Gary and Tim

"This is a problem intersection."

by Brian Howard

Last Wednesday night I met Gary and Tim at Broad and Pike. I wasn't planning to. I didn't even know them. To be honest, I'd never heard of Broad and Pike until a half-hour earlier. My GPS had suggested I turn there in order to get to Germantown Avenue without tussling with rush-hour traffic on 76.

That's when we all met.

As fate would have it, I was involved in an accident with a car heading southbound on Broad. The details are best left to accident reports and insurance companies, but the important fact is that nobody — not the other driver, not my passenger, my girlfriend, not I — was hurt. Unfortunately, the cars were no longer drivable.

I've never been in an accident before. And I guess you could say I picked an interesting place for my first. Broad and Pike is far from home for a South Philly guy like me — 39 long blocks north of City Hall. More interestingly, up there, Broad is the dividing line between the 39th police district and the 25th, meaning the accident happened in no-man's land. I suspect my car might have been in both when we collided, with the force knocking me into the 39th.

Which might explain why it took three hours for the reporting officer to arrive. No matter. One nice thing about Broad and Pike is that not a half-block away is Joseph's Auto Collision Center, and whether due to the shop's proximity or simple coincidence, Gary Murray, a shop employee, and his friend Tim Green, a Reverend at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in the Northeast, were on the scene before the first wave of gawking onlookers.

Gary was immediately checking on me, my girlfriend and the other driver. Tim began directing traffic and continued to do so for what seemed like an hour before an officer from the accident squad arrived. (Accident squad officers secure accident scenes but do not take police reports.)

Joseph Aviv, who owns the shop, arrived not long after. "I wish you'd have called me earlier so I could tell you not to go this way," he laughed. "This is a problem intersection."

The driver's mother, Alyce, arrived, too, and, quite understandably, insisted her son be examined at nearby Temple Hospital. By the time the reporting officer arrived, at around 9 (judging by the number of sirens we all heard as the sky grew darker, it had been a busy night in the districts), the driver had just returned from the hospital. We gave our statements, had our cars towed to Joseph's and filled out lots of paperwork. 

At around 10, everything was finally signed and notated. Then Gary and Tim — two friends who, as it turns out, met three years ago when Gary reported to the scene of an accident Tim was involved in, and have been tight ever since — in a gesture of unimaginable kindness, drove us all the way back to South Philly. Gary lives in Roxborough. Tim lives in the Northeast. And the pair of Philly natives who'd started their evening with plans to hang out ended it driving an exhausted, shell-shocked couple all the way across town.

We all talked about baseball (Gary fondly recalled selling parking spots for a quarter near old Connie Mack Stadium); how long a hamburger stays in your system; the finer points of Eddie Murphy's The Distinguished Gentleman; the languages we can speak (Tim's a self-professed "language man"); the new PECO Building lights ("That's really nice," said Gary, suddenly ponderous); and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (after Tim, who says he's been "diagnosed as being extremely extroverted," went into an extended rant in the affected speech of Carlton Banks).

I think we laughed most of the way home.

My car is likely totaled. And since I'm not counting on any insurance money, I'm contemplating carlessness. But that ride home went a long way toward making things feel OK. As Tim and Gary can attest, it's sort of amazing how kind people can be in even the crummiest of circumstances. Alyce, the driver's mother, even called the office here the next day to check on everyone. She said her son was OK. We said we were OK. For a crummy night and crummier circumstances, it was all surprisingly OK.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)