I can be a first rate idiot. I can inhabit a space that is peculiar to my own idiosyncratic view and make a fool of myself on home turf. I can’t explain it properly, but when I’ve been that fool, it burns. This is my turf. I can fully appreciate me being a numbskull in any one of my many pursuits, but not at the level of I’m a soul operating a body. When that happens I realize perhaps this soul has shells, comfort spaces, protectorates to which I flee when a little introspection and personal honesty would have held a candle to a weakness and exposed it. Instead, I indulge it, foolishly. I am always prepared to play the fool, but to be it. No. That’s offensive to my sense of self.
But anyway regardless, when I am a fool, I’m a champion fool. The other night was no exception. I was visiting a friend who has bought a farm in Taidong. We’d had a few and I was going to quickly dodge back to my bed and breakfast to pick up a few more. In the process, I ran my car into the gutter. Two wheels, front and back, in the drain, completely and two wheels on terra firma, 11 o’clock at night with my buddy in the car to whom my famous last word would be, “I’m in my natural element.” Cluck. I’m in the friggin’ drain.
Fuck a dead skunk (something that would of, at this stage, been more inviting, really)!
My mate, who is not all together unaware of my foibles, suggests we call Ahde to help. Before you start wildly guessing whom Ahde might be, I’ll let you know he is a local aborigine with his finger on the pulse and in every pie in the neighborhood. My friend’s description of him relates much to Ahde’s pension for unsolicited advice on everything from plumbing to the bedchamber. I’ve already shared a half dozen cans with him (Ahde), he’s good company, but he is going to get a laugh out of this city fool.
A quick cell phone call and a five-minute wait sees Ahde and a small band of merry men arrive at my indignity.
“We can pull it out,” is Ahde’s suggestion.
I’m hopeful but a little concerned that given the ditch and position of the wheels the comeback to that line is: “Or we can pull it apart.”
But I acquiesce. I thought if there is one thing these blokes are going to be good at, it is getting a car out of a drain. They’d never land one in there themselves, but they’d have known many fools that had. So I joined that long list of fools and didn’t care to make matters worse by being a foolish asshole.
Ahde produces a rope and quickly begins to knit it into a stockinette rope. I hold the torch under the car whilst Ahde knots the rope around the front axle. I’m concerned. The wheel is a weak point and pulling the car apart seems like a real possibility. I can see the chassis and want to say that looks a little more robust, but I keep my tongue. Then they back up my friend’s car that has arrived as the tow vehicle. Soon Ahde and I are under there trying to find an attachment point and this time I quickly indicate the chassis as the best option and Ahde understands.
Back on the surface, the others have been milling around engaging Ahde in a conversation based solely on unsolicited advice. None of them could have possibly seen what was going on under the car, but they needn’t have been looking anyway – the underbody of a car was as familiar to them as pussy to Jack Nicholson.
So here we had someone to back the tow car up, Ahde to drive my car, and a bunch of us to lift. If there were ever a time when I wanted the impossible to fire, a phoenix to rise from the ashes this was it – humiliation aside I wanted my car out of this ditch. And she rose first go smooth and deft, without any hurrah, except that which was leaping in my soul, “We’ve done it. You friggin’ beauty!”
And then I felt small. Tiny. Foolish.
But Ahde, who could have entertained himself to no end at my expense, and hopefully will out of earshot, was a gentleman.
