Good luck if by reading it there's any real communication of what I've attempted to get across. It's looking like I have my old difficuly of expressing myself returning. Being here and reading of the stories has been helpful. Thank you all for taking time and describing the hardships experienced with TBI. Especially identifying some of the drawbacks with which I can relate, and finally recognize some difficulties as not solely of my own making.

The driver came completely to terms with what he had done by making his way by stealth or design within the community. As he ran his scam he thrice bedeviled his victim. I've been at a loss for explanations forty years later, after a fairly rocky beginning on Sept 25,1968. Much takes place in a scenic town on the hudson in NY. Anyhow, this is an attempt to write of a pretty twisted time, that I wouldn't care to repeat. Sorry for taking up so much room under computer story technicalities. Somehow it's a hodgepodge of job, personal, betrayal, legal, and healthcare, having written on different matters. Here's my mix.

The driver had a talent for making people's actions revolve on the dilemma at hand without making them feel manipulated. Starting first with mistaking his look guilt for one of sorrow, it wasn't a far cry to pull for his advantage. 'You really want to tell your own story, or somebody will tell it for you.'

I went through a windshield and awoke with my head on the other side. As I stood in this position I began to assess my injuries and think about home. Thoughts went quickly from this to the horrible realization I was being pulled back into the car. I planted my feet on the floorboard of the car and stiffened my legs with all of my strength to keep from being dragged back in. I started to make motions to leave me alone, but thought that it would be misinterpreted.

I didn't have room to move but attempted to see if there was anyone who could help. I looked down the street for the ambulance, than listened for the sirens. The ambulance, in such a short period of time, was nowhere in sight. Feeling the glass was too close to my neck, and my strength giving way, I tucked in my chin. With one last great tug I went back through the small opening of the windshield.

I had amnesia for 15 years. From the time my head hit the windshield until I awoke in the hospital corridor was spent mostly unconscious. I didn't know the paramedics had found me in the street. After my memory returned (15 yrs), I attempted not to think about what had occurred all those years ago. The implications of how I had been treated would be uncomfortable, but more at issue was the thought of telling my family the bad news after so much time had passed.

So I hung on to the story for another 15 years.

I had forgiven the driver, before he gave misinformation that kept doctors, friends and family from understanding the degree of my health issues. I was asked to come along after their band practice and ushered to ride shotgun. I hadn't seen the keyboard player for most the time, but he would pop up now and than. His story was that a guitar became wedged in the steering wheel and he couldn't make the turn.

I could have gotten out of the car, and it had crossed my mind to do so, but I was cajoled into staying for the ride. Without saying anything he unceremoniously lit half a J. When it dropped, he dove under the dash to retrieve it while the car was still moving. Had I been faced forward, no one would have been hurt.

There is a lengthy, convoluted aspect of a clash of interests that makes me experience the emotions time and again. From this time of tumult of being in this wreck forty years ago, deceit kept people from understanding my medical woes. I try to be thorough, and accuracy is intrinsic to my coming to terms with some of the behaviors during that time. One tenet of deception is to continue the farce and defy attempts to clarify.

The driver defended himself by manipulating the truth without ever revealing the events as they had taken place. Very early into the wreck, the driver was outside my hospital room. He knew investigators were coming to see me. He had a friend dating a judges daughter who knew people associated with the chief of police. I was beginning to sit up in bed and had just begun communicating with pen and paper. I couldn't get their attention before he managed to bar their entry and lead them away. That is how he postponed his troubles for another day.

What they hoped, was to confuse the issue with the preoccupation of drug use in the older grades. Even the most unlikely candidate as a friend, brought a portable record player to my room. Just a week earlier the faceless fellow had been cold and crass, but one day ends soon for youth. He followed up after I left the hospital with I have termed, 'my cycle of doom'. The red mopped bloke turned jock to earn favor from the driver's neighbor, a husonette, who blew smoke in my hospital room and tried to force a pipe into my mouth thru the bandages.

The attempt to obscure my profile started immediately after the boy collected himself to make a plan. I awoke to his father's cold stare and imposing callousness in assessing my injuries while I slept. These were the people who insinuated themselves into my life to conveniently allow the perception of drug use as part of a larger pervading mayhem, before it was my lot. This was the environment I was given to expand my intellect and attain social experiences.

