-- Hello! It's been forever yet again! Sigh. I hope that all is well.

I just got back from a trip to Houston. As usual it quickly deteriorated into a stupidity-fueled frolic that I must share. My little old road-tripping friend "Trippa" gave me all of the warning signs before I left, and I probably should have taken them as a bad omen, but of course I chose to ignore them. (In case you've forgotten, Trippa is my maroon Honda Accord.) I guess you could call this particular Life of Kai story, "Slippery Trippa's Tale".

Trippa, my trusty little road-tripping Honda Accord, had just begun acting up. The clutch had been "about ready to go" for about five years without any real problems. Unfortunately, right before leaving, I made the most grievous of consumer errors and asked a mechanic to take a look at it. He assured me that my crepe-like clutch plate might as well be made of buttered toast for all the grip it had and that I would never make it up another hill. Of course, once he'd had his hands on it he was right. As I drove away the clutch was already slipping. I cursed the man and all of his ilk, whom I could only imagine were a coven of witches who used their skills to toy with powerless vehicle owners. There was no way I was going to let him get the best of me. I would drive all the way to Houston just as a slap in the face to this cretin.

Of course, leaving Austin was not without its own perils. My somewhat cowardly motivation was to avoid my girlfriend Wendy's family inquisition. They had been looking for something to do for the weekend and decided to pour into Austin like angry army ants. I had managed to survive my few brief skirmishes with small numbers of them in the past, but the idea of interrogation by a larger force was quite daunting. I also knew that my joblessness and newly purpled hair wasn't going to help my case any and so I was racing to pack up my car and was almost ready to bolt when they suddenly arrived at the door.

I hugged. I smiled. I shook hands (theirs). I shook knees (mine). I listened patiently to wartime stories and dodged dangerous questions that snapped and sizzled in like a sniper's potshots. It was only with my ambiguous mission to Houston and a fabricated deadline for arrival as my ally that I finally managed to make an escape and slip out the door.

As it turns out, Wendy was actually at her office. This was to be one of my final stops on the way out of town. I headed directly to her desk and began describing the previous scene at the house. She started to laugh but before she had time to decide whether to think it was funny or punch me for my insolence, the entire crew (including grandparents) arrived at her door in hopes of seeing what this hard working girl did for a living. I'm not sure who was more surprised to see whom, but I felt like an escaping POW caught in a searchlight. I grinned some more. I shook some more. I darted for the exit while firing rounds of "late! Late!" behind me.

I had originally planned to stop by the house that Wendy and I were working on but now that the troops were on the move it was their next most likely destination. I wasn't going to risk the chance of another run in. I gave Trippa a good long drink and motored for the highway, certain that freedom was assured. It had taken me some time to get ready to travel and when I passed the city limits the sun and the city lights were already waving goodbye.

Now while I didn't have a great deal of guilt about my flight, apparently Trippa did not share my feelings. I managed to drive smoothly for about an hour but it was as though there were a long rubber band pulling us back to Austin. The further we got, the more Trippa slowed and slid and puttered. I tapped at the clutch and played with the accelerator and managed to get a little further down the road, but finally the rubber band grew taught. As I crawled up the final hill, the engine could no longer connect with the wheels and at last spun freely, uselessly against the climb. I pulled to the side of the road and examined my surroundings.

I looked up at the night sky. The stars were plentiful and beautiful. There weren't any distracting lights to interfere with their brilliance and they stood out like millions of bright little points of hope. That could mean only one thing. I was hopelessly lost in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

I examined my options but it didn't take very long. It was a pretty short list. I could either walk several miles into the dark in either direction, hoping that in some tiny town of three people and two cows one of the people might be awake, or I could wait until morning. I've spent a good part of my life camping and sleeping in cars so I took the later option and figured it would be good to catch a few winks. The car clock read 12:30 AM when I cranked back the seat and rolled myself in my leather jacket.

The same clock read 2:30 AM when I was jolted awake by a sharp siren chirp and a blinding white light. I heard footsteps and I fumbled to sit upright. My blood was furiously trying to refill my veins and my brain was struggling to locate exits.

"This is the state highway patrol," said a deep voice from behind the light.

Now Austin is a pretty progressive town. Outside of its protective hills, rivers and city light, however, lies a much larger Texas fatherland that adheres to tradition. There are many traditions that keep Texas stable and strong in their resistance to change through time, and there is none more sacred than the hating of Hippies.

As a Yankee from Chicago I must admit that I had only seen this behavior in movies or read about it in books. I wasn't a believer. What could it possibly matter that I had goofy sprout-like hair and purple fingernails? Apparently, it meant all the difference in the quite-large state of Texas.

I rubbed my eyes and pulled myself up out of the car and into the blazing spotlight. It felt a little like one of those dreams where you are suddenly on stage and naked in front of crowd of strangers.

