A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Dennis

Then came Boston, on a hot day in June, halfway through our trip. Arriving at Logan Airport, we couldn’t find our driver because we didn’t know that Logan has a designated place away from the terminal where drivers of limos and town cars wait for their clients. By the time we figured this out, our driver, a large man who weighed at least 280 pounds, had been waiting a long time, sweating in the hot sun. We headed into town through the Liberty Tunnel and our driver, who’d been talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone, lost his connection . “Damn tunnel,” he said, “can’t get a good connection.” He snapped his cell phone shut, and then he died. Instantly, without struggle or pain—he just stopped living. It happened immediately after he said those words and snapped that phone shut. His head came back onto the headrest and he made a gurgling sound. I thought he had fallen asleep and was snoring, in perhaps the worst-ever case of narcolepsy in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the late-afternoon rush hour, and traffic in the tunnel was moving slowly, thank God. Andy and I are forever thankful that this was a one-way tunnel with no oncoming traffic. The town car was drifting to the left. There was a bus beside us in the next lane, and I shouted, “Look out for that bus.” Our driver didn’t move. The bus stopped as we drifted across its lane. Drivers beeped their horns as we continued our slow drift across three lanes, hitting no cars on our way to the tunnel D E N N I S 154 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X wall. The wheels were obviously turned a bit left, so that even when we hit the wall, it was only the left front tire that made impact. The car itself didn’t get a scratch, but its driver was dead. By this time, I had climbed over the front seat and was slapping the driver, trying to wake him out of his stupor. “Hey wake up!” I was slapping a dead man. Once we hit the wall and were in the emergency lane at the left of the tunnel, Andy and I climbed out of the car and pulled the driver to the pavement. As I continued efforts to revive him, Andy made a sign reading DOCTOR and held it up, Norma Rae–style, before the oncoming traffic.Wegottwodoctorsimmediately.AsthedoctorsperformedCPR, Andy called 911. They asked for identification, and I looked for the big guy’s wallet. His name was John Dennis Bourne, and he was fifty-three years old. He was loaded into the ambulance and taken away. The town car company instructed us to drive the car to our hotel, where they’d pick it up. On the way, Andy learned from the dispatcher that Dennis’s girlfriend was blind and diabetic, needing daily insulin shots. Dennis was very important in her life. They had a date to go dancing that night. ...