Hitchhiker(s): Pt 2

I probably worked at KXII for about eight months before moving out of my parents’ house.  I think it was around November 2004.  Right around the time a Republican candidate for president got a rare popular vote victory.  This would have been before that though.  Sometime in the preceding summer.

I drove a 1996 Pontiac Grand Prix.  I loved the way it looked, and it’s probably the only car I ever owned that could top 100 MPH, but it was kind of shabby and had a lot of miles on it.  I was on my way home from work one night, so it would have been around 11PM.  There was a lot of rural area between Sherman and Bonham, so there’s not much traffic and it was dark on State Highway 82.

Anyway, I was driving east toward home and noticed my temperature gauge shot all the way to the right.  Overheated like crazy.  I pulled over and waited ten minutes and fired up the car and started off again.  And again, the car was hot.  I knew what this was.  My last car, a LeBaron from the Reagan administration blew a head gasket.  I said to myself, “Crap!” only it may have been a different four-letter word.  It would be like two years before I’d get a cell phone.  I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, but I knew it had to be within like ten miles of home.  I got out and started walking.  Alone.  On a dark Texas highway.  Cool wind in my hair.  Warm smell of colitas rising up in the air. Just kidding.  I hate the Eagles by the way, especially Hotel California. 

Anyway, before I got distracted (again)…people ask me all the time, “What’s the weather gonna be like today/tomorrow/tonight?”  I almost never know. Usually they reply, “Don’t you work in news?”  Yes.  Yes, I do.  But I don’t have time to pay attention to that.  I don’t know what the high temperature is going to be.  I don’t know who won the big football game.  I know about the big proposition on the next ballot.  I know about yesterday’s bank robbery.  I do not know the relative humidity in Ector Texas! Shout out to Ector Texas. And that night I didn’t know there was like a 90% chance of heavy rain at 11PM in Bells, Texas.  That would have been useful information.  As it were, it rained, and that was news to me.

I was a mile or so away from my car and the floodgates opened.  Damn.  It wasn’t a sprinkle.  It was a midsummer midnight Texas deluge. 

I’m not in shape. Never have been.  But it was raining hard.  Like from Forest Gump.

And it was cold rain.  I was on a highway in the middle of nowhere.  My car a mile or so to the west.  A convenience store (Kwik Chek) an unknown distance to the east.  No houses.  Just pastures bordered by barbed wire (pronounced BOB WIRE in Texas).  Panicked, I chose to run toward home, toward the Kwik Chek store across the street from my old High School.  Near the Burger King I worked at several years before. 

I don’t know how far I made it.  A mile?  Two?  I was gassed and slowed to a walk.  I wore glasses and had to take them off.  My vision is terrible, I was effectively blind.  But wearing the glasses was useless. If they weren’t fogged, they were covered in rain drops. I was cold. I was wet.  I walked on in the dark, barely able to see five feet in front of me.  I would have heard the squishing of my soaked shoes if it weren’t for the loud rush of rain pounding the pavement.  This sucked.

Then a gilded chariot of hope arrived.  A car approaching from behind slowed and drove along side me.  The passenger window rolled down and an angel from heaven asked if I wanted a ride. “Yes!” The answer was “Yes!”

I squeezed into the back seat.  It was a coupe already filled with four young men.  They asked where I was heading and I directed them to Kwik Chek. I told them I broke down a little ways back.

“We figured that was your car, a Pontiac?”

“Yes, it overheated.”

They were nice and told me not to worry when I apologized for soaking their seats.  We were only about a five-minute car ride away when they dropped me off.  Five minutes in a car is so far on foot.  Guess we were about five miles away from my destination?  I thanked them.  I had only hitchhiked once before and would almost never do something like that on my own, but I was desperate.

I had change in my pocket and called my dad at the payphone (in 2004 those were still a thing).  He picked me up right away and took me home.  I just wanted to dry off and put on warm clothes.  Man that sucked.  We took the car to a mechanic and sure enough the head gasket blew.  $1,500 down the drain.  The worst part of the whole thing?  For like a week I had to drive my parents’ mid-90’s Chevy Van.  It did have a sick cassette deck though.  No, I never played the Eagles.  Probably plenty of Creedence though.