Overdriving your lights

It was Me, Jaime, and Tony up to shenanigans one night in Jaime’s new pickup truck. When I say it was new, I mean it was 10 days old.  Jaime was testing out his tire durability on pavement and in a field when we saw some headlights coming.  Like anyone with half a brain, we did not want to get caught driving in a field, so Jaime got back on the road and took off.  The car was coming up behind us fast we assumed it was a cop.  And if you know Jaime, no cop is going to catch him so he floored it.

We turned right off of Overton road onto 302 and the damn car turned the same way.  So by this time we were shitting our pants, Jaime was pulling every last bit of power out of that truck when we turned on Smyser Rd, which has a number of corners along with a hill you have to climb.  Surely this is the road to lose a cop on.

I was sitting on the passenger side and Tony was riding bitch.  I remember looking over at the speedometer and feeling that we were going too fast for the corner that was rapidly approaching.  I may have even said something, but just about everything was a blur until SMASH.  We did not make he corner and this was a corner with a 6-8 foot ditch right in front of Doerflers house.  Jaime started yelling immediately for us to get the hell out of the truck.  You would not believe how heavy a truck door is when you have to lift it up vertically.  And by this time the car that was following us had stopped and it was not a cop.  I want to say it was Brent Horskey, but now that I think about it, it was probably Brandon Patterson.  Either way, it was a kid from our class who was just driving fast too.

The truck would not come out of the ditch so it was time to make some phone calls as there was no way we were making our curfew.  I call home and Dad answered…damn it.

“We were in an accident.  Jaime overdrove his lights and we hit the ditch” I told dad.  I just had to say it because there was no beating around this bush.

“What the hell do you mean, ‘overdrove his lights’?  That sounds like he was going too fucking fast!” Dad responded.  Then I hear him telling Mom and everyone else in the background.  “What did he do to his truck?”

“Well it is pretty bad. We hit the ditch by Doerflers.”

Dad harassed Jaime about overdriving his lights for years after that.  He would just ask him, “Hey, you overdrive your lights lately?”

A funny sidebar to this story is how I got out of a ticket that night.  After we hit the ditch there were smashes in the windshield, one over the steering wheel and one right in the middle.  The head that hit the middle actually took out the rear view mirror.  So the head marks were obviously from Tony’s head who was seated in the middle and Jaime’s head. Somehow I was spared.  When the cop got there and questioned us, he asked if I had my seatbelt on.  Now I knew I didn’t, but shit, I did not want a ticket, so I said I could not remember, but I thought I did.  To me this was not quite as bad as just saying yes, which was a lie, playing dumb was in that gray area which at age 16 was an ok place to be.  The cop said since he could not prove that I did not have it on he could not give me a ticket.  When I got home I noticed there was a lot of glass still in my hair so I started combing it out and this is when I noticed I had a rectangular knot with cuts on the edge of it right above my hairline.  Check out a car without a rearview sometime and you will notice that this is the exact same shape.

Shawn