"Hi there!" I said. "My clutch gave out and so I figured that I would sleep here until morning and then walk to a phone." I was squinting into the light and I could just make out two beefy figures in cowboy hats looking me up and down. One had a flashlight in his hand that looked like a club. He held it up at shoulder height and used the light to paint me up and down. The other stood almost motionless. Both had necks the size of spare tires. They looked as beefy as the bulls they probably wrestled every morning.

"Is there any chance you could loan me a cell phone so I could call for a ride?" I asked. "My friend is waiting for me in Houston." They ignored me and moved forward to peer into my vehicle. The silent, motionless one kept his eyes locked on me like a cat hunting a small bird, waiting for the smallest indication of flight. I put my hands well in view and tried not to make any sudden gestures. No simple task for someone like me. Maybe, I thought, they were like the Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park who could only see movement.

"Look", I said, "sir, I really just need a phone."

"Got any illegal drugs in there we should know about?" the more animated one asked, finally speaking.

"No," I said, surprised, then, "No.", with more finality. It was clear neither of them believed me. He continued to scrutinize the interior of the car as though a single overlooked strand of hair was just the clue he was looking for.

"You sure you don't have any drugs. Guns. Knives," he asked, as though I may have forgotten some grocery bag full of contraband in the back seat. I tried to remember if I had any salt or baking soda that they might be able to use as evidence against me.

"No. Nothing." This time I was more confident.

They looked for a while longer, including under the car, while continuing to grill me about illegal drugs. At last they took my license and papers and, after an extremely long examination of the photo, went back to the car to consult. I took no chances of stirring them up and sat on the trunk facing them, directly in the light. I kept my hands open and out in front of me, trying to look as natural as possible. I didn't move. I wondered if assuming a lotus position would indicate passivity and unlikeliness to flee, or verify that I was some kind of freak. After what seemed like an hour, they turned on the patrol car's interior light and analyzed my license still further. After spending no small amount of time on this task they began to argue briefly and then shrug their shoulders. The light went out and I waited for another ten minutes. At last they emerged.

"What's the number," said the moving one. He held a cell phone in his hand. I told him and he dialed it and then handed me the phone without moving forward. I stepped forward, took it carefully from his hand and waited for it to ring. There was total silence. No one moved.

"Hello?" Ori's mother answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Hi! Mrs. Sofer! It's Kai. Is Ori home?" I tried not to sound nervous. I felt like this was the officers' final test of my story. If she didn't play along, I was fair game for target practice.

"Hello? Who is this? It's three o'clock in the morning. Do you know what time it is?"

"Uh. yes. My car broke down. I'm trapped just outside of..."

"What kind of a person calls at three o'clock in the morning? What kind of a person would do that?" I wasn't sure what to say. I was terrified that she was going to hang up or, worse, continue lecturing me.

"Could I please speak with Ori?" In the background I heard shouting.

"Orrrrrri. someone is calling for you. Someone has woken us up to talk to you. Orrriiiii." I waited.

"Hello?" The sound of my friend's voice sent waves of relief through me. "Dude! Hey, I'm stuck out here halfway to Houston. My car broke down. I."

"Do not have a conversation." I jumped as one of the two iron giants standing next to me moved forward and shouted. I looked up at the two pairs of eyes glaring at me from under large cowboy hats and atop massive necks. I looked at their leather belts loaded with clubs and guns. I did my best not to have a conversation.

I quickly determined that there was a gas station nearby and that Ori and I could meet there. The officers were not happy about having to carry my carcass to town, despite the fact that, as highway patrol, they could not possible be going anywhere else. They thoroughly searched me and all of the bags I wanted to bring with me, continuing all the while to make me insist that there was nothing I "needed to tell them about".

The ride to the gas station was a long one, the car filled only with the sounds of my weak attempts at conversation.

"So. anything interesting happen tonight?"

"No."

"You guys always work this late shift?"

"No."

"What do you think of those new police cars?"

All I received in reply were shrugs from the driver. The mute was in the passenger seat and was, as always, motionless until we reached the gas station. As soon as we pulled in he stepped out of the car and strode quickly to the store. The other officer had to open my door so I managed to say thanks and make an attempt at shaking his hand. He made brief contact, refused to look up at me, and darted for the door. I sighed and dropped my bags and myself onto a wet park bench nearby to wait. Now all I had to do was figure out how to get my car back to Austin.

The adventures in Houston were light. I had to dodge Ori's mother in order to avoid further scolding for calling at such an outrageous hour. We spent time with a friend of Ori's whom he had once sworn never to see again. He swore never to see her again. I wrote some music and we visited some decent art exhibits. Finally it was time to take care of business.

