The Split Second of a Car Crash

It's Trent Reznor's fault entirely.

Today, 8:00 am in the waking downtown of St. Louis, one slightly sleepy but content driver makes his way from the parking garage on 10th and Washington to the Saint Louis Art Museum. Around him people in long coats and scarves make their way into offices or toward coffee shops—small puffs of carbon dioxide punctuating each breath. It's a brisk 27 degrees, but clear and pleasantly sunny.

Our driver thumbs his stereo and selects "Somewhat Damaged," the aggressive opening track from Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile.

This isn't just any Nine Inch Nails song—not, at least, to the driver. This is the one that he can't help but pump his head to, can't help but growl and stomp to, can't help, every once in a while, pressing, just a little bit, on the gas peddle reigning the 330 horses at his rear wheels.

It's the left turn from Pine onto Tucker that finds him in that split second, that split second of a car crash, even though he doesn't know it yet. He's still accelerating to beat a yellow light and beginning to thrum to the music, beginning to feel the fuck-you of this particular ballad. Beginning to turn into a curve and let it ride a little, let it coast.

There isn't a drop of precipitation in the air, but the road is iced—at least enough for his Camaro. And this particular driver hasn't seen a winter in nine years.

Keep in mind: It's nothing new for him to lose his tail around a corner. The 350 push rod under the hood makes that a simple task even on a summer day. He's used to recovering from a fishtail and enjoying the experience. He's quite good at it actually. He's the kind of guy to teach others how to recover from a spin, how to turn out of it, how to ride the physics until the frictional coefficient ... you get the idea. He's used to playing with a squirrelly rear end.

It's just as the turn ends that Trent convinces him to throttle the gas just a little bit. Enough to feel that effortless thrust, and move him along to the next red light. We're talking a minuscule amount of pressure on the gas, nothing outrageous. Just a touch. Just a tickle.

The first wiggle is completely familiar. He's experienced it hundreds of times and responding to it comes as naturally as driving. The rear wheels lose traction and the rear end shifts a little toward the right, following inertia as he makes his left hand turn.

He's so used to compensating that it happens instantly. The front is directed in the same direction as the rear, to straighten things out and haul ass away from here—music pumping.

There's a momentary hiccup as the tires decide whether to give up their marriage to the pavement. He feels it through the body of the car, a communication between man and much beloved machine.

The tires' decision is quick; traction doesn't catch. The tires decide to flail. No big deal: He turns into the fishtail, left, and then right.

The wheels are sliding more than they should. It's still nothing important, hardly, but he realizes the cars to his left—the ones waiting at a red light to make their own left turn—are too much entering his line of site. This needs to be settled, and sooner rather than later.

By the time the rear end really starts swaying—now to the left for a second time, and determined to do more than squirrel—he knows this isn't a normal situation. His instincts instruct him to compensate accordingly.

It shouldn't be terribly difficult to recover from this slide. Remember, he's done the same thing hundreds of times, to a lesser extent, and now—with no power applied to the drive wheels—the car should settle into a straight trajectory almost instantly. After all, he's got brand new BFG's with very aggressive tread.

And he's done this a hundred times before.

But the car doesn't straighten.

Instead the tail continues to spin left, and he turns the wheel to compensate—exactly as he should. The real mystery is why the car hasn't married back to the road, and why he can no longer pay attention to the music—the song that got him in trouble in the first place. The real mystery is why there's adrenaline everywhere in his system all of a sudden, and why he's paying a new found attention to the parking meters that wait just beyond the curb. A row of them. One after another. Waiting, it seems, to be run into or run over.

See, he's starting to need all three lanes to control this slide.

And it started so simply.

A little twitch.

A wiggle.

A push.

His love of the car is replaced by animal instinct now. Its beautiful engine, its over protected paint job, its regular synthetic oil changes—they aren't quite forgotten, but they are, somehow, placed aside.

At the same time—caught in this instant—the driver is feeling what he'll later describe as embarrassment. In actuality, he's feeling the urge to fix this. Now. Immediately. Fuck the old remedies. Everyone is watching and his reputation is on the line.

The parking meters are looking very ominous as the car decides it wants to turn completely around. It's done with fish-tailing. There's no more compensation. The front end is going to trade places with the rear end.

That's when he brakes.

Hard.

It's not exactly panic so much as indifference. It's not as if he isn't good enough, it's just that the game has changed on him.

The Camaro parallel-parks itself, a perfect ten inches from the curb, facing the wrong direction on Tucker.

No curb is overrun and not a single parking meter is touched.

It is as if nothing happened.

The oncoming traffic begins to roll slowly toward him. Our driver restarts his stalled car—having forgotten to press the clutch—and begins to reorient the car. He resumes his drive to the art museum.

No one looks at him. No one gives him grief. It is, after all, St. Louis, where cars spin out and people don't judge—whether or not the two are related.

But if they were to ask, our driver would tell them, it was all Trent Reznor's fault.