Speedy
Speedy is not the guy’s real name. His real name is Shane but I do not think I have ever seen anybody but his mom call him that. Speedy was the nickname given to Shane by a high school teacher because Shane kept falling asleep in his class; it had nothing to do with drugs or being a fast runner. It was just about his inability to stay awake in American Politics and Government.
I was not really friends with Speedy, I knew him through his brother, Lee. Both of the boys were very Irish and both looked like they were fresh off the boat, trying to escape some potato famine. While Lee had long hair, I never ever say Shane with any hair. Despite the fact that he was balding by the time he was twenty, he always kept his head shaved. The hair on his head was reserved for the thick and devilish looking goatee he perpetually wore.
Just because I was not best friends with Speedy didn’t mean I didn’t hang out with him constantly. Because they were brothers, and both very much alike, when you got one, you pretty much got the other. It didn’t bother me, Speedy was a pretty funny guy and he didn’t bother my troop of friends very much. When I told Lee I was going to be having a party at my apartment, I pretty much already knew that Speedy would be there.
The day of the party arrives and the keg is on ice. Of course I had a barbecue grill raging in the backyard and people were starting to trickle in around eight o’clock in the evening. Lee had to work until nine and then he and his brother were going to walk over; they only lived a few yards over from my apartment complex, separated by two tall privacy fences that they often hopped. The party really started swinging at around nine-thirty; most of the people who were going to show up were already there, including some ex-girlfriends who were not invited…at least by me. My roommates…always playing those funny, funny jokes…
For some reason, around ten o’clock I looked at the clock and I realized that Speedy and Lee hadn’t shown up yet. Oh well, Lee must have had to work late and Speedy must have just been waiting until he arrived so that they could walk over together. A few minutes after ten, one of the last guests to arrive, a tall dude named Scott wandered into my home and met up with me in the kitchen. As he was pouring himself a beer out of a pitcher he asked me who the guy passed out in the parking lot was.
“What?” I asked, thinking he was joking.
“The dude,” he said as he took a pull off of the frosty beer in his hand. “There’s a dude passed out in the parking lot over by the fence. At least I thought he was passed out. He wasn’t moving much…”
Oh crap, this isn’t good. Loud music and tons of people in an apartment is reason enough to get the cops called on just a minor triviality such as noise, but if you had people passing out on the neighbor’s lawns, the cops would surely be visiting…and soon. I grabbed one of my roommates and told him the trouble. We both went out to the parking lot.
Sure enough, over by where Speedy and Lee usually hopped the privacy fence, Speedy lay sprawled on the ground. We walked over, thinking he had started the party early by himself and had managed to pass out on the way over to our place. Great, we’re gonna have to haul him into one of our cars and drive him home. Goddamned drunks!
As we approached the prostrate form, it became rapidly apparent that the person on the ground was not passed out due to over drinking. Speedy’s face and arms were covered in scratches from the top of the fence and his ankle was sticking out from his leg at an odd angle. Oh hell, I remember thinking, he slipped coming over the fence and now he’s got a busted head and a busted ankle. My roommate and I hauled him over to my truck.
Once we had gotten him strapped into the passenger seat, my roommate went back into the party to keep an eye on the goings on there. He had instructions to let Lee know that I was taking Speedy to the hospital and that he should follow me down there so that he could pick him up. There was no way in hell I was gonna miss this whole party just because he had fucked up and broken his ankle!
The drive to the hospital was a short and uneventful trip. Speedy managed to wake up a bit and tell me what I had already known; he had gotten his jeans caught on the top of the fence, slipped, and taken a nasty fall. We pulled into the emergency room parking lot and the parking attendant handed me a validation token. We drove under one of those parking lot arms that are supposed to keep people in or out depending on if they had paid for their parking spot. Some orderlies met us at the door and put Speedy into wheelchair. A doctor took a quick look at his ankle and then he was swiftly admitted. At that point I figured that I could get out of there and get back to the party. I was wrong.
