15 Years Later

“On Dec 7^th, 1978 while walking home from school, I was run over by a chicken truck.” 

This may very well be my favorite of all the stories I’ve told in my classroom because it prompted the single…best…quote…in the history of something I call the Stupid Board.  It’s a white board on the side of my classroom that starts off the year empty, but gets filled throughout the school year with quotes when someone says something before they think. 

I’ve been on there many times.  Whildin was on there in his day.  It’s almost a badge of honor to have a quote on that board.  One day, the Larsen Stories and the Stupid Board converged in one magnificent moment.

I said, “On Dec 7^th, 1978 while walking home from school, I was run over by a chicken truck,” and a student said,

“Did you live?”

If you’ve been in my classroom, you know that moments like these are treasures.  I walked over to the board.  I wrote it down while we all laughed.  And then I said, “No.  It was a sad day for all of us.”

Having enjoyed that moment, let’s move on.  I was 6 years old.  And this is how it happened.

If you ever find yourself watching after little kids, you only need to know two games that can serve as tricks up your sleeve.  The first starts out as a “Peek-a-Boo” game with the tiny little ones.  Just show your face, make an animated smile and say the silly words.  And then you hide again.  You don’t even have to move or leave their field of sight.  You can literally just put your hand in front of your face for 2 seconds and then remove your hand and those little monsters will giggle and laugh for 5 minutes.  You’re a comic genius. 

A 7-year-old will claim that they are way too grown up for such a childish game.  But if you tell them that you’re playing Hide-and-Seek, they will lose their shit and go crouch behind a toilet for two-and-a-half hours.  They’ll think they have picked the best hiding spot in the history of the game while you check your phone for notifications and upload a meme about the stupidity of 7–year-olds. 

It’s the same game with a slightly different spin.  If I’m still telling this story in another 10 years, I’ll probably have an updated version about how it also works on my elderly parents.  But we’ll just have to wait and see.

But it’s the next game that brings us together today. 

The second game that all kids love to play is any game where you run.  Like a game of tag.  “You’re it,” is something every person in America has heard a thousand times before they even hit the 4^th grade.  Duck-Duck-Goose.  It’s not even a real game until the kid gets picked and runs his ass off like the world is on fire trying to catch the son of a bitch that called him a goose.  Then there’s the game we played in the parking lot behind our elementary school.  In this game, if you had the football you ran as fast and as far as you could before everyone else caught you, tackled you, and beat the shit out of you.  All are games where the main purpose is to run.

And ladies and gentlemen…the race.

We raced from the garbage can to the lunch lady’s car.  We raced from the merry-go-round to home plate on the baseball field.  We raced from the water fountain in the hallway to the library door (and got yelled at by whatever nun happened to be there hating on children’s happiness that day).  We raced.  We took every opportunity to race.

So I grew up right next to Detroit.  If you start walking west from the school building, which I did, you will go a couple of blocks and have to cross a pretty busy road.  It has 2 lanes in either direction and plenty of stoplights.  If you go east, you have to cross Telegraph Road.  It has 4 lanes on each side, making it the busiest road in the area.  We had kids walk home in each direction and cross both streets. 

Now here’s the thing about crossing both of those roads.  They had “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs.  The RED HAND tells you that you could die if you try to cross the street and the GREEN WALKING MAN tells you that the world is your adventure to behold. 

When you left school and started your walk home, you went in two organized lines toward those busy streets.  Some 8^th graders, who looked like giants to us 1^st graders, were placed in roles called, “Safeties.”  They led the walk away from the school building and wore orange belts around their waists that also came up diagonally across their chests like seat belts in a car.  These Safeties were in charge of two things.   

They made sure the two lines stayed intact until after you crossed the busy street, so the children didn’t wreck the neighbors’ lawns along the way.  They also ensured that the children waited until the light turned green before they crossed the street.  American heroes, these 8^th grade Safeties.  Real American heroes.

Now there’s one more crucial detail about this walk home in either direction.  Just like you’ll see in many cities, there is a thick, white line painted on the sidewalk before you get to the street.  The intent of this line is to keep pedestrians out of harm’s way from passing traffic while the RED HAND keeps them at bay.

But we didn’t see a safety mechanism.  What we saw was a racing stripe.  And a red light that said, “Line up.”  And a green light that said, “RACE!” 

At the end of every school day, we would all walk home in these two separate directions.  One group heading west and one group heading east.  We would get to the busy street and line up at the white stripe.  We would lean forward and wait.

And when the RED HAND turned into a GREEN WALKING MAN, we would race. 

You raced across your busy street and if you won, you got to race the winner of the other busy street the next day during recess.  It was like a championship race every day. 

All of your friends who went home in your direction knew that you won.  But without cell phones or social media, no one knew who won in the other direction.  You would talk about it throughout the morning.  People would make bets.  Trash talk occurred.  And then we raced. 

This is how we lived.  And we loved it.  I’d won races and I’d lost races.  The world revolved around a red light on the walk home from school.  And the GREEN WALKING MAN was my friend.

It had been a snowy afternoon on December 7^th, 1978.  The walk home was filled with two lines of children wearing boots, gloves, and winter coats trudging down blocks of sidewalk.  I had a backpack on my back and a Star Wars lunchbox at the end of my arm, held onto by a hand in a mitten.  We got to the light and had to stop.  The RED HAND.  Those of us at the front of the line, we smiled and lined up at the white stripe. 

