Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand Page A

We could do to boats what we would never be allowed to do to cars. There were no laws on the water then. To run the outboard engines, we needed to sit on a bucket to see over the bow. People on shore could see only our heads over the gunwales. We looked like five little monkeys in yellow rain gear cruising along offshore. Later, as we graduated to more powerful outboard motors, we terrorized the Inlet. One time, we were racing kids in another skiff, and Andy turned sharply. The 25-horsepower Evinrude outboard engine flew off our boat and sank out of sight. The other boat came back and hit a wave so hard, their engine split the transom, and it too dropped to the bottom. We laughed our way in to port, paddling with an oar. Dad was not happy.
    The intensity of our younger lives, with this hunger for the joy of living, inevitably reached a pinnacle that included a world of pain. Andy and I liked to jump cars and motorcycles. I do not know why. I do not know the why of most things I used to do. Once we jumped a car so high we would have landed on the front bumper if a friend named Phil, who weighed 300 pounds, had not provided ballast in the backseat. He hurt his back permanently, and that was the last time he jumped with us. It was also the last time that particular car jumped or did anything else.
    Andy bought a Honda CR80 bike that he jumped going 60 mph. When he landed, the handlebars dropped around the gas tank, and by all rights his neck should have snapped. A full-face helmet—the only time I ever saw him wear it—saved him. A friend ran over to him lying on the ground and said, “Man! That’s the farthest I ever saw anyone jump in my life. Are you OK?” Andy was alive, but his spine was wrecked, and he could hardly walk. He had ruptured his spleen, hit his head, and broken ribs, and he was hallucinating when he picked himself off the ground. He could not breathe, and he said his life was flashing before his eyes. He saw sparks for days.
    A few days later, I jumped off the Frieda K ’s deck to the beach, which I thought was only five or so feet down from where I was standing. Maybe it was lower, but I was nineteen years old and thought of myself as immortal. Halfway down in midair I said to myself, “I should have landed by now.” I fell twenty-eight feet to the beach. When I hit, my chin thumped between my feet and rocks flew off my chin. I broke both my ankles and my wrist. Numb with pain, I drove myself to a party, got laid, and only then went home. I said, “Andy, man, I have to go to the hospital.” I do not know why I did not drive there myself, except I wanted to see how the pain went for a couple days on my own, like I did the time before, when my wrist was broken for a year, the bone became abscessed, and my body killed the bone. I just did not want to go to the hospital. Andy drove me to the emergency room. He was bent over like a little old man in pain and he dragged me along the corridor on my back by my one good arm. The nurses stared at us. “What the heck happened to you two?” they kept asking. They could not believe what they were seeing. The doctor told us, “You two just used up eight of your nine lives.”
    When they released me from the hospital, I lived in a supermarket shopping cart for six weeks. My brothers cut a hole in the bottom so that I could go to the toilet, and they pushed me around. I could move the cart myself with a stick like an oar. It was a miserable time. We went to a Night Ranger rock concert, with me in the cart. I was in the mosh pit in the cart. The group’s guitarist, Brad Gillis, pointed at me from the stage and said, “Now there’s a fan.”
             
    W hen I was twelve, our mother Joan called it quits with Dad. Their divorce might have contributed to our recklessness. But she had tolerated his ways long enough. He understood her point but was not willing to change. She told us, “He was something else, your father. He was a good fisherman