While I was seeing to Speedy’s admittance, I managed to give my house a call. My roommate explained to me that Lee had not shown up yet and I was probably going to have to wait down there to make sure Speedy had a ride home. Later, we found out that Lee had been late because he had gotten into a minor fender bender on the way home from work. He didn’t show up to the party until well after midnight.
I wasn’t very pissed off; this wasn’t that big of a problem. I found myself a seat and a magazine and got comfortable. This would probably take an hour or two, surely I could handle that; the party wouldn’t be over until at least five in the morning. Like so many other things that night, I was very wrong.
Sometime around one o’clock in the morning I was jolted awake by somebody poking me. I groggily opened my eyes and looked up at Lee’s worried face. He had just made it there finally and was really worried about his brother. I calmed him down and explained what had happened. He got noticeably better, relaxing more and more as I spoke to him.
“I’m getting out of here,” I told him once we were straightened out. “Get him out of here as soon as you can, then come back to the party.” Lee nodded and took the chair and the magazine I had been using.
I wandered back out to the parking area. Nobody was around and the night had gotten much colder while I had been sleeping inside the hospital. I climbed into my truck and pulled up to the parking lot kiosk to put my validation token into the slot and get the hell out of there.
Funny thing about parking tokens…they can magically disappear. I was not conscious of this fact, but I was being briskly made aware of the notion as I patted all of my pockets looking for the damned thing. It was gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere and there was nobody in the parking lot kiosk to let me out of the lot. The evening, which had begun with such promise, was about to take a nasty turn for the absurd.
For some reason, I never thought to go back into the hospital and get another token or to ask for help. I must have been mad about Speedy, missing the party, or the lateness of Lee. I wanted out of that lot right then! Climbing out of the cab of the truck, I examined the arm that was holding me in the lot. It was the standard parking arm: a long piece of wood that was painted white and had red stripes on it. It was attached to a machine that would raise or lower it depending on if a person had a token…the token I didn’t have.
I tested the arm, trying to see just how strong it was. The wooden thing moved a bit in my hand. I realized that the whole thing could be lifted if I just got under it with a good grip. After a few minutes of struggling, I had the thing all the way up. Inside the machinery I had heard something break, a gear or a cog or something, and the arm remained pointing straight upwards. With a shout of glee, I hopped back into the truck and began driving under the upright arm.
Right about where the cab of the truck passed under the arm, two things happened at the same time. The first thing was that a loud alarm went off, it’s crazy wailing was piercing and it rang out into the night. The second thing was that the arm slammed down on the roof of my truck with surprising force. A very apparent dent appeared just over my head, inside the cab. Good Christ! The thing was deadly!
I couldn’t stop right there, the alarm was driving me out of my mind and I was under the impression that I was in a very bad spot. I gunned the trucks engine and hauled ass out of the parking lot. A few miles down the road, I stopped under a streetlight and examined the damage.
The little yellow lights that were on the roof of the cab were all ripped out, the plastic reflectors shattered and the wiring was all exposed. Behind them, long white streaks of paint were etched into the dark blue of the truck’s paint job; some of the red paint from the parking arm was engraved into the truck as well. Goddamn it, I liked that truck, this was gonna cost a pile of money to fix and I didn’t have a pile of money. Who knew that parking lot kiosk arms were fashioned to be as efficient and brutal as any guillotine?
Cursing, I got back into the truck and drove home. The party was still going like mad and people hadn’t changed much in the time I was gone…maybe a bit more drunk. I joined them and the party was a normal college aged kid-fest like you would expect.
Speedy had broken his ankle very badly and was laid up in bed at his house for several weeks. Finally, after a long convalescence, he was back to normal…as normal as could be for a character like him. The day he was fully better and the doctor had taken his air cast off, he slipped in the shower (his first in weeks) and broke his collarbone.
