Apache Rose Terrordrive

I offered to drive my roommate Billy home from college one Winter Break, it wasn't that far out of my way. It's normally a three hour drive, but he and I had a strange synchronicity that I've never found with anyone else -- he could make me laugh as hard as I could make him laugh. It was almost as if we plucked punchlines out of each other's heads. In another era, we would have been a vaudeville team, happy to perform even without an audience. The other half of the time, he was drunk and violent, and better to avoid. But, as they say, you can choose your family but you can't choose your friends.

We started down Route 17 South in my untrusty 1982 Chevy Cavalier, packed up with duffel bags thrown indifferently into the back seat, and within 15 minutes it was a full-on blizzard. Visibility was next to zero. The road was so bad that instead of a sedate 70, I had to slow to 30, then 20, and finally 10 miles per hour.

Well, at least we could shoot the shit, right? Wrong. Billy, undoubtedly hungover, curled up in that vinyl seat and promptly drifted off to sleep.

It took 8 hours to drive home, and I use the term 'drive' loosely. It was like steering a boat -- drifting and making corrections. Hunched over the wheel, wiping the windshield with my sleeve, I finally pulled onto his street in Queens reeking of sour adrenaline, sweat, and naked fear.

I so idolized Billy that I had made a special mix tape for the drive home. I listened to it twice as he slept.