Whenever something irreversible and horrific happens to me, I somehow feel that I've been tricked, in fact I momentarily know that I've been tricked, and then out of helplessness this idea fades, until the next time I see a car door closing on my thumb.

I mention this feeling because I took the first turn driving Jim's recently-acquired used car on the first day of our long-dreamt-of road trip, and, only a half hour north of Ann Arbor, while I was at the wheel, that sad colorless thing strangled itself to death.

I was supposed to be following the car that had my brother and his friend in it, so the four of us could visit a girl we knew in Grand Rapids, at which point we'd split off and run through different sets of states. Jim and I wanted to go south and west, for weeks if we could.

September had washed out the afternoon light, and a traffic jam took everyone down to rolling speed before it quickly melted away. Jim's car had a hard time getting back up to the speed limit, much less keeping up with the other car.

Just as the needle made it to sixty-five, a few little puffs of white smoke seeped from under the left side of the hood. Seeing them, I instantly felt panic and guilt that something I had done was dooming our precious ticket out of Michigan-- a place where good ideas go to die-- and I felt that queasy realization feeling flicker at the base of my skull.

I pulled back off the accelerator, the speedometer drooped down to fifty, and as I tried to pull over into the slow lane behind the dirty white eighteen-wheler I had been inching alongside, more and more white wisps of vapor curled ominously from the edge of the hood. Jim unnecessarily suggested pulling over, and I steered through other cars, drifting to a wispy stop on the paved shoulder of a bridge. We were sandwiched between a metal guardrail and the tender sanities of rush-hour lemmings, we hadn't even made it to the first city we'd tried to visit, and an expressionless notion floated through my brain that this was not a good sign.

My reasonable side tried to throw sand on that thought by constructing a version of reality in which this wasn't a disaster. Jim had had the car for about a week, he'd paid for it in cash, and there was no sign that my brother or his friend had stopped. Not working very well.

We dug the sucker's manual out of the glove box and popped the hood. I didn't know anything about cars, I knew Jim didn't, and it was one of those arbitrary american eighties sedans under the hood. I started to look for where the smoke might be coming from, but it had completely stopped. I tried not to scream.

It was around that time that I noticed that the level in the coolant reservoir was somewhere near the bottom, below 'add' and way below 'full.'

'Um, Jim-- say, did you, uh, fill this thing, here, before you came to get me?'

"Uh, no, not that I remember," he said, meaning, what thing.

The guilt spread uneasily over both of us. This was little comfort. I might have to steal a tricycle with streamers on the handlebars if I wanted to leave this state, that much was clear. We hauled out a gallon of drinking water and sacricifed most of it to the coolant system. We weren't exactly sure where we were supposed to add it, so I just dumped it into the plastic reservoir and ignored the metal radiator cap entirely.

Jim went around the side and started the car again, while I stood stricken looking down at the engine. After a minute or two, the white smoke came back, but we didn't know what else we could do for it.

'I guess we need to get it to a gas station,' I said, looking wildly around in a circle, at rows of trees and narrow roads.

"You want me to drive?"

I answered in a sick wheeze. 'Yeah, that'd be better.'

Jim let the car creep across the bridge, and down the off-ramp, which was just on the other side. Fittingly, this off-ramp had a curved concrete lip forcing all emerging traffic to head east. Jim was rolling down his ramp at twenty-five miles an hour, cars inches behind the bumper, and there didn't seem like there was anywhere to make a U-turn.

Having grown up around my father, who I remember from early childhood as a pair of legs sticking out from under the car, I was aware that pushing a damaged car any further could be really bad. But my brain was close to melting down, and I wasn't able to explain this any more than Jim had been able to explain how I should drive his car on the freeway.

There were houses coming up on our right. 'Why don't you pull off and see if one of these people will let us use their phone,' I asked, stressing, panicking stressing stressing--

Frozen to the wheel, he said, "There's got to be something just up ahead--"

What was he afraid of? Imposing? Rednecks? I didn't care who we bothered, the car must have been limping along, still wisping, for more than a quarter-mile, panic, how long would we be stuck in that weird place, between towns, how much would it cost to fix the car, panic, don't tell me don't panic--

We went around two slow turns and down a slight grade. I pleaded with him. 'Look, just pull over here and I'll ask to use the phone.'

