Nick, whom I've known since high school and is also noted in some of my colorful posts in the past, was also going on this weekend trip with his wife so I struck a gas sharing deal with him. During our drive up, Nick and I started sharing old college and drinking stories that I ended up writing down. They go like so:
First Ride in the Back of a Cop Car:
My first trip to Athens, Georgia was during a summer semester at Auburn and was to celebrate the birthday of my friend Raf. There were a number of great moments during this night of drinking. The following picture adequately describes my level of sobriety midway through the evening:
Under normal circumstances my sense of direction is exceptional. I've navigated through the streets of NYC black out drunk (not my proudest moment) but for some reason Athens has my number. I can't tell up from down and the ten blocks we need to walk might as well have been one hundred. It took very little time to make our way from the bars to the UGA football stadium where it became painfully obvious that neither of us had any idea where we were. What was worse; no one we knew was answering their phone and there were no cabs to be found. For a while, there were actually no vehicles to be found. Like beams from heaven a pair of headlights came upon us quick, so I flag the vehicle down for a chance to beg for a ride. Enter police spotlight.
It took very little time to realize what I've just done. Of all the cars I wanted to see, the police cruiser was at the bottom of that list. I expected a short chat, a field sobriety test and a trip to jail without passing GO. What I got was a rolled down window and a pleasant surprise. After an explanation of our situation, we were offered a back seat less the trip to jail.
Neither Raf nor I knew the address but had noticed two distinct landmarks down the road. We asked the officer to drop us off near the Waffle House across from the fire station. I'm pretty sure this raised suspicions about our story, but after asking a couple follow up questions he let it go. Five minutes later Raf and I were eating pancakes and trying to decide the best way to tell everyone else that a cop drove us to waffle house. Looking back, I'm amazed that I didn't wake up in a cell.
Recalled for a Reason: (this one is shorter I swear)
While I was in college I drove a 1989 Jeep Wrangler Islander Edition. A pretty sweet ride if I do say so myself. For all it's glory, it had a few faults; such as everything under the hood was crap, smoke from an oil leak would occasionally fill inside with choking amounts of smoke and the tires turned out to be those Firestones that had been recalled in 2000.
I believe it was a Friday because I had finished up classes and was driving to my parents home for the weekend. I make it out of Auburn pretty early in the day and hit I85 south towards Montgomery. I haven't gone ten miles and I start to notice a bit of a shake in my rear left tire. I'm going 70 mph so I start to slow down, thinking its the beginning of a flat. As I'm slowing down the shaking becomes much more violent. At what I estimate was 40-50 mph the tread on my tire explodes off and slaps the back of my jeep; tearing my cloth top, shooting the wheel well guard in 3 different directions and crumpling up my license plate like a paper ball.
I panic and slam on the breaks. As you can probably guess, that was an extreme err in judgment. I start sliding on the interstate, forward at first and quickly find myself sideways. I'm a dead man. In a jeep wrangler sliding sideways, the chance of rolling is somewhere in the 600% range. I have been in few terrifying vehicle situations in my life, so I'm not sure what possessed me to cut the wheel as hard as I could, but I did. A quick spin and a second later I was motionless and upright; the perfect combination. I was, however, now facing the traffic I had just been "racing" seconds earlier and they did not appreciate it. For someone who had just pulled a 180 on the interstate, I would have thought drivers would have shown a little more understanding and not laid on their horns as they passed but that was not the case.
When I was finally able to convince my hands to release their death-grip on the steering wheel, I attempted to crank the car up again to get it off the road. No luck. Two things can be said about God; He's always looking out for you, and he has an interesting sense of humor. It turned out that day that the only people around to help me push my car out of the road were in orange jump suits and had been cleaning the side of the road. After a nod from the corrections officer, they ran across traffic and gave me a push to safety. Once in the clear, I was asked for cigarettes and pot. Unfortunately, I had neither to gratefully distribute. I eventually made it home that evening on a spare and got rid of the three remaining tires, but the damage was done. More so to my psyche than to my vehicle. It's been nearly ten years since this happened and I'm still super paranoid about the condition of my tires before any trip. I suppose it's not a terrible thing.
To be continued...
I never heard that second story. Crazy! Freaking explodin' tires.
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