That’s really true. And then about half an hour later the head gasket blew up, and we had to spend I don’t know how long in this dirtball motel, although the girl walked all the way to the liquor store through about a mile of slush and got all kinds of wine and did weird stuff with the bottlenecks later. So it was sort of okay, except that the garage where I left the Mercedes burned down and I used the insurance money to buy a motorcycle.
Now, girls who like motorcycles really will do anything. I mean, really, anything you can think of. But it’s just not the same. For one thing, it’s hard to drink while you’re riding a motorcycle—there’s no place to set your glass. And cocaine’s out of the question. And personally, I find that grass makes me too sensitive. You smoke some grass and the first thing you know you’re pulling over to the side of the road and taking a break to dig the gentle beauty of the sky’s vast panorama, the slow, luxurious interlay of sun and clouds, the lulling trill of breezes midst leafy tree branches—and what kind of fun is that? Besides, it’s tough to “get it on” with a chick (I mean in the biblical sense) and still make all the fast curves unless you let her take the handlebars with her pants off and come on doggy-style or something, which is harder than it sounds; and pantless girls on motorcycles attract the highway patrol, so usually you don’t end up doing anything until you’re both off the bike, and by then you may be in the hospital. Like I was after this old lady pulled out in front of me in an Oldsmobile, and the girl I was with still wanted to do anything you can think of, but there was a doctor there and he was squirting pHisoHex all over me and combing little bits of gravel out of my face with a wire brush, and I just couldn’t get into it. So take it from me and don’t get a motorcycle. Get a big car.
Usually, most fast-driving maneuvers that don’t require crazy girls call for use of the steering wheel, so be sure your car is equipped with power steering. Without power steering, turning the wheel is a lot like work, and if you wanted work you’d get a job. All steering should be done with the index finger. Then, when you’re done doing all the steering that you want to do, just pull your finger out of there and the wheel will come right back to wherever it wants to. It’s that simple. Be sure to do an extra lot of steering when going into a driveway or turning sharp corners. And here’s another important tip: Always roll the window down before throwing bottles out, and don’t try to throw them through the windshield unless the car is parked.
Okay, now say you’ve been on a six-day drunk and you’ve just made a bet that you can back up all the way to Cleveland, plus you’ve got a buddy who’s getting a blow job on the trunk lid. Well, let’s face it—if that’s the way you’re going to act, sooner or later you’ll have an accident. This much is true. But that doesn’t mean that you should sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you’re in control of the situation.
You know, it’s a shame, but a lot of people have the wrong idea about accidents. For one thing, they don’t hurt nearly as much as you’d think. That’s because you’re in shock and can’t feel pain, or if you aren’t in shock, you’re dead, and that doesn’t hurt at all so far as we know. Another thing is that they make great stories. I’ve got this friend—a prominent man in the automotive industry—who flipped his MG TF back in the fifties and slid on his head for a couple hundred yards, and had to spend a year with no eyelids and a steel pin through his cheekbones while his face was being rebuilt. Sure, it wasn’t much fun at the time, but you should hear him tell about it now. What a fabulous tale, especially during dinner. Besides, it’s not all smashing glass and spurting blood, you understand. Why, a good sideswipe can be an almost religious experience. The sheet metal doesn’t break or crunch or anything—it flexes and gives way as the two vehicles come together with a rushing liquid pulse as if two giant sharks of steel were mating in the perpetual night of the sea primordial. I mean, if you’re on enough drugs. Also, sometimes you see a lot of really pretty lights in your head.
One sure way to cause an accident is with your basic “moonshiner’s” or “bootlegger’s” turn. Whiz down the road at about sixty or seventy, throw the gearshift into neutral, cut the wheel to the left, and hit the emergency brake with one good wallop while holding the brake release out with your left hand. This’ll send you spinning around in a perfect 180-degree turn right into a culvert or a fast-moving tractor-trailer rig. (The bootlegger’s turn can be done on dry pavement, but it works best on top of loose gravel or small children.) Or, when you’ve moved around backwards, you can then spin the wheel to the right and keep on going until you’ve come around a full 360 degrees and are headed back the same way you were going; though it probably would have been easier to have just kept going that way in the first place and not have done anything at all, unless you were with somebody you really wanted to impress—your probation officer, for instance.