Of Nudes, Cars, and Montreal

As another Spring Break approaches, I begin to reminisce about what happened to me last Spring Break. Finally, I feel comfortable enough telling the sordid tale. The only reason I feel somewhat less uncomfortable than I might otherwise is the fortunate fact that one of the characters in this story recently graduated. The odds of him reading this article are about as likely as me getting a date. of course, if he did somehow get hold of this article, I would be a dead man.

Last Spring Break, I stayed here in Cambridge, just hanging around Harvard with my friend and former business manager. I'll call him "Young Jin". Since one of our mutual friends knew that we would be suffering here during the break, while he went to Cancun, he was gracious enough to allow us to use his car for little errands. To protect his identity and possibly my life, I will just call him "Bob."

For the first couple of days, Young Jin and I used the car to go to Star Market and Blockbuster video because there was nothing to do here but eat junk food and watch videos. As everyone knows, however, there are only so many movies you can watch before you get exhausted.

By the forth day of break, we decided to get out of Boston--more specifically, out of this state. Since our good friend, "Bob," was spending his week in notice this little trip to Freeport, Maine. All told, that day Young Jin and I drove about 350 miles.

That trip was fun but we still had six more days of vacation to kill. Two days later, around 10 pm, we were driving to Star Market to get some food, and I said to Young Jin, "You know, I have never been to Canada...(pause)...Wouldn't it be so funny if we just drove Bob's car to Canada and came back. Ha!" I guess what I said wasn't taken as a joke because just like that we got on the Mass Pike, and we were on our way to Canada.

After an hour or so of driving, Young Jin asked, "Shouldn't we have checked the car before we left or something"? To assure him. I said confidently, "I never ever check my car before I go driving. I am sure that there won't be any problems." In movies, when someone says this, there is always a problem. Usually the car is ends up in the middle of nowhere with smoke coming from the hood. Well, that's exactly what happened. Sure enough, as soon as we passed Albany, we started to hear a very faint buzzing sound on the car, and the red emergency light flashed on the dashboard. When we neared the Canadian border, this faint became a loud drumming sound, So about 30 miles from Canada, we pulled the car aside on the road and lifted the hood. Suddenly the car started to hiss, and steam hid the view of the engine.

"Young Jin, I think the car overheated. Why don't you pass on it or something?" I suggested helpfully.

"I am not going to piss on it. I think it needs oil," he said.

Although we were arguing over whether the car needed it, neither of us wanted to check it. Because we both were too lazy and neither of us took auto-shop in high school, we decided to ignore light and the buzzing and put off worrying about the car until daylight. So we drove the car the rest of the distance to Montreal. When we arrived at the border patrol, some guy who spoke broken English asked to see our passports. Of course, we did not have any, nor did we have any registration for this broken-down car. Like the overpayed, underqualified civil service worker he was, the border patrolman let us go. So we were finally in Canada. As we approached Montreal, we started to see words that sort of looked like English, but not exactly.

"Hey, Young Jin, is this French"? I asked.

"I think so."

Biggest problem so far. We are in Montreal ,and we don't know the language. How are we going to explain to the auto mechanic that our car is piece of shit. Unfortunately, no gas station was open at 5:30 in the morning so we were unable to practice our Franco-English. C' est la vie. (It's the only French phrase I know.) In fact, the only thing that was open was a 24-hour peep show which only losers go to. And, losers that we are, we went in and spent some time there until we were sleepy. Because we didn't have enough money for a motel, we parked the car near a museum and went to sleep.

When we woke up, it was around 2 in the afternoon. Since we didn't have money, we didn't know French, and we didn't know that to do, Young Jin and I went to McDonald's with $40 worth of Canadian currency. Afterwards, still directionless, we parked the car and started walking along St. Catherine Avenue.

We realized that it was lame to be here in a foreign country and not be doing anything, so we went to the arcades and played Street Fighter 2 until our delicious meal at McDonald's. We then went to a bar (because the drinking age is like three or something) and started to drink Molsons in an attempt to become one with the natives. But we got tired of the bar scene so we decided to do the craziest thing that we could think of--we went from one strip joint to another. Naked women were nice and all, but I will talk about strip joint in a future article.

But I must get back to the story about "Bob's" car. After leaving L'axe Cabaret, we spent the night driving around Montreal for hours looking for a car mechanic who spoke English. We finally found one, and it turned out that we drove about 500 miles without any oil. That, I was told, would "fuck the car up." If you saw the Castrol Motor Oil commercials, you can understand what happened to our car.

So after we got the car fixed at this Esso station (thank God, this place took VISA), we started to drive back to Boston. It was around 11 pm or so. We decided to take I-93 because that would save us at least 2 hours of driving. Since the gas prices in Montreal were ridiculously high, we decided to fill up once we got past the border. However, once we crossed the border, we could not find a single gas station open past midnight. So we were stranded in the middle of nowhere without gas. We pulled the car into a gas station and went to sleep hoping to wake up when the station opened up.

When we woke up, there were already cars waiting in line to get gas. I guess they had been open for hours, but people had not wanted to wake us up. When I got out of the car to fill the tank, the attendant gave me a sort of weird look and did not block my path to the pump. I guess Young Jin and I scared them somewhat.

We filled the car with gas and got back to Harvard with no trouble after that--other than the fact that I drove the car 100 miles per hour while Young Jin was sleeping.

Three days later, "Bob" came back from Canada.

I said, "Bob" since you were kind enough to lend us your car to do little errands, I decided to give your car a much needed oil change."

"Bob" thanked me for my kindness.

Since then "Bob," Young Jin and I went on many car trips together (like to Foxwoods), and "Bob" never knew. But, since that incident, Young Jin and I did every little favor that "Bob" asked of us.