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austinpanda · 5 years

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Yesterday, The Long Version

The day started out well, because it was Junk Food Day, and we had a plan I was looking forward to (mid-week pepperoni wangs). I get to work, and the boss lady (whom I love) came by to chat with me about an upcoming observation scheduled for next Wednesday. Observations are when someone sits with me and watches/listens to me taking phone calls, to see how it’s done. It’s not unusual for the company to sit someone with me when an observation becomes necessary. The reason it’s interesting this time, is that the person coming to observe me is the third highest-ranking officer in the company. So this is one of those occasions where it’s wise to have my manager come over and (a) make sure I’ll be there, (b) make sure I know who he is, and (c) make sure I’m together with their plan. I will, I do, and I am.

So I’m at work, and my boss is sitting right in front of me, and I need to log in. I start to log in, and fuck it up, because it’s complicated, and my boss is watching me. I try again, and about halfway through, my pocket starts vibrating. I log in successfully, pull out my phone, tell my manager, “This can’t be good; it’s the husband.” And I answer the phone. It’s my husband!

He’s obviously terrified. He tells me he had an accident, and he panicked and left the scene. My boss can tell it’s an emergency just from my end of the conversation and tiptoes a short distance away. My advice to the husband is, roughly, “Enhance your calm. The scary part is over. Call the police. Tell them what happened. It’ll be fine. And don’t sweat it honey, this is what your husband does for a living! We’ll deal with the shit.” His car is fucked up. He may be at fault.

What happened in the accident was this: He pulled to the exit of our apartment complex parking lot on William Cannon. He looked left, didn’t see anyone coming, pulled out, got straightened out in his lane, when a vehicle behind him and to his left hit his little Hyundai Accent on the left front. This means one of two things: the police will think Zach failed to yield the right of way exiting the parking lot, and got hit by the other vehicle, OR that Zach pulled onto William Cannon and then got nailed by someone coming into Zach’s lane. I have no idea which is more accurate, so I don’t know how the police or the insurance folks are going to make that determination, but that’s what happened. I just assume he’ll be cited for failing to yield.

After the impact, Zach was sitting there and the other driver walked up and tapped on the window. This moment here was almost certainly the beginning of the worst part for Zach. He tried to get his insurance out to give to the other driver, but he couldn’t because he kept slapping himself. He left with parts dragging, and with his front bumper and license plate still there at the scene, and came home to yell at and hit himself more.

I don’t mean to get too dark here, but...can you imagine being trapped in a room, and you can’t get free, and someone’s hitting your spouse in the next room over? It makes you willing to do anything to stop it, but you can’t, so it robs you of your sanity instead. The only good thing about it is that it ends.

By the time Zach and I are done speaking on the phone, he is calmer. His voice is back down into its normal register. He says he’s okay and will call the police. We end our call. I let my head fall to my desk with a small but audible boom, three or four times, and I hear from my manager in the background, “So...is everything okay?” And I tell her what she’s already deduced, husband in accident, panicked, left scene, thinks they might arrest him, isn’t it lucky his spouse works for the claims department of an auto insurance company. I don’t remember what she said in reply, but it amounted to, “Yeah, go.”

I went home and looked at the front of Zach’s car on my way into the apartment. I’ll include a photo here.

I think the car did what it was supposed to do to protect my husband. All the pretty curved plastic shit on the front end just took one for the team and gave up its life, so all the energy from the impact simply left the car, born away by the bumper instead of being transmitted to the driver, causing injuries. I could be wrong about some of the physics, but generally, the more the car gets fucked up, the better you feel after the accident. I’m starting to have a fondness for Hyundais.

So I’m now home with Zach. He’s been kicked in the emotional fork pretty hard, and is trying to make peace with a brain that’s telling him to panic, that he fucked up, that he’s stupid, that he handled it wrong, that he’s going to have to have SO MANY conversations with people in authority who will give him shit about it. So I begin to formulate the new plan for unfucking our situation.

By now, Zach had called 9-1-1, only to be told that he needed to call 3-1-1, which he did, and he reported the accident. He’d been given a case number and a phone number, but little information about the next step, and specifically NO information whether one police officer, or several, might be popping by to handcuff him and take him away to jail. Fortunately, plans like this pretty much write themselves:

Call the phone number provided by the 3-1-1 person and ask, in the humblest and most Texan way possible, complete with ma’ams and sirs, if someone could let us know whether there’s anything we should be doing, or maybe tell us what will happen next.

Get on the computer and file the claim with State Farm. Insurance company won’t care how little info we have; they’ll just want to set up the claim and assign it to an adjuster to get started working on it.

Address the husband’s need for a repair shop, and a tow to that shop, as his car is now strictly decorative cause it’s dragging shit on the ground.

Make sure I know whether a rental car is coming our way while Zach’s car is being fixed.

Calm down. Get under the covers. Order some wangs. If there are drugs about, abuse them.

I call the phone number provided by 3-1-1 and tell the nice lady my husband was in an accident, and might you please be able to tell me if there’s anything we should be doing now, ma’am? It takes a few different searches to find our accident, which she eventually tracked down with husband’s license plate number. She begins to ask me questions to fill in some missing info. What’s the car’s year, make and model? What’s the color, and license plate? Why did he flee?

