Not Everyone Survived
Lori Yeghiayan Friedman weighs the lasting trauma of a 1988 car accident that took the lives her her high school classmates.
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Some part of each of us remains frozen in 1988. At the time, the word “trauma” may have been used to describe head injuries or the experiences of war veterans, but not the emotional wounds of a bunch of teenagers whose friends perished in a fiery crash one Friday night, and who were expected to go on as usual Monday morning.
Take my high school classmate Sarah Marbury* and her Facebook post on the 30th anniversary of the accident: “Fuck you for all eternity, Elliott Klein,” she wrote, sounding like a teenager even though she’s almost fifty.
I don’t blame her for her rage, still hot thirty years later. She lost her best friend that day: red-headed, freckled Amy Jaworski, whom I didn’t know very well. I have an image of her, though, a still image that never changes of her frosted lipstick, denim cut-offs and a tie-dye Guns & Roses t-shirt, her smile just like Axl Rose’s “sweet child.”
At the time, the word “trauma” may have been used to describe head injuries or the experiences of war veterans, but not the emotional wounds of a bunch of teenagers whose friends perished in a fiery crash one Friday night, and who were expected to go on as usual Monday morning.
I started thinking about the accident after a video call with my childhood best friend Giselle. She leaned in close, her heart-shaped face filling my phone screen, and asked me if I’d seen the Facebook post. Giselle had been smiling, her cheeks bunched up in rosy orbs (the only cheeks I’ve ever seen that actually look like apples), but then turned serious.
“Lolo,” she said, using her childhood nickname for me, “did you ever think of Elliott as anything other than a victim?”
Her voice was pinched with fresh pain. I wondered if the word “victim” made Giselle think of Jim who, at the time of the accident, had been her longtime crush. Jim was Elliott’s best friend. He and Elliott had grown up together. The four of us had been in the same classes since elementary school. We were there when Jim transformed from pudgy kid to string bean pre-adolescent to handsome teen. A champion swimmer, he cut a statuesque figure at the edge of a diving board, shaking blonde bangs out of his eyes un-self-consciously, his face still a boy’s, his body an almost-man’s. He was her Aquaman, she told me recently, invincible—which must have made his sudden death all the more difficult to process.
Elliott had been the driver―the drunk driver, wrote Sarah Marbury―of the car; Jim and Amy, passengers. It was Elliott’s car that crashed along that main strip of road―the one with few traffic lights―connecting our Westside neighborhood to the beach. His actions led him there. No other vehicles were involved.
Elliott was known for being a prankster and a star athlete on our high school’s cross-country team, as well as for his uncanny resemblance to the actor Jon Cryer. He was also known for his car: a former police vehicle bought at auction. We heard it could go up to 180 mph. Elliott drove the car too fast down the straightaway road. The tire hit the curb of the center median. He lost control. The car hit a tree, flipped, burst into flames.
I started thinking about the accident after a video call with my childhood best friend Giselle. She leaned in close, her heart-shaped face filling my phone screen, and asked me if I’d seen the Facebook post.
Giselle never learned to drive until recently. She told me she’d been seeing a therapist because of near panic attacks she was having while driving. The therapist asked her if she’d had any bad experiences with cars and she’d said: Well my Dad drove drunk ALL the time, like actually holding a drink. And my friends were killed in a crash in high school. The therapist had looked up at her and said: Yeah, we’re going to need to talk about that.
“Lolo,” she had asked me, “should we have had counseling back then?”
Of course we should have. What else but unresolved trauma could account for how, some nights, I might be wiping down the stove top or standing over the kitchen sink scrubbing down the rack I sometimes use to cook bacon in the oven so it doesn’t sit in its oil―you really have to scrub in the corner of each small square to get the gunk out―and my husband will be listening to a podcast in the living room, and my kids will be upstairs getting settled into their rooms for the night, and I will think about the moments just before impact. I’ll imagine it like it happened to me, since without even thinking too much about it I can think of half a dozen times it was me, just with a different ending. I’ll wonder if they felt most alive, like they’d won it all, just before they lost their lives, like I felt that time I was 15 and wasted and I went for a joyride with my sometime-friend Merlot―also 15 and wasted―in her mom’s convertible Chrysler Le Baron along that same road.