"There has to be something right around here...."

'I don't see anything.' How long have we been creeping and wisping? Half mile? Shit.

Finally, after more sections of houses, on the left, a dusty roadside store, by itself, with faded beer posters and hand-lettered signs in the windows. There was room for four or five cars on the sandy apron, and Jim pulled into the corner.

Jim got out and just stood by the car for a minute, leaning against it. He turned and walked toward the store. I had brought too much stuff with us, and it felt as if every bit of the junk I'd felt compelled to jam into the back seat was crushing me down into myself. I didn't want to look past my shoulder. Paralyzed by helpless self-disgust, I tried indifferently to destroy the drivers' side roof support with my stare, right where it met that band of blue sun-shade.

Jim and I were both leaving school, he because he was done with it, and me because they'd handed me my official exit. We were ready to veer off into the land of complete indulgence. Our supplies included a fear-and-loathingesque array of psychedelics and entheogens, plus two generously sized bags of pot. There was no point thinking in that direction, just then, though, as I didn't need any help being unsure of what was going on.

My thoughts drifted, powerful as specks of dust, through the diseased evening slantlight pouring into the car. On top of my stuff was a bag full of things we were supposed to open later, from my recently ex-girlfriend and her roommate, the coolest parting gift I could have wanted. The bag's promise of amusement seemed to be poisoning my saliva.

Jim poked his head through the driver's door window. Under his flyaway hair, his eyes looked blank, blue in a square face, as though his dog had died and some neighborhood kids were kicking it around for fun.

"Your turn," he said. He had, with some trouble, made a phone call to the first towing service listed in the phone book only to discover that it was closed for the day. The dim counter woman didn't want anyone to use the store's only phone, there was no pay phone, naturally, the owner had told her not to use the phone for personal calls, or something.

Jim and I had both worked the cash register at a liquor store, and I wanted to be pleasant, and grateful, if I could. Instead I listed to the clerk whine, and dither, and repeat herself for a full five minutes, as I explained and re-explained the situation, you know we're stuck here, gimme that phone, damn it, before accepting the quarters I slid across the counter for each call. Which, by that point, was a test of my desire to remain non- violent.

The phone book was not helpful as to which towing services were closest. The muddle-headed clerk, who had just had a pizza delivered, presumably she had ordered it telepathically, the bitch, was even less helpful. I called information, but I didn't even know what city listings I needed. I just started going through phone numbers for garages, and I got more hopeless each time the phone rang forever, or gave me a grainy recording telling me their regular hours ended at six.

Finally I called back one of the closed places that still had real people answering, and asked them for advice on who might be near us, and open. He gave me a number to call, but couldn't tell me how far away it was.

I hung up, and called the number, and the station agreed to send their tow truck out, as soon as it came back in, they said.

I won't subject you to the exact details of the wait, but I avoided eating my fingernails in their entirety, that's the important thing. The tow truck driver quickly grasped the extent of our mechanical idiocy, and mercifully didn't ask too many questions. He gave us a pitying look and rigged the car to the truck. Jim and I wedged into the passenger seat and we rumbled off down the road, back the way we'd come. I think it's safe to say we both felt another of those flickering realization moments as the truck pulled into the service station, roughly half a block west of the bridge we'd had to stop on, its unlit sign somewhere just short of the treetops.

The driver rolled the car inside the garage and tilted the spout on a gigantic red canister of something into the engine. Without even looking up at the driver's face, I knew right away that the loud spattering sound against the concrete floor was an unhappy thing in our lives.

I had about a total of seven hundred dollars for the trip, and Jim had about a thousand. So when the mechanic explained that we'd probably blown out the antifreeze plug, or something, and the repair would be about a thousand, give or take a few hundred, sensible thoughts ran away from me, leaving ugly trails behind.

We pushed the car into a spot in the station's parking lot, and locked it, worrying vaguely about the stuff still inside. A silent mechanic took pity on us and gave us a ride up the road running through the woods along the freeway to a junction of two highways, where a motel and a couple of chain stores were visible at the edge of the twilight streaks.

