TRUCK PROBLEMS

The first full day of driving saw a flat tire and two accidents.  All three while Lasky was driving.  We were somewhere in Ohio at about 4 a.m. when the truck started shaking violently.  I don’t know much about cars and Lasky doesn’t know much about anything so we were able to convince each other that the road had ridges in the pavement and that was causing the shaking. 

We drove for over forty miles cursing the state of Ohio for allowing the highways to be ridged in such a hazardous way.  What could the point or cause of these ridges even be, we wondered?  We agreed that Ohio sucked at maintaining it’s infrastructure before we pulled over and saw that one of the four rear tires was completely destroyed. We sat on the side of route 80 for three hours waiting for the repair truck.  Lasky talked about things.  I thought about different things. 

The first accident came three hours later about twenty miles from the Indiana border.  Fuck Face was pulling out of a gas station and tried to squeeze our 16-foot truck between two cars that were stopped at a red light.  A skilled driver in a Smart Car would have struggled to pull off what Lasky was trying to do.  As he inched toward the crevasse of space the bumper-to-bumper cars were creating, he asked me if I thought he “had it.”  I told him I believed in him.  He immediately hit one of the cars. 

The driver of the car was a toothless redneck in the Ohio tradition.  He stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “You stupid motherfucker!  You hit my car!”  He was right about everything. 

We pulled over behind him and the redneck shot out of his car and charged toward us, out of control like a bear running down hill.  Lasky got out to talk to him.  I stayed in the car to make sure that if anything bad happened, it didn’t happen to me. 

I wasn’t sure if the redneck was on crystal meth, but if he wasn’t, there was a clearly a time when crystal meth was an important part of his life.  Listening to him shout at Lasky with the window cracked and the doors locked, I could tell his brain was completely fried.  He could barely put a sentence together and he picked his nose seven times during the argument that I counted. 

The man’s mental disadvantages aside, he was still equipped to handle Lasky in a debate about his car.  “You know ha mut this gunta cos me?”  The hillbilly riddled.  “Least fo hunnit!”  Lasky’s response to this was tremendous.  “No way.  I know a guy who could buff that scratch out for fifty bucks.”  The backwoods junky thought about Lasky’s approach to the argument for half a second before figuring out a way to side step it.  “Well, I DON”T know that guy!”  The inbred Neanderthal reasoned deftly.  Lasky tried to think of response, but couldn’t.  He nodded to the man, acquiescing defeat.  If only his old classmate from The Dalton School on the upper east side could see him now. 

Lasky got back into the car after giving the man his insurance information.  That was when he told me he had declined the insurance through Penske and was using his own insurance.  He told me he doesn’t have collision so damaged he does to other cars is covered, but he’s liable for any damage he does to the $90,000 truck we were driving.  He asked me if I thought that was bad. 

If he saw me smile, he acted like he didn’t.