That was the question I was trying to work out as I drove home from work on November 22, 1999. I’d been knocking on the door of financial success, and it all blew up in my face. So I’d switched doors. I’d knocked on the door of fame and acclaim—same thing.
Was it me? No way! Was I jinxed? Who knew?
I was beyond frustrated, but there was nothing I could do but pick myself up, clean myself off, and see what came next.
I was selling cars for Royal Honda in Metairie—a regular paycheck, and that was about it. I could connect with people and move vehicles, and I knew my way around cars and all their features from working with Dad. So I had the pleasure of being pretty good at sales.
Yet I felt deep inside I was meant for greater things than hitting monthly quotas on a car lot. I felt I had gifts. I was two for two in proving myself—in business ability and then in creative entertainment. For me, life felt like a game of Monopoly, where I was just about to land on Boardwalk, but I kept drawing the card that sends you back to “Go” without collecting $200.
So, back to square one.
It was late on a Monday, three days before Thanksgiving, and I was on my way home from the Honda dealership in Metairie, heading east toward Chalmette, cigarette in hand, lost in my thoughts. I never saw the eighteen-wheeler that slammed into me.
He was merging from I-10, and I was coming in from 610. I was in his blind spot as our vehicles approached the same location. His truck slammed into my left rear bumper, which locked our two vehicles together. The semi shoved me into the right guardrail.
My bumper ripped off, and the truck slowed for an instant, then kept moving. To my great fortune, another driver saw the whole thing, and he wouldn’t let the truck flee the scene. He chased him down, and the truck driver had no choice but to pull over.
My Mustang was one of Dad’s fix-up jobs. He’s terrific at rebuilding totaled vehicles, but on this one, there had been a hairline fracture to the seat frame in the earlier collision. You’d never have known it except that now, with a truck slamming into it, the frame didn’t have enough strength to hold up. As a result, my seat broke off the hinges as my seat belt locked, and I was hurled to the right side of the interior.
As the car came to a stop, I was thinking what everybody does in that situation: “I could have died just now.” Given the speed and mass of the eighteen-wheeler, this could have been fatal to me, and I understood that. What I couldn’t have known was that it would set events into motion in my life that were almost fatal in another way.
For now, I was shaken up and hurting all over. I hobbled out of my car and checked out the damage to my Mustang. Pretty bad. The truck driver, defensive and ready to intimidate, was walking back in my direction. “This was your fault!” he said. “You came over into my lane.”
“I don’t think so! You came out of your lane and slammed me into the rail.”
We argued, but to my relief, a witness to the accident soon accompanied the police officer that drove up. The officer wrote the truck driver a ticket, establishing that the law was on my side.
I tried to flex my back as the officer wrote up his account. Looking up ahead to the left, a steeple caught my eye, gleaming over the trees of the neighborhood. It made no impression on me, but it was the perfect symbol of what the future held. What was beneath that particular steeple made all the difference. Behind me lay a traffic accident that would almost doom me; ahead lay a hope that would redeem me.
Death, life, and eternal destiny, together in one place. This was an intersection of more than highways.
I called Dad and told him what had happened. “A truck just hit me from behind on the way home, Dad,” I said. “Mustang’s in pretty bad shape. Totaled again, I’d say.”
“Never mind the Mustang, son, are you okay?”
“I’ll be all right. A little sore.”
More than a little sore as the evening drew on. All I could do was take a few ibuprofen, but the next day my doctor took a good look at me. He checked out the X-rays and told me I had two herniated disks in the neck and two in the back. “You were messed up pretty good,” he stated. “You might need surgery down the road. And I imagine you’re in some pain.”
The doctor went out of the room and came back with a prescription for Vicodin and muscle relaxers. Vicodin combines an opioid (hydrocodone) with acetaminophen. I filled the script and used them as directed, every four to six hours, which took the edge off the pain.
For the next two months, I lived my life and endured my job with the help of the pain pills. I knew I’d heal, though I couldn’t train to fight anymore. Most of my attention went to getting paid by the trucking company to repair my car. I had no thought of any injury-related lawsuit; all I wanted was eight thousand dollars to cover repairs—eight thousand dollars the trucking company eventually told me I was never going to get, unless I took them to court.
Ridiculous—now I had to find a lawyer just for the car repairs in an accident that wasn’t my fault. I’d never worked with a lawyer before—didn’t even know one. But I did know a guy from my network marketing experience. He had a friend who had gotten a large settlement with a personal injury attorney. I made the connections, and the lawyer took it from there.
When we met, the attorney wanted to
