A shirtless drunk rubbernecker standing in his yard called 911.

I walked him back to his car, and he collapsed in the grass by the sidewalk, clutching his groin. “I thought I killed you! I couldn’t stop! I thought I killed you!” he cried. We both staggered toward each other and hugged in the middle of the street, elated to be alive.

As soon as I got out, I heard him wailing from the other side of the intersection.

The impact crashed like cymbals, the airbag deployed, his car pinballed across Broadway as my wife’s poor Subaru-with me inside of it-skittered in the opposite direction. When his car slammed like a missile into my passenger-side front quarter panel, I experienced that elastic moment you’ve seen in movies-headlights coming at me in peripheral vision as everything slows, right before accelerating real fast. I’d never been more relieved to see a parking ticket under a windshield wiper.Īnd then, driving home, I was absolutely smoked by a guy who blew a red light going 60 on Broadway, late for his UPS shift. And after surviving all that, E dropped me off back in that North Mississippi Regional Park lot at 4 a.m., and there was my wife’s Subaru. I wondered if my knuckles would ever again approach their natural pink after getting so deeply whitened clinging to my digital recorder as E revved his speedometer like a digital slot machine, hitting 90 in the Lowry Hill Tunnel, 95 on Energy Park Drive, 140 approaching the University Avenue exit on 280. Then E would get another address on his phone from the mysterious “admins” running the slideshows, and we’d head somewhere else to do it all over again. Over and over again, we peered up at the State Patrol helicopter tracking us from above and scrambled in 10 different directions at the first sight of flashing cherries, each time given half-assed chase by a modestly engaged law enforcement. I’d go on to spend more than six hours with E, watching young men his age and younger hang out the windows of Dodge Chargers and Ford Mustangs as they whipped around and around and around in empty parking lots, buffeting a hundred teenage bystanders with huge clouds of hot gray smoke on blacktop from north Minneapolis to Eagan. “Just leave your car,” he said as I rode shotgun. He texted me to look for his white 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT-a version of the soccer mom’s grocery getter that can hit 100 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds. I was there to meet my chaperone for the night, E, the 23-year-old alpha driver of the city’s late-night car scene.

The Minneapolis police had rolled through the lot, and a cop on a bullhorn sternly instructed all the teens and 20-somethings gathered for the Friday-night slideshow to disperse. Hours earlier, I had left it in North Mississippi Regional Park on the city’s Northside neighborhood. It was 4 in the morning, and my wife’s Subaru was a crumpled wreck on the side of the road in Northeast Minneapolis.

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