Day 795
As those of you that have read my book and those of you that have read this column for a while know, I have a buddy called Rage. He moved out to Colorado a while back and I haven't seen him in a few years, but to this day, he's still one of the best friends I've ever had.
Rage got his nickname because he was that loose-cannon friend. And while some of you might refer to me as "Angry Joe", I'm just loud, abrasive, and opinionated. Rage, on the other hand, is one of those quiet guys that just explodes at times. Not because he's unable to control his anger or anything, but because he's SO in control of his anger that he is like a pot of boiling water that gets covered. Eventually, something has gotta give and he's going to explode, and when that happens, it's quite impressive. And the thing is, he's so naturally angry that those explosions can become almost predicable. You can almost tell when he's about to explode if you know him well enough and can calculate how many "anger points" he's accumulated since his last explosion. It's quite the spectacle.
Often times, I would go out of my way to push his buttons one at a time just to see how close I could get him to that glorious seething volcano of rage without it bubbling over into a Mount St. Helen's like anger explosion. It was a game and even though virtually all of my friends played it, I just played it the best. Hell, I'm planning on putting at least a few stories about doing just that in the next book.
This story however, is not one of those stories.
See, Rage is also almost as random and weird as I am. He is certainly less abrasive and belligerent in his daily behavior, but he's also a lot funnier than me. Truth be told, I was probably one of the least funny members of my group of friends up through my mid-20's. I'm not sure if that's a reflection on how funny they were, how much funnier I've become, or how un-funny my current friends are, but that's a whole other examination that I don't feel really compelled to get into today.
In other stories, I've also told you about one activity that I have always loved doing but don't get as much of a chance to do anymore. Getting in the car and getting lost. Either because of gas prices (seriously, I remember 83 cent gas in the late 90's. This "almost $4" bullshit is un-fucking-acceptable) or time or just because I now live close to the city and there's nowhere TO get lost, I just don't get the chance to do it very often. One of the reasons that I always loved getting lost was because it inevitably led to a good story for one reason or another. There's the Brownstown story. There's the "magical gateway to Indiana" story, there's the "holy shit, we got lost for like 5 hours and wound up in Canada how the fuck do we get home without going past border security wait how did we get INTO Canada without going past border security?" story and at least a dozen more.
This story stayed local. We made a turn off of Route 30 near North Huntington one evening and just started taking roads that "looked cool". Either roads we'd never been on before or just because it reminded me of some road from some movie and oh wait, that's how every horror movie starts, isn't it?
Like most of our other "driving aimlessly and hoping to get lost" stories, we were inebriated. I've told you before and I'll mention it again... I do NOT condone drunk driving or stoned driving. I do my best to avoid doing so at this point. I did however, often engage in it in my younger years and because nobody ever got hurt or died, I can joke about it now. So don't do it. You're probably not as invulnerable as I was in my youth (and still am, to this day). But once again, we were fucked up and driving around.
For the most part, the drive was uneventful. We would turn onto this road or that one and slowly get further lost into the semi-rural areas of Western PA. But because I was involved, eventually something fucking weird had to happen. And inevitably, it did.
After making a turn onto one particular street, we began driving up a hill after about 100 yards. It was fairly steep, but also crested after only about another 50 yards. It was a blind hill where you couldn't see anything past the crest until just before you reached it. And reach it we did. At about 40 mph. This wasn't that big of a problem because Rage's Explorer that he shared with his brother, PrettyBoy, was a fucking beast and weighed approximately as much as an elephant with legs made of cement. It also handled about as well. If it had been a car rather than an SUV, we would have been in the air as soon as we reached the peak of this small hill because of how quickly the road dropped off beyond that point, but thankfully we stayed on the road.
I say thankfully because I have never in my life seen anything like what we saw beyond the top of the hill.
50 feet ahead of us was a guard rail that stretched across the entire road. With a STOP sign mounted directly in the center. Beyond it, all we could see were trees.
Rage slammed on the brakes and we skidded to a stop only a few feet before the guard rail.
