A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (31 page)

Mike was disappointed. I, on the other hand, was fine with the decision.

On another trip, I found myself deep in Texas when I got trapped in a lightning storm due to my own stupidity. It never occurred to me that driving through a storm in Texas might be a little different from driving through one in my home state of New Jersey. In Jersey, people slow down for the first ten minutes of a storm, then proceed as per usual. But Texas storms don't fuck around. When lightning bolts started hitting the actual highway I was driving on, I figured it was time to pull off and find a place to spend the night. Unfortunately, every hotel I stopped at was all booked up, presumably by the rational people who had pulled off the highway when they saw the deadly electrical storm looming in the distance.

I wound up sitting in a dusty truck stop diner all night, eating a not-great grilled cheese sandwich. My waitress was a teenaged Mexican American girl. The hostess was her younger sister. They'd seated and served me in silence, but after I'd waited about an hour for the storm to pass, my waitress meekly approached me.

“Your accent ain't from around here,” she said, her own accent more Valley Girl than either Texan or Mexican.

“I grew up in New Jersey,” I said. “I live in New York now.”

“Oh my God,” she said, her eyes growing wide. “Are you SERIOUS?”

“I am,” I smiled. For the next fifteen minutes, no matter what I said, she shouted the words “Are you SERIOUS?” in response.

She asked me every question she could about New York. It all culminated in something I didn't see coming. After her first dozen questions, she got nervous and shifted back and forth on her feet. She looked back at her sister, who nodded, egging her on.

“I gotta ask,” she said. “Have you ever seen Ground Zero?”

“I have,” I said, suddenly serious. Having been in the tri-state area on 9/11, I felt a strange responsibility to convey the experience to this young girl in an appropriate way. My mind scrambled as I tried to figure out what to say about that day, but before I could think of anything, she interjected.

“Oh my God, are you SERIOUS?” she said. “You are so
lucky
.”

I was shocked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Well, it's kind of the worst thing ever,” I said. Then I smiled. She smiled back, not understanding at all what I meant. Satisfied, she went back to whispering with her sister and ignored me for the rest of the night.

On another trip across Texas, in early 2011, I had a short but sweet encounter that summed up everything I love about the great Lone Star state. I'd stopped for gas in a dusty little town off of a two-lane highway, and when I stepped inside the station to pay I saw that they had a whole bunch of kitschy items for sale. Among them was a red baseball hat with a picture of a deer on it.

That's the coolest hat in the fucking world
, I thought to myself, clearly affected by road delirium. It had been a few days since I'd been able to shower, and so in addition to appreciating
the awesomeness of the hat I was feeling pretty grungy and figured that using it to cover up my unwashed hair wasn't a bad idea. I paid for it and put it on. As I left the store, a wiry, grizzled old local entered.

“Damn, boy,” he said. He grinned a toothless grin at me and pointed at the hat. “You about to go get your redneck on?”

“I'm gonna do my best,” I said, before strolling out. I've never felt more American, more like a man, in my entire life.

During another trip driving from California to New York in 2009, I made a foolish mistake in my trip planning. I forgot that Indiana occupies a strange place in space-time. It is a state populated by insular farmers who play by their own rules, and those rules don't involve recognizing daylight saving time.

I'd pushed hard that night, intent on driving until 4 A.M. before stopping, in an effort to get home fast. Due to my mistake with the time zones, I drove until 5 A.M., costing myself an hour of sleep. Worst of all, by the time I went to pull over I couldn't find an open hotel room for miles. The first five places I stopped at were sold out. I was on the verge of sleeping on the side of the highway in my car when in a last-ditch effort I rolled into the parking lot of a crappy roadside motel.

The guy behind the counter was a smooth-looking black guy with a pony tail.

“How can I help you?” he asked, a broad knowing grin on his face. He tapped the counter in front of him excitedly, displaying a large number of rings adorning his well-manicured fingers.

“I need a room,” I said. “Haven't been able to find one tonight. I'm pretty exhausted.”

“I got one room open,” he said, looking slightly confused. “It's a suite though. Ninety bucks.”

“That's fine,” I said. “As long as I can crash for a few hours, I'll pay anything.”

I filled out the paperwork and he handed me my key. I went to my car to get my bag. I headed back inside, wanting nothing more than to sleep.

When I got to my room, the guy who had checked me in was inside.

“Sorry, sorry!” he yelled when I yelped in fear. “I just wanted to make sure no one was in here.” He scurried away.

I was confused, and couldn't quite piece things together in my exhausted state. I entered the room and saw that a gigantic red heart-shaped hot tub took up most of the space. A king-sized bed with an attached coin-operated vibrating machine stood next to it.

I sat on the bed and ruffled my brow. It took me only a few minutes of shaking off my exhaustion to realize I was sleeping in a hooker hotel. In the last open room. Which had probably been rented hourly up until that point in the night. The man was probably making sure no hookers were practicing their wares on the bed I was about to sleep in.

I took a nice hot bath in the heart-shaped tub and slept for three uncomfortable hours.

Through all my soul-searching travels across the country, I've met a lot of strange people. I've been lost in a lot of interesting places. I've seen things I never thought I'd see, done things I never thought I'd do.

These trips have always made me feel better, but usually I don't even realize it until the very end. It's when I'm back in New Jersey, exhausted and making my way past the flame-dotted refineries along the Turnpike, with planes flying too low over my head on their way into Newark Airport, that it happens. It's then that I know that I'm home.

The trips I take may make me feel better, but they still don't make me feel like I'm “okay.” One of the things I've finally
accepted is that I'm not sure I ever will. I don't know if Tumbleweed, Mike, Blue, Indigo, Donna, the girl from Texas, or that hotel clerk in Indiana are okay, either. From my earliest days in West Orange to my travels in California, I don't know if I've ever met anyone who is.

But I do know I feel better when I'm home. Where my memories of Pa and Koozo collide, where I became a young man and where I lost my mind in the process, where I grew up and got better, I'm home. Maybe not okay, but home.

T
he author would like to thank the following for their support, guidance, and inspiration: Ken and Sally Gethard, Gregg and Ilana Gethard, Fran Gillespie, Ethan Bassoff, Jonathan Crowe, Brian Stern, Dianne McGunigle, Joe Mande, Anthony King, Will Hines, Shannon O'Neill, everyone at the UCB Theater,
Nights of Our Lives
,
Asssscat
, the cast and crew of
The Chris Gethard Show
, and the entire down-the-hill section of West Orange, New Jersey.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris Gethard

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Gethard, Chris.

A bad idea I'm about to do : true tales of seriously poor judgment and stunningly awkward adventure / Chris Gethard.—1st Da Capo press ed.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-306-82059-5

PN6165.G48 2011
818'.602—dc23

2011037223

 

First Da Capo Press edition 2012

 

Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com

 

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