When I was 32, my brother died of cancer. He had been battling cancer since he was 15, and he finally succumbed to it after 12 years, which were 11 and a half years longer than he was told he would live. A month before Jason passed away, he came to me and told me that he was leaving me some money in his will. I was touched, but didn't want it. All I wanted was my brother. But he insisted. He said that he knew that there was something I had always wanted, and he wanted me to be able to get it. He was right. I had always dreamed of owning a Corvette, but it was just a dream. I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we had 2 little girls, a mortgage, and I worked 2 jobs to pay the bills, as my wife didn't work. It was just too impractical. Sure my wife would have a place to sit, but I was pretty sure that a child in a car seat is required by law to be inside the car. So Jason told me, “When I am gone, I want you to take the money I am leaving you, and I want you to get a Corvette. I know you would never do it otherwise, and I want you to have it.”
At the time, I didn't realize that I was so close to losing my brother. But prepared or not, he went into the hospital 3 weeks later. What the doctors first thought was pneumonia turned out to be a tumor that had grown in his left lung, and he was riddled with the evil, out-of-control cancer cells. Losing my brother was the most painful experience of my life. But I did do what he asked of me. I took the money he left me, and much to my wife's dismay, I bought a 1993 40th Anniversary Corvette. And when I got it tagged, I got personalized license plates that read “Lil Bro.” I loved that car. For me, it was like a connection that only my brother and I had. In that car I would remember all of the trouble he and I used to get into. I remembered the time we raced a Mustang down Highway 13 and blew its doors off, laughing and flipping them “the bird” over our shoulders as we passed them doing 140 miles per hour. I remembered us burning our tires off, and joking around, picking on each other. The Corvette helped me to remember my brother in the best possible light, and I just loved that car.
A year later, I got a knock on the door of the home I shared with my wife and children. It was my neighbors, and they told me they had to talk to me. What they told me nearly stopped my heart, and nearly doubled me over like a punch to the gut. They told me that while I was working 2 jobs to keep my wife and children in the expensive house that we loved, that my wife, who refused to work, was sleeping with the 54 year old, 300 pound, RICH neighbor across the street. She was leaving my little girls alone during their naps, and stealing away to meet him while I was gone. To make matters worse, they had bragged about it to the very neighbors that had come to warn me, and they had hatched a plan to have me thrown out. Unfortunately, the warning came too late. I was thrown out of my home, ripped away from my little girls, and the only life I had ever known.
I was devastated. I missed my daughters, and I was betrayed and angry. Everything that I loved was taken from me, and just a year after I lost my brother. So I went a bit crazy for a while. I had been working since I was 16, had been with my wife since I was 15. I had been responsible my entire life, and now I was without anyone to answer to, and without any bills to pay. A friend of mine was going through a similar situation (his wife left him for another man, and he lost the house he built with his own hands, his son, and even his DOG!) and we decided to go and cut loose a little. I started to go downtown with him, to hang out at the bars and have drinks. We didn't go to try to meet women. We were both pretty done with women at that point. We just went to let loose a little, and complain to each other what the latest demands were of the lawyers and what our soon to be ex's were trying to pull.
And then it happened. I went out with my friend, and had more than a couple of drinks.
Then I left the bar, and my friend, and went out in the Corvette, looking for a race. Boy did I find one. I pulled up to the stop light at National going west on Chestnut, and what should pull up beside me but a Trans Am. He revved his motor, I revved my motor, and the race was on. When the light turned green, we floored it. I just knew my 'Vette had his Trans Am beat, even when my tires broke loose the first time. I let off the gas for a moment, then slammed it into second and floored it again. It is at this point that things are a little fuzzy. But I do know that somehow I managed to jump the curb, and roll my beloved Corvette over onto the drivers side. It only took me a second to drag myself out of my poor car, and then I guess the adrenaline took over, because I pushed my car back onto its wheels. Once I did that, I realized that I was looking up at the fountain that faces Chestnut at Ozark Technical Community College. I jumped into my car, and tried to limp it home, but less than a block from OTC I saw flashing lights in my rear-view mirror, and my stomach just plummeted. The officers that pulled me over knew that I had been racing, and of course they gave me a Breathalyzer test. This is where fortune smiled on me. I took the test, and came in half a point UNDER the limit. I recall babbling something about what was going on with my wife, and the pending divorce, and the officers seemed to relax a bit, especially since, according to the Breathalyzer, I was legally not drunk. But they wouldn't let me drive my car home. In fact, they made me call my parents, who had to come out in the middle of the night to bring me and my wrecked car home. I was given a ticket for Careless and Imprudent Driving, and sent on my way with my dream car badly damaged and a boat load of fines for being an idiot.
That night I didn't just come close to losing my dream car. I came close to a lot of different disasters. I could have kidded myself, and called it bad luck. I could have told myself that it was the first time I had ever gotten behind the wheel of a car with alcohol in me, so I should just go on and not worry about it. But the fact was, I could have died that night. And my daughters would have had to live without their daddy. Or I could have gotten a DUI that night, and lost my daughters in a completely different way. My ex-wife would have used that to turn me into an every other weekend dad. And even though it makes me sick to even think about it, and even worse to see it in print, I could have killed someone that night, cut someone's life short and destroyed a family, lost my freedom and my daughters. I broke the gift my brother gave me, but it was probably a good thing that things happened the way they did. I learned some valuable lessons. I have never gotten behind the wheel of a car again after having so much as a single beer. In fact, I barely touch alcohol anymore. I learned to better control my temper, since a bad temper can cause you to make bad decisions. I learned that one bad decision can cause you to lose everything that you care about.
I still have my Corvette, and she is still broken three years later. With two daughters to raise and child support to pay, and being a full time student, there is just not enough money for me to completely fix her yet. But I do what I can when I can. I would like to think my brother understands what happened, and is glad that I learned my lesson as quickly as I did. But he was always a smart-ass, and there is one thing that I know he would tell me if he was here. “Next time, Steven, you should invest in a better set of tires.”
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