I went on a rampage in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Let me tell you about it.
The story begins when I rent a 15-foot moving van to retrieve my possessions from Fairfield, CA, where they have been entombed for the past year and a half. Not five minutes after renting the truck, I am taking a right turn on one of those narrow San Francisco streets, and, failing to swing wide enough, I crush the car parked on the corner. The car is actually physically stuck to my truck and dragged several feet down the curb before I manage to disentagle. Its entire left-hand side is mangled, the side mirror smashed off, etc., etc.
But one car does not a rampage make. I am not done.
I now continue the right turn, and, still failing to swing wide, I do the exact same fucking thing to the car parked just around the corner. Mirror smashed, headlight smashed, glass everywhere, body twisted. Between the two cars and the truck, I am mentally estimating the damage at somewhere in the neighborhood of ten grand.
Now, I do have insurance on the truck. But I am not at all sure what it covers. I am deathly afraid that it is not going to cover stupidity on this scale. After all, I have left a Terminator-style wake of destruction behind me. And if insurance allows you to drive around smashing into things, wouldn’t more people drive around smashing into things?
Anyway, I am not thinking particularly clearly at this point. My knees are shaking in a violent sort of way, and I continue driving slowly down the street absently looking for a place to pull over. This being San Francisco, no parking spaces are available within a ten-mile radius, which is fine with me, because I have managed to convince myself that I have time to sort out my options as long as I don’t! stop! moving!
My options, as I see it, are these: 1) Leave a note on the two cars and hope for the best; or 2) get the hell out of dodge and let my victims’ insurance take care of the mess.
Normally when confronted with a stark moral choice like this, I am pretty much a boy scout. I’ve dinged parked cars before and always left a note. But this is destruction on a whole different level, and I am sick with worry about the potential cost. On the other hand, I also know that I’ll never get away with fleeing. Witnesses abound. My battered 15-foot truck isn’t exactly inconspicuous. A perfect crime this ain’t.
The debate becomes moot when a police officer pulls me over a few minutes later in response to a 911 call from one of the witnesses.
“What’s your story?” he says. He is trying to see if I will bullshit him. I will not bullshit him. I immediately confess, and although the cop tries to scare me with an accusation of hitting and running, he is basically nice to me, because I am not like “the shitbags [he] usually [deals] with.”
(Incidentally, in high school my friends and I reserved special contempt for Erin Connely, who was always getting pulled over for speeding in her red Mazda Miata, and always getting let off with a warning on account of her blond hair, long legs, and propensity to burst into tears at the sight of a badge. This contempt, on my part at least, was fairly hypocritical, given that I have always had pretty good cop mojo myself. I attribute my luck mostly to the wide-eyed, “Golly, mom sure is going kill me” look that I’ve honed over the years.)
I drive back to the accident scene, exchange info with one of the car owners (who is surprisingly friendly considering the damage done to his vehicle and my apparently casual attitude toward my role in the matter) and leave a note for the other. The policeman releases me into my own custody; it is now time to return the truck, which I rented not an hour before.
As I drive back to the rental agency, I am giving myself a little pep talk on how it’s only money, life goes on, someday I’ll look back on this and laugh or least give a tight little smile, blah de blah, but basically I want to drive myself into the bay.
The rental guys take a look at the truck and say: “Nice.”
I say: “I need a new truck. With extra insurance, please.”
It turns out that what I have to pay is: nothing. Not only do I not have to pay a cent, I don’t even have to fill out a form. The rental company immediately gives me an even bigger truck than the one I just bashed up, and the only consequence is a telephone call from an insurance agent in which I breezily describe my role in the affair (“Yeah, I was taking a right turn, and I pretty much just smashed the shit out of the two cars parked there. Smashed ‘em good. Anything else?”).
The only unfortunate aspect of this incident, in retrospect, is that I wasn’t able to enjoy the rampage while it was underway. I can sort of see what people are talking about when they refer to the “moral hazard” of insurance, by which they mean the perverse tendency of insurance to remove any motivation on the part of the insured to avoid reckless behavior. Whatever.
My friends, for their part, seem to find my trauma highly amusing. One has dubbed the episode “Mr. Happypants takes a truck ride,” and has proposed the following narration: “[crash, tinkle] Oopsie….[crash]…Oopsie again…” I feel that tight little smile coming on already.
