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Boring hitchhiking story made fabulous
GOZF asked for my story. It's really quite boring but if you think about it, my mother and I could have been sold into sexual slavery because of it...but not really because Vermonters are pretty tame. So, here is my boring story turned fabulous.
I was 6 and vacationing in VT with my family. The family decided to go on a mountain biking trip (which for this Jewish family meant biking paved roads in a hilly area) and my pretentious self insisted that I could make the trip. Of course, I had no idea what I was talking about--I was a 6 yr old child wearing florescent pink rose-printed biking shorts and a side pony tail. Why my parents listened to me I have no idea.
About 15 minutes into the trip, my brother and father took off on a downhill that I was no doubt hitting my brakes on and screaming the whole way. Being the selfless worry worts that they are, we didn't see them for the duration of the trip (mind you this was in the time before cell phones). Of course on the next uphill I was crying like a baby, exhausted and no doubt suffering from a major wedgie and begged my mother to leave me on the side of the road to be eaten by a bear.
No stranger to being a drama queen herself, my mother threw her hands up in defeat, cursed the living daylights out of non-existent father and brother and taught me a lesson that has served me oh-so-well in life, she freaked out. After resigning ourselves to a slow and painful death of starvation or mauling by wildlife, my mother finally got a surge of adrenaline and decided that we weren't going to die on the side of a country road. (If anything, we'd rather die rotting in jail after killing my dad and brother for ditching us)
So my mother and her then-fire engine red hair and matching nails and me and my biker shorts and side pony tail stood on the side of some bumpkin road hands-on-jutted-out-hips with our road side thumbs out. Finally some rural trash truck driver took pity upon us, threw our rented bikes into his flat bed of black trash bags (possibly filled with the bodied of less fortunate hitch hikers), and drove us back to town with his slobbery dog in the front seat. My mother proceeded to freak out the entire time while my blissfully ignorant self played with the pup. Had I not managed to become thoroughly soaked by slobber and matted in dog hair, and had our driver been a complete whack-job, we totally would have been killed or sold into slavery.
Ok, GOZF, your turn!
Re: Boring hitchhiking story made fabulous
Ooo, I have a hitchhiking story, too! Yours is better, though.
So, I can't bring a cell phone into part of our office, so there's a little basket outside the door to leave them in. I had forgotten mine at work in that basket when I left one evening, but thought no biggie, since I don't get too many calls anyways. I figured I would just pick it up the next morning.
The next morning, I was driving to work. My gas gauge read 1/8 tank left. It lied. My car died, but I was thankfully able to coast into a turning lane and out of the way of traffic. No problem, I have AAA. I'll just call them. Cue freakout when I remember that I left my cell phone at work.
So, I start walking along the road, which is pretty busy but has houses on it. There are no sidewalks and no curb, so I'm traipsing through the weeds in a skirt suit and heels. I knock on the doors of the first half-dozen houses that I get to, figuring I'll just ask to use their phone, then go back to my car while I wait for AAA. No one answers. Cue more freaking out. I realize that I have a friend who only works part-time who lives about a mile up the road from where I am, so at that point, I say screw it, I'll just walk to her house. So, I keep walking.
Thankfully, someone driving along the road pulled over and offered me a ride. He was a blue collar-looking guy in a nondescript car, and while getting into a car with him by myself probably was not the greatest idea in the world, it was infinitely more appealing than walking a mile in heels through knee-high weeds. He said that he had had to walk that road after a nasty snowstorm we had a couple years ago, and no one had offered him a ride, and it just wouldn't sit right with him not to offer me a ride. This is why I love the South, by the way. Chivalry is NOT dead!
Anyways, he dropped me off at my friend's house, and she thankfully had not left for work yet. I used her phone to call AAA, and then she drove me to work so I could dash in and get my phone, then drove me back to my car, where I waited until AAA brought me a few gallons of gas. Apparently half the office had driven by my car abandoned on the side of the road (I have a distinctive car and a vanity plate) and were worried about me. I explained what had happened, and the guys in the office haven't let me live it down since! They always make jokes about running out of gas or knowing how to read gauges!
