When I was growing up, Daredevil was my favorite Marvel superhero. I loved his costume and the noir-like cityscape where he battled for justice against arch criminals. But mostly I liked the name—Daredevil—and the risk-taking personality such a name suggested. Something about that really appealed to my youthful imagination, and as I got older, I tried to follow his lead, not as a crimefighter, but as someone who would put himself in danger without fear of the consequences. This began modestly enough with stunts like standing outside in a thunderstorm, heedless of the random lightning strike that might follow (and fortunately never did). I also went through a brief skateboarding phase during which I tried to jump over curbs and bomb down steep descents, mostly without success.
In high school, my daredevil tendency reached its apex, with a far more ambitious and sustained campaign to prove I had the nerve to live on the edge. By then, I had something of a reputation among my friends, and I burnished it with hair-raising feats of daring do, like shooshing down a black diamond ski trail without poles (don’t do this), riding on top of the family station wagon clinging to the roof rack (don’t do this), and bunny hopping over a downed power wire on my bicycle (DON’T DO THIS). Somehow I survived my adolescence, but not without frequent remonstrations from my parents, especially my mom. She was always warning me to slow it down and rein it in, reminding me that I was no daredevil, just another mere mortal. Persistently, I ignored her admonitions.
Despite my thrill-seeking adolescence, my college years unfolded relatively risk free. I quickly outgrew my high school shenanigans phase and settled in at Bucknell as a serious student with a demanding range of cocurricular commitments. I still went crazy every once in a while, but I was far less interested in being a daredevil and far more preoccupied with becoming a serious student. Most of my risks involved taking upper level philosophy and English courses and applying to the university’s honor program. And when I graduated in 1978, my parents were both proud of my achievement and (mostly) convinced that my daredevil days were finally behind me.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. I enrolled at Columbia in New York City for a masters in comparative literature, which involved a lot of school work but not too much risk, at least on campus. However, I brought my bicycle with me, and took great delight in cycling all over Manhattan, sometimes in densely packed traffic patterns. I am not sure what the riskiest activity is in the world, but flying along on a Schwin Paramount up Sixth Avenue during rush hour has to be in the top ten. Of course, my mom had warned me not to ride on city streets; in fact, she recommended that I leave my bike with her and try running in Central Park instead. For the umpteenth time, the daredevil within me ignored her advice. After all, what’s life without a little risk every once in a while?
One day, I was cycling down Second Avenue in the low nineties (right past Elaine’s), weaving in and out of traffic, pretending I was a downhill skier at the Olympics. I was having a grand old time. Suddenly, a cab came alongside and careered right into me. I suppose the best simile is that I flew like a pin struck by a bowling ball, landing hard and unconscious on the pavement below me. I woke up in Metropolitan Hospital to discover I had broken my collar bone, dislocated my shoulder, and suffered lacerations from my earlobe to my ankle. For these injuries, I spent three days in a hospital bed before returning to my apartment. This may be hard to believe, but all the time I was laid up convalescing, I never called home to tell my parents. At the time, I didn’t want them to give me the I-told-you-so speech about being reckless. It didn’t feel right not to call, but my stubbornness overrode my common sense. I healed up and moved on, vowing to put the accident behind me and never tell my parents.
Do you believe in Karma? I do. I know that when you pull something monumentally stupid and/or hurtful, it will come back to you one day. And that’s exactly what happened to me. About six months later, I went home for the weekend to visit my parents. My mom confronted me with an envelope; apparently, it had arrived in the mail a week earlier. What’s this? she asked. I noticed the Metropolitan Hospital logo in the upper left-hand corner, apparently sent to my parents’ address by mistake. Quickly assessing the situation, I went straight into downplay mode. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” I said. “I got hit by a cab on Second Avenue and was laid up for three days. No big deal”. My mom’s face assumed a look of utter astonishment. She said, “You were in the hospital for three days and you never called?!” Suddenly, and irrevocably, I knew what I had done. Pathetically, I pressed on. “Well, it wasn’t so bad, and I didn’t want you to worry about me”. At that moment, my mom burst into tears, and all my feeble attempts at apologizing had no effect whatsoever. I had never seen her react to anything like that. Things eventually settled down in the aftermath, and life went on, as it must. But something fundamental had shifted in the relationship between my mom and me. It lingered quietly between us in the years that followed. I never had the nerve to bring it up in conversation, and my mom never mentioned it for the rest of her life.
I don’t have a standard formula for writing these essays, but generally I reserve the concluding paragraph for the “lesson learned” portion of the story. However, for this piece, nothing comes to mind. What lesson? Don’t stand outside in a thunderstorm? Apply to graduate schools in rural areas? Fess up when you’re wrong? Quite honestly, I am really not sure what I learned from one of the dumbest things I have ever done. The best I can do is put it in context and perspective. I came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, a period during which rebelling against one’s parents was de rigueur, to put it mildly. I defied my folks at almost every turn, regarding their middle class conservatism as something from which I needed total liberation. That my quest took the daredevil form it did probably resulted from a toxic combination of watching too many action movies as a teenager and listening incessantly to rock stars like Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Dylan. Be that as it may, I’ve had more than four decades to think about that period in my life, including my bike accident. How I handled it remains a deep regret, something I wish I could do over, something for which there was, and remains, no excuse. But forty-seven years later, I am still riding a bike, still taking a modest risk every now and then, and still working to become a better person.
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Author photo by Anthony "Truncs" Truncale '26
To contact the author: Mr. Keating