Crash and Learn

By Tom Matlack

I woke to the sound of metal scraping against pavement. Sparks brightened that otherwise
gray winter day in 1991. I was hanging upside down inside my girlfriend’s baby blue
Ford Escort, suspended by a seat belt as the car hurtled at sixty miles per hour along the
westernmost section of the Massachusetts Turnpike.
I was twenty-six at the time. I had been in New York City with my girlfriend the night
before, taking a break from my grad studies at Yale and drinking until dawn. While she
took a train home to Albany, I had gone to class in New Haven, still drunk, and then set
out for Albany myself. On the thirty-mile stretch of the Mass. Pike between Exit 3 in
Westfield and Exit 2 in Lee you see nothing but pine trees and the occasional white-tailed
deer. Somewhere along that span I drifted into a peaceful sleep.
I remained calm as the car slid along on its roof. There was nothing to do but wait
and see what would happen next. The sensation was familiar. I had long been a human
missile with no guidance system. One summer evening, just for fun, I’d lifted a love seat
over my head and tossed it out an eighth-floor window of a UCLA dormitory; one New
Year’s Eve, just before midnight, I was thrown through the plate glass window of a
midtown Manhattan restaurant, to the horror of the foursome whose dinner I landed on;
I’d been accepted at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and then was thrown out,
before attending my first class, for lying on my application; and I had developed a habit
of blacking out from drinking.
I felt a searing pain as the roof of the car, slamming against the turnpike an inch
from my head, crimped around a clump of my hair and yanked it from my scalp. The
seat belt dug into my chest, drawing blood that stained my shirt. At last, the car stopped,
leaving a wake of scrapes in the pavement. I unbuckled, fell on my head, and screamed,
“Fuck!” After forcing the door open with my shoulder, I sprinted away from the car,
afraid the gas tank was going to blow.
We have a remarkable ability to respond instinctively to life-threatening danger.
The problem comes after that initial, instinctive response: The body shuts down. A state
policeman found me shaking violently on the side of the highway. I still can’t remember
what happened after I got out of the car. I could have been standing on the side of the
highway for thirty seconds or for thirty minutes.
“Son, you’re one lucky son of a bitch!” the trooper screamed while shaking his
head in disgust. “I’ve seen plenty of Escorts flip, but I’ve never seen anyone survive. I
don’t like having to pull dead bodies out of wrecks, so how about being more careful?”
His words didn’t register. I had beaten death again.

****

In my budding business career, as the stakes grew bigger, I brought the same sense of
invincibility and calm that I had felt hurtling along upside down in the Escort. At twenty-
nine, I became chief financial officer of the Providence Journal Company, a huge and
fiercely private media conglomerate. The company’s other executives, most of them
twice my age, thought I should be getting them cups of coffee. I spoke only when spoken
to. I sat attentively with my boss, the chairman of the board, as he drank scotch and
smoked cigars, rarely saying a word except to nod my head in agreement. And yet, once I
had become his most trusted adviser, I needed just ninety days to take the oldest
newspaper company in the country public and then negotiate the sale of the business in
an Atlanta hotel room for billions to a bunch of cowboys from Dallas. The chairman had
initiated the contact but never thought I could negotiate such a good price. When I did, he
had no choice but to proceed, despite the firestorm it would cause among shareholders,
employees, and the community. I stood to make several million dollars and be credited
with pulling off the impossible.
My calculus at work had been flawless. After the sale, I appeared on the cover of
the Wall Street Journal, a blond-haired wunderkind. What I had failed to calculate were
the risks I was taking at home and how much I had to lose. I had two baby children, and I
was about to learn how precarious my relationship with them really was. It was as if the
car crash had put the emotional part of me into suspended animation. I was fearless in my
professional life but unable to feel anything in my personal life.

