While digging up some links to add to TTAC post for tomorrow, I came upon one of my favorite capsule reviews about one of my favorite personal cars. Yes, it’s a Plymouth Colt, apologies to Walt Whitman…
The Colt Capsule Review introduced a character, Greg, that many people thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. In this case, truth was stranger than fiction and had I written about some of Greg’s wilder eccentricities I certainly would have had readers calling the proverbial BS.
But I’ll share one of those stories here for you, the elite readers of my personal website. (Really, there should be some branded merch or something to distinguish you from the people who aren’t hip to these hallowed pages.) One day, Greg was driving his Eclipse to work through the streets of Victorian Village when he saw a Black girl in her late twenties waving at him and yelling “Stop!” Because Greg has Asperger’s Syndrome and lives in a world that is only faintly connected to reality, he thought it would be a good idea to stop.
“I need a ride,” she barked at him through his open window.
“Okay,” he said, and let her get in the car. “Where would you like to go?” She named an address that wasn’t that all far away from the hospital where Greg and I worked. As they were driving, she said to him,
“You really bailed me out. I was going to be late and that was going to be trouble.”
“What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m a escort.”
Blank stare from Greg.
“That means prostitute,” she clarified.
“Okay,” he said. As they trundled closer to the destination, she said to him,
“I really owe you for this ride. You really helped me out. Let me do something for you.”
“Okay?” he said, not without trepidation. For one brief and scary moment, he thought she might offer to suck his cock in exchange for the ride. Then he realized she meant that she’d toss him five bucks or something. Greg always needed money. Not in the sense that he was poor; he had tens of thousands of dollars in his checking account and uncashed paychecks in his drawer. But he often forgot to go to the ATM and as a consequence he often went hungry. So five dollars would be nice.
“Let me,” she said, “suck your cock in exchange for the ride. Don’t worry,” she chirped, seeing the look on Greg’s face, “I’m really good at it. Oh! We’re here. Just pull around the corner and we’ll take care of this.”
“I’d like,” Greg said, after a few frozen moments of consideration, “to go home now.”
“Suit yourself! You’re a great guy! See you next time!” And just like that, she was out of the car. When he finally got to work, he told me the story and I just about fell out of my chair.
“What,” I laughed, “you’re too shy to get a blowjob?”
“It wouldn’t have been safe,” he said, facing his monitor and tapping away at a Unix shell session.
“Not safe? You dope, she would have had a condom with her.”
“Oh,” Greg said, tapping away and mumbling his words, “no, I can’t, most of them hurt, they don’t fit, when I was seeing [REDACTED] she had to go buy special ones, the Magnums, I was scared she wouldn’t have the special one and it would hurt.”
“Oh, in that case,” I snapped, turning back to my own Unix shell session with a decisive swish of the chair, “feel free to die in a fire.”
LMAoff!
Brings back the memory of a similar event.
Some years a go, I was on my way home from a night of dancing my ass off at the Red Sea in downtown PDX, when a comely and shapely Black woman stepped out into the street and signaled for me to stop.
Since it was raining the usual proverbial cats and dogs, I was reluctant to have the leather interior my immaculate SVO violated by a dripping wet person, even a beauty with legs all the way to heaven. But, taking pity on the drenched creature, I stopped.
I asked where she needed to go and she said down the ave. Finally, she said stop here, and then asked if I needed anything. I related that I had just come from the Red Sea and needed to get home and get out these smoky clothes and get a shower to get the smoke out off me and out of my hair. She asked “maybe something else?” and it hit me… duh!
I said thanks, but no, and asked her if she wanted to be dropped somewhere else, she said no this would be fine and then said “your a nice guy”, I let that pass. As she was about to get out, she turned to me and pointed to the corner of the dash and said “you better get that out of sight.
I had taken a buddy with me to the Sea and he had left a fat baggy in the right hand corner of the dash. I hadn’t noticed it. I said “take it with you” (Thinking that would teach my friend a lesson), she thanked me and stepped out into the drenchingly wet night.
I watched her in my rear view mirror as she and she and I moved into the night, thinking of the different worlds we all live in. Mine safe and secure, except on the track or bombing the Fremont bridge in the middle of a city at 120+mph, in the rain and the dark, as I had just done with a baggy on my dash, prior to meeting the ephemeral beauty. And hers of unimaginable danger and hardship.
As a friend of mine says about the risky or dirty jobs… “Somebody has to do it”. Maybe… And so it goes…..
Now… what is with this? “feel free to die in a fire.”
That was great! I love stuff that makes me laugh when I read it. Also, as a guy who learned last spring - at age 52 - that he’s an Aspie - it gives me one more reason to appreciate Greg. Tre: Your story was a good one, as well. Ain’t it great when life hands you things that you can turn into paragraphs, later on?