The truth is that, despite my
penis, I don’t like cars and I hate driving. It’s boring, and it’s cramped, and
dealing with the idiots on the road is a pain in the ass. Plus, there’s nowhere
I want to go. If I don’t want to go anywhere and I don’t like the act of
getting there, what’s the point? There
isn’t one.
I’ve also never changed a tire
or oil, or even opened a glove compartment.
Actually,
I have done the last thing once or twice.
There are two reasons I insist
on driving when the only other person in the car is my wife. Want me to list
them? No? Well, I’m going to do it anyway. If you didn’t want to read my
ramblings you probably shouldn’t have bought this book, and you definitely
shouldn’t have made it this far into it.
The first is that my wife gets
nervous every time a truck passes her on the highway, and every time she gets
nervous, she nearly drives us off the road. Seriously, in eleven years of
marriage we’re averaging two close call collisions into the midway per season. It’s amazing there aren’t multiple shards of
windshield embedded in my brain yet.
The second reason I don’t like
to let my wife behind the wheel is because she seems to think she knows exactly
where she’s going, when in truth, she knows very little. The problem is that
she’s lived in southern California her entire life. She thinks she knows every
secret back road, shortcut, and quicker route home that there is to know. She
thinks she’s smarter than the GPS and the various satellites feeding the GPS
its information. That’s right, she thinks she’s smarter than the billion dollar
computers floating in space.
This
is a woman who isn’t yet sure how to empty the trash can on her laptop.
On this particular occasion,
when my wife opened her hand, motioned for the keys, and said to me, “I know a
shortcut. It’ll get us home in half the time,” she seemed oblivious to just how
silly she sounded.
I knew she was going to get us
lost and she knew that I knew that she was going to get us lost. The car even
knew she was going to get us lost and the keys clung to my palm like sticky
candy to the grubby-fat palm of a pudgy baby.
Needless to say, I was
reluctant. I tried to shoo her away. “No, it’s okay. It’s not like we’re in a
hurry or anything. I’ve got it.”
“Stop it, Steven. Come on.
Give me the keys.”
I should have shoved her over.
That’s exactly what I should have done. I
should have walloped her in the chest with both hands and slammed her to the
pavement. When her skull hit the cement, it might have knocked her unconscious.
Once she’d been neutralized, I could have rolled her into the trunk, drove us
home, and saved us both the misery of what was to come.
Unfortunately, I did the exact
opposite.
Her eyes narrowed and she
motioned for the keys once again. “Come on, Steven. Give me the keys.” She
meant business.
With a sigh and a shake of my
head, I handed over the keys. I really
need to start walloping people more.
We were on the highway for
less than five minutes when she pulled off.
“Where are you going, hun?”
“It’s a shortcut. Trust me.”
Before continuing, I should
mention that we were only half an hour away from our destination to begin with.
We didn’t have a long trip ahead of us. We weren’t traversing the country by
covered wagon and stopping at night to cook beans from a can and blast a
buffalo in the face for protein. There wasn’t a chance that either of us was
going to die of dysentery along the way. The car was air-conditioned. It was
comfortable. There was a bag of fun-sized snickers in the back seat.
In a roundabout sort of way,
the regular cut was actually a shortcut.
The wife wasn’t hearing it,
though. She thought she knew a quicker way home and damn it she was going to
take it!
Ten minutes into the journey
it was fairly clear to the both of us that we were lost. The direct route the
highway provided was a distant memory. Even if we had wanted to turn around and
go back the way we came, we wouldn’t have been able too. We’d been wandering
for too long and we’d past the point of no return.
I felt like I needed to say
something. “We’re lost, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t buying it. A blind man
with one deaf ear, the inability to speak, a pack of rodents living in his
lower intestine, and wooden pegs where his arms should be wouldn’t have bought
it. My wife is a terrible actress.
She was nervous. She wiped a
bead of sweat from her face, tried her damndest to erase the look of utter
confusion from her face, and turned on the radio. Some terrible 80s song began
to play and she threw one hand into the air like she’d just stepped into the
hottest club in town and she owned the place. “Alright! I love this song!”
I still wasn’t buying it. It
was a distraction. She was trying to throw me off the scent and it wasn’t going
to work. No one likes old Bananarama songs that much. Not even Bananarama.
Fifteen minutes later, the sun
began to set. The car jumped and the road turned to gravel. Our tires were
spitting dirt, and there were rocks banging against all of the car-stuff on the underside.
I think I heard a piston pop. I dunno what it was. Something popped.
Before I could say a word, my
wife held up her hand and pointed her palm at my face. “Not a word, Steven!
Don’t you dare say a word! The turn is right up here. Three more blocks and
we’re there!”
My only problem was that there
didn’t seem to be anything even vaguely resembling “blocks” where we were.
We passed by a fence that
looked like it had been constructed in the early 20s from the bones of dead
cowboys. I swear I saw a femur. There was a dead raccoon twisted in the barbed
wire, binding them all together and blowing in the breeze like a pirate flag. It was a warning.
Five minutes later I spotted a
rusted Port-A-Potty in the middle of an empty field. Rip Van Winkle himself
peeked out from the door and flashed us the finger. I think I might have seen his junk.
When the sun dropped from the
sky I began to get worried. We’d been four-wheeling through the backwoods of
DeliveranceTown for nearly an hour. Sure, we hadn’t yet been kidnapped and butt
raped by the locals, but it was bound to happen sooner or later. I’ve heard
that hillbilly butt rape happens most often at night. Trust me on this. I read it in a pamphlet.
From the darkness outside,
something howled. I can’t say for certain if it was a wild dog, or a wolf, or
some poor, unsuspecting sap bent over the backdoor of a pickup truck getting
his fudge packed more awkwardly than Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory.
It was one of those things, though.
Something smacked against the
window and we both jumped, and my wife laid into the gas. Suddenly the car was
swerving, careening back and forth and tearing into the uneven ground beneath
us. A flash of lightning exploded over the mountains. Something laughed. The
radio went dead and something that sounded like a lion roared. I think I even
heard a gunshot.
I was seconds from leaning
over, walloping my wife in the face, taking the wheel, and getting us the hell
out of whatever circle of hell we’d accidently driven into when the gravel road
transformed, quite suddenly, again into pavement. A streetlight popped into
existence just over the horizon and three more followed soon after. A couple
minutes later my wife maneuvered the car back into civilization.
Not only were we on a street I
recognized, but we were also ten minutes from home. A trip that should have
lasted thirty minutes at the most, had taken us nearly an hour and a half.
My wife turned to me and
smiled brightly. “See? Told you I knew where I was going.”
I think she actually expected me to buy it. The woman’s got balls.