****
Christmas that year was agonizing. My soon-to-be-ex wife had kicked me out of the
house for good. My nine-month-old son, Seamus, and two-year-old daughter, Kerry, went
to Albany with their mom. I was not invited. I packed a huge red fire engine in my
company car, got on I-95, and drove to my parents’ house in Washington, D.C. On
Christmas morning I gave my brother’s oldest son the fire truck and tried to soak up his
enthusiasm. It didn’t work. All I could think about was my own children waking up
without me, on Seamus’s first Christmas. My brother and sister and parents all were
understanding and overly friendly, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would never
have the chance to live with my kids.
The next day, on my way back to Providence, I stopped in Manhattan to smoke
cigars with some college buddies. I had been trying to stop drinking without much
success. That night my friends and I ended up in a SoHo restaurant with a mirrored bar
that let all the beautiful people enjoy good views of themselves. It wasn’t my worst night
of drinking—I didn’t flip any cars or fly through any plate glass windows—but I was
rude and more than a little lecherous.
I woke up the following day with a pounding headache, the smell of cigarettes in
my hair, and the taste of cigars on my tongue. I spent the morning contemplating how I
could kill myself quickly and painlessly. But later in the day, as I drove back to
Providence, I convinced myself that neither Seamus nor Kerry deserved the shitty father I
had been. They certainly didn’t deserve a dead father who didn’t have the guts to face his
demons.
That was the last time I had a drink, but sobering up was just the start. I had to
learn how to take care of my two babies by myself. When their mother moved back to
Boston, I knew I had to follow. But I had trouble finding a place that felt right to me,
because moving out of my week-to-week hovel in Providence would mean that this was
to be a permanent condition: I really wasn’t going to live with my kids.
I eventually found a penthouse on the corner of Commonwealth and
Massachusetts avenues, a killer bachelor pad to be sure, but not the dream I had in mind,
so it took quite a while for me to settle in. The bathroom had a skylight over the tub, and
often, when I couldn’t sleep, I would take a bath and gaze up at the stars. The apartment
faced east, toward the city core. From the seventh-floor bay window the views of
Boston’s brownstones and parks looked positively European. Each morning I meditated
in the bay window until the sun hit the State House’s gold dome in the distance and
eventually made its way to warm my face. This perch became my monastery.
My ex-wife and I agreed that the kids would come to my apartment every Friday
night. I put bunk beds and a matching wooden toy chest in what would become their
room. Each week I’d pick up Seamus and Kerry, and all their gear, and drive around my
city neighborhood looking for a parking spot. The kids were usually grumpy and hungry
by the time I finally parked the car and loaded them into their double stroller. I’d put their
bags on top and start pushing. I was driven by adrenaline, trying to make this all OK for
them. By the time I had reached my building, unloaded the kids, and got them through
the door and into the lobby, I would feel as though I had climbed Mount Everest. I’d tell
Kerry to hold Seamus’s hand, and then I would go back outside, collapse the stroller, and
lug it up the stairs and into the lobby before corralling the kids into the elevator. From the
elevator, the kids would run ahead down the hall. I’d catch them just in time to open the
door to my apartment and lead them up a final flight of stairs inside. Then it was time for
me to make dinner.
The first night I had the kids on my own I gave the them baths, slipped them into
matching footie pajamas, tucked Kerry into her bunk, and then warmed a bottle for
Seamus. In my bedroom, I turned off the lights and rocked him gently while he drank. I
inhaled deeply. It was the scent of my son that changed everything—his scent and the
sound of him suckling his bottle, the softness of his skin and the sensation of holding him
as his body gradually went limp with sleep. I looked down and realized that this—being a
father—was my deepest satisfaction. Chasing Kerry around the house at five the next
morning, catching her, and tickling her as she screamed with joy confirmed it.

