Bin Laden's Bald Spot: & Other Stories

Do You Think We Should Pull Over?

22 do you think we shouLd puLL over? Which famously was the question my friend Pete asked me as we were driving in New Hampshire and his car, this was the Datsun, BURST INTO FLAMES! FLAMES WERE SHOOTING FROM THE ENGINE RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES! and Pete asks hesitantly do you think we should pull over? as I am shrieking pull over!!!!!! and hammering on the dashboard hoping that indeed he will soon pull over so we can exit sprinting across the icy stubbled fields into the dense and brooding forest, from which refuge we watched the fire burn out eventually, and shuffled wearily back to the car, and stood there freezing and snarling until a guy came by and drove us into town in his truck, which had, no kidding, huge flames painted on it. We agreed that the flames on his car looked pretty cool. Then there was the time we were driving, this was also in New Hampshire, you wonder what it is with Pete and cars and the Granite State, and THE FLOOR FELL OFF HIS CAR, in such a way that you could SEE THE HIGHWAY SPEEDING BY BELOW YOUR FEET, and I screamed that time too!!! and hammered my sneakers on the dashboard until he pulled over!! but that time he didn’t ask me if he should pull over, he just pulled over, having learned his lesson. Pete points out that the whole floor didn’t fall off the car that time, just most of the front part, and he notes also Brian Doyle | 23 that it is not accurate to say, as I have said, that the chassis fell off, because the chassis did not fall off, only a vast piece of the floor, which apparently had rusted to dust because the car was ancient beyond reckoning, it may have been the first car ever invented, this was not unlikely, that car was probably four hundred years old, probably the conquistadores owned that car, and Pete had paid something like three hundred bucks for it, which is not the least he ever paid for a car, no no, not by a long shot, for there was the convertible he bought for a hundred dollars, this was the Impala, he drove that car THROUGH THE CAR WASH WITH THE TOP DOWN to see what it would feel like, which he said it felt great except that he lost his spectacles in the rush of water. That car, the Impala, never did dry out, although it dried out better than our friend Billy’s car, this was the Chevy, which he parked near an ocean before a hurricane , and it drowned. Pete actually bought another car for a dollar, this was the Buick, from a guy who said there were no dents, go ahead and walk around it and see if there are any dents, boys, which we did, and there was a huge dent on the right front side, and I said, fairly reasonably, I thought, hey, there’s a huge dent over here, and the guy says to Pete, who’s your asshole hippie freak friend? anyway Pete buys this car hurriedly, but it turns out the car was sensitive to weather, and whenever the temperature went up or down more than ten degrees overnight the car wouldn’t work until the temperature went back to what it liked, which was about eighty, because the car had been born in Florida or something. One time we went to the movies, Pete and me, this was To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks, just a terrific movie, the rare kind of movie in which you want to live for a while, and a cold front blew in during the movie, and we had to PUSH THE CAR ALL THE WAY HOME, because we didn’t have money for a taxi, and the buses didn’t run after midnight, and you can’t just abandon a car, as Pete said, it’s your car, man, you have to be responsible for it, otherwise you shouldn’t even have a car, am I right? Another time he had a car, this was another Buick, which a dog got stuck to, this was a Labrador retriever named Hank, but the 24 | Bin Laden’s Bald Spot details of this story remain sketchy, as Pete says the dog was trying to...