Stepping out of the truck, Jim proposed a twelve-pack, which sounded very useful, and so equipped, we walked across a bridge towards the motel. I finally grasped what I'd been wanting to ask since I saw those three little bits of smoke. 'Listen-- answer however you want, or say whatever you're really thinking, and I'll understand, but uh, do you think that since I was driving when it happened it's my fault?'

I looked at his face as he answered me. "No. I mean I didn't think to check the water when we left, so I don't think it mattered so much who was driving--" Ducking a painful memory of pushing my foot down to try to reach the speed limit, I guessed he was basically telling the truth. But neither of us knew what was going to happen to us, or if we would be able to do anything about it, so I was weighed down by dread and failure anyway.

The motel was obviously set up for mid-level business clients, and the odd family drifting through. There was a large arched entranceway flanked by well-lit flowerbeds, fresh white concrete. It frightened me. For some reason, I was elected to see how much a room would cost, and Jim waited outside with the beer and our bags. The lady, who was older, and so pleasant she almost didn't seem real, told me it would be over fifty bucks, and I went outside to see what he said.

I went back in, and asked the woman behind the counter if she could tell me whether there were any cheaper places nearby. She said there was a place about a mile down the road, and she let me use the phone book and phone behind the counter. The night manager at the other place said she had three rooms left and that she would hold one for me.

I turned to the lady at the counter. I wanted to be staying there, because I knew what could happen if I walked back outside. 'Thank you very much, I really appreciate it,' I told her earnestly, with a worn-down smile.

"Oh, you're welcome," she said, and then her face stopped moving.

Jim and I were walking past an endless series of corrugated metal mailboxes, watching for the magic marker numbers written on their sides to slowly crawl up to the address of the motel, trading the box of beer back and forth, a flat gray lake beside us, semi-rural lake-dwellers speeding past us in red pick-ups, and a drizzle of cold, respectably-sized raindrops starting to pepper us.

'I don't want to know if it can get worse.'

"Something would have to fall out of the sky for it to get worse." Instinctively, we both glanced up, and then laughed from inside our heads, a small, sick pair of sounds.

It might have only been a mile, but it was a very long, very cold, and very very damp mile. Sadly, at that point it still seemed worth it to have saved fifteen dollars on that mile. At least the night manager took my traveler's check right away.

I called Mary, the girl we were heading up to visit, on the phone outside the office. My brother and his friend were already there. I was pissed they failed to notice we had needed to pull over, but whatever. Mary and my brother had been friends for a long time before I knew who she was, so that part was fine, but I was still stranded. She hunted around for encouraging words, which didn't last long, and I told her I'd call her as soon as I had news.

Inside our 'rustic' ashtray-smelling cabin, we discovered that each bed had its own room, which almost made up for the sulphurous goo which dribbled from the shower-head, like god's piss, onto my waiting hair.

I slugged down a couple beers, to help me into a relaxed state of frozen terror, but I knew we were still fucked. I envied Jim, who seemed to benefit substantially from the several bottles he emptied. I flipped around the channels on the TV, but there I was really kidding myself.

'So if it's as much as he says it is, what are we going to do?'

"First of all, let's see about getting back to Ann Arbor and then worry about it."

'All right, tomorrow, wake me up and I'll call around.'

Normally a plan would have relaxed me, but each moment that night was an ice cube massage.

Since I'd had a few beers, I went to go gulp some water before I tried to sleep, but as I lifted my cupped hand from the faucet, my taste buds yowled, get that iron-blood-piss-taste away from us, now, idiot. Ordinarily I'd refuse to sleep with toothpaste residue sticking my tongue to my teeth, but I'm really not exaggerating about the water.

The sunlight was like a cheerful spike thrugh my brain as I called a few towing places in Ann Arbor, getting estimates and asking whether they operated a repair shop. One towing service that was partnered with a full garage offered to make the drive for forty-five, the cheapest I'd heard.

The driver said he could make it easily within a half-hour, and when I told him we might still be walking from the motel to the station, he offered to pick us up on the way. I figured even if we got charged extra for it, it'd still be worth it, so I said sure.

He was there in like fifteen minutes, so the traffic must have really been backed up the night before. In any case, when he got there, I thought there'd been a mistake-- the tow truck was gleaming, apple red paint and chrome. He said, "'Yeah it's brand new; ninety-five model.'" At least someone out there's doing well.

