It was a gorgeous Saturday in the city, late summer turning to Indian summer. Ellenwood and I were out apartment hunting, cruising the upper Market St area. We hadn’t had much luck that morning so we decided to head over to Carlton’s place for lunch before resuming the search in the afternoon. Ellenwood turned left off of Market and headed the Olds down Clipper St. toward Carlton’s.

For those of you not familiar with San Francisco, Clipper St. starts at upper Market near the top of Mt. Sutro, the tallest hill in the city. From there it winds down a parkway until it straightens out and descends through city streets into Noe Valley, a drop of about 300 feet at roughly a 45 degree angle. In the years that we had made the trip many times and this one didn’t seem any different…until at the stop sign at the bottom of the parkway Ellenwood’s foot went to the floor.

I will make note at this time that in the past I had always done the brakes on the Olds. My thinking back then was that doing your own brakes was like packing your own parachute, if it’s not right you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. But Ellenwood had decided a few weeks before to take the Olds to a garage and have them done by a professional. I will also point out at this point that what few safety features were to be found on a 1964 Oldsmobile, the horn and the “emergency” brake, were no longer functional. If it had seat belts they had long ago retreated into the seat cushions.

As we sped through the intersection Ellenwood’s first instinct was to jam the transmission into park. This didn’t work but it did stall the engine, which disabled the power steering. We were in free fall. And we were rolling. As we picked up speed the intersections acted like moguls and we were catching some serious air. It was like being in a movie and waiting for someone to yell “CUT”. Ellenwood looked at me, terror in his eyes, and asked, “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to hit something.” This proved to be understated. The first was a Chevy at the stop sign at Noe. The impact knocked the Chevy, and it’s four occupants, out of the intersection and caused us to veer left, side swiping a Toyota coming up the hill. Caroming off the Toyota we veer right and clipped the fender of a parked car before jumping the curb on to the sidewalk, skidding along a retaining wall before finally t-boning a car parked in a driveway. The final impact threw both of us against the windshield, creating matching spiderweb patterns. As I looked over at him I noticed a trickle of blood from above his eyebrow, at the same time feeling a warm trickle below my nose. We gazed at each other in stunned silence until the chaos that we had wrought caught up with us and people arrived to pull us out of the car. They were amazed to find us relatively unhurt and able to exit the car on our own power. Miraculously, no one involved seemed seriously injured, save for some minor shock. For myself I was so jacked on adrenaline that I barely noticed the pain in my lower back that I would carry with me to this day. The concussion symptoms didn’t show up for a day or two and last six months or so. A month after the accident I was riding the Greyhound back to Stockton to visit my folks when I began scratching at an irritant at my hairline. After a few seconds I dug out a chunk of windshield glass that had been floating around up there all this time. Never the less they piled us all in the ambulance and hauled us off to SF General where I had my lip stitched up by a very cute ER nurse, who seemed kind of flirty right up to the point when she dropped a lead glove in my crotch before wheeling me into x-ray.

In the aftermath Ellenwood was ticketed for exceeding the safe speed at the time of the accident…which was zero. When Ellenwood protested the cop noted that he could also write him up for running four stop signs. And someone down at city hall noticed that the now defunct Olds had racked up $400 in unpaid parking tickets over the years in the pre-boot city. The other result was that we both would have to move out of the city, although Ellenwood only on a temporary basis. As for myself, I was off on other adventures.