Why DID he flee? Here’s why he fled, as best as we can figure out. We think he’s somewhere on the autism spectrum. We haven’t the resources to find out for certain, but it explains a lot of shit. Possibly Asperger’s. Reading the symptoms are like reading a description of Zach: He’s quite intelligent, but his social abilities are fucked up. He tends to avoid eye contact and speak in monotone. He hates, hates, hates change. He has a high IQ and superior rote memory. He has depression and anxiety. And the last time he had a regular therapist, that therapist said he thought Zach might have Asperger’s.

Therefore, he fled because he couldn’t handle the overload. Just like I did, when I had a similar accident in my mid-20s, he thought life as he knew it had just ended, only since his car was drivable (mine had not been) he went to ground. He ran home and called me. He fled because he panicked. He fled because he couldn’t stop hitting himself. Poor dude’s circuitry just exploded. I told the lady, “He’s...not very experienced with this type of situation, he’s autistic, he panicked and just went home and called the police.”

The lady I spoke with finished filling in the information she needed, and I even got a soft chuckle or two out of her while I obtained it. “Husband’s phone number? I regret I haven’t committed it to memory...um, honey?” (Husband reads phone number, woman chuckles.) She even made a little sympathetic sound when I explain why he left the scene. She was super nice. She summed up the next steps, which were not what I expected. Since Zach left the scene, the other driver is designated the victim.

Send a letter to the victim, have him get an estimate for the repairs, and mail it back.

That info will be given to a detective who investigates.

They don’t issue a warrant unless you flee the scene, AND they can’t reach you. If you’re in contact with the police, they will not, as a matter of course, send someone out to put you in the pokey.

Zach felt a lot better about things after I made that call. Any time you’re in a scary situation with a lot of unknowns, it helps you feel better by getting answers on those unknowns. Now he could relax a bit, cease panicking, and spend the afternoon quietly condemning himself for being worthless and stupid and whatever else.

The rest of the day is kind of a blur. I reported the claim on State Farm’s website, and that also addressed our short-term needs, namely, the choice of repair shop, the beginnings of the towing arrangements, and the beginning of the rental car arrangements. We ended up driving into downtown Austin yesterday--which is the opposite of what husband felt like doing--because we had to pick up the rental car. I checked, and I have coverage for $50 per day of rental car. That’s kind of a lot! Most people have coverage for $30 per day. We went to Hertz. Naturally, its parking lot is punishingly small and cramped. We spoke with a nice lady with long, pointed, avocado-colored fingernails who got us through the process. When it came time for her to give me the keys to the rental, she said, “We have a Chevy Traverse. That sound okay?” I have about as much respect for Chevrolets as I do for chlamydia, so I wasn’t thrilled, but what the hell. It’s a loaner.

Then this guy behind her, who was Asian, and had eyebrows exactly like Zachary Quinto’s, said, “Oh, you have a choice. We also have a Toyota 4-Runner. You can have the Traverse or the 4-Runner.” To which I replied, “Um...4-Runner! 4-Runner! 4-Runner!!!” And since the lady said that we would face a deoderizing fee of $300 if they found any evidence of smoking in the 4-Runner, I gave my cigarettes to Zach and said, “Remove these from mine sight.”

I never drive anything larger than my car, and a brand new 4-Runner, which is the size of an aircraft carrier, felt really, really strange to drive. Yesterday was so very weird. It was a day when I went to work, but only stayed for 17 minutes. Zach wasn’t keen on driving, so I suggested he drive my car home and let me pilot the star destroyer. I found myself listening to NPR while driving in heavy traffic in a very large, expensive vehicle, and all I could think to myself was, “I’m huge! Ohmygod I’m huge! I’m SO HUGE!” Stepping on the gas was like sending away for an authorization to accelerate. And when it was going 70, it felt like it was going half that speed. It has a backup camera, which I find unreasonably exciting.

We got through the rest of the day as best we could. Handling shit like this is primarily just a long series--days, weeks worth-- of phone calls to exchange information. Now it’s the next morning, and we’re getting his car towed from our apartment to the repair shop. It’s taken about eight phone calls so far.

And that’s how we handle it when Zach wants to hurt himself. We get through the moment, then we get through the day, then the next day is usually better. Once the tow truck is gone with his car, he’s going to hop into the star destroyer and drive it around the parking lot a little bit. I don’t know what this will cost us, but between the government shutdown and this, our plan to leave Austin by end of May is pretty much obliterated. So we’re considering changing our move date to December 1 of this year.

December 1 solves a few problems. It gives us more time to save up. It means I’ll be with the company long enough to earn next year’s gainsharing bonus. We can move in the fall, rather than at the start of summer. We can spend Next Christmas there, but we can spend the coming Thanksgiving here. It’s what would happen anyway, if we sign for another six months after our current lease runs out. It seems to be suggesting itself, because it feels right.

The tow is now done. Gonna keep an eye on husband a bit longer. The claim seems to be humming along as it should. Updates to follow. Now would be a good time for the government to reopen.

#motorcrash #aspergers #hyundai #flatbedtowtruck

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