Brush with Death

“Buckle up. Buckle up for safety.”

-1970’s commercial jingle for car safety

The click of my seatbelt prompts me to think about Sugar Bear.

The summer months of my undergraduate college years were spent painting school buildings. As a summer hire, I worked on a four man painting crew making a lackluster dollar above the $3.85 minimum wage. I was on a work detail with Sugar Bear, a blond haired mountainous man who owned more than an ounce of rebellion in him.

Aboard a gas guzzler of a flatbed truck, the driver turned on one of the most winding tree-lined roads in Gloucester County, aptly nicknamed Snake Road. The cab was filled with the driver and the troublemaker of our motley crew. Passengers often stood hanging on to the wooden side rails as the truck lumbered along. Sugar Bear and I were no smarter than the average bear.

So we stood tall in the back of the flatbed. The invigorating wind blew in our faces and cooled off our sun drenched bodies. We laughed to the sound of youth squeezing life by the balls. With the Friday work day almost over, the upcoming weekend inflated our mood. We could lay down our brushes and paint the town red. Life was grand.

Sugar Bear bobbed and weaved his man-child body to duck under the tree branches from the overgrown canopy. All of his attention seemed focused on the trees above. We were rolling along at 40 mph when a pothole swallowed the truck’s right front end. The truck inadvertently shifted tossing our bodies in the loose flatbed. I grabbed and hung unto the left wood rail for dear life. I heard wood snapping and breaking away behind me. I turned back to check on Sugar Bear but he was no longer a passenger. Bouncing along the road were overturned paint cans, the right wood rail, and Sugar Bear. I watched the tail end of Sugar Bear’s twisted body roll to a merciful stop. Even stuntman Evil Knievel would have called this a bad landing.

I pounded on the cab while screaming at the top of my lungs for the driver to stop the truck. He did. As we dashed back to Sugar Bear, the spilled paint provided a polychrome splatter pattern. Dirt and gravel collected in Sugar Bear’s bloody cuts. He barely hung onto consciousness. Sugar Bear did not try and talk but he laid strewn out in a silent prone. The strangest expression in all of tragedy, he exuded a Cool Hand Luke like smile. We held vigil until a summoned ambulance whisked him to a hospital.

I paw for the reassurance of my seatbelt. Life is a bunch of snapshots in the mind. I never saw Sugar Bear again.