Toes of our boots just behind the line.  Leaning forward.  Lunch boxes dangling over the white stripe.  If you were sly, you watched the actual traffic light in the middle of the intersection out of the corner of your eye and waited to see it turn yellow.  Then you knew.  Your moment was about to arrive…

We saw the GREEN WALKING MAN and tore into that intersection.  All of us thinking, “This is my day.”  I had the lead right away.  I was going to win this one.  I started smiling.  I ran faster.  Then I heard one of the Safeties yell, “No!  Come back!” 

But it was too late.  A truck, which I only remember as a Chicken Truck, tried to stop but slid through the intersection in the snow.  I don’t know if it had live chickens in it, frozen chickens, or just a picture of a chicken on the side, but as far as I remember, it was a chicken truck.  It slid through the stoplight and hit four of us like bowling pins.  I did not win that race.

Now, if you really want to see some mayhem, go watch 4 elementary children get run over by a chicken truck.  The neighborhood exploded.  There were people running and screaming everywhere.  My sister sprinted home to tell my mother what happened.  My brother stayed to try and be a good big brother.  Nuns were running all over the place like a scene in a really weird video game.  My best friend Donny had also been hit by the truck and had a broken ankle, but he ran the two blocks to his house to tell his dad.  His sister Debbie and her friend Cara, two 5^th graders, were unconscious under the truck.  This was a shitstorm.  A shitstorm to end all shitstorms.

The next thing I remember, a stranger approached me.  I don’t know where the hell my brother was for this, but the strange man said, “Hey little boy, my car is warm.”  He gestured toward his car.  “Why don’t you come with me and sit in my car until the ambulance gets here?” 

Ummm, I had been trained on how to react to this situation for my whole life.  I pointed and yelled, “STRANGER!!!!!” until he went away.  Later, I would tell this story to my family with a sense of pride, looking for some props for doing what I had been taught.  My mother said, “He was probably just being nice.  You should have just gotten in the car.”  What the hell is THAT?!?!?

At that point, Donny showed up with his dad.  Thank god.  He asked me if I felt ok.  I noticed two things.  One, I could no longer move my left arm.  Two, my new coat (which means a coat that my cousin could no longer wear) had a big rip in it on the left arm.  I didn’t start crying because I had a broken arm after getting run over by a chicken truck.  I started crying because I noticed that my new coat had been ripped during a race, and I thought I was going to get in trouble when I got home.

The ambulance showed up and somehow, my brother reappeared.  This is how much of a great brother he was that day.  He left me in the back of the ambulance by myself so he could ride up front and play with the siren the whole way to the hospital.

Now the next several moments are a bit foggy on my end, but I do know that my mother went to two hospitals that I wasn’t even in.  Remember, no cell phones or internet and we were in the city.  There wasn’t just one hospital close by, there were three of them.  She put my sister in the car and drove all over the area looking for me and my brother.

I got rolled into a room and they put a mask on my face that smelled really bad and…I’m unconscious. 

I wake up in a very white and bright room.  I don’t know where I am, where my brother is or why I have a giant, heavy thing on my arm.  But I do know how to cry, so I put some emotion into the room. 

The man laying in the bed next to me, let’s call him Scary Man, didn’t want to hear it.  He said, “Kid, I’ve been here all day, I don’t want to hear you crying.”  Well, I lost it.  We’re talking screams.  Nurses (who look like photo negatives of nuns, by the way) rolled my bed into a hallway and walked away, leaving me to scream by myself until…out of nowhere…my mother and father showed up. 

I looked at my mother as if to say, “Where on earth have you been?” 

If you could go back in time and know that you wouldn’t get hurt too badly, get yourself hit by a chicken truck.  You will have the best party when you get home.  Grandma and Grandpa are there…and Aunt Kitty.  Balloons, cake, and literally all the ice cream you could ever eat.  Donny is there and so is his dad.  Even Mrs. Santia from Santia’s Pizza is there with a Snoopy stuffed animal.  Soak it in, kid, it’s the last party like this you’ll ever get.

Once things settled down, there was a trial over the matter.  I testified and so did Donny, even though we were only 6 years old.  I remember him saying, “Me and Tim went flying!” and everyone in the courtroom laughed.  My family and I were awarded $5000 for me being run over by that chicken truck.

After lawyer fees and whatnot, that left me with $3000.  My father told me to never tell anyone that I had that money.  It was going in the bank and I was going to use it for college.  So when I turned 16, I promptly bought a used Mustang with it. 

During my senior year, while driving to basketball tryouts, the dumbest girl I’ve ever encountered totaled that car.  She went through a red light and crashed into the front of the driver’s side at 50 mph.  Then she claimed that the brakes failed.  The insurance company gave me a check (for much less than $3000 by the way), so I bought another used car with what I had left.  A Ford EXP.  Two years later, the engine in that car exploded. 

And now, I have nothing left but this story.  But there’s this, my father still calls me every year on Dec 7^th to wish me a happy anniversary.  He’s pretty sure that it’s hilarious.

I know the moral of this story is supposed to be, “Look both ways before crossing the street.”  And honestly, I have ever since.  But I guess my point is, The GREEN WALKING MAN may seem like your friend when you win the race, but he definitely isn’t your friend when there’s a chicken truck around.  Maybe he was never a friend at all.  I’ll bet he never even cared.