Million Dollar Deals

How Far I Will Go When I don’t want to go somewhere, and the Hilarity That Ensues

            Me, and my two friends who were in the car with me this night, all agree this premise of what really happened on this night could have be used as part of a script in a movie of the comedy variant. Now that I’m sitting here writing this, I figure maybe it’s only good enough to be used in some film school drop out’s short film about teen angst and coming of age dribble. We all know it’s boring and yet still watch the damn movie anyway, much like you’re going to sit here and read the rest of this crap.

            Let me set the mood for you I was about 18 years old. It was senior year of high school. Sometime during the summer of 2001, to try and be a little more exact without straining myself trying to remember much more about the exact point in time. A Friend of mine that we shall call Puck puts it in his mind that after watching some big WWF (yea, now called WWE, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when I call it by that shit) event at this kid’s house where everyone went to for the big pay-per-view events (now I don’t even know anyone that watches wrestling anymore) we were all going to the strip club out in the county north of where we are.

            My dilemma is this, I hate paying women to do nothing but shake their goods at me in return for my hard earned cash. I don’t have any qualms with them doing these acts; it’s just that I don’t like paying for it. It’s kind of like the equivalent of if you were to pay for a meal at Taco Bell that you wanted, and just sat there staring at it instead of eating it. You understand now? No, probably not you fucking sexual deviant.

            So, the thing is this. I tell whom ever that I will not be going over to watch the PPV event because of some nonsensical lie like “I’m not feeling well to go out, so call me later to go out when wrestling is over.” What do I do in actuality? Plot an escape plan as to how I’m going to get out of this situation. So, I call my friend, who I will refer to as Parker, and devise a plan because he too doesn’t want anything to do with this whole evening that’s been planned out for us.

            Usually conversations like this start with a bitch, a little moan, some more bitching and over hatred for minor things followed by an agreement to non-verbally tell everyone to go fuck themselves. This is always followed by me hopping into a car, and heading to whoever’s house it is who I am in total agreement with and then leading up to some grand adventure… or a trip to somewhere like the local 7-11 at times. This night however was not a trip to 7-11, or else this would be a rather dull and pointless story. No, this night leads with us getting our buddy, I’ll call CHIP, who obviously wanted nothing to do with the trip to the strip club either (and later on in life we learned he doesn’t like doing much of anything else, or so we believe). This, being the summer of 2001, I was driving my dad’s old, light blue, ‘91 Chevy Lumina that we had named “Ol’ Blue” out of sheer unoriginality. This car had gotten me out of quite a few car chases and it was a marvel that no one chasing us ever realized that this car was driven by me with my close friends always I the shotgun and/or other passenger seats.

            Step one of our plan was to play keep away from the others.  How prey tell did we pull this off you may be asking? Well, the only way that it’s easy. Make it so obvious where you are and hope to God the others are too stupid to realize the obvious. We had parked maybe a block away from the house holding the television watching event and sat idly by waiting for a sign of them leaving to let us know that it was over and that they were coming to get us. Step one starts out with a call to my cell phone (I had been the only one at the time out of my friends to have one, and this was only because my mother wanted to know where I was since I had a knack for just vanishing without even saying goodbye to anyone before I left the house. I thought I was such a rebel). Obviously I do not answer the phone as I let it go to voicemail. We see them drive by us as we sit in this dark, unlit road. One of them actually notices the car and points us out to Puck who is driving his old 1990 black Nissan Maxima. What ensues is a battle of 10-year-old cars, one racing in pursuit as the other tries to lose the latter. I pull my patented move of finding this long stretch of road, which has 2 hills, so that I can lose them on the dip between two hills. While flooring it, I turn the lights off. Not very safe, but when you know the roads better than you know birthdates of your family members (wait, who the fuck knows their family members’ birthdays?), you don’t really worry that much about safety. What I do next is I try and slam on the breaks hard so I have enough time to slow down without breaking later on, and the people in pursuit don’t see the break lights turning. Yet again, not safe or recommended, but whatever, you’ll sit here and enjoy the story and not try and sue me for trying to attempt things you should be. What results in all these Dukes of Hazzard-styled driving methods is I turn off onto some side road before the second hill, fooling the people following into believing I had driven so fast, that I’m already over the second hill and that their efforts to keep up were useless. Did it work this time? You bet your autographed Derek Jeter rookie card it did.

            Like any kid growing up in my generation, you start to lose interest shortly after you’ve done all the victory dancing, laughing, and saying how stupid the others are for not being able to keep up or even figure out what we had done to lose them. Well, either that is the case, or I’m just an easily bored asshole. What did we do afterwards? We devised a plan to play a prank on Puck and anyone that was in the car with him. The prank we decided on was to get into Puck’s car and park it in another parking lot across the street that had nothing to do with the strip joint. The thing was, two of the three of us had only gone to this strip club once before, and Puck, being one of them, was driving that time. Thank the Lord I have an uncanny memory of inane and useless things, because I had half-assed a road trip for us that night from scratchy memory of how we had gotten there last time.

