The Diesel Incident (A True Story)

Engines are the things that make cars go, and engines need gas, and somehow Peter’s engine wasn’t working anymore and it had something to do with the gas. Those were the only things we knew for sure.

Six months earlier the question had been: did our family want a trip to France with family friends? Yes! Yes! A thousand times Yes! And so, like an art deco Pan Am travel poster, our first week was filled with capital-a Adventure:

SEE THE BAYEAUX TAPESTRY!!! (See a two-mile carpet with dudes on it!)
ENJOY SAUSAGE SANDWICHES!!! (Enjoy a cadmium red hot dog resting on a croque-monsieur!)
EXPERIENCE ROUNDABOUTS!!! (Experience them over and over, because Peter and Pat like to check maps while driving in circles!)

But now there was this problem with Peter’s car. The men, including the 13-year-old boy who would grow up to be Nick Confalone, took turns investigating the engine. Yep, the car was broken all right, and there was the engine right there, and the problem had to do with the gas, or the engine, or both, we concluded, like the manly men we were. We’d stopped somewhere between La Rochelle and Bordeaux, in a tiny town with a name like D’ardenté, which I became convinced was the French word for YOUR CAR IS BROKEN FOREVER AND YOU ARE DOOMED!!!!

But wait, a tow truck! A taxi! All our problems were over! Our families united in the taxi and our car, and we followed the tow truck to destiny. First, we crossed a massive bridge, the biggest I’d ever seen. The toll: six million francs one way, or six million and one francs for a round trip. The toll burned deep into my dad’s soul, but he thought, at least we can save one franc and get the one-way, because we’re never coming back. (That’s foreshadowing, baby.)

You know, the most rewarding part of traveling is noticing the little cultural differences. For example, in America, tow trucks take broken cars to service stations, but in France they take you to deserted airfields. This is one cultural difference I noticed. As the tow truck driver was ready to dump the broken car at the deserted airfield, Kristi took the reigns with her second-year French: “Attendez. Je m’appelle Kristi. Ca va? J’aime le pomplemousse.”

Peter, not a man to be satisfied with such inefficient pleasantries, took a different approach with his fluent German. Now there were two people talking to this man, in different languages, trying to convince him to take the broken car to a service station. Somehow Kristi deduced that the car was diesel, but it had been filled with regular gas, and that was the problem. “It was filled with regular gas,” she said, passive voice, blameless, like, “…mistakes were made.” Somehow she pantomimed her message, and tow truck driver realized that this was no ordinary abandoned-airfield-calibre situation. He locked down the car and we were off.

Back to the bridge! Wait– what? Noooooooo!

Six million more francs and one sulking dad later, we found ourselves at a service station. But not before Kristi’s rite of passage into adulthood: driving on an off-ramp, against the flow of traffic, the car in reverse, Kristi without a driver’s license, in a foreign country, driving stick for the first time. On that day, she made her father proud and truly earned her family name. (Tracey would earn hers a few years later, when in Cannes, she realized she could order unlimited screwdrivers from the French bartender and charge it to Peter’s hotel room.)

At this point, the wise and gentle tow truck driver departed our lives forever, leaving us in the capable hands of Service Station Man, caretaker of The Most Magical Place on Earth. Another Pan Am poster:

SPEND TIME AT A HOMELESS MAD SCIENTIST’S AUTO PART GRAVEYARD!

Like a true world-traveler, I reclined on an airline seat– one seat of an entire row ripped wholesale out of a 737 and dropped, as if by magic, into this man’s dirt-caked junk yard– and watched Peter explain the problem to the guy, but it was futile, like he was trying to explain the diels-alder reactions to a drunk pirate. But then finally there came a spark of recognition, when a massive Cujo junkyard dog snarled and Peter weirdly called it a “hound dog,” or maybe the dog’s name was Elvis, but either way…

“Ah!” The grizzly bearded child-molesting service station man said, in English, finally understanding. “You know Elvis? The king, the king!”

It was suddenly so clear. There was only one way to get this car fixed, so Peter, my dad, and the Service Station Man sang Elvis’s Hound Dog together, and through the power of music, a new car appeared, good as new, and everyone piled in. We waved goodbye to all our new friends and drove off into the sunset together. Actually what really happened was the new car had a broken trunk but we were like WHO CARES LET’S GET OUT OF HERE VRRROOOOM!

Actually, Dear Girlfriend, The Best Present is No Present.

The happiest of birthdays I wish upon you, dear girlfriend. Welcome, welcome–a thousand times welcome–to the 33rd year of your life, your Jesus Year, your Larry Bird Year. A wonderful twelve months lie ahead of this glorious day, that I can assure you. But it appears, dear girlfriend, that my unorthodox birthday gift may have adversely affected our otherwise blissful relationship. So please, oh please, believe me when I tell you that the best birthday present is actually no present.

You are certainly not incorrect in saying that even a simple gift from the heart, like a pocket dictionary for example, would have made you the happiest of all birthday girls. And truly, I could have showered you with uncountable presents like you were the great and powerful King Farouk. But you are the singular love of my life. Any attempt to infuse a lowly physical object with such emotional grandeur would be an exercise in belittlement, an aggressive and apostatic act against affection itself.

Wait! Do you remember that sunlight morning three months when I surprised you with breakfast in bed? And it wasn’t even your birthday. Although most reasonable people would say yes, that glorious breakfast indeed counts as a birthday present, I look into your ambiguously scornful eyes and see that to you, no, it does not count as a birthday present–though it was truly a great and heroic deed on my behalf. I only brought it up to make sure you remembered it happened.

Fine. Suppose, for the sake of ending this argument, I had gotten you that pocket dictionary, the one you now claim would have made a perfectly passable present. Yes, I’ll be the second to admit that such a present would have shown I’d noticed your developing love for new words, words that ensure linguistic supremacy on the Scrabble board. So let us suppose, dear girlfriend, I’d gotten you that pocket dictionary. What a waste of time! Don’t you know you can pretty much look up any word on the internet for free?

See, instead of wasting all that time and effort, I chose to spend that energy on you directly, in the form of a loving embrace that said “Happy Birthday,” a gesture born from profound simplicity, infinite tenderness, and absolutely not from “the fact that I’m a lazy bastich.” No matter how many times you call me that hateful and possibly made-up word, it will never be true. Also it will never be a real word, I’m pretty sure.

Still not satisfied? Then maybe you should go buy that stupid pocket dictionary yourself, so you can look up your favorite new word. That’s right. Then we’ll see who’s the real bastich (hint: the bastich is YOU). That’s right, “dear girlfriend,” walk out that door and see if you ever get another present from me! Enjoy your stupid 33rd year, your Larry Bird year, which now I’m changing to a different number 33, as in “the atomic number of Arsenic,” as in, “I hope you eat some Arsenic,” but actually I mean it like, “I hope you don’t die from the Arsenic but instead get really sick and feel bad about how mean you were to your amazingly great boyfriend,” you ungrateful bastich!