Highlights from a Fender Bender

My wife was involved in a minor traffic accident a few weeks ago, the most minor of fender benders. A motorcycle tried to squeeze between her and an illegally parked bus at a yellow light, crashed into the wing mirror and fell. No one was injured, the damages to our car amounted to a whopping $100, to the bike even less. It was all very humdrum, but the highlights might be instructive to a non-Brazilian.

• A private ambulance was right behind my wife when the motorcycle fell, so the paramedics immediately got out to help the driver and his passenger. The two were only lightly grazed, but they started to panic and to wail, so the ambulance took the passenger, an 18-year old girl, to the ER. She was fine, we were later told, barely even a scraped elbow. Since someone was officially injured, though, they had to call the cops and the car would have to be impounded and inspected.

The bus stop in the background, by the way, is named after a kid who was eletrocuted there. No wires fell, the bus stop itself electrocuted the kid when he leaned against the metal railings.

• One hour after calling the cops, a policeman happened to ride by on his motorcycle, so my wife and her sister-in-law hailed him. Eventually, a tow truck arrived too. One hour for the police to show up for anything is not unusual, but do keep in mind that the accident happened at the narrowest part of a very busy avenue, downtown, at five PM, one block from the access to a major hospital.
• The motorcycle driver had a cast on his left hand, which means he shouldn’t be riding. That’s probably why he lost control of his bike when he tried to run that yellow light. He wasn’t ticketed for it, but the police officer did give him a dirty look. Not a stern talking-to, of course, the accident wasn’t that serious.
• My wife, the woman who was driving the car and who is married to me, couldn’t take the car from the police parking lot. It’s in my name, after all. So I took a cab to the police station. The cab driver ran red lights, crossed into the bus lane to avoid crashing at the cars who had dared stop at a red light, overtook cars from the right, and just generally drove like a maniac on meth heading for the border with radioactive contraband in the backseat.
  All this on the way to a police station, let’s not forget.
  When we arrived, I paid up and greeted a police officer on the curb.
  “Hey, that driver just broke every single traffic law known to man,” I told him. “He was speeding way too much, swerving like crazy.”
  “Yeah,” the policeman replied. “Those cabbies are all nuts.”
• At the police station, we hanged around for an hour or so waiting to register our complaint. The officially-injured passenger had been released from the hospital, but didn’t go meet her boyfriend at the station. The driver, a skinny dude wearing ragged shorts and a backwards baseball cap with a peroxide patch sticking out, didn’t know her full name, her date of birth or her parents’ names. The girlfriend was 18, but didn’t have an ID. He did have a birth certificate for the girl’s 4-year old daughter, though. So the clerk decided to search for her in the police records.
  “Hey, do you know her past?,” the clerk asked.
  “Yeah,” the motorcycle driver replied.
  “Theft, attempted kidnapping…”
  My wife and I half-smiled. Weird joke. Then the clerk turned his computer screen.
  “Says here she and her brother knocked on a car window with a handgun, tried to rob the driver.”
  “I wouldn’t turn my back on her,” the policeman who was with us grinned.
  “That was her brother. She was just with him.”
  “She’s listed as the perpetrator. You don’t have a record, you’re just involved in that bodily injury thing, but she…”
  “Yeah, you better not turn your back on her,” the policeman repeated.
  That’s when we realized why the passenger was so insistent on leaving the scene before the police arrived.
• “Hey,” I said to the motorcycle driver while we waited. “Those scrapes on the back of your hand, have you put anything on them yet?”
  “Nope.”
  “You should get that cleaned,” I said, then turned to the policeman who was with us. “Do you guys have anything for that?”
  “No, I’m all out,” he replied. “I guess I’ll have to raid an ambulance again.”
• Finally, the clerk at the police station handed my wife five copies printed on continuous form paper for her to sign.
  “Hey, do you want yours?,” the clerk asked the policeman.
  “No, they don’t keep it in my station,” he replied. “I used to staple them to my report, but one day I handed it in person and the dude just removed it and tossed in the trash. So I said ‘screw it’ and I don’t bother keeping them anymore.”
  Well, it’s not like mine and my wife’s name, address, phone number, ID and automobile information were printed on that thing.
• To get my car from the police parking lot across the street, I had to provide photocopies of a few documents. The police station couldn’t make the photocopies, since all they had were dot matrix printers. Because he didn’t have any money, the motorcycle driver asked me to pay for his as well. By now it was eight PM, but there was a copy place nearby still open. It was someone’s house with a big XEROX placard out front, and they charged literally 1,000% more than anywhere else I’ve ever been to. Still, supply and demand, marginal utility, I couldn’t complain.
• An hour later, I had to get another photocopy. This time, I cannot remember why, it would have been easier if my wife went. The clerk — a different clerk, at the parking lot, said it wasn’t safe for her to go alone, and it would be better if I went. Again, I was right across the street from a police station. There was a second police station next to it, for crimes against women. And we were behind police headquarters.
• My wife’s conclusion: “If it wasn’t for that ambulance, those two would just have driven off. And I would have, too.”