"Creepshow 2" in which we got to see sexy teens get eaten by a lake blob, and then a fun racist little story in which a white lady was repeatedly attacked by a black zombie hitchhiker. We sat there the entire time until the next film came on, "The Fury," which was just confusing and had Kirk Douglass in it, dressing up like an old man while psychic girls made each others’ noses bleed. It didn’t make much sense, and I had a newfound hatred for Kirk Douglass after watching "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" a few weeks ago, so I didn’t object when the movie was changed.
After a resurgence of the Judd Apatow feud, Jay threw in "The 40 Year Old Virgin" to prove a point, or to expand our Apatow palette, I don’t know. Gordon still wasn’t up. He’d somehow poured himself a glass of water and a giant bowl of cereal and then laid back down holding both of them and passed out again, punctuating the clean air every so often with the most poisonous farts you’ve ever experienced in your life. At one point, Jay simply asked “Who shit the bed?” to which we all replied, "Not me," except for Gordon who was passed out still.
I forgot to write in the last post (which was gargantuan enough as it is) about our power converter. We had an adaptor that we could plug into the car’s cigarette lighter, which we could attach ordinary plugs to and thus charge our computers/cell phones etc. This we repeatedly overloaded via a power strip, and it finally got pissed off and just burned out. Both the adaptor and the cigarette lighter itself stopped working. We were praying that it was just a fuse and not a giant malfunction that would require new car parts or anything. We had planned to do something about it that day, but AMC’s horrorfest had made sure we were as unproductive as possible.
I think Jay saw how utterly useless we were being, and along with other errands he needed to do, went off and found us an auto parts place willing to look at our problem, which saved our lives. He gave me a call and said they didn’t have time to do much because they were so booked, but they’d look at it and at least find out what the problem was. I got the feeling I should hurry up, and I also felt like a complete asshole because we were pissing around watching Kirk Douglass movies while our friend who’d done nothing but help us was out doing our dirty work for us.
I went as fast as I could to get into the car, and Bryan and Darren said that Gordon should accompany me, because it’s his car. So they roused him with much difficulty, while I started the car. It was apparent now that he was hung over, though I don’t know what from, as we hadn’t had much to drink the night before. He zombie-walked to the car where I was basically pounding the steering wheel in my desire to leave immediately. He finally sat down and put his seatbelt on and I took off around the corner to follow the vague directions to the auto parts place. As we drove down the street, Gordon bobbed around a little bit, exhibiting about as much personality as a puddle of drain water, and then suddenly became rigid, stared straight at the floor and said monotonously, “I don’t think I should come. I think I’m sick.” I had a brief, vivid image of us scrubbing vomit out of the inside of our mobile house, and without a word, took the most utterly maniacal U-Turn in the middle of the street and gunned it back to Jay’s house. When we arrived there 30 seconds later, I screeched to a halt in front of the house, and Gordon farted again in the car, then left. I chose freezing to death over noxious fart-breathing-to-death, and opened every single window in the car in an effort to remain alive, and then took off again for the auto parts shop. I didn’t know Gordon had gone inside and told Darren to take his place. Darren came upstairs and outside to a bafflingly empty front yard.
Meanwhile, I was driving like Cruella De Vil to the auto parts shop, except there was no English van driver yelling “Crazy woman driver!” at me as I tore around a snowy mountainside in a psychotic effort to acquire a dalmatian fur coat. Did anyone ever wonder why she went so absolutely insane over one coat? I mean, I got a couple coats, y’know, they’re all right, I wouldn’t kill 99 puppies for one though. What am I writing about? Oh right, the auto parts, right, so I tore off down the wrong road for a few minutes, and then came back and found where I was going and met Jay outside. A really prototypical looking young mechanic in a blue jumpsuit with a ratty baseball cap and long sideburns messed with the fuse-box for a pretty long time while we waited by the side of the car, like worried fathers waiting for a baby to be delivered. I passed the time by showing Jay the license plate of the car and teaching him how to pronounce “Massachusetts” which he’d been having trouble saying for the past day. His way came out something like "Massa-two-shits”.
Finally Jay asked the mechanic what the damage was, and the guy said casually that it was just a fuse and that he had changed it already about ten minutes ago, and was now just trying to get the box closed. We were stunned. He’d spent the entire time trying to get the box closed. I thought the car was gonna need $100,000 quadruple by-pass surgery from the time it was taking him to fix it. We told him we’d sort it out ourselves, and the guy said he wasn’t gonna charge us anything, which was incredible. Jay said he’d meet me back at the house, and we split off again.
Back at the house...
"The 40-year-old Virgin" was still on, and everyone was still sitting around. Gordon had apparently ralphed in the bathroom and was now once again comatose on the floor. Bryan and Darren tried to get things going, and we finally shut off the TV. I cleaned up the kitchen while the others tried to figure out where we were spending that night. That was pretty much the goal of each day on the trip. Jay eventually returned and hung out for a while before he had to go to work for a few hours. We finally left the house and drove around town stocking up on winter clothing as we prepared to go north, and food for the trip and so on. We picked up a 6-pack of Sam Adams Boston Lager to give to Jay to appropriately thank him with some Massa-two-shits gratitude. (Except for me, who continues to exhibit indomitable New York pride among these despicable Bostonians.)
We got everything we needed and returned to the house to ready for departure. Bryan couldn't remember which house was Jay's, so we ended up parking two houses down the road, where we unloaded everything on someone else's lawn and repacked the car. Bryan and Darren walked all the way around the house looking for the side door, before realizing it was the wrong one. After we had finally cleared out most of our stuff, Jay returned from work for a few minutes, insisted on a photo, to which we obliged, then we said our thank you’s and goodbyes, cleaned up the rest of our stuff, and squeezed into the car.
We set our sights on a northern town called Grande Prairie, and a campsite just outside it, and we were once again on the road, the moon smiling down on us, and Jay’s luxurious acre shining out from it.
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