There But For The Grace Of Joe Go I

I guess one of the great things to have when you're in your late teens is a guy who has a car, is willing to drive drunk, and is actually good at it. Joe was that guy. His dad's big old Caprice Classic fit about 25 people in it. I was on a break from boarding school and we had a full crew rollin' (of skinny white kids, listening to Z-100 and acting about as rebellious as a Japanese mid-level executive on Quaaludes). It was cold out, and the car was full of cigarette smoke, the cheapest beer available, and whatever cologne we had all recently discovered.

I was very high, and very drunk, and discovering that rather than cancelling each other out, they actually exacerbated each other! The night jerked by, as if time was being pulled along on a bicycle chain missing a few links. I looked around, we were in one place -- I blinked and we were literally 15 miles away. I blinked again and Bill's dad was sticking his face in the car, looking directly at me and shaking his head. Blinked again - we were in the woods. It was all very film noir meets time machine meets severed corpus callosum.

I don't know the name of the woods we were driving through, but I know where they are. I don't pass by there often, but sometimes it comes back to me.