My friends and I were the cleanup crew for a giant flea market in the amusement park we worked in not far from my house. We would go around destroying anything left behind before throwing it in the dumpster. This was a semi-condoned practice, as it saved space in the dumpsters, but often lead to danger. It was a stress relief for teenagers who loved to break stuff.
Someone decided a box of old 45 records. They looked like a perfect frisbee to toss. We were smashing them against a wall that was behind the dumpster, dropping them inside if we hit it right. Fun AND Productive. We started tossing them around and one missed. It was a jagged, broken, dangerous record of death.
I happened to toss it in the direction of the dumpster without thinking. Maybe I was pissed off about something. I don’t recall. Someone had been facing me, between me and the dumpster. The record of death bounced once on the ground, continued spinning, jumped off the ground, and headed straight towards this person’s head. We weren’t far away from each other, and as soon as it left my hand I knew it was going to do significant damage if it hit anyone.
I’ll never forget watching it fly through the sky as I shouted “WATCH OUT!” helplessly. It looked like a table saw blade heading straight towards the bridge of this person’s nose. The decapitation trap in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? It was going to take off the top of his head in one clean slice.
He moved his head out of the way in a Matrix style back lean duck. The timing was incredible. It missed by millimeters. It was so close to being lodged in his brain that I had a cold few minutes of panic and shock set in. The record skipped and bounced down into a corn field. He ran and picked it up to show me. He thought it was awesome, and wasn’t angry at all.
I started cursing and saying, “Holy shit, HOLY SHIT, I could have KILLED YOU!” I think this is the event that broke me out of that “random destruction” phase everyone goes through as a teenager. I just sometimes think about what would have happened if it had hit him.