Here’s something I now know, with my fully-developed, if slowly deteriorating, middle-aged brain: if at 15, 16, 17 years old you care about yourself, it’s because some adult in your life cares about you. If you prioritize your health and safety, it’s because some adult in your life has the desire and the ability to prioritize your health and safety. At 17 you are limited by the limitations of the people you depend on to love and care for you.
That we all lived and didn’t kill someone as a result of our limitations was purely a matter of luck.
“Do I think Elliott was a victim?” I repeated the question instead of answering it.
***
After the call I wanted to understand who we were then and why. Yes, we are Generation X, famous for surviving the neglect of our childhoods. We gained resilience. We lost things too.
Here’s something I now know, with my fully-developed, if slowly deteriorating, middle-aged brain: if at 15, 16, 17 years old you care about yourself, it’s because some adult in your life cares about you.
I ran across a Wikipedia page about Elliott’s father, who had a high-profile job, and learned a fact that floored me: Elliott was just 7 years old when his mother died in a fiery crash, not on a road but in the air.
In 1978, in what was at the time the deadliest accident in U.S. aviation history, the residential neighborhood of North Park, California was rocked to the core when a 747 commercial airliner collided with a two-person Cessna in the air space above it, the debris raining down on the quiet San Diego community. All 128 passengers and 7 crew members on board PSA Flight 182 were killed―the passenger and pilot of the Cessna too. Seven people on the ground died. I lived in San Diego during the 1990s, and even all those years later people would tell stories about that day. Elliott’s mother had been a passenger on Flight 182. His father remarried four years later.
I also found an article in the local paper covering the school assembly that took place a few weeks after the crash. I remember when a tall man walked onto the empty stage, looking just like Jim, or how Jim would have looked someday, the ghost of the future-Jim that would never be: Jim’s father.
He told us he was a war veteran and an alcoholic in recovery.
“My son made a mistake, getting in that car,” the paper quoted him as saying. “It was a bad judgment call, a poor decision that cost him his life.”
We know now that the teenage brain is not capable of making decisions in the same way adult brains can. Hard evidence has only been available since the early 1990s, though, with the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI allowed researchers to measure the brain activity of a living person for the first time, making it possible to confirm that the frontal lobe, the part of brain responsible for judgement and decision-making, is the last to fully develop, usually not before the age of 25. It is also the last part of the brain to be optimally wired to the other parts through a process called myelination. During myelination, nerve fibers get covered in a fatty substance, myelin, increasing the efficiency of electrical impulses being sent from one part of the brain to another.
The only reason I wasn’t drinking and driving that Friday night, or with someone who was, was because of the fall drama festival. That year’s cut-throat competition between elite Southern California high school drama departments started early the next morning.
“Without those insulated connections,” writes neurologist Frances Jensen, M.D., in her book The Teenage Brain, “a signal from one area of the brain, say fear and stress coming from the amygdala, has trouble linking up with another part of the brain, for instance the frontal cortex’s sense of judgment. For adolescents whose brains are still being wired, and whose frontal lobes aren’t done developing, this means they sometimes find themselves in dangerous situations, not knowing what they should do next.”
***
The only reason I wasn’t drinking and driving that Friday night, or with someone who was, was because of the fall drama festival. That year’s cut-throat competition between elite Southern California high school drama departments started early the next morning.
I wasn’t the prettiest girl, or the smartest, or the most popular. My senior year, a few of my classmates said they voted for me for “Most Understanding” and “Nicest Eyes," but I didn’t win those. I was crowned “Best Thespian,” along with Billy Broder who was height-challenged, but made up for it by being handsome, funny and generally better than everyone at nearly everything.
