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***this is the first post in a series of installments detailing my trip up to hooch and sarah’s 10th wedding anniversary bash in southern illinois. not to give away the ending, but it was one of the best adventures in recent memory. and i love my friends and don’t deserve their unending generosity. but we already knew that …***

my car …

is dead.

it died at exit 208 in 55 in the middle of mississippi, about 100 miles south of memphis. lefty and i had just stopped to take a leak at a ‘parking area.’ mississippi has a lot of these ‘parking areas.’ a ‘parking area’ is similar to a rest area, except there are no services at all provided. by no services, i mean no restrooms, no vending machines, nothing. in fact, the sign on the highway says ‘no security provided,’ which seemed weird, like it was boasting, ‘if you want to go do something really fucked up to someone, this is the place to do it as the authorities will not be bothering you.’

mississippi …

i pull over and the ‘parking area’ is in disarray. the grass was at least six feet high, and the few garbage cans that where there were overflowing. if you, for some twisted reason, were looking to get raped, this would be your spot. there were only three cars in the parking lot. they were all parked a good distance from each other, and inside each car was a single, lonely looking man. here’s where it gets really weird: as i was walking the dog, i noticed that there were these trails heading off into the woods. like fifteen or twenty trails just heading off into the dense timber. walking back to the car, i see a big fat guy in flowered shorts and a camouflaged t-shirt disappear into the woods. i can only hope he was meeting a cross-country trucker back there for some loving mutual blow jobs and not heading off to bury a body …

at any rate, we didn’t hang out long.

right after i merged into traffic on the highway, i looked up and saw smoke pouring out of the top of the hood. temp gauge buried in the red. i pull over at the next exit. by the time i got to the stop sign at the top of the incline, the car died. when i tried to turn it over, it made the most tired, gaspy, sad sound i’ve ever head. i said aloud to lefty, ‘this does not look good.’

i pushed the car across the road and coasted down the on ramp and pulled over. opened the hood. no coolant in the overflow reservoir. fuck. i left the hood up and walked down the freeway a bit with lefty to see what exit we were at. exit 208. i called hooch. i called todd. i thought about calling AAA immediately, but thought i’d give the car a bit to gather itself and start back up so we could continue on down the road.

never happened.

at about 4:30, i started the ball in motion to get towed somewhere. after countless calls (on a dying cell phone) to AAA, hooch, service stations in memphis (one place told me that they regularly get cars stolen out of the inside of the shop, so i shouldn’t leave my car there overnight), todd, AAA, hooch, et cetera, i sat down with lefty in the shade of my dead car and played a little guitar. i gave lefty the last bit of water from out canteen, and i drank the last diet coke in the cooler. we had a nice view of a small cotton field and little pond. there was a relatively cool breeze. i wrote a nice chorus to a song, but the verses were too ‘i’m broken down on the highway with my dog waiting for a tow truck,’ so i scrapped them.

all in all, we was quite comfortable sitting there in the late afternoon. so comfortable, in fact, that i almost forgot i was waiting for a tow truck when the phone rang …

***stay tuned for the next installment, where we meet william, the tow truck driver from durant, mississippi and i lose lefty in a beer garden by the university of mississippi.***

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