            Pan over the story to what was going on in Puck’s car. He riled up a troop of 3 other people who were at the house watching wrestling with him into going with him as well (kind of makes you wonder how the hell he intended for 3 more people to cram into an old Nissan Maxima with 4 others from the party already in it). The people with him will go under the guises of Curley, Duke, and McNugget.

            Well, apparently my memory was much, much better than Puck’s because i was told later on that they had to stop and ask for directions once they crossed the bridge and got into the next county. This is where THEIR story starts to get a tad bit interesting, as I’m told. Not only did the man who they stopped to ask look shady as all hell, but he had apparently just gotten out of prison. When they asked him if he knew how to get to the place, he replied back with something a long the lines of “SURE! I know where the titty bar is, lemme hop a ride there with you guys, I can sure go for that.” Now, any level-headed person would know better than to let a complete stranger into a car, especially one who apparently looked like a walking shop rag that’d be hung from the back pocket of a greasy mechanic. What Curley does next has been considered outrageous and absent minded (obviously by everyone else in the car with him at the time, and I’m sure you’d agree with them as well). What Curley did was he, sitting in shotgun and not having any concern for this guy doing anything to him goes, “sure thing,” and unlocks all the doors on the car to let this vagabond into the car with them. McNugget, being freaked out, as any sane teenager should be, basically dives from the left side of the back seat, all the way across to the right side, borderline sitting on top of Duke’s lap to keep away from any physical contact with the drifter they had just picked up. On their travels, the guy tells them stories similar to those of Tuco aka “The Ugly” in Sergio Leone’s “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” You know, long-winded rants of highly embellished stories regarding his past that only a lone drifter-criminal could make up to make his life not seem so bad. Stories about how he invented the ATM and he can get money out of it at any time by a secret code he programmed into all ATM’s before he was arrested. If my memory of what Puck told me about that night is correct, the “secret code” is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. He then went on and told them other such lunacy as that he wants to go see his woman… but that she just doesn’t know she’s still his woman. When asked why he went to jail, he claims he was “a little bit too rough” with his woman on night after an argument and the police took him away to “think about what he had done.” Apparently the thinking he had done was probably going to lead up to another visit from the police.

            The whole time in the heads of Puck, McNugget and Duke (and probably to a highly lesser extent, Curley) were a hope and a prayer that this guy would finally go away and out of their lives. When they got into the strip club, the usual rule of 20 dollars to enter plus a mandatory of you having to buy at least one drink in the club was in effect (and what a crappy rule that is when the drinks aren’t even alcoholic. ‘Cause, you know, I want to drink apple juice while starting at a set of boobs being shaken in my face). Puck, and the others thought their prayers had been answered because one of the things. The drifter told them that when he was released, he was given an evidence bag back of what he went into the jail with. Among things like shoelaces being in the bag, he only had a 20-dollar bill in there. Thinking this would mean he wasn’t going to be let in, Puck and Co. had all jumped for joy. The jailbird had started asking each person who reluctantly drove to the club with him if they would lend him 8 to 10 bucks for one drink (yea, did I forget to mention that not only were there no alcoholic drinks, but that they were ridiculously over priced?). But as bad of luck as I have, they noticed their luck was going straight down the crapper because that damn bum was begging the bouncer at the door to let him in regardless because he had jut gotten out of the joint. Apparently the bouncers, you know, those guys who will defend the honor of a V.D. ridden stripper, have a heart when it comes to those who were in prison.

            Now, lets dissolve and turn to what’s going on with my compatriots and I who were driving in Ol’ Blue. While the adventures of the Nissan Maxima were quite entertaining, the adventures of Ol’ Blue were that of a normal aimless adventure, We had just been driving around bullshitting about go-nowhere subjects while listening to WSOU because we had all grown quite tired of the cassette tapes I had in the car (yes, it was that old that the CD player was still an expensive option to have in a car and tape players were still a common thing to have when this car was made, or the previous owner was just a cheap fucking asshole).

            Finally we had arrived to the strip club and all got excited cause we just had to find Puck’s car, drive it off somewhere else and then scout out a spot to hide so we could sit and laugh, as he’d freak out while none-the-wiser that it was all our doing (ok, it wasn’t the best prank, but jacking a car at 18 for the sole purpose of watching someone be stranded sounded funny to us. We knew Puck’s reaction would be hilarious because of the time we took the fuse out of his car that was responsible for his car horn this one night he was really horn-happy and we got sick of it. That instance lead to him screaming at his car, climbing under it and slamming random pipes wildly with a hammer or some form of blunt object he had found in his trunk as he kept screaming. Yea, we were expecting something like that to go down when he was done oogly-eying girls whose fathers never gave them any attention. What we weren’t expecting is what went down next.

