Chasing Cars

In the Winter of 2004, I was just finishing up my first semester of college. I had made a few close friends that semester. This story is about them; the story called "A Banana, A Piece of Cinnamon Toast, and Two Whores in the Backseat."

It was a cold, wet, frozen night in early December. The Fall semester had just finished and I was celebrating with my friends Shelly, Adam Jones, and Tammi. We were going to watch another friend of ours, Anson, play a gig in Iowa City. But first, I had band practice back home.

I have to go back a few years to explain. When I was a Senior in high school, I started taking guitar lessons. There were three of us actually learning guitar, and one person to play bass and one to play drums. Eventually, our teacher decided to just have me sing, because I was already fairly proficient in guitar (at least to the degree that he could teach me, as he was a bassist not a guitarist) having been playing for a year. One of the other students stopped showing up all together, so we were left with a singer, a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer. We were officially a band. This lasted two years until it became too much of a hassle to drive home from school every weekend to do this.

Since I was driving to Iowa City later on anyway, my friends decided they would just go watch me sing and then we'd make our trip. So before we left Cedar Rapids, we stopped at the Super Wal-Mart for provisions, because when I think snack food, I think Wal-Mart. Shelly bought these shitty pastries that were covered in cinnamon. That was it, no filling, nothing. Basically, it was just cinnamon toast that tasted like crap. I bought bananas to eat, because I do love me some bananas. We finished the bunch before we were even half way there.

After stocking up on snack food, or "num nums" as Shelly called them, we left for Victor. The trip down was nothing spectacular, except that it started to snow a little bit. I'm from a small town, so driving in snow is not a big deal for me. We got to the school where we held our band practices and they were already set up and ready to go. We ran through our normal set and tried a few new songs. Of the songs worth mentioning, I sang "Drive" by Incubus, which Shelly loved (and I despised) and "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who, which made Shelly and Tammi start crying. They had never heard me sing before, so it was nice to know that my voice could move people to tears.

After our practice, we stopped at my dad's house for a few minutes to pick up a few things, such as CDs, money, and a special item that will be detailed in a later story. By the time we left, it was dark. Shelly informed me that she needed to go to Norway to get a few things, so I headed toward Belle Plaine, as there was a road to the East that was almost a straight shot to Norway.

On the way out of Belle Plaine, I had the radio blaring, and both girls prattling in the backseat. Suddenly, the car started drifting to the other side of the road. I started tapping the breaks, but it wasn't working; We were still drifting. I began turning my wheel to the right, and it still wasn't working. I had come to the conclusion we were going into the ditch. There were two ways of going in: The way we were going, which was sideways, or I could turn into and go down front first, keeping us from getting hurt and keeping my car upright. I turned the radio down.

"Hold on. We're going in the ditch."
"What?" from the backseat.

We drove down into the ditch and stopped in a drift. There was no way we were driving out. The car had turned off upon impact, so I had to turn it back on to keep us warm. My phone got no reception in that area, so it was all but useless. I had to borrow Adam's phone to make phone calls. I tried my dad, first, but he wasn't home and didn't have a cell phone. I tried a few other people, none of whom answered the phone. Finally, I called Kent, who answered. I told him my plight and he called his dad for us. During these phone calls, my friends decided to try flag people down as they drove by using the special item we had taken from my house. It was black, though, so it couldn't be seen clearly in the dark.

While we waited, we decided to throw away the cinnamon toast things. I had to urinate, so I just took them out with me. I threw them on the ground. Now, be warned, ye of faint heart, what I did next I'm not particularly proud of. Okay, I'm a little proud, just understand that it was very immature and I'm aware of it. I started to pee and did what most people do when they're in snow: I wrote my name. Obviously, my name is short, so it didn't take long and I had more urine. I thought it would be funny to pee on the cinnamon things. I got back in the car and announced what I had just done.

"I peed on those things we didn't like."
"You peed on the num nums?"
"Yes."

This got a big laugh from everyone. Shortly thereafter, Kent's dad came and picked us up and took us back to my dad's house. My dad still wasn't home. So we watched a movie that we had brought with us (or rather, I brought with us): "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle." A movie about people who are trying to get somewhere and keep running into obstacles. Sound familiar? About half way through the movie, my dad came home. There was no hello, only questions:

"What are you doing here?"
"Watching a movie."
"Where's your car?"
"Outside Belle Plaine... In the ditch..."

Dad flipped out. I explained what happened, so he decided to go out there. After he, in his truck, slid around on the same road a little bit, we finally got to where my car was. He parked on the side of the road and almost slipped and fell crossing it. He decided there was no way to get the car out that night. He also said he wasn't driving any farther than Belle Plaine that night, so we were all stuck there.

Adam is epileptic and he only had his night pills. So we had to call the pharmacist and make sure that we could go get some medicine for him in the morning so he wouldn't have a seizure. We figured out sleeping arrangements and went to bad shortly after. This was about midnight, so it wasn't that early. Tammi and Shelly slept out in the living room on our pull-out bed, Adam slept in the guest bedroom, and I slept in my own room. The next morning, my dad and I went to get Adam's medicine and on the way home he said what was possibly the most insensitive, yet funniest things I've ever heard someone say:

"So is this medicine for AIDS or something?"

I laughed so hard on the way home that I had tears streaming down my face. This made him laugh, so after I got my laugh out of the way, I explained about his epilepsy. Now, this may not seem as funny to most of you who are unfamiliar with my friend Adam, so let me explain: Adam is gay. Not super flamboyant, but still gay. I later told him about that, and he laughed so hard he almost started crying. My dad also told me that Shelly and Tammi were doing something weird out in the living room the night before, because he was hearing noises from the living room that were making him nervous. He seriously thought one of them was going to come and rape him. This made me laugh even harder; I almost threw up. Seriously.

After dropping off the medicine, my uncle came out and took my friends back to Cedar Rapids while my dad and I pulled my car out of the ditch, a process that took all of about 20 minutes. While he pulled it out, I surveyed the area around it and a dawning realization came over me: The "num nums" were gone! When I told my friends about this, a new phrase was born. "Joel peed on the num nums, and now they're gone." That joke is dependent on someone assuming that my piss makes food disappear. I never found it that funny, but everyone else involved did, thus I had to mention it.

So in effect, this story had a banana, a piece of cinnamon toast (or whatever those stupid things were), and two whores (Tammi and Shelly) in my backseat. Not a fantastic story, I'll admit, but one that is still remembered as the day the four of us became best friends. Especially when considering that these three people will come to play in many of the stories to come.