MY WEIRDEST CHRISTMAS EVER

This ran in "LA Citybeat" Christmas '03 - but it's damn funny and hope you enjoy it....

MY WEIRDEST CHRISTMAS EVER
The car that arrived for Xmas~
By CARL KOZLOWSKI ~
t was the night after Christmas 1991, and my parents had taken off on their first vacation away from me and my siblings in over a decade, when they capped off the ‘70s by shakin’ it with Don Ho in Honolulu. I was 20 and my sister was almost 22 - so my folks felt they could finally trust us to watch our two little brothers and the house for a couple of days as they headed off to the slightly less exotic destination of Branson, Missouri, for a little R&R.
As they prepared to drive off on their own, they issued the immortal cliché uttered by every parent leaving the kids in charge in a movie: "Don’t let the house fall apart!" before chuckling to show us they really trusted us to have it in control.
They had no idea how prophetic their words would be.
For on that night - their FIRST night away from us in 12 years - at about 12:30 in the morning, as I watching David Letterman while writing a note to my college girlfriend about how nothing ever happened in Little Rock...something did.
My youngest brother Nick was 13 and asleep in his room upstairs. My brother Lud was 15 and in his bed downstairs. My sister Krys was passed out on the couch behind me. I was the one who heard it coming - it sounded like a descending jet plane heading straight towards us, and then - our house was rocked with what seemed like a sonic boom.
Krys practically fell off the couch. Lud sprang awake. Nick was still silent upstairs as we quickly tried to rationalize what had just happened, and whether it was safe to go outside. Earthquakes didn’t happen in Arkansas, did they? We scratched that off the list of possibilities. I had grown up eagerly anticipating the possibility of alien life as a young boy - perhaps I had been wrong to grow up and disbelieve, and the little green men were now here!
What remained on our mental list was far more disturbing. I thought we’d been hit by a nuclear weapon. After all, we lived in an area that during the Cold War was among the top 20 targets for the Soviets – 15 miles from an Air Force base and a hop, skip and a jump from Camp Robinson, one of America’s largest national guard training facilities that stretched over 50 miles in length.
I decided that as the oldest male, I would take the hit for the team and go outside to see what had happened. I grabbed a huge flashlight and a baseball bat and gingerly opened the front door, Krys and Lud left behind me, Nick still in his amazing Rip Van Winkle slumber down the hall.
I stepped out just as a teenage guy jumped out of our bushes and ran across the street and to the top of the driveway across from us and started waving frantically as an SUV-type truck came screaming around the corner, screeched to a halt, picked him up and drove away.
I decided I had to look in our bushes and see what he might have left behind. But it was a lot bigger than something he could hide in a bush. As I crept along, I heard the gentle purr of a
rotating engine ... the engine of a car HANGING OUT THE SIDE WALL OF OUR HOUSE IN MID-AIR!!!!
We have the insurance photos to prove it. There was a Dodge car hanging out the side of our garage, looking like Michael J. Fox’s Delorean in "Back to the Future" if, well, if it had not quite made it to the future and just clobbered the town courthouse instead.
And inside the car were three very drunk, very stunned teenage boys who, like me, were trying to figure out what just happened. The driver was apparently the one who had come to his senses and run away, creating the first hit-and-run on a house that I’d personally ever heard of.
The amazing thing was that none of our neighbors seemed to notice a thing. None of them had come outside to help or even stare.
Not really knowing what to do with three guys sitting in a car attached to my house, I called 911. And oh, about 38 minutes later, the lightning-fast North Little Rock Police Dept. showed up to take control of the situation. By this point, the boys had unbuckled their seatbelts, jumped to the ground and used our phone to call their parents - and one of them had even come to realize that we’d played on the same YMCA basketball team seven years before. He saw our team photo on the wall, and soon we were reminiscing. What else could we do? Neither one of us was going anywhere anytime soon.
It was when the police decided to call in a tow truck to yank the car out of our house that two things happened: 1) The neighbors suddenly decided to come out and see how we were doing, and 2) It was time to call our poor parents. What does it take to get the neighbors’ attention? It’s not every day you get to see a tow truck pull a car out of a house, even in a state known for its monster truck rallies. But then it became a real bonding experience, as they tried to "console" us, some even bringing us fruitcake, which we declined, because there was no need to add to the senseless tragedy at hand.
And so the truck heaved, and pulled - and just about knocked over the left side of our house as it took the car out. More than a few neighbors said "I hope they have insurance!’ which both we and the driver thankfully had. The boys’ parents came and picked them up, apologizing sheepishly as if they had just pulled a simple little prank out of an episode of "Leave it to Beaver," and our parents sounded like they jumped right out of their bones when they heard the news and raced home five hours in the dead of night, their vacation cut off before it began.
When the police reconstructed the accident the next day, they estimated that the car was going 110 mph in a 25 mph zone, careening down a backwoods straightaway before hitting a curve as it entered our residential neighborhood. The driver hit the brakes and laid black rubber over 100 feet across pavement, through the neighbor’s lawn, and smacked into the side of
our house. But the most amazing thing was, they had defied the laws of physics to do it – they had actually squeezed impossibly between two trees in the neighbor’s lawn, barely scratching the trees and only putting some dents in their doors, but hitting the trees had rerouted them from hitting our front porch and slowed them down enough to ensure they weren’t flung from the car like projectiles upon impact with our house.
The driver actually came back with his insurance paperwork the next day - while driving a Porsche. Sure, he might have planted his car drunkenly into the side of our house; sure he might have come back the next day in a Porsche, but at least he came back! Can you really say they’d do that here, in L.A.? Or the O.C.? I think not! In Little Rock, we might plow into a person’s house in a drunken stupor - but we pay for it!
And over the next month, my mom used that money to not only rebuild the damage but to make a couple of improvements. We now have a brick wall that blocks access to the actual wall of the house - just in case it happens again.
We also have a set of highway reflector lights that have been put in our front lawn. For the same purpose. Classy, but effective. No one’s driven on our lawn since.
And oh yeah, Nick slept through the whole thing.
Merry Christmas!
12-31-03




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