****

In the days that followed my kids’ first overnight visit, I realized just how much work I
had to do as a dad. I feared I would never be a decent parent no matter how hard I tried.
When they were at my apartment, my childhood fear of heights returned. I often had
nightmares of the kids falling out the bay window. Kerry didn’t help matters. Even at age
three, she loved to taunt me by standing on the ledge inside that window with her nose
pressed against the glass, looking out at the city and giggling at my discomfort. To set my
mind at ease, I nailed two-by-fours across the bottom of the window.
I didn’t want to see my kids just on weekends. During the week I took them to a
playgroup in one of the buildings on Newbury Street. I sat in a circle with the moms and
their kids, singing, wrestling, and generally acting goofy. As I rolled around on the floor,
the moms didn’t know what to make of me. But they gradually accepted me, and I got to
be with my kids. On Saturdays I took them to the top of the Prudential building, only a
few blocks from my apartment. The carpeted floors and large, soft furniture were ideal
for some safe roughhousing, and the observation deck was a large square track, where the
kids could wear themselves out by running around and around. There were rainy days
when we couldn’t see a damn thing, but we still went up there, just to have something to
do together.
Care objects were very important to the kids as their little minds tried to manage
all the moving around. Kerry had a blanket she slept with every night. Seamus became
attached to a stuffed Pal dog from the PBS show Arthur. Pal took on identifying textures
and wear marks as he was beaten, barfed on, and laundered. He was one of a kind and not
replaceable. I became obsessed with knowing where Pal and “Blankie” were at all times.
At the time, I kept a bag full of the kids’ things in my room and doled out clothes and
toys like gold bullion. As the end of each visit approached, I turned the apartment upside
down with drill-sergeant precision to insure all the kids’ stuff was accounted for.
Then one day Pal disappeared. I scoured under beds and behind furniture. The
apartment wasn’t that big, so coming up dry convinced me that the crisis was indeed
serious. After several nights of listening to my tearful son on the phone bemoaning the
loss of Pal, I slunk over to FAO Schwarz and purchased another.
I brought the replacement Pal to my office. I tried to duplicate, in a single day,
years’ worth of wear marks. I took a baseball bat to the pristine doggie, and then I threw
the six-inch-thick Handbook of Fixed Income Securities at him. My partners in our
venture firm couldn’t figure out what was going on. My door was shut and I didn’t
respond to any calls or e-mails all day. On the walk home, I took the now-limp dog and
rolled him in sidewalk sand. When I got to my condo, I threw him in the washing
machine for an extra-heavy spin cycle.
That night I stood apprehensively at my ex-wife’s front door with the new, but
suitably worn, Pal. But before I could present him, I learned that the original Pal had been
recovered: Kerry confessed to smuggling him home and hiding him inside the folds of
her mother’s curtains. When I returned to my apartment, I stored the spare dog in the
back of my closet, just in case.

****

Six years to the day after my last drink, I remarried. Elena and I had a son named Cole.
I’ve been married now six years and sober twelve. Cole just turned four, Kerry is a
freshman in high school, and Seamus just started junior high.
When Cole’s eyes are heavy after a long day of pretending to be a knight, I get his
jammie-joes on, brush his teeth, and he gives Mommy a good-night kiss and hug before I
carry him in my arms down the hall to the cowboy-themed bedroom that Elena designed
for him. We snuggle into the lower log-cabin bunk bed and read three books—about lost
penguins, monkeys toying with alligators, and dogs wearing strange hats and driving
cars.
Often Cole starts snoring before I have finished the first story. But sometimes he
goes the distance. Either way, I turn the light out while still pinned between Cole and the
wall. Even if he is already asleep, he stirs when he hears the switch and asks, “Daddy,
will you stay with me for a little while?”
Holding my son as he slumbers on the bottom bunk of his bed, surrounded by big
logs of raw pine, I feel cocooned and have to force myself to leave. I allow myself twenty
minutes of forgetting what I was so anxious or mad or sad about before climbing in to
read bedtime stories.
In the dark I listen to Cole snore as I stare up at the bottom of the top bunk, my
mind empty of any thoughts. Every night some instinct eventually tells me it’s time to get
up and walk back into my life. But I return nourished just enough to make it through
another twenty-four hours, until it’s time to get our jammie-joes on again and climb back
into the bunk beds.