|
In the summer of 2003, just before I returned to UT for my junior year, I was working full time at Wendy's. It was of course a terrible job, but without any real experience or a college degree, I couldn't find another job. I did have a couple of friends at Wendy's. In particular, the only other girl my age there, whom I will call M. I gave her rides home from time to time, and we developed a close friendship. In time, hanging around Wendy's and Barnes and Noble wore thin, and we decided to take a day trip to my hometown of Houston, which M had never visited. We discussed it the evening before and opted to visit a couple of my favorite hangouts, including the restaurant The Black Labrador and the Battleship Texas. M bought some paper and crayons at a WalMart to keep herself occupied in the car, and I went home to get some sleep. The following morning, I picked up M at her place. She was taking her time getting ready; she couldn't decide which pair of pants to wear. She was torn between regular blue jeans (for their durability, an important factor when exploring the Texas) and a soft pair of plaid, pajama-like pants. At (predictably) my suggestion, she opted to wear both, with the jeans on top. Satisfied and snickering, we hit the road, pausing so she could call in sick to work. We drove most of the way down 290 without incident, but then it began to rain. Heavily. I slowed to twenty miles per hour (the speed limit was seventy). Needless to say, visibility was terrible, and as a result, we got lost at the junction of 290 and 36. We stopped at a gas station in Brenham and purchased a cheap map and then proceeded to downtown Houston. We floundered around, pausing at the Best Buy in the Galleria to use the restroom, and found our way to Montrose. I located The Black Lab, and we went into the restaurant, pleased with having actually found it. I don't remember what I ordered; I think it was bangers and mashed. At my recommendation, M had the shepherd's pie. Typically, the restaurant-sized portion was too much to eat all at once, so M asked for a box to take it with her, ignoring my protests that it would spoil on the return trip to Austin. She said she would eat it in the car, even though I pointed out that she had no fork. So we put the Styrofoam box in the back seat of my car and recommenced getting lost. It was at this stage that things really began to happen. We should have guessed from the amount of trouble we'd had thus far that the remainder of the trip would not go smoothly, but we were young and foolish. I hadn't been to the Texas in many years and had never driven there, so I asked M to refer to the map we had purchased earlier and direct me. As we drove down to La Porte, the shepherd's pie in the back seat wasted no time in spoiling, basking in the summer sun. It stank abominably, and before long, we were looking for a place to throw it away. I didn't want M to throw the whole box out the window on the grounds that Styrofoam wasn't biodegradable, so she figured she'd just empty the contents out the window, and she'd throw the box itself away later. Naturally, half the shepherd's pie failed to hit the ground and stuck to the side of the car, where it remained impervious to car washes and thunderstorms alike for many months afterward, becoming increasingly discolored and disgusting-looking. I decided to overlook this snag in favor of reaching the Texas. M gave me directions, but we became horribly lost and got all tangled up with the port authority. It turned out that M had navigated us to the wrong side of the bay, and we had to ask a very confused-looking guard for directions. She told us to back up and get back onto the main highway, but we couldn't reverse because an eighteen-wheeler had just pulled in behind us and began honking angrily. M and I nearly got our asses kicked by the extremely irate truck driver whose cargo we suspected was of dubious legality. Then the guard told us that since we couldn't back up, we could just go on through the gate, and she gave us instructions on how to get back out again. So I made a neat little U-turn, but the guard never bothered to see if we actually left, which I thought was kind of funny. For all she knew, we could have been lying about being lost and actually smuggling an entire trunk full of heroin (the trunk of my car was surprisingly spacious), and we could have made a break for the shipyard and never been seen again . . . though the car may have traceable by the shepherd's pie stains on the side of it. Anyway, after that latest mishap, I lost my patience and insisted that M didn't know how to read a map and forced her to hand it over. Looking at it for myself, I gaped and wondered that we were even on the right side of town. That's what happens when you buy a cheap map. I might not have known how to get to the Texas, but I knew damn well what the Lynchburg ferry was called, and it was mislabeled. Several main streets in town were missing, and a couple of streets from my old neighborhood were also gone. There was no telling how such a map ever got published, but it was truly an exercise in satanic cartography. We decided to abandon the Texas and go home, since in all probability it would take us the rest of the day to get ourselves un-lost. Too true, it was at least another hour before we were successfully en route back to Austin. By this point, the tea from our lunch had caught up with us, and we decided we'd stop in an Exxon to go the restroom. We were about to leave the restroom when M spotted a loose thread in the knee of her jeans. She wanted to make use of my pocket knife to cut the thread, but she was afraid of accidentally cutting a hole in the pajama pants beneath. We worked out a solution. M sat on the counter in the restroom and, leaving her pajama pants on, pulled her jeans down, and I squatted on the floor in front of her and began cutting the thread on the jeans without damaging the pajama pants. It was working like a charm, but then the catastrophe occurred. The restroom door opened. A middle-aged woman walked in, unsuspecting, saw us, and froze. M and I looked up at her blankly, not knowing what to say and therefore not saying anything. We couldn't have logically explained ourselves—it would have been both unwarranted and completely unbelievable. The woman continued to stare at us in horror; God only knows what she thought she was witnessing. She probably thought it was some kind of weird lesbian sex act, never mind that we were both technically fully clothed (and straight, not that she would know that). After the awkward silence had stretched to snapping point, she shook her head, turned around, and exited without using the facilities. M and I were mortified and hastily left, triple-checking to make sure she wasn't following us or notifying the police of our supposed public indecency. We quickly got back into my car and sped back to Austin with red faces. Later, we laughed hysterically and swore that we could not tell anybody about the disastrous incident, and we certainly couldn't ever go back to that gas station again. Perhaps I should have made a note of which gas station that was. |