Our drama teacher, Ms. Davis, had chosen me to compete in one of the toughest categories at the festival: Individual—Serious. My whole high school acting career had been leading to this.
I had chosen a role in which—I realize now—I would never have been cast: Estelle, the beauty queen and socialite, in French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte’s existentialist play No Exit. She is the lust-object of the other two characters in the play: ruthless Inez and cheater Garcin. The dead trio, strangers to each other, find themselves locked in a room together in Hell, and condemned to be each other’s psychological torturers for eternity.
In my monologue, Estelle cracks under the pressure of her torturers, who force her to drop her well-curated façade and admit to her rotten deeds, which include marrying an old man for his money, getting pregnant by one of her many lovers, and murdering the baby by throwing it off a balcony while her lover watched: “I’m so cowardly. I’m such a coward!” she says. “If you only knew how much I hate you!” she tells Inez and Garcin.
I had chosen a role in which—I realize now—I would never have been cast: Estelle, the beauty queen and socialite, in French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte’s existentialist play No Exit.
It was a strange choice for a 17-year-old. Then again, I was a strange actress drawn to presentational characters hiding secrets.
In other words, I related to the material.
Not that I’d thrown my baby off a balcony or anything. But, I was haunted by the sense that my life was a lie, a performance. I didn't yet know about the cognitive dissonance that can result from growing up in a dysfunctional family in which you must continually play your part; the emotional discomfort of sensing, sub-consciously, the chasm between what you experience, and what you can safely show the world.
Those of us competing in the festival met for dinner the night before at a local pizza place. I remember tracing swirls into the sawdust on floor of the restaurant with the toe of my Reeboks while my friend, and fellow character actress, Barbara Steinman sat beside me, at a long, picnic-style tables, obsessively blotting her pizza slice with the paper-thin napkins, creating a grease-soaked pyramid of them next to her paper plate. We were listening to blonde heartthrob alumnus Brett Stephenson who, though he had graduated the year before, had returned to share his perspective as a festival veteran.
“Tomorrow might seem like a big deal,” he said, not looking at us, but over his shoulder at the corner booth where the popular girls sat—the ones who played the ingenue and leading lady roles in all the shows. Sarah Marbury sat with them, somewhat eclipsed by their star-power. “But once you get to college you realize it really isn’t.”
“Since you have so much life experience now,” muttered Barbara.
Beside us Billy Broder was locked in a fierce Mario Brothers battle with Seth Ferry, whose theatrical baritone cut through all the other sounds―video game bleeps and Def Leppard blaring about love biting and bleeding. Billy would win, like he won everything, like he’d probably win tomorrow, competing in the Individual – Comedy category with a monologue from Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.
A round of cheers and boos erupted as the Mario Brothers game ended. Seth wrapped an arm around Billy’s neck, rubbing his knuckles into his hair as Billy smiled triumphantly but good-naturedly, as people who are used to coming out on top do.
A few miles away, Elliott, Jim and Amy were making the decisions many of us made routinely, our luck so far having held, while theirs was about to run out.
***
I must have mentioned the accident to my parents. I attended three funerals and would have had to tell them where I was going. We didn’t talk to each other about much.
My parents were Armenian immigrants, although not the kind of immigrants I learned about in history class. Their stories didn’t end happily once they reached U.S. shores. They got to live, carry on their culture and pass on their genes. Surviving, though, is not the same as thriving.
Our family presented well, but at home the mood was mostly dour. Outside our apartment, we enacted our roles: good parents, dutiful daughter. At home we dropped it, like puppets with cut strings. A sadness hovered in the air along with their cigarette smoke, occasionally punctuated by my father’s angry outbursts and vague comments from my mother expressing disappointment with how her life had turned out. “I never really had a chance,” is a phrase she would drop now and then, a reference to her refugee childhood and what it took from her.
My parents were Armenian immigrants, although not the kind of immigrants I learned about in history class. Their stories didn’t end happily once they reached U.S. shores. They got to live, carry on their culture and pass on their genes. Surviving, though, is not the same as thriving.
