When I was younger I had a passion for cars. I was a petrolhead.
I had an inclination for technical stuff since childhood; motors, engines, electricity, fire, explosions, rockets, turbines, computers, aircraft, cars, robots. Anything that is man-made and contributes to global warming or depletes the resources of the planet.
The elation of watching a newspaper printing press running at full speed is pure magic when you are a child.
I was hooked on cars since via Mr. Fascist -who was a petrolhead too and prided himself in doing all sorts of mechanical and tuning work.
The moteur-du-jour of his youth: the Volkswagen Beetle.
It seems that the man had raced them in some sort of amateur racetrack and was proficient at it back in the 1960s. A few blurry black and white photos of those days were there in an album, but interestingly enough, I never quite believed that it was him at the wheel of those cars.
Mr. Fascist cultivated in me the art of mechanics, the toil of knocking down an engine with greasy, sweaty palms. The toil of changing the spark plugs, the oil or the braking fluid. I am sure the Greens would not be amused if they saw a younger me pouring the used motor oil down the drain.
Nowadays, I only like driving. What the car does under the bonnet, and how it manages to get me to my destination is not that important anymore.
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The inertia of a one-ton car hurling at 200 Km/h is something to worry about.
I think the impact of the cars must have been at around 120 Km/h – fast enough for a fatal crash accident, but slow enough for emergency newspaper headlines.
My last minutes on this world were being played out in a very slow motion reel. I was braking so hard and travelling so fast that the skid marks extended over eight metres.
The other car was T-boned just behind the passenger side door. The driver, oblivious to his fate and drunk to the point of unconsciousness, survived the crash pretty much unscathed. He tried to do a U-turn in a freeway ramp and unfortunately for me, I was street racing against another car, when all this situation unraveled before my eyes.
My car had ceased to exist. Everything from the front windshield on to the front bumpers was a jagged and mangled mass of smoldering metal, oil and plastic.
I walked away with a bruise in my body, caused by the pressure of the safety belt on my shoulders and chest: a blue and brown belt that decorated my 20-year old self for a week or so. The product of deceleration, imprudence and high speed street-racing.
How I survived this accident was a mystery. Mr. Fascist was not happy at all, as the car I crashed in was the spiritual successor to his beloved racing days of youth.
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Twenty-five years later, I had the opportunity to cheat death in another road accident -and this time with Mr. Fascist as a passenger, while one of his distant cousins was at the wheel.
Talk about irony.
The driver was cocky and imprudent, like most Italian drivers are, and the wintry conditions of the winding road did not make for a lovely day out.
We were on a grim pilgrimage to see my grandfather’s grave and Mr. Fascist was excited to take me there to meet his dead father. A man who I had no emotional connection with was beckoning.
We ended up driving to a lonely and grim little village, high in the mountains outside Rome. There I saw the grave of my ancestor -and as it happens, I saw the little ceramic plaque with his image, adorning the headstone.
He did show a family resemblance. But I never met him, as he left my grandmother when she was pregnant of my father, and never saw him again while he lived.
The road was icy and the cousin was driving too fast, going back to the city. Lunchtime was approaching and he wanted to do something else. So he was speeding to arrive earlier.
About five minutes before the crash, I told everyone that I had to buckle-up and that I did not feel safe with the driving. My father raised his eyebrows in surprise and annoyance at this, but he ended up fastening his seatbelt. The driver just chuckled at my insolence.
A few minutes after that, an oncoming car became the focus of the decelerating forces on us, as the cousin lost control in the icy road and we struck the oncoming car head first.
After the impact I remember the silence, the smell of burnt oil, the puddles of petrol on the asphalt of the road, and the shouting and screaming of the driver of the other car, as he realised his leg was fractured.
Both cars were totaled and we all ended going up to hospital. Other than a concussion, I came out of the crash unscathed.
Deceleration is a serious thing.