Who's Gonna Drive You Home, Tonight

Picture yourself on the side of a congested highway, vehicles speeding inches from your foothold. Asphalt kicks up in clumps as cocaine-addled truckers stress-test the road with their endless convoy. Stretching for miles, a turbid haze in various shades of sepia muddles the urban vista. Adding insult to injury, your tire’s blown a flat yet the trunk carries no spare. And you – stubborn Luddite born of cost savings and technological rejection – lack a mobile device; placing yourself at the mercy of nearby exit ramps, derelict gas station pay phones, and hypodermic needles jabbing forth from their change return slots. In a harrowing commute turned hellacious journey, you, my friend, stand on the shoulder of a bustling artery amidst the choking exhaust of metropolitan rush hour. And your head is throbbing. And your legs are tired. And nobody is helping because nobody cares.

Without warning, the cocktail of chest pain, shortness of breath, and acute anxiety chokehold your sanity. You wheeze frantically while heaving your neck forward to catch air. Bodily functions yield rapidly as the hurt radiates from one symptom to another. Vision blurs, balance fades, mouth dries, stomach churns. Lumbering unsteadily, feelings of claustrophobia and panic percolate through the amplified clamor of traffic horns. In mere seconds, legs will finally fail, one first then the other, knee caps cracking awkwardly as head meets pavement in a surrendering final slam. While some may notice, none will stop. Instant heart attack.

Through the rippling heat, two men appear, sweaty and alarmed. While your senses have numbed, the ensuing heroism-cum-buffoonery wakens you to the sensation of being clumsily dragged. Somehow, this inelegant mode of transport sends your mind into horrifying flashbacks of 'Deliverance,' sans banjos. Clothing is shredded to ribbons as it coarsely scrapes blacktop. After what feels like a mile but is likely a few yards, you are dropped, quite brutally, in a grassy patch within earshot of the highway but hundreds of miles from comfort. In this unassuming field you will experience fear unlike any conceivable nightmare. One of the men positions his car nearby – spinning the tires and splattering mud and earth – while the other holds you hard; arm across neck, knee into groin, gnashing his teeth and spitting vulgarly. You flail. Fade to black. You gasp. Back to black. You quietly consent to fate, wishing only not to die. Darkness smothers.

Time has passed, though whether minutes, hours, or years remain unclear. Oddly enough, your pants appear zipped and buttoned, a nice consolation among an otherwise gruesome kidnapping. And yet, something is terribly wrong. Jumper cables have been fastened to each nipple, positive and negative, in some perverse abortion of outdoor sadomasochism. Your heart pounds brutally, throbbing against rib and bone as your mouth hangs agape, drooling and coughing to catch air. Suddenly, a car engine roars, sending a violent electro-current coursing through your body, knocking your torso forward as if hit with a defibrillator blast. Upon falling backwards with a heavy thud the engine roars anew, throwing you head over heals in agonizing pain. Again and again and again your body is heaved and throttled until your eyes have bulged dry from their sockets and your nipples run bloodied and raw. You scream about hospitals, but your voice is shredded by the deafening growls of engines angry and fuming. You are alive. Stripped of your dignity. Bruised. Used. Humiliated. But you are alive.

* * * * *

“And that’s basically how it happened,” our substitute science teacher concluded, his cherubic face assuming its dead-on likeness of the obese yet jovial John Candy. This fool – holding down the fort while our regular instructor enjoyed maternity leave – had just relayed a perfectly asinine monologue on saving a man’s life with his automobile. Steeped in imbecilic hubris, and more suited for a chapter in ‘S&M: Breaking The Usual Routine,’ our lecture on the circulatory system had descended into a “citizen of the year” brag-fest over some poor bastard who allegedly had his heart revved and his colon blown via junk science. Thanks to the miracle of jumper cables, six-cylinder engines, and a pair of trusty, conductive nipples, a man allegedly walks the streets like Christ, risen from the dead after a tangle with the devil on Interstate 95. Impressive, no? After all, my physics teacher never regaled us with sundry tales of banging Stephen Hawking to unlock quantum gravity mysteries (that said, my physics teacher was a heterosexual man, and Mr. Hawking is nearly paralyzed, limiting his lechery).

The AMA was clearly asleep at the switch, as the heroics of our myocardial maestro were given nary a footnote in the journals of the day. Chalk it up to another of life’s cruel injustices. If funded by a university, our rotund friend could’ve been curing AIDS by now with old carburetor parts. But alas, he aimed for the mediocrity of substitute science education, smiting the coronary research field while indirectly killing 500,000 Americans per year with his callow neglect and desire for non-working summers. Then again, once you blow fifty miles through the point of no return (in a car that might just as easily be the second coming of Christine), few hospitals in the developed world will even let you don scrubs, much less operate a defibrillator. And there aren’t many casting calls for John Candy lookalikes, especially since, well, Candy’s dead.

Nipples, people. Nipples. One word: ouch!