My parents should have been told of these incursions to riddle the true event with lies at the outset. I treated each as temporary, instead of one part of a larger a deal and never bothered my folks when I identified each attempt to find a chink in my armor.

Several months later he told me part of the story to take the place. He told me the story was a guitar was stuck in the steering wheel of the car. I said it was unbelievable. Ironically, this discussion took place at the site of the wreck. I had gone up to the top of the ave to get my thoughts together. At the time no one that I knew of was aware the boys pulled me out of the wind shield before help had arrived.

There were many actions I didn't understand at the time. It was obvious that he had no concern for the health issues that would have benefitted from full disclosure, as naive as that sounds. Upon recollection I had hoped this wasn't true. I just didn't think he had the heart to blind side me again. The school cleared him to enter the campaign for school prez before the settlement and the police never came back to talk with me.

It may have been the lawyers or the judge were on terms with the father of the driver. I don't know, but he certainly set the tone. One of the troubling aspects of the lies following this is being robbed of a voice in these matters. All support systems gone missing, and I got left out of the process. His dad may, even have known a doctor that could have supplied them with my condition. There was one person who was chased out as he was not assigned to me, but was on my case. The recollection is to vague to include.

What he had accomplished was to corrupt the police report. For a reason I am not aware of, I didn't tell my parents the student had been using. Part of the murkiness that can be adolescence. I was going to take care of everything myself, by talking with police and a lawyer. It did worry me to see the driver make it harder for me by interfering with tall tales I hadn't heard of at a time while convalescing or after. That he succeeded is tough to live down and really can't be done. By the time he was through he had become the eyes and ears of my drug problems that ramped up considerably in the months to follow. Not too wholesome.

I still don't know what I should do, except my choices have been wrong ever since. He still hasn't told me of how it was. While I struggled to keep my head above the glass I couldn't see who and what went on. That's disturbing too. Having lived all that time without my parents knowing the whole story or, at least, some trusted adult knowing, was a sentence to live out my nightmare as a youth alienated from much of society, and of having succumbed to an ulterior agenda.

I believe that money and fear caused him and his parents to act against me. This causes a gap in communication that the legal system can't seem to close. The contrived version being told during my convalescence, had turned him into the victim. Much sympathy in the community was with him, while I became just an extra in his show. There is too much going on in the victims life to be aware of where sympathies lie. Eventually one does process the info rmation, but it was years before I began thinking about the past. The grey area of figuring what events came before or after the wreck becomes more clear. Seeing there exists a difference in how I was after the wreck, made me distraught. Perhaps adults didn't want to interfere with the insurance process, again in sympathy with the his family.

Forty years since, the car of a stoned out driver went into a pole propelling me through the windshield. Though it doesn't matter anymore, the details begin to bother me. At the time I was disappointed that the story wasn't told, but sucked it up since it was a small amount of the substance. Of course, it turned out that he had spent time during the whole rehearsal disappearing and getting high.

As I came to know these people better, I was beside myself for, however inadvertently, helping these folks who carried neither the purpose nor the character for whom I'd care to put my life on the line. I was quite oblivious to having been pulled back through the windshield, though a true rendering may have put me on track.

I don't know if SS benefits would have been considered, and I deliberate if this course is a worthy option considering the many uses of the program.

My folks were loving, diligent and admirable in their work and family, as was their nature. The difference of information, as to disclosing of the full impact this wreck had to my future aspirations, and personal life is beyond my imagination. These days I ask myself, and frequently I am asked by other people, why I haven't done better in my attempts at employment. I have blamed myself for not attaining my goals.

At fifteen years of age, life had changed, effectually leading to errors in the choices I made and the challenges before me. The increase in anxiety since picking up this thread again, as considerable as has been, is little in comparison to the time under duress of these forces, and after being wracked by the same person is hardly the work of a vivid imagination. As has been reported when amnesia clears, my thinking has improved, and it will be a further relief to be out from under the strain of going back to these times that took me away from my auspicious beginnings.

I don't exaggerate when I say there was very little humanity in their souls. Trying one of the more heartening versions of forgiveness, where it is said the best terms are those that do not need forgiveness, was out of a general feeling that I lack a shared human awareness. My fear is dragging myself down to their level, assuming complicity of the driver's family and his friends.

I have made attempts in the workplace and I pursue an interest in music.

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