The Car (Subtitle: "The Story of the Car")

Last night around 11 I received a text from a friend:

"Whatchya doin'?" she asked.

"Dancing to 'Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Puff' at a wedding in Maine," I replied.

And I was. No, to be fair, I believe I had just finished dancing to "Push It" with the bride's father and had stopped for breath when I sent that message, and was, in reality, listening to "Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Puff" and not dancing, per se.

We were in the middle of the woods. All around us it was dark. Pine tree silhouettes limned the sky and above us hung white paper lanterns. We ate our miso-dipped green beans and heirloom tomatoes and boogied like you only wish a wedding party would ever get down. Heels never felt so superfluous but kicky. The cold of August never felt so shivery but fresh.

The bridegroom's mother gave a speech that made us cry. "He taught me words I never knew before," was her refrain about her son. She said, at the end of the speech, that there was one word she had never known the true meaning of and had never used before tonight: "Daughter," she said.*


Then we ate cheese.

Then we drank more. Then we left the woods.
The after-party was worthy of mention.

Picture this: A bride in white-white, white petals in her hair, voluptuous cleavage spilling over her red plastic cup of boxed wine on a polyester-clad bed in a motel room. Considering the professional achievements of most of the people under that drop-ceiling, this was the lowest-brow highbrow after-party possibly ever thrown. My one regret is that a cohort and I had, earlier in the day, in a fit of brilliance, deviously rigged the pool so we could access it that night. We never made it in, instead crashing unchlorinated in our rooms among beer cans and ice buckets. Life is super rough sometimes.**


I am now in a car driving from Maine, seated in the back behind S (girl) and D (boy). Our topics of conversation have flown from how the nickel is the underdog of the coin world ("Nickels are shit." "I'd kick them in the nuts." "Pennies are trash.") to why we don't like to date people in our own professions and how we don't necessarily like to date people in other professions.

I just read that sentence to them.

"No, I'd date people in my own profession," S said. "And I want to date people in other professions."

"So you want to be a whore," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"I want to date an alien," D said. "But not a squishy alien."***

Our latest brainstorm was who at the wedding is what animal. Par example:
On the scale from chicken to cat, S is an otter
A is a kangaroo.
M is a moose
H is a duck-billed platypus
D is a kingfisher
D is a monkey
I am, according to S and D, a wild horse.

On to who is what food:
M is a bratwurst
D is cole slaw and fries
Now we debate which is more whimsical and which is more serious: coleslaw or fries? Coleslaw is definitively more serious that fries, I say. We argue fiercely.

Amarone--they are debating what drink I am, and are venturing into dark wines.
D is a negroni
M is a Long Island iced tea
S is a gimlet
Who is the white russian? Who cares? They are vomitous.

Our party has become gratuitously hostile. "Hello and fuck you," D smiles at a carload of little kids.

Rest Stop.

We debate the positive and negative aspects of remaining in a Pizza Hut in New Hampshire for the rest of our lives.
"S, you can work in the CVS across the street in the pharmacy." (Med student.)
"D, you can wait outside for car accidents and then sue people." (Former lawyer.)
Me: "So I am the one with the useless profession here?"
"No," D says. "You're going to be putting out our newspaper." We will be our only sources for every story and feel at liberty to quote ourselves profusely.

"How quickly do you think we would turn to cannibalism?" D asks. He answers his own question. "Hours," he says.
"Minutes," I venture. "Minutes." We consider making a break for the door. We hang out heads over our individual not-what-we-ordered pan pizzas.
To be safe, we pick out which family we might devour first.
The blond one with string-bean daughters, we decide. Not the table of old people in pastels behind us. Definitely not. Chewy.

We realize we are actually on the verge of spending the rest of our lives in the Pizza Hut and force ourselves to leave.

...Hours pass...

We stop again for a bathroom at a convenience store with a strangely long line of men at the register. Across the street is a cemetery. We debate spending the night in it. I declare we will. They declare they will not listen to me. A rebellion is fomenting.

I wonder if we will make it to Brooklyn tonight.

Unclear.

We do not, however, die on the Mass Pike, as we speculated we might, and feel a surge of joy at that development.

"Maybe I will go to a diner tonight," D says. He thinks aloud: "Can I do that?"

"I want yogurt and fresh peaches," S says.

"Spinach," I say.

"Let's get a farmer with dirt on his pants--"

"And lick the dirt off," I say.

To sum up: We are greased out, hungover, and insane. One of us has fantasized about licking dirt off a farmer's pants. Send help...?


___________
* This is not a generic "feeling" shot. This is actual lavender from the actual wedding site.

** No, this does not illustrate the point "super rough sometimes." And no, it was not taken the night of the after-party but is in fact the bar from the previous night's after-party. I returned the following day to this bar to attempt to retrieve two friends' jackets. They did not get their jackets. And then they froze to death.

***D soon clarified: "A taut alien. I would date a taught alien."