The question for me always was: why? At least some of that oppressive silence, I now know, had to do with the fact of our family history as Armenians which, while I was growing up, was both defining and obscured.
My mother’s family were Armenians living in Jaffa, Palestine when the Israeli-Palestinian War made them, along with 750,000 others, refugees. My father grew up as part of the diasporan Armenian community of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. My parents had made the decision to raise me as an American, speaking only English.
“Why learn Armenian?” I remember him saying once. “We’re not going back.”
In the zero-sum game of global geopolitics, the Armenians had lost.
While historic Armenian lands had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire since the 15th century, by the end of the 20th century the Empire started to crumble and the relatively peaceful coexistence of the Christian minorities and the Muslim majority began to fray. Sultan Abdul Hamid II initiated massacres in Armenian villages that came to be known as the Hamidian Massacres. As modern Turkey struggled to be born, the leadership―a group known as the Young Turks―overthrew the Sultan and decided to resolve the “Armenian question” once and for all. They ordered the expulsion of the Armenians from Ottoman lands, determined to get rid of them by any means necessary. Turkey was for Turks, so the reasoning went, and the Armenians were in the way.
On April 24, 1915, prominent Armenian community leaders and intellectuals were rounded up and killed. Systematically, the villages were emptied out. Armenians’ belongings were looted and those who weren’t slaughtered outright were tortured, tied together and thrown into rivers, forced on marches through the desert, subjected to horrific violence or murder at the hands of Turkish soldiers, or left to die from starvation or disease. At the start of the war, two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. By the end, only a few hundred thousand were left.
My parents were descended from the slaughtered and expelled. They, along with their parents, followed a very common pattern of survivors: they didn’t talk about it. Hoping to leave the past behind, they got on with it.
By the time I was 17, our family patterns were set. I had no access to my parents’ inner lives; they had none to mine. I followed their example―I didn’t talk about the accident.
***
Every year a different Southern California high school hosted the drama festival. Walking onto an unfamiliar campus early the next morning felt like boarding a ship whose destination was uncertain: a mixture of excitement and dread.
By the time I was 17, our family patterns were set. I had no access to my parents’ inner lives; they had none to mine. I followed their example―I didn’t talk about the accident.
I joined my classmates outside the school’s nondescript brick-building with beige double-doors, the school’s main auditorium. They were already in a circle doing our pre-performance ritual, eyes closed, humming as one organism, following Ms. Davis’s direction at the head of the circle. I slipped in beside Barbara and squeezed her hand.
My nerves hit me the minute I opened the door to my Round I classroom, and the heads of the other kids swiveled around to check me out. There was a strict no-costume rule, so I had worn what I thought of as my most sophisticated outfit: a silk-like, rust-colored, V-neck, knee-length dress with utility pockets on the chest. It suddenly seemed cheap and not at all what Estelle would wear. I slid into a seat in the back.
I don’t remember much about Round I. The scoresheets, which I’ve kept all these years, reflect a workman-like performance, and that squares. I do remember a young woman dressed in a black turtleneck and black skirt, a thick black head-band holding back her straight blonde hair, her face as open and bright as the moon, doing a monologue from the play Agnes of God, as the virginal young nun who believes she conceived a child with God. I knew I was in trouble when a glistening tear rolled out of one sapphire blue eye. The room stilled, the judges leaned in.
I looked down at the hairs covering my crossed arms like overgrown grass, curling this way and that. Who was I kidding? Moon-face was a beautiful glass vase, emotion bubbling up and out of her angelic features. I was a cloudy clod of unruly dark hair and sebum-slathered skin, wearing a ridiculously off-the-mark polyester dress, trying to play a beauty queen.
I somehow made it to the next round and let my fury and fear of humiliation feed my Round II performance. There was no moon-faced girl to eclipse my light, and I killed it. Take that, world! I remember thinking as I raced down the hall excited to reach the auditorium and tell Barbara.
