Grey's Journal:
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I neglected to answer that final question of Jill's because I knew she would cancel the ticket if I told her the truth: I was two hours away from JFK International Airport, near the end of the North Fork of Long Island. |
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| When I
picked her up at the airport a few days later, she assumed I lied when
I gave her my estimate of the driving time. Jill is used to me
being less than truthful with her her and -- I state for the record --
it isn't my fault. Often I'm sarcastic or I'll say something
obviously untrue for a laugh. Too often, Jill responds to my
falsehood with an inquisitive look and a `Really?'. When a gullible
person says `Really?' I
hear `Please lie to me.' For example, when I took Jill to New York, we went to the Merrill Lynch Bull near Wall Street. On television, the bull is always shown from the front where it looks powerful with its head bowed low to charge the bear. |
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| We
approached from the rear what you get to see from this angle, and not
on the Merrill Lynch Commercials, is the bull's large testicles -- each
about the size of a man's head. |
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| I turned to
Jill and said, in what I thought was a sarcastic tone, ``It's good luck
to rub the Bull's testicles.'' ``Really?'' Please lie to me, Grey. ``Oh, yeah. Everyone in New York does it. It's a long standing tradition. Go on.'' She hesitated but eventually, and with my encouragement, stroked the bull's bollocks. Sadly, trying to capture her photographically at this moment would have raised too much suspicion, but I did get her annoyed face afterward. |
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For some reason when Jill is in the car with me, I become a bad driver. I become blind to pedestrians, oncoming traffic and all road signs. I find this odd, considering that the friendship between Jill and I is mostly car based. In college, where we became friends, I usually waited until her away message broadcasted panic (Physical Chemistry test, lab AND Humanities paper all due TOMORROW!!!) to call her, announcing that I wanted to go on a drive to nowhere and needed company. I used the full force of my personality to get her, against her better judgment, to come with me. Who the victor was depends on who you ask. I say she didn't come out enough; she says she came out too much. But, we'll both agree that the drives to nowhere were good times. I enjoyed aimlessly driving around the open fields of upstate New York that were so unlike the suburbs I grew up in. We'd listen to music and talk about whatever came up. So, it was only natural that when Jill visited me this time on Long Island, driving was mostly what we did, touring through the Hamptons, to the Montauk Lighthouse and back again. The car's odometer increased 350 miles in two days. I hadn't driven a car in eight months or so, and this accentuated my usual Jill-induced bad driving. So, when I tried to take a faster-but-slightly-more-complicated route home late at night, it wasn't really a surprise that I went in the wrong direction. I must have made a right instead of a left and failed to notice until about half an hour later, when I saw a sign to a town on the wrong side of the island. I turned around and got even more lost on dark roads with no one around. Eventually, when it became tremendously obvious even to Jill that I didn't know where I was going, I pulled off to the side of a lonely road to look at the map. Now this is where, once again, Jill's impression of the world diverges from mine. Ask me what happened that night, and I'll tell you `I saved Jill's life.' Ask her and she'll tell you `He nearly got me killed.' When I pulled off the road, I noticed that the car behind us did likewise -- a car that had been following us for some time. It's easy to tell when it's late at night and there's nobody else around. The car stopped about twenty meters behind us and one of the doors opened. I frowned in the rear-view mirror and said to Jill, ``You might want to lock your door.'' ``Why?'' I explained the situation and she exploded into panic, pressing all the buttons on the door, unintentionally opening the window (not an improvement) and yelling for my assistance. I reached over to lock the door, but soon withdrew my hand because I didn't know which button it was either. I let out an unhelpful `huh' and returned to looking at the rear-view mirror to see if someone was approaching. It was probably someone coming to kill us. But perhaps, it was an over-eager samaritan who, upon noticing my random driving, was coming over to offer assistance. ``Drive!'' yelled Jill. ``Huh?'' ``DRIVE! Get us out of here!'' ``Oh. Right.'' Somehow, I forgot that by pressing down with my foot on the accelerator, I could simply and effortlessly remove us from this undesirable situation. I pulled out into the street and, after a few seconds, the car behind made a hasty u-turn and retreated in the opposite direction, adding to the certainty that who ever was in that car had ill intentions. ``Well,'' I said with a smile. ``I didn't like the feeling of that at all.'' Jill wasn't ready lighten up just yet. ``So, what was your plan back there? Huh!? Were you just going to wait and see what that lunatic wanted from us?'' ``No... Well... Yes.'' ``You almost got me killed!'' ``What are you talking about?'' I said casually. ``I just saved your life.'' |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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