I knew that getting a tow truck to move Trippa an hour back into Austin was out of the question. The price would be astronomical. I attempted to contact my insurance company to find out what kind of coverage I had and ended up in a two hour conversation with a lot of Muzak and, finally, a nice insurance girl from Tucson. The maximum that my insurance would cover was $50. I thanked my kindly phone hostess and ducked out to do some more research.

As it turns out, U-haul had a little tow dolly for pulling cars that only cost $48, so we were in luck! We headed down to the U-haul and hooked it up to Ori's truck.

The tow dolly was actually kind of like a little ramp with wheels. There was one wheel on either side, like a Roman chariot. Just behind each wheel was a little ramp that went up to a platform with two slots, one on each side. The idea was that you would use the ramps to get the towed car's front wheels up into the slots and then lock them down. In order to pull the thing, a metal bar, like an arm, protruded from the front of the dolly. The arm reached forward and grabbed onto the ball hitch sticking out of the rear of Ori's truck. (A ball hitch looks like a metal golf ball sitting on the back bumper.)

I noticed at the time that the arm itself, leading back to the trailer, was up on a steel tripod. The salesman waited until the truck was lined up, and then swung the arm onto the ball hitch behind Ori's truck in one swift motion. If I had looked a little closer, I might have noticed that he had to lift it a bit by hand to get it in place, but of course these important little details get lost when signing papers and squinting at small print.

Next we hit the highway and tried to locate my car. In the dark the total lack of landscape features made it hard to remember where I had left Trippa, but the same lack of landmarks made it easier to spot her as she was the only distinct object for miles in any direction. Sadly, she was a little too obvious and my first observation was the broken rear window, missing radio, and missing tools. The next observation I made was even more fun.

How it hadn't occurred to us before is somewhat of a mystery to me. The tow dolly that we had located was designed to pull cars behind moving vans when dragging one's belongings across the country. Remember those little ramps? One of the fundamental assumptions behind this device was that the car could be driven up the ramps. To make matters worse, my car had quit because I was trying to drive up a slope. In order to get it up onto the dolly we would have to push the car uphill. Luckily, Ori and I are mental giants. We rolled the car backwards down the hill until we hit a reasonably flat spot and backed the truck down to meet it. Now all we had to do was lift the car.

At first we tried to figure out a way to pull Trippa, but we didn't have any winches or strong enough ropes. We tried simple grunting and pushing, but all of our initial attempts to simply ease the car up onto the ramps failed. We were clearly going to need a little bit more momentum.

Now before I go on I should point out that in any story of this kind, there is always a defining moment in which the bad decision is made. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine at which point this moment occurred.

We decided to back down the shoulder a little further in order to obtain more speed. I sat halfway out of the driver's side window so that I could see the wheels and make sure they lined up with the ramps. Ori pushed. He ran the car forward, building up speed as we got closer and closer to the ramps until I heard the chunk of the wheels hitting metal and stopping. I crammed on the brake with my right toe and looked down. The tires were only halfway up the ramp. At that instant, Ori, who was not expecting the car to stop, collided with the back of the car with two loud thumps. One was his chest. The second was his face. Ori backed away laughing and moaning and holding his nose. I let go of the brake and eased the car back down. We pushed Trippa back to the starting point and tried again.

This time Ori managed to give it a little more muscle and we got even closer to the top. The rubber of Trippa's tires was almost to the edge of the dolly's platform. The instant we stopped I squeezed on the brake with all my toe's strength to hold the car where it was. Ori was still pushing from behind. I could hear him panting and then he yelled out, "Put on the parking brake and come help me push!"

Now, during the actual event it took a couple of seconds for the wisdom of this statement to sink in. I'll give you a few seconds as well. Let's back up a moment.

"Put on the parking brake and come help me push!" It was much harder to hold the brake, let alone breathe, when laughing so hard.

For the next trial we decided to switch positions. This time I pushed and Ori got in the driver's window. We backed up about twice as far as we had in the last attempt. I checked that he was ready, and started pushing and running forward with all of my might. She started slowly, but within a few seconds Trippa was silently speeding towards the waiting ramps. I kept pushing and accelerating and Ori began making minor course adjustments.

"Keep going," he screamed. I could see the orange of the ramps ahead in the dark. I locked in on them and dug my feet into the asphalt. Seconds later came the squeak of impact as the rubber tires hit the metal ramps and the weight of the car became suddenly tremendous as it shot up the ramps and then, crazily, mysteriously, became. light.

You may have seen a young bird learning to fly. You may remember the first time you hit a big mogul skiing, or built ramps for a BMX bike or skateboard. You probably felt like you were flying. Trippa wanted to fly too. Unfortunately Trippa's flight was less like that of a young bird or a skier, and much more like that of, well, a 3000 pound car. The beauty and majesty of the brief airborne experience ended in the crunching, grinding, scraping, and screaming of metal on metal. I watched in horror as the car scraped forward and then stopped, sitting like a teeter-totter halfway across the front of the tow dolly and inches from the back of the truck.