“How’s it going? Where…” I say, out of breath, my hand reaching toward the doorknob. Barbara throws her hand up like a traffic cop’s…“Don’t get in there―,” she said. “There’s been an accident. Last night. Elliott and Jim and Amy…” She hesitated before saying: They didn’t make it. They’re gone.”
Intercepted. By whom? I don’t remember. A finger pointing me away. Down the hall. I head upstream, a river of students flowing toward me.
Barbara! I see her by a door.
“How’s it going? Where…” I say, out of breath, my hand reaching toward the doorknob. Barbara throws her hand up like a traffic cop’s.
“Don’t get in there―,” she said. “There’s been an accident. Last night. Elliott and Jim and Amy…”
She hesitated before saying: They didn’t make it. They’re gone.”
“What?” I said, not comprehending.
“There was a crash and they…they’re dead,” she said.
Barbara nods then, in slow motion, while throngs of students rush around us like rapids, roaring.
The floor tilts, one end rising up fast and I roll backwards, Barbara too. We pass two girls walking briskly toward the auditorium, one of them the moon-faced girl! I tumble backwards like a barrel, the moon-face girl gone now, absorbed into a nearby group of girls who surround her, jumping up and down and squealing.
My mouth dry, the involuntary pumping of blood my only bodily function, I sail past the double doors of the auditorium, grab a doorknob just in time, pull myself inside and find a vast echoing cave of cold metal. A silver toilet. Holding the sides. Someone is throwing up. Is it me? Barbara is there, peering over the stall wall. I look up at her.
“What about Giselle?” I say. “Does she know?”
Everything blurs then, like we are all underwater. We leave the bathroom, Barbara leading me back to the classroom where my classmates are gathered, the girls hugging and crying in groups. I go to hug them, already feeling numb. Sarah Marbury joins. Some of the boys hover nearby.
I find a chair with a little desk attached, and sink into it. A plastic cup. A tissue box. I hold onto the desk’s edges to keep from sloshing around. Equilibrium a thing of the past.
Estelle! How I long to be in her Hell instead of this one.
With each new person that arrives, the chatter of the outside world spills into ours, like a missive from another planet.
Someone keeps shutting the door quickly as my classmates arrive, cloistering us away. Even now I wonder whether I actually saw him or filled it in later from the sound of his voice: in the hallway a tall boy, curly-haired, charismatic and confident passes by and catches a glimpse of us in there, wailing. He says: “Is that the room for the LOSERS?” lobbing the word into the room, like the winning shot, followed by triumphant laughter.
He turned out to be right. Only Billy had made it to the finals.
***
Merlot and her mom seemed more like sisters or roommates, so it makes sense that one night when I was over at her apartment, her mom left us to go out and Merlot suggested, unlicensed though we were, that we take her mom’s convertible Chrysler Le Baron Town and Country for a little spin. Merlot said it would be OK. We’d had a few wine coolers and smoked a few bowls―and given that the nerves connecting my frontal lobe to my amygdala were not yet fully-myelinated, I thought, why not?
If Merlot had happened to lose control of the car, the front slamming into a tree, flipping over, the car spontaneously bursting into flames, the last thing I would have seen would have been Merlot’s blonde curls flying behind her like a horse’s mane, her golden skin lit by street lamps, her mouth open, lips drawn back revealing straightened front teeth getting dried out by the wind as the trees whirred past like watercolors, the inky night sky above, the stars twirling; I would have heard the music blasting through the speakers, Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” my hands in the air like I was taking a plunge down a roller coaster drop, without a thought about reaching the bottom, only feeling exhilarated, thrilled—the past gone and the future a dream and the road open and endless, where it doesn’t matter if you aren’t the best actress, or your single mom is more like your roommate, or your dad is an alcoholic, or moved on too quickly after your mom died, or your parents are too broken to really love you, because in that moment you no longer exist, you are the road, the speed, the wind, the song; and who cares what happens next because you know now more than anyone else who has ever lived what it’s like to be a person on a spinning planet, barely held in its elliptical orbit by the very weakest of forces, alive: a winner.
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