COME GET US

I have been stranded, once, right in the middle of everywhere. I've watched every bus pull away, I've seen the parking lot empty and then the workers went home some time after. We were there for it all, seeing Carlos from Interpol getting into a small car full of women. And then they were gone, too, but there we were, waiting for a way to get off the island, surrounded by the ruins of an abandoned civilization, we were stranded, out of luck, shit out of luck, to be truthful.







The four of us, me and my wife Lindsey and our friend Evan and his date, Ian, we met up in Metropark and traveled together in Lindsey's black Neon, the windows tinted barely legal black, through Turnpike traffic to the Curiosa festival, a traveling circus parading as a rock touring show, headlined by the Cure, and supported by a slew of great bands, and while I am not much of a fan of outdoor concerting events, I agreed to attend. There were many great bands on the bill, but Lindsey was just giddy with Cure fever.

We were pulling into the parking lot, being herded through the parking maze on Randall's Island, the location of our concerting experience. It felt like the final snap of a bended paperclip, the way it sounded, but just a giant pop somewhere underneath us, inside the car with us. And then came the trembling of the Neon, the violent rumblings somewhat like a car shaped paint mixer, just as we were rolling into the parking spot. It shuddered one last time as Lindsey cut the engine.

I'm sure the smart thing to do in that situation, of course, would have been to call a tow truck and get someone there to ascertain the damage of what had happened. But we didn't. I think, me at least, I think I thought it would somehow repair itself magically as we attended our concert, like some sort of accidental happening. But we had to pee from the long car ride, and I needed a smoke, so we headed towards the grassy gates of the concert area, a real cool setup surrounded my murky trees, a vast rolling hill gave way to an even vaster spread of flat land heading right towards the stage, which was massive.

I was, temporarily, distracted, from the direful car situation by the allure of loud music and keeping hydrated and trying not to burn in the daylight, being so fair and all. We watched Mogwai play on the big stage, a great big rumbling barrel full of sound, and Muse was a fantastic experience, maybe without the Mercury trip they've seem to taken, but still a good cathartic thing, like drano holy water.

We finished watching Interpol's set about halfway through the field, a sea of people filling in the green with one massive biomass, deeper and deeper. The stage looked a mile, two miles away. The Cure began to perform, and my wife was suddenly disappeared, like a shot through the crowd. We trundled after her, us boys, tired and confused by Lindsey's gazelle like movements, closer and closer, closer than for comfort for me or the guys. But I didn't want to lose track of her, so she finally got comfortable in a spot and danced and screamed and was amazing to watch. And the Cure were good, too.




We saw the bassist from Interpol in the crowd, watching like a fan, and Lindsey got very excited and I took a shitty cell phone picture of them that I'm sure she has stored somewhere in a digital archive, he decked in the liederhosen and suspenders. He didn't seem annoyed, he was into it.



And then, like it always has to happen, the show ended, and the lights came up all over the island, all lights pointing towards the parking lot, to our dire fate that had yet to reveal its truly ghastly facade. It was a long walk back, I watched how everyone got into their cars and exited in an orderly drunken fashion. There was a bus that drove people back to Manhattan, back to the mainland, and policemen were directing the traffic. I found one and asked him to look at our car, and he told us what we didn't want to hear: the front axle was broken.

i think at that point the three of them got out their cell phones and began trying to make arrangements to get us and the car picked up, towed someplace closer to home, They called parents and AAA and there was a lot of being put on hold and nobody calling back. The cops wished us luck and went home or whatever. We were stuck.

Nothing was lining up with finding a towing company to dispatch someone out to come get us. Suddenly the idiocy of local politics played a factor in our psychodrama. Technically, Randall's Island is not considered a part of any of the boroughs. It was, however, in its history, home to an orphan asylum, an idiot asylum, a burial ground for the poor, and an old-school reform school. To us it was our prison, a holding cell purgatory kinda feeling, while we frantically now attempted to at least get us home, meaning to deal with the car the day after but even that put us in a dead end. Nobody wanted us, nobody wanted to help us, we were plum fucked and just about out of options. And I don't remember if it was my idea or Lindsey proposed it, but someone spoke what the other one was thinking.

