When my parents got the call, they put everything down and left immediately for a hospital in rural Connecticut.

Page and Bobby Higgins, a guy with whom I had played baseball and still stares out at me, frozen at age 14, from an old team photo, had gone to New York where the drinking age at the time was 18. It was legal for Page, who by then was 18.  But Bobby, his partner, his bagman for that day, was my age – 16. They had taken the shortest way there, on the dangerous Route 44, a ribbon-candy road through western Connecticut.

It must have seemed like a good plan at the start of the trip, but then they had to face those same treacherous roads on the way back, when it was dark and they were drunk. Page, who had no license and wouldn’t be able to get one until he was 25 for all his previous legal problems, deemed Bobby too drunk to drive. Well, Page was too drunk to drive, too.

They made it just across the state line back into Connecticut when Page lost control of the car and it flew off the highway into the heavily wooded countryside. The car bounced between the trees like a pinball and as it did, the driver’s side door burst open and Page, in those days before seat belts, began falling out of the car. And that’s when the driver’s side of the car scraped by a tree,  crushing Page as he was falling out.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I had no idea that it was as serious as it was. It didn’t sink in. When the phone rang and Mom and Doom left, I thought: Hey, they are gone, I can go driving around in my car. So I grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a small cooler that I filled with beer and ice and went for a drive.

It was raining slightly and I was less than a mile from the house when I took a right turn and stepped on the gas. The car began fishtailing on the wet, oil-slicked road. I hadn’t been going that fast or doing anything too crazy, other than packing the beer and I’d only had a few sips. I was just accelerating out of a turn. I panicked and luckily in my panic, I took my foot off the gas and that allowed me to get the car under control. I pulled over on the dark street. No one was coming in either direction. I realized how stupid I was and went home. Which was a lot of restraint for me in those days. I was no Page, but I was no angel.

Page was alive, but critically injured. They brought him to Hartford Hospital and he kept holding on. I kept waiting for him to get better. Kids weren’t allowed to visit and having Liz and me around the house to worry about was taking a toll on my parents. I don’t know what happened to Liz at the time – she was 10 – but a friend of mine’s mother called and said she’d take me with them to the Vineyard early. I was only supposed to go for the last week of their vacation, but Mrs. Winston realized it would be better if Mom and Doom didn’t have to worry about having me around. So I got two weeks on the vineyard out of Page’s accident.

We had a great time on the Vineyard. I met Ginny, a girl from Columbus, Ohio, who became a pen pal throughout high school. I hardly thought about Page because in my mind, I didn’t think I had to. He was going to get better. When you are a teen-ager, no one dies.

I came back from the Vineyard and everything was still the same. Page kept hanging on. When I got back, I was finally allowed in to see him. Hospitals kept a tight reign on visitors in those days and Page could only have two visitors at a time. Doom stayed in the car while Mom and I went in.

As we were walking down the hall, everything began to hit me: the seriousness of Page’s condition, and the smell and the look of the hospital. I never had been that deep into a hospital. In fact, I’d never been in one before. I got to Page’s room and looked in. I saw a body on a bed almost completely wrapped in bandages with a bunch of tubes sticking out of him. It could have been anybody. Only the name on the door told me it was Page.

Then everything went blank.

The next thing I knew, I was thrashing on the floor and 3 nurses and a doctor were hovering over me telling me I was OK. Apparently, I had fainted and went down like a sack of potatoes and hit my head on the floor. They kept me there for an hour to make sure I was all right.

Doom was sitting in the car, hopeful that I had provoked a response from Page. I know he was disappointed when Mom and I got back to the car and he found out all that time he had waited was because I had fainted and not because I had communicated with Page.

About the only thing Page had said after the accident was uttered early on when Mom went into his room and in a kidding reprimand demanded, “What do you have to say for yourself?” She was mostly kidding because it is hard to yell at someone wrapped like a mummy and hooked up to a bunch of tubes in a hospital room.

Page tried to shrug his shoulders the best he could and managed to whisper, “What can I say?” with as much of a smile as he could muster.

But that had been it.

Next: Chapter 13: The News is delivered.