We were shocked. There had been no "dead end" or "no outlet" signs. There was no warning whatsoever to warn drivers of what was coming up in front of them. It was simply "road, steep fucking hill, blind drop-off and then BOOM OH HERE'S A MOTHERFUCKING GUARD RAIL!" That was it.
We needed a moment here. We were both borderline hyperventilating and it took us both a moment to catch our breath. Holy fucking sweet jumping Christ on a pogostick. There was no way that a road just ends like this, is there? Not a fucking chance.
We stepped out of the SUV and stood there for a moment before walking up to the guard rail to look over. All we could initially see was trees. Just a bunch of goddamned trees. It was getting quite dark. Even though it was summertime, it was pushing 11:00 and we were out in the middle of fucking nowhere. The ambient light from the city barely reached out this far, but there were a few houses in the area with lights on, and the Explorer's headlights were still on, so we were able to squint over the guard rail and notice...A motherfucking cliff. I'm not just talking about a really steep hill, this was the kind that if you started falling down there was virtually no stopping you until you slammed into a tree or hit the bottom. It wasn't quite 90 degrees straight down, but it was at least 75.
Looking over this cliff for a few more moments, I began to make out more shapes and colors. I turned to Rage:
Me: "Dude, is that a car there?"
Rage: "There's at least 3 that I see"
Me: "What the fuck, man?"
Rage: WHAT THE FUCK?!"
We stood there for another moment, alternating our glances between the burned-out hulks of long-since-wrecked cars and each other. We were utterly speechless.
Rage was the first one to start looking around. I was still in shock. I've done a lot of stupid shit that's almost killed me, but this was a first. This was the first time I've almost died because of the stupidity of someone ELSE. The someone else being whatever waste of sperm that designed this road and whoever in this municipality that had decided that there shouldn't be a fuckload of clear god damnned warnings about the clusterfuck of civil engineering failures that you were about to drive into when you turned onto this road.
I turned and noticed that Rage was walking towards the closest house with lights on. The porch light and the living room lights were on, as well as the TV. I was about to say something and figure out what he was doing, about to yell out to him, when he pushed the doorbell.
Try to imagine this. 11:00 at night, in the middle of nowhere, with very few neighbors, on a dead-end street, and someone is ringing your doorbell. And then try to imagine opening it to see a short, scruffy looking young guy standing there who you've never seen before in your life.
Now imagine that the next thing this total he does is turn half-way away from you, point at the SUV parked in the middle of the street right against this random guard rail and stop sign, turn back to you with a very blank expression and his finger still pointed in the exact same position and simply yelling, not asking, but yelling "WHAT THE FUCK?!?!"
The guy almost fell over laughing after his initial split-second of shock passed. And I just almost died from oxygen deprivation from my hysterical fits while still standing in the road.
RandomGuy: "HAHAHAHAH!!"
Rage: "NO, REALLY, WHAT THE FUCK!"
RandomGuy: "HAHAHAHAHAHA"
Rage: "SERIOUSLY MAN! WHAT THE FUCK!"
RandomGuy: [He's not even making audible noises at this point, he's doubled over in his front door hyperventilating from laughing so hard]
Rage: "SWEET CHRIST MAN! WHAT THE FUCK! WHAT? CAN'T THEY PUT UP A FUCKING WARNING SIGN OR SOME SHIT?"
Rage waited for the guy to regain his composure. He said some other things that I don't really remember because I was still 100 feet away and he was no longer yelling, but after the neighbor managed to stifle down a few more chuckles, he gave Rage some sort of explanation. Rage was not satisfied. He also knew that talking to the neighbor was no long going to be helpful either and without another word, he just turned and walked back to the car. No "thank you". No "sorry to disturb you". Nothing. Just turned and walked away.
I was standing next to the passenger door waiting for him to come back over before getting in. He reached the car, turned back to look at the guard rail again and looked at me again. With the most serious expression I had ever seen before, he looked at me and said "I hope that whoever planned this gets hit by a meteor" and got back into the car.
I think I might have laughed hard enough to let out a little bit of pee before I even got back in the car.
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