We would drive the car, broken axle and all, off the Island, if not to make it all the way home, just make it far enough to inconvenience someone into rescuing us.

Evan and Ian thought our plan was insane, but it was like three in the morning and sometimes at three in the morning you think crazy thoughts when you've been stuck in a parking lot all damn night and you're sweat sticky and so tired. And it made sense to me, to drive the car out the entrance and hopefully make it far enough into a major motorway so someone would have to tow us, due to us clogging the arteries of the New York highways, and hopefully not get run over in the process. The boys got a cab company to come pick them up and take them back to Ian's house. They told us to come with them, but we resisted. We had a drive to take. They went away, the neon light fading, our Neon parked there wounded, broken, and just about good for nothing. We got in, Lindsey behind the wheel, me as passenger, and she started it up, and pulled forward right as we felt the first shudder turn into a full blown vibration, the steering wheel jumping in her hands, so hard you felt your insides slosh and she stopped, and said,
'Put on your seatbelt, this is going to be a bumpy ride…'




(Totally didn't happen. It's just she hates the one-liners from movies that would have been perfectly appropriate here. But, I wanted to get her goat.)



And it shook the shit out of us, driving 10 miles an hour crosscutting the marked out parking lot, out onto a ramp, a wide spiral that dumped us out right onto the FDR Expressway, shaking like a seizure, like hydraulics gone mad, the wheels spinning gyroscopes on a pinwheel stick, we were barely contained by our seat belts. Anything over fifteen mph felt like you were dematerializing into another dimension, some sort of quantum breakthrough as cars whizzed by, their horns blaring. We crept closer to the shoulder, awaiting the end, the final demise when the car wouldn't go any further, we died then, not us but our sense of motion. It gave a grinding death rattle, just to say goodbye, and suddenly we were very still and very aware that we didn't make it all the way off the road.

We sat very still, as if our movements would have us get rear ended or side swiped. It felt close sometimes.

Lindsey called 911, and they sent out a towtruck. They put the Neon on the flatbed and we rode in their backseat of their truck, down the turnpike and then to local roads when we hit the Parkway. We did make one stop, in a shadowy part of somewhere, they stopped and the one guy went to buy booze for the trip to NJ, which they shared in the front of the truck. The ride felt like an extension added to forever, I faded in and out until we pulled into Matawan, where they left the car in front of our apartment complex. They wrote up a bill of 550 dollars, for which I numbly wrote a check for. I didn't know if we had it in the account, but I still paid them while we walked into our apartment at six in the morning. We crashed hard, and I woke up mid-afternoon when Lindsey said Evan was stopping by on his way to get his car.

He seemed a little shocked by our decision, but he only knew us as daredevils, at the dealers with the inevitable. I zoned out while Evan sat on our couch and played with his soda bottle and smiled like he does, and I went back into my coma. Lindsey arranged to have the car repaired, and we kept it for a while, and I eventually inherited it as my car when she got another ride. I eventually killed the Neon with a lethal one-two combination. First, I was pulling out my parking lot at work, a left past the cars who couldn't go, someone waved me on and I didn't notice the car driving up the turning lane. We had a minor fender bender that totally sucked, but the car seemed repairable, So, I was scheduled for the cosmetic work to be done and one day I'm driving home down Route 1 South and I notice it doesn't do nothin' when I step on the gas pedal. I was slowly decelerating through a thick flow of traffic and I had to coast and weave until I could pull it into a parking lot , which just happened to be the parking lot of our local adult emporium. I called Lindsey and told her the bad news, and her and Stefanie and Alley came and picked me up and fed me cookies, and another tow truck came and took her away. She was gone, and I got a new car, who never shakes or fails me at crucial moments. And that is dependability money cannot buy.


And this is Evan: