absolutely wanted to talk to me and hammer things down A-FUCKIN'-SAP. They even tried to hunt me down at my workplace.

How they got that number we will never know.

Alas. I couldn't interview any attorneys to intervene on my behalf. Know why?

🎶🎄🎶 Jinga-linga-ling...jinja-linga-ling
🎶🎄🎶 Jinga-linga-ling...lick my dinga-ling
🎶🎄🎶 Jinga-linga-ling...suck my Lingam-ling
🎶🎄🎶 Ding. ✨ Bing. ✨✨ Jinga-ling.

(“Lingam” being the reverent Sanskrit word for my BIG, JUICY COCK. Means "Wand of Light.")

✨🍆✨

Oooh! Another journal gem from December 27: Penrose Hospital couldn't be bothered to take neck X-rays, listen to my bodily complaints, consider the word "concussion" after hearing the description of my wreck, or inform the police that I had been injured. But you know what they did instead? They gave my phone number, without permission, to the UCCS Psych Department to see if I wanted to participate in some sort of study.

Oh, was I mad!

Here I could barely get ahold of anyone to help me, yet I received unsolicited and unauthorized phone calls from an entity that was supposedly on Winter Break. I told them no.

Prolly shoulda said yes.

We might have found out that I had permanent Dain Bramage and PTSD earlier than we did.

The best thing that happened on the 27th (hahahahaha...or so I thought), was that I decided which attorney to hire for the civil suit, and to finally get USAA off my back.

Tell ya what, I would quickly come to covet USAA after dealing with my own company, Safeco. Since I was never military, I couldn't switch to them any more than I was able to switch attorneys once mine started screwing me over after he watched the video tape of me belly dancing hours before my crash.

(Because apparently belly dancers don’t deserve civil settlements when they get rammed by a drunk driver. We’re all just too slutty for any jury to ever award us one.)

But all that stuff is a ways down the road. We're only up to Day 7, and today we're only covering how weathering a trauma over the holidays threw gasoline onto the trash fire that had become my life.

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🎄 Holiday Hell - Day 8 🎄
December 28, 2000

My brandy-new boyfriend generously drove me back to the car lot so I could photograph my vehicle and its pieces-parts on the ground for the court case.

Me - seeing my car for the second time.

Not quite as dramatic as the first time. At least I stayed standing.

Still an eviscerating, flashback-inducing shock.

🎶🎄🎶 Joooooy to the Worrrrrld...

He also took me to the office so I could pick up my check for the final three days I had worked, which allowed me to pay my rent for January.

🎶🎄🎶 It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
🎶🎄🎶 The minor fall, the major lift
🎶🎄🎶 With every breath I'm singing Hallelujah...

In between these holiday season miracles, the remainder of my journaling for that time period documents my ever-deteriorating bodily maladies, mindset, financial situation, and the continued frustration that everybody had lied when they told me that I would finally receive some help on December 26. They'd even lied when they pushed it back to December 28.

The truth: nobody was going to be available until after flippin' New Years, so all I could do was hold onto the ledge by my claws. Good thing I needed a lot of sleep in those days. I was only capable of staying awake for two hours at the most, so that helped speed through those days I have almost no memory of.

I was so messed up and exhausted I wrote three-sentence letters and called it good.

© 2020 Hartebeast

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