Things were not looking good.

Ori was OK, although it took him several minutes to stop laughing long enough to climb out of the window. The doors were pinned shut by the sides of the trailer. We looked at the metal sculpture we had created, and then around us at the two endless ribbons of road stretching silently off into the night. Deja vu hit me as I recalled the last time I was trapped in exactly this same spot in the middle of nowhere.

Neither vehicle was, of course, capable of taking us anywhere under the current circumstances. We realized that if we were ever going to get out of this mess we were going to have to either move the car back or free the truck. We did a survey of our available resources and began the process of arguing over and choosing between a number of silly to overtly stupid ideas.

We initially tried to think of ways to jack up the car to the point where we could throw it back onto the trailer. Certain that it was a work of mechanical genius, we thought that if we could jack it up high enough, when we pushed it off it would fall back onto the dolly. This method was, as one could imagine, fairly risky. It involved climbing under the less than stable car and building a platform for the jack. We also required something from which we could build the platform and there wasn't much of anything around for miles. I did manage to find a large metal sewer grate, and was convinced that I could remove it with a Swiss army knife and two sticks, but Ori was convinced that it still wouldn't give us enough height.

In the end we decided that a better (and perhaps safer) bet was to figure out how to lift the pulling arm of the tow dolly off of the ball hitch and get the truck free. We decided that using a jack was our best bet and so we set it up, under the teetering Trippa, and slowly began cranking. I held one end of the jack and Ori stood just outside of the car and worked the jack lever. Slowly the dolly's arm began rising into the air and lifting off of the ball hitch. It was almost clear when something happened. I'm not sure exactly what, because all I remember is hearing myself shout, "look out" as I dove backwards followed by a loud clang crash clang of the jack falling and the metal arm flying through the air and finally bouncing onto the pavement. We carefully looked up from our respective cowering spots several feet away, certain that we had each narrowly escaped death.

You will want to remember those looks of fear. That feeling of terror. The idea that we had escaped death. It becomes important later on in the story.

"Well, I guess that takes care of that," Ori said, slowly rising to his feet. "At least the truck is free."

We turned on Trippa's hazard lights and drove back east down the highway. We managed to find a gas station that was still open and a lady who knew a guy named Tony who did 24 hour towing. She gave him a call and it wasn't long before Tony, his son and the two of us were cruising back to the site of the damage.

The car was easy enough to spot thanks to the flashing yellow hazards. We could see them from miles away. Tony got out of the tow truck and carried a flashlight around the whole arrangement. He was a skinny guy in greasy coveralls and a cap that was rolled tight around his forehead. His son was a little kid with bed head who looked like he had just woken up and come along for the excitement. Tony took a couple of turns before returning to where we were standing and, looking back at the car, slowly drawled, "Now-- exactly how in the hell did y'all do this?"

Considering the amount of time that it took us to create our little masterpiece it took no time at all for a professional to dismantle it. He simply attached Trippa's front end to a little crane, lifted it up, and set it gently down on top of the dolly. Minutes later Trippa had her two front feet snugly in place and was resting comfortably.

The only thing remaining was that tow arm on the front of the dolly. There lay the massive tow arm that had almost killed us an hour before. We had expected Tony to lift it onto the truck's ball hitch with the tow truck but he was making all of the signs of packing up to go.

"How are we going to attach that arm," Ori whispered. "Ask him about it. He looks like he's going to leave." I paused, certain that Tony must be planning something.

"Come on," Ori whispered again, poking me. "Don't let him go without fixing it."

After several minutes, I finally broke down.

"Uh, hey, uh, don't we have to figure out a way to lift that." Just as I started speaking, Ori walked forward and looked down at the arm. Before I could finish, and just as Tony looked right at me, Ori reached down and picked up the tow arm with one hand and hefted it. It didn't weight hundreds of pounds. It wasn't even rigidly attached to the dolly.

I glanced at Tony, who was giving me a strange look. I thought back to Ori and my endless planning and manipulating as we struggled to determine the best way to lift that arm. The heated arguments over the best way to move it, arguments that threatened to end in a brawl. I shuddered as I thought back to the insane ideas that we didn't try. At this point you'll want to recall our terror and the fear on our faces as we dove for safety and the idea that we had narrowly escaped with our lives when the arm fell. I turned bright red, coughed, and then broke out laughing.

I gave Tony a couple of extra dollars for coming out so late and, though he tried to refuse it, I think I secretly hoped he would take it as a bribe not to include our names when he told his story. The tale of two morons from the city and their little car Trippa. I imagined the two humorless, beefy highway patrolmen hearing it and wondered if the mute giant would finally crack a smile.

OK, must get back to slack and the sack. I'm sure I'm behind on my napping... Keep that email coming!

Love,

Kai