            I had parked the car at the very edge of the lot near the exit, in some dark and wooded area. I had gotten out and told Parker and CHIP to sit in the car and keep an eye out and get me if they saw Puck or anyone else coming out of the club. You may at this point be asking yourself, “but how was he going to move Puck’s car in the first place?” Well, here’s the thing. The early 90s were the age of those stupid keypads under door handles where you punched in a code, and depending on which code you pressed, you either unlocked all the doors in the car, or you opened the trunk. Sometime during the year or two that he had gotten this car, basically all his friends had learned and memorized these codes by heart. We had also known EXACTLY where he hid his set of car keys in the car. If you knew Puck, you’d know he is that lazy/forgetful that he thought the best idea was to lock his car keys in his car as to not need and worry where he left his keys. But, this night was obviously not one of those normal nights. By the time I found his car I should have already knew where everything is and been in and out of there faster than a regular car thief. Instead, I had been in the car ripping up his front seat for quite some time looking all over for his car keys. So long as to the point Parker came running over to see what was taking so long. He jumped into the backseat helping search but all he found was this strange plastic bag filled with pamphlets on why drinking and driving is bad and other things on how to become a better citizen. He showed me the pamphlets and goes “what the shit is this?” I replied back with “Ah, probably some of that hippie bullshit Puck is always reading into. You know him.” We had finally given up after we turned the inside of his already messy car inside out. Mainly because we found it weird that he took his keys with him, something he never does, but even more so because the bouncers outside had started to take note of the two of us ransacking a car that didn’t belong to us and we didn’t need any gorillas man-handling us. 

            We had regrouped back to Ol’ Blue and talked it over with CHIP, who was sitting in the backseat of Blue, as to how we couldn’t find the keys but found all these weird things in his backseat instead. We decided to cancel this plan and head back to our stomping grounds to plot a new mode of attack on Puck and Co. Thing is, we barely knew how to get to the strip club, which meant we had little to no idea about how to even head back home, nor where we even were in the first place. The fact it was rather late and dark out didn’t help much either. We eventually found a highway and decided to hop on it in hopes of it leading us back home. Unfortunately, like I said, I’m not the luckiest person and this flip of coin decision lead to us headed deeper into the next county which then would have lead us into New Jersey. Since we were so far north, exits on the highway started to become few and far between each one. Instead of being patient and waiting til the next exit to get off and hop onto the highway in the right direction, Parker and CHIP keep telling me “just cut across the dirt between highways and get onto the one heading in the right direction towards our home. I start to think to myself, “well, if the police do it all the time, why can’t I?” My paranoia of being caught was calmed by the reassurance of Parker and CHIP telling me that if we haven’t seen anyone on the highway in a while, why would we see anyone while crossing the grassy land divide the two parts of the highway. Oh, how unlucky I can be. To paint a vivid picture of this action, it was like a scene out of Ace Ventura 2, you know, where Ace is taking a “shortcut” through the jungle and the road is bumpy as all hell?

As bad luck may have it, a state trooper just so happened to be pulling up the hilly part of the highway and saw me just in time to pull me over. Suddenly, seconds after I pull onto the road and a giant dust cloud clears behind me, I see the old red and blue flashing like wild behind me. I, being utterly freaked out, pull over in the left lane. Over the loudspeaker coming from the cop car behind me, I hear “usually people pull over to the right side of the road, get over there, NOW!” I then start pulling right, but cars were flying up behind me and I hear “WAIT FOR TRAFFIC TO DIE DOWN BEFORE YOU CROSS!” come from the loudspeaker. Finally I get to the right side of the highway, and am so freaked out the car is still running and the radio is still on. What happened to be on the radio at the time was “Fuck Authority” by Pennywise. How ironic, right? How lucky I am to not have the cop realize what it was while he told me to turn the car off is more like it (ok, so I’m not THAT unlucky as I may make it sound). The trooper asks me if I had anything to drink. I said “no sir.” He then asks me to give him my license and registration and follows that by saying that the reason I was pulled over is cause as he was coming up over a hill, he saw me all over the road and thought I was drunk. He believes I wasn’t drunk because obviously I didn’t smell of booze. He did however want to know why I was driving the way I was. (Mind you that while he is talking to me, CHIP is in the backseat wagging an old Captain America toy he found in my back seat at me every time the officer says a word so that in my rear view mirror, it looks like Captain America is talking to me). I, not knowing how to explain anything without admitting to fault just sit there and simply say, “I was confused.” He goes “CONFUSED!?!? What the hell could you be confused about!?!?” I then tell him how we were trying to go to the local strip club but got lost and don’t know where we were. All of a sudden, outside from the right side of the car, we her a second voice go “THE STRIP CLUB! WELL, WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY SO? I KNOW WHERE THAT IS!” The first trooper stops the second trooper before the second trooper can say anything more and asks me, “How old are you that you’re going to the strip club,” I say that I’m 18 and bite my tongue after this because I want to blow up about how the trooper has my drivers license with this information right in his hand as he asks me. After this, they start going over directions between one another as to the best way to tell us how to get there. I then go “actually, we’d really like to just get home.” They ask, “Well, where exactly are you headed?” We tell them we need to get back over the bridge and get into our county. They ask “Why are you all the way over here if you live there?” My response was, “um… strip club, remember?”

