A) So I'm living with a roommate in my apartment. He's this buddy of mine that I've known since I was fourteen (I'm twenty-eight now), and when my old roommate (another guy I've known about as long) moved out, this guy moved in 'cause I can't make rent on my own and he needed a place to stay.
So one night, he gets drunk. Ripped, really. And he's a pretty spastic guy to begin with, the sort of guy that was always a little too into Highlander and likes to walk around with a sword under his trenchcoat. And he's having girl troubles. Total recipe for disaster, here.
This guy likes to drive. He is, in fact, a driving idiot savante. I don't think he's ever read an entire book. Comicbooks tax his attention span -- he'll sometimes leaf through them and look at the pictures but then he looks up and asks someone else to tell him what happened in the story. But when it comes to driving a car, he's got this freaky supernatural power. He's like Mad Max. If he weren't such a twitchy little nut, he'd make a great professional racer.
So before he goes on this little drinking binge, he hands me his keys and says, "Don't give this back to me, no matter what." Cool. I don't drink, generally, so I'm often the designated key-holder (made only slightly inefficient by the fact that I don't drive and hence can't be the designated driver as well).
Naturally, in a few hours, he comes to me roaring drunk and sobbing and ranting about his ex-wife and wants his keys back. Nuh-uh. He actually hops up and down at one point, but I still won't give 'em to him. He even threatens me, but he's about 5'8" and weighs maybe 140 lbs., tops, and I can dribble him like a basketball. Doesn't get him anywhere.
So he goes to his ex-wife, the woman who's driving him nuts in the first place, and gets a spare set of keys. Why she has a spare set of keys for his car, I can't imagine. Nothing this guy does really makes a lot of sense.
He hops in his car, starts it up, revs the engine ... and promptly discovers that big ol' me is now standing behind his car. I explain to him as patiently as possible that if he wants to go off himself in a fit of drunken stupidity, that's his business and there isn't much I can do to stop him, in the long run. But he isn't gonna drive around like an inebriated maniac on my island and squash some poor kid walking around the road at night, or wrap his car around someone else's car. I'm playing the 800-pound gorilla card.
More engine revving. He insists that he's gonna back up over me if he has to, that I have no right to stop him. Arguing doesn't work, so I just stay right there. He jumps out, tries to whack me around a little, but it would take five of this guy to actually move me. Goes back to the driver's seat. Revs some more. Screams that he's gonna run me over.
Of course, I'm sitting there thinking that he might actually be drunk enough to do it ... but what the hell else can I do? Sure, if he goes screaming off into the night at Mach 10 while intoxicated, nothing will probably happen, but we're living in the only halfway-urban section of the island, and I keep seeing us as teenagers, walking alongside the road in the dark, trying to get to someone's house to play a midnight game of Dungeons and Dragons or something stupid like that. I picture us geting scraped along a stretch of road because some drunk asshole is having problems with his ex-wife and doesn't know when not to drive. How the hell can you move out of the way when you have such images going through your head?
So I stand there, being the dumbass speedbump from hell.
After a while, he either gives up or runs out of gas. The engine shuts off, he storms inside, and I wipe some sweat off my forehead. I had no idea whether or not it was gonna work. :)
That, as embarassing as it is, is my finest moment, I think. Me versus the Mustang. You wanna squash little kids on my island, you're gonna have to squash me first.
Q) What is the definition of "magic?"
