Thursday, July 31st.
Now we’re sitting in a Best Western drinking Vodka tonics and watching VH1, but earlier today we survived a fire ball and an encounter with a serial killer.
I went to work this morning because I thought we were going to leave for Chicago on Friday morning instead of the break of dawn today. So I went in and sat on the internet for three hours and occasionally went outside to chain smoke. Then Jeremy called and said the car was okay. It was 1pm and it seemed like if I rushed back to Brooklyn, we could leave by 3 and drive until midnight and then have a short ride to Chicago in the morning. So it was like okay, okay… Due to my bad map reading skills, I got us slightly lost in Newark, but then Katherine got us on the freeway heading towards Pennsylvania.
There was such an air of self-satisfaction: good-fucking-bye NY (well, almost, for me).Also, Julie, Katherine’s younger sister made us a care package that was opened on the Manhattan bridge to much celebration and excitement. We stopped for gas right on the border of New Jersey/Pennsylvania. I got a NY Post and was reading about Broadway’s Annie run-in with the cops in Queens. Then the distinctive smell of gas started to be noticed. Pretty strong actually. So we pulled over at the next exit. Already, the car was reaking of gas and everyone was getting a little high and nauseaous and headachey. Jeremy’s contacts were burning and I kicked into crazy mom mode and started screaming about not using cell phones or smoking. Knowing nothing about cars or how they work, except that Katherine’s retard mechanic ‘fixed’ the fuel line, each of us started coming up with crackpot ideas of why the car was filling up with gas fumes. Katherine thought there was a little bit of gas on the sole of her shoe. Jeremy thought the car was burning off ‘excess’ gas somehow and I was pretty sure the car was going to explode spectacularly into a giant fireball. When you’re on a road trip, there’s always that inevitable fear that something horrible is going to happen to the car and you kind of think denial will combat all the bad shit that could happen to you. Katherine decided to lie down in the back seat for ‘a little nap’ (forever) and Jeremy started speaking in tongues. And yet, still, we’re kind of like, ‘maybe it’ll be okay.’
So we pulled over at the next exit into a parking lot for a True Value hardware store in a town called Tannerville, PA. Katherine called her mechanic, who is not so secretly in love with her and offered to drive out here and look at the car. But wait… perhaps I should be describing this a little differently. Because this chain of events unfolded in a kind of slow motion where every unfolding event was met with an endless forum of plotting, speculation, bickering and freaking out. It was kind of like ‘Blair Witch’ once the three kids start to get really lost in the woods. Eventually, a tow truck was called throuh USAA and we had to wait an hour for the guy to come out. In the meantime Jeremy went to a supermarked across the street to get us some sandwhiches since none of us had really eaten much during the day. Since no one thought we’d be leaving today, the packing was pretty bad. Like there were plans to make sandwhiches and have healthy snacks, but this translated into water crackers and un-refrigerated fresh mozzarella that I sliced and doled out from the back seat as Katherine tried to make difficult u-turns on busy streets.
Jeremy stayed at that super market FOREVER. Having been in supermarkets with him before, it was easy to imagine him blithely wandering around, price comparising and reading labels making sure stuff wasn’t fattening while buying the most fattening stuff in the store. Then the tow truck showed up and Katherine and I started freaking out that Jeremy was never coming back and didn’t have a cell phone. So as the tow guy is pullying the car onto the back of the truck, Jeremy drives up right next to us in the passenger seat of a black BMW. My eyes nearly fell out of my skull. Jeremy pops out of the car all excited, ‘This guy is a mechanic!’
Huh!
At the pizza place next to the supermarket, Jeremy was telling the guy behind the counter that he was stranded in Tannerville and this guy, Rich, behind him in line eagerly starts offering to help. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I shouldn’t speculate. And I haven’t read his version of this story yet. Except I’ll probably always wonder what the fuck happened that would make Jeremy get in this weirdo’s car. We’ve gone over it about a million times tonight. In such cases, facts dribble out slowly and not in chronological order. There has been speculation that Jeremy, altered by fumes, was not in his right frame of mind. But the reality that I’ve patched together is that in this pizza place, Jeremy starts talking to a guy who claims he has a friend who is an on-site mechanic, who he was willing to call now, to have drive out to the True Value parking lot and fix the leaking gas line. Done and done. But then the guy also offered a lot of strange and un-requested creepy personal information. I should mention now that Rich is in his probably mid/late fifties, had a long gray pony tail that went down to his butt and a very strange necklace. You could say he was going for a kind of Northern Cali/Marin County down on his luck guru type look. But when he got out of the car with Jeremy (aside from that instant freak panic moment where I thought, has Jeremy lived in PA before, ran into a friend/has a whole secret life I’ve heard nothing about in the last two years and now it’s being revealed at a pretty bad moment). But mostly I was thinking, who is this gay serial killer? Rich pretty instantly changed his story from having his friend come to this parking lot on a busy street to having the car towed to his house in the hills!!!(and we could all stay with Rich!). And he was so ridiculously desparately over helpfull. And I don’t think it’s cause I’m a distrustfull person coming from NY. I don’t think my parents would be this concerned. It immediately became a case of how do we get the fuck away from this scary guy. All I could think about was Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Vanishing. Rich was getting pretty vocal about critisizing the one auto repair place in Tannerville and despite his hard HARD sell to get us to come with him, he was pretty foggy about payment. My heart started beating really hard and I don’t know what because I was thinking that Jeremy was going along with Rich and thought his help was our good luck. But I could see Katherine wasn’t having it. Before we could get out of there, we ended up exchanging cell phone numbers. Rich suggested a terrifying local inn in the hills and when we said, that’s okay, no thanks, he badgered Katherine for what name she was going to register under (Katherine…. Smith…). She rode to the garage with the tow truck guy, who never really seemed that fazed that he might be losing his auto-repair sale to Rich and Jeremy and I walked, fearing Rich was sitting in his car, dousing the hanky with the chloroform and planning to offer us a ride to the mechanic. Fortunately, it was a short walk.
I walked/ran at my fastest speed across this shit hole pitt stop town. We passed 3 gas stations, a Ramada Inn and a small field where there was little league game going on. There was no side walk and since this was an a nowheresville, the two streets we had to go down were both small highways cars were whizzing past, barely crashing into us on the shoulder. I kept wondering. How did all those people get on that playing field? Do people usually just walk around this pedestrian-threatening town? But mostly I was screaming at Jeremy to walk fucking faster, since he was eating his sandwhich and I was sure Katherine was already dead at the auto mechanics. Said mechanics turned out to be more a scrap yard with a pink neon glowing diner at the edge. Katherine was visibly trembling and by now we were leaning against the car chain smoking. It still smelled like gas, but whatev, let’s just get it over with. That fireball didn’t seem so bad anymore. I kept thinking that Rich and his buddy were going to show up in a van, each carrying a sledge hammer.
Anway… There was nobody available to fix the car, but there was a Best Western behind the garage. I got us room. We tried to buy about 20 cases of beer, but surprise!! in Pennsylvania beer is pretty non-existent. So now we’re here, a little freaked out, a little drunk, furniture is piled against the door and we told the conceirge to not send any calls through or tell anybody we’re here.
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