Back to the Future

Today I was hitchhiking back home from a lesson with my new Romanian tutor when I was starting to really curse myself for not zipping my rain hoody on my jacket before I left. It wasn’t pouring down rain, but you wouldn’t classify it as a drizzle either. All of sudden, I hear the squeal of tires spinning on wet asphalt to my left. Like a flashback from 1985, a beat up, grayish Dalorean-looking car comes barreling around the corner, peels to a halt in front of me, and backfires. As I walked up to the car, I could hear some serious techno beats radiating from the inside, and although pensive about taking another death defying ride in this country, the rain persuaded me otherwise. I open the door, and first see a flashing, multicolored, electronic strobe light mounted on the dashboard, and then a pair of acid wash jeans. I was fully expecting to see Michael J. Fox asking me what year I wanted to travel to- “2010 please, this is too weird”. Instead I see a kid, barely 18, with black-out sunglasses, a black leather jacket lined with rabbit fur on the collar, acid wash jeans, a lit cigarette loosely hanging from his mouth, and the most glorious mullet I’ve ever seen in my life- straight business in the front, total party in the back. Classic.

I asked Marty if he was going to my village, and he replies, “yeah, lets go”. Before I even got a chance to shut the door, the tires started searching for traction on the wet ground. After barreling out the gate, we hit 80 mph (I’m guessing, my mental kph is off) when the driver switched movies, and we were then the cast of Tokyo Drift coming up to a 60-degree turn with a bus coming at us. If I were a religious man, I would have been doing some Hail Mary’s at this point, but instead I held tight and braced myself for death. Well, I’m here writing this, or at least I think I’m here writing this, so you can guess that we made it out alive. Barely. We made some serious mud ruts on the shoulder of the road coming out of the skid. I told the kid I wanted to live, and that maybe we should slow down. I’m pretty sure he even realized that was too close of a call, and he heeded my advice, some. Wanting to make chit-chat so I could get my mind off the looming possibility of death, I realized that it was raining, a little after dusk, and this dude had black-out sunglasses on. I made the mistake of asking how it was driving with the glasses- “I can’t see a damn thing, but don’t worry I know this road really well” was his response. I guess he didn’t know the road as good as he thought, because as we were approaching the margin of my village, he hit the biggest pothole in the road, the one everyone knows to avoid. You know how you always cringe when you accidently hit a pothole in your car and you always feel bad for your tires? Well imagine SLAMMING into a Moldovan sized pothole. I’m glad I wasn’t driving because I would have felt like a total jackass, as I'm sure he did, especially when we both realized that the front right tire had blown. I was pretty impressed with the string of Russian cuss words that he managed to work into one sentence at that point.

Not to let you down, but the ending is unfortunately anticlimactic. While cursing and pacing around the car, he spit on the hood, turned on his heal and marched off leaving me standing there in the rain wondering what the words for “spare tire” and “jack” were. No discussion, no goodbyes, he just took off.

Thanks for the lift man. Tell the Doc I say hello.