We are then sent on our way with not even a warning. All three of us give high fives and shouts of joy and excitement of how ridiculous that situation was and how we got off very easy. Our next destination is home. What we do once we get back into our hometown area is go straight to Parker’s house. There, we grab his giant bucket we’d use for water balloon ridden adventures. We sit in his basement bathroom, like an assembly line, filling the bucket as fast as possible with as many water balloons as humanly possible. We do this because we realize quite some time had passed and we had no idea of when Puck would start to drive people home.

This is where our two stories meld as one. Back at the strip club, all 4 of them wait until the vagrant is in another side of the strip club than all of them for them to make their hasty escape out of the place. While this is going on, me, Parker and CHIP are circling town, waiting near the entire set of possibilities for highway off ramps into town from the direction they were coming from, in hopes of catching them to see who is in the car with Puck. We then figure Curley is definitely one of the ones in the car with them and say we should take a chance of parking near there and hitting them with water balloons from there. We park up the hill from Curley’s house and wait in a poorly lit section of the street so as to not be utterly visible when we attack. 

They arrived at Curly’s and we just jumped out of the bushes, hailing water balloons on them like nothing you ever seen before, and then disappeared into the night as quickly as we came. The crew of fools in the Maxima were freaking the fuck out, wanting revenge on us, and probably thinking something from a teenaged moronic mentality of “stupid freshman!” While they jumped out of the car to come after us, we ran down a side road to where I had parked Ol’ Blue, hopped in it and headed to our next destination. Duke’s. Yet again, we just kept pelting them and ran like Kenyan marathon runners to the car. This, though, erupted in a car chase with the remaining 2. We went through 3 towns trying to lose them. How not one cop in any of those square mile shit-holes of towns came after a wet dream of teenagers breaking traffic laws is a mystery to this day. It is especially surprising as that I did a 180 e-break turn at one point, losing the our friends in pursuit of us, with tires screeching into the night like a banshee. I also question how mentally retarded my friends are that they didn’t recognize they were chasing me in my old jalopy of a car. Hell, I even fucking waved at them in jest as I drove past them in the opposite direction, like 2 families from the 50s, leaving church on sunday to go on with the rest of their days. Really makes me think what nincompoops I had for friends when I was growing up.

The story goes on to us beaning the shit out of the car once again as Duke got dropped off and Puck had just given up and gone home. We weren’t done with him though. We followed him home. As we drove up his block, he was at the front door to his house, about to put the key into the door to open it, but stopped and started running at us, full rage swing in effect. We retracted all the water balloons we planned on pelting him with and hid them to see if he would believe it wasn’t us who were the fiends wielding water balloon. Like I said, I had idiots for friends. He believed it. Puck went on to tell us about the story of his night and we pretended like we did the usual 7-11 and video games kinda night. Although, once Puck told us about the bum he picked up and started talking about all the pamphlets he had , Parker, in the backseat, let out a loud, “OHHHHH, THAT’S WHAT THAT WAS!” Puck goes, that’s what, what was? Parker passed it off as something he had trouble seeing due to his poor eyesight. As Puck went on to tell the rest of the story, Parker, from the back seat, began rubbing his hands on CHIP’s shoulder. Did I mention what a germaphobe CHIP was? He started flipping a shit and having a breakdown screaming and Puck ran inside before his parents woke up and realized he was out all night, covered in glitter and smelling of shame and vagina juices. 

We then went home to watch CHIP have a mental breakdown as he basically washed his hands with fire, screaming not to touch him with our “bum hands” from being in Puck’s car, touching the felon’s belongings. 

And that, my friends is a very long and boring story of what it is like to grow up as a teenager in the suburbs. Maybe I’ll eventually get to writing the story of how on my last night before leaving for college, we were on the run from the cops who were chasing us til 5 in the morning.

-heartshapedtaco, staff

Question

Have you ever punched a bear in the mouth? No? Then fuck you.