Dead car battery. Husband and kids are gone for the day. Friends are getting ready for our event and not answering their phones. Taxi cab not available in 10 minutes. So, car service seems like the most reasonable option to get me across town to meet my friends for our charity luncheon.
A dirty brown car, most likely a late 1970s model maybe something like a 1976 Chevy Chevelle, lacking hubcaps pulls into the driveway. A man with curly long hair, sporting brown tinted sunglasses, a tan and white flowered shirt underneath a brown leather vest and a pair of faded jeans gets out of the car. He signals for me to snap out my brief but deep “fight or flight” concentration. Choice: Be late and make us all late or enter a scene from a Stranger Danger Awareness film? I select film stardom.
He opens the door and I scoot across the cracked leather seats, noticing a green apple scented air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. It stopped working long ago.
“Where are you going?”
“Washington Street”
“What is the house number?”
“I don’t know. I told your dispatcher.”
“Okay, just take me to Washington Street. I know the house when I see it.”
Not given the address by the dispatcher. Makes no sense. Yep, I am going to die today. This isn’t a Stranger Danger movie. This is a snuff film. He is the director/producer and I am the star. I am going to be tortured and murdered with the footage streamed to snuffit.com, showing me wearing the wrong textures. I have on denim tie-dye dress paired with a black silk cardigan that my husband got me in Germany that just screams expensive. The dress is very Colorado but cardigan says Uptown. I heard that the moms from the neighborhood where they trim the toilet seats in gold are going to be there. So, I added a little panache, a little style, a little nouveau riche to my wardrobe….and a lot of desperate overcompensation. Garbageman’s daughter. Humble upbringing and a lifetime of bad hair. Lifetime of overcompensation. Wonder if I’ll have to overcompensate in Purgatory…”
“Where are you going today?”
“Going to a friend’s house. Then, off to a charity in event in Denver for our moms group.”
“You’re a mom.”
“Yes and a librarian.”
“Librarians are cool…l always think of librarians as spies... so mysterious and they know everything.”
Here where go again and man with a librarian fetish. So by spy, he means freak in the bed. If I would have known that libraries were such fetishized aphrodisiacs, I would not have wasted so much of my youth writing. Should have become a library clerk in high school, probably would have been felt up before I was nineteen…
“I have a kid too. He is eight and a brilliant musician. He is going to follow his destiny. The destiny that could have been mine when I was eight. We are sending him to a music conservatory in Massachusetts. One of the best in the country. He’ll live there and only come home for holidays.”
Yes, Mr. Car Driver, I am sure he is. And, my kid is going the University of Iowa’s writing program at the age of the eleven followed by his own column in Computer World magazine writing about the use technology among middle school kids….
“Turn right here, please.” He failed to listen to me and entered the neighborhood several blocks away from my friend’s house.
“Oh this neighborhood brings back memories. Almost all my firsts, the bad kind of firsts, were in this neighborhood. First beer, first whisky, first sexual encounter, first hit of pot, first bad LSD trip…”
Jump. I am just going to jump. How fast could the car be moving? 20, 25, 35 miles per hour. How bad could it be? A few broken bones, a little blood, a ripped cardigan. No, I can’t rip my cardigan. My new phone. I could call for help. If only, I paid attention when my husband showed me how to dial. Facebook. I’ll post “Save Me.” Nope. The Facebook status update is passé. Email. Not fast enough. Jumping is my only option…
“Sir, there is the house. Please let me out.”
Car stops. I handed him some cash and quickly slammed the door behind me. I embrace my friend and ask, “Can I please have a ride home this afternoon?”