Ha! Ok, that's really funny.
All right.
I was 19, a sophomore in college, and a total nightmare of a party girl. I was drinking at a friend's off-campus apartment, because it was Tuesday, and why the heck not? I was really good friends with one of the guys at this get-together, and we got to talking, and ended up staying up later than everyone else. We're on the couch, about 3 feet apart, and I pass out. With my drink balanced on my knee.
Enter his girlfriend, through the sliding glass door. She's been looking for him since midnight. It's about 6 a.m. She sees us, passed out on the couch. Upright. Not touching. And then, quite logically, decides that we are fake-sleeping, and that we must have just finished having sex. So, she does what any rational person would do. She picks me up by my hair, drags me outside, slams me onto my knees on the patio, and proceeds to start kicking me, and telling me what a slut I am.
I am wasted, remember. Wasted. So, I'm like a ragdoll, but a ragdoll stuffed with jelly, and I'm not actually feeling any of this. And the absurdity of this entire situation isn't lost on me. So I'm giggling like a fiend. This makes her more angry, so she calls her friend, who manages to talk her into leaving me alone and looking for her boyfriend (who had locked himself in the bathroom, by the way, because he was scared of her). Before she went into the house, she told me not to move, because she wasn't done with me. And that if I tried to run away, she'd run me over in her Ford Explorer.
Well. As soon as she went back inside, you can bet I bolted. But I was really drunk, and really tired, and I had to keep looking over my shoulder for her awesome SUV. So when I saw a white van, I decided to maybe see if the person in it felt like being a good samaritan.
So. I thumb the van down. Soccer mom in plaid dress and 15 year old with acne are peering at me anxiously. I calmly explain that some girl is trying to kill me, and that I need a ride back to campus. It's a good thing she stopped, because I was actually going the wrong way. She said, "sure," and I hopped into the back, becoming immediately aware that I am in last night's party clothes and that I smell like a brewery. Mom tells me that we have to drop her kid off at trombone lessons first. He is clearly horrified by me, and is not interested in the fact that I used to play piano, and flute, and french horn. Or that I used to sing. He does not care. He hates my drunk guts, not matter how much I try to band-geek it out with him.
So, we ditch the kid, and we're heading back to campus, at which point, I realize I don't want this woman to know exactly where I live, so I'm vague about which dorm is mine. Then she starts talking about how the good lord Jesus put her in my path, and that she is my guardian angel, and that she is here to save me from myself and my slutty, sinning ways, and can she please pray with me.
Well. I wanted to say no. But she gave me a ride. So I spent the next 10 minutes staring at her closed eyes and she talked about how even drunks and harlots need salvation, and Jesus knows that yes he does, and that she is an angel and an agent of good, and I can be saved, YES, I CAN BE SAVED. When she finally stopped all of that, I thanked her again and hopped out. I kind of wanted to tell her that I'm Episcopalian, and we're ok with a certain level of drunkenness and harlotry, and that her version of Jesus was a lot scarier than mine, but I thought it best to keep mum.
I never hitchhiked again. And that girl who kicked me a lot told everyone that she beat me to a pulp, so everyone was really confused when I didn't have a scratch on me. And then we all laughed, because that's what you do when you're 19 and stupid.
The end.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I totally tried to win that kid over. He was not having it, which made me try harder. I am obnoxiously charming when drunk, and I simply cannot understand why one might not love me.
In reality, I was probably the third tragic case his mom had picked up and prayed for that week. I'm sure it all made him weary.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
While all three stories were amusing, GOZ wins! Hands down!!!
They see us rollin'...they be hatin'.
I think the funniest part about the whole story is the mom asking to pray with you for ten minutes and picturing you sitting there, reaking like booze and still drunk, probably trying your best not to bust out in a fit of laughter. And we all know how hard it is to actually suppress laughter like that. Great story!
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.