At the gas station, he got the car hooked up quickly, I heard them talking about where to take it, how much it would be, another expensive catch-twenty--

I had to take my bike off the car rack so it wouldn't get crushed. There wasn't any place to put it, so I wedged it along side of the truck. I was trying to figure out how to chain it in place, but I was interrupted.

"It'll be fine," said the driver. I knew I didn't know what I was doing, for sure. I grabbed the door numbly and climbed up into the truck.

Somehow the truck itself, a few dozen shiny dials and switches littering the dashboard, came up again. This thing had to have four times as many gauges as the truck we'd seen last night.

"Yeah, well, I got a pretty large settlement, a while back..."

'What happened? ...if you don't mind my asking...' Of course my curiosity didn't care whether he minded or not.

"I got my ankle crushed in an elevator, at the U-M hospital."

I could see where this was going. 'And the settlement was that large?'

The driver was a friendly looking blond scarecrow, maybe forty, and he looked over at me. "Yeah, they'd installed the wrong kind of elevator. You know, a freight elevator has a different kind of door than a passenger one..."

I nudged him onward, 'Uh-huh--'

"And it takes just a little bit of pressure to stop a passenger elevator door, but a freight elevator door isn't set up that way...." He winced, and then he laughed, as though feeling a pain, and then forgetting it. "So I was off my feet, couldn't work, and I got lucky-- it turned out I hired a good lawyer-- you know who Geoffrey Fieger is?"

I knew exactly who he was. 'Jack Kevorkian's lawyer,' I laughed sharply, wryly, puzzling, strange planet we landed on this time-- Mary's parents were friends with Geoffrey Fieger when she was little, in Royal Oak. So many iconoclasts bloom there, like flowers in cement, a clown nose for the hangman. 'He won the first million-dollar settlement in Michigan.... and I think he represents Dr. Jack for free....' Where did it all balance out? 'So how long ago was this?'

"Several years."

I was too far along for fake etiquette. 'And I would imagine the settlement was... substantial.'

"Oh yeah, it was six figures," he chuckled good-naturedly.

He was a good, almost careless, driver. I remember the truck shooting under a freeway overpass into the sunlight, through a curve, as he talked to me. He didn't look at the road very often, the truck steering itself.

"I got a house down in Florida, I got a jet-ski for each of my boys--" there was no urgency to what he said, shrugging, "--new truck."

He chuckled again to himself, soft and surprised. Jim and I looked at each other. Where do we put our quarter in, goddammit? Lawsuit, society, stranger than para dice--

'So how come you're still driving?'

He said, casual, "I enjoy it. Got my own truck... it gives me something to do." Professor Mark Twain, won't you explain, he's hurting my brain--

'And your ankle?' I waved at his feet working the pedals.

He pulled his heel off the floor a little bit and flexed his toe up and down an inch or two. "Ah, it's all fucked up still," he said gently, smiling, changing lanes, smiling again, jamming his welded foot onto the clutch.

The truck hummed along the newly paved freeway, smooth as a puddle. The the wind caught my bike just wrong, though, and my heart stopped, brilliant lizard green, hanging off the truck by its tires, sideways, levered against the shiny tow mount.

'Hey!' I said, but the truck was already pulling over. I streaked out, leaving the door swinging. I was too grateful, lucky, drained, unlucky, to complain, argue, think, anything but lock the bike to the tow mount.

"It's okay?" he asked, hesitant. I was the one who wedged it, so there really wasn't anything too harsh I could say.

'Yeah, I guess I should have chained it.' To think, too tired.

The rest of the minutes in the truck were quiet, the near-death of my beloved green bike swallowed by the driver's innocent, happily absurd surreality, my jealousy streaked by virulent awe at the endless insanity I had been chosen to glimpse, his luck juxtaposed to mine like the unflinching thud of a cosmic hammer down on a phallus, an oversized thumb.

The driver towed us to a big garage at the edge of an immense shopping mall parking lot, right at the exit off US-23. Jim went inside the building to pay the driver, and I tilted my face up at the columns of stretched-out clouds, so sky blue chill, unfairly far away.

Jim walked back outside, and the sun bleached the asphalt between us.

"He only charged us forty," he told me.

Stunned, you just can't hold it against some people.

'Hey, that's cool,' I said, faint as ever.