Tuesday, January 12, 2010

LA Stories: Manifest Destiny Part 1

Leaving was surprisingly not the hardest part.
Bravado and Novelty are wonderful anesthesia.
Like a successful surgery, I didn't feel much until it was all over. Just a little pressure. You may feel a pinch, or a pulling sensation. This is all perfectly normal.
The hard part is post-surgery. When you try to adapt to life now that you're missing an important piece of yourself.
The Hard Part keeps showing up and WHAM over the head, and I think, "OK, THIS is the hard part, right here," but it's not the hard-EST part... The hard part hits you at IKEA when you break down crying in the mattress department because you wish you hadn't sold YOUR bed. It comes when you're driving in the ever-present bumper-to-bumper traffic and just missing your mom and knowing she's missing you too and there's not a damn thing in the world that'll help except time. The slow eventual numbing of pain. Like a chronic disease you can't cure, but you can only "manage it." A carrier for life.
But I digress.
The purpose of this is to chronicle How I Got Here and What I'm Doing, so if I full-on lose it later on there will be a record of my slow decent into Madness. Or, as I like to call it, "LA."
...
Jaime and I pulled out of my driveway at 11:30 in the morning on May 28th, and by 3:30pm we were on our way out of Florida. Things were downright uneventful throughout most of the day, and we began to look for out-of-state license tags on other cars along the highway. His brother made us a road-trip CD, and we listened to it. La la la, we sang. California, here we come!

We ploughed through Alabama, where I was convinced that I'd lived for 2 years of my early life. Called my mom and discovered that I was wrong, and I'd never lived in Alabama, ever.

The plan was to stop in Louisiana for the night, and as we were driving though Covington, I became hungry for some Cajun food. The sun was setting and I could see the pink and purple rays of the dying light reflecting in the waters of the bayou. Beautiful. I wondered how many alligators were watching the cars go by along the highway and just dreaming of the days when a tourist gets out to pee in the dark. Traffic was moving along at a good pace, but down the road about a mile we could see the flashing yellow and blue lights of a police cruiser and construction equipment. We slowed, and slowed, and came to a gradual stop in the right lane of the two lane highway. I was talking about my sudden and intense craving for jambalaya, or gumbo.
The truck behind us somehow missed all those lights, and the slowing down, and did not attempt to stop until it was way too late. Jay and I heard that god-awful sound of tires squealing against asphalt, and we saw the truck barreling down behind us, fishtailing and way too close way too fast. We were going to get rear-ended. We were going to get rear-ended, we were going to get thrown into the car in front of us, airbags would pop, our car would be totaled, and, both of us without insurance, would wind up with shoulder, back and neck injuries. The trip would be ruined- we'd have to go back to Florida to recover from our injuries. Years of physical therapy, thousands of dollars in x-rays and MRI's. Just like what happened to me 5 years ago. Why God Why.
Somehow, though, my Hero saw the truck too, and heard the screaming tires, and had the foresight to leave enough room between his car and the car in front of us, and he floored our Eclipse into the right-hand lane in the nick of time- the truck slammed through the empty space where we had just been, and continued on to slam into the car that had been in front of us, which slammed into the car in front of them. The squeal, the sonic-boom double-crunch of metal slamming into metal. That sound has been in my nightmares for years, and here it was again, 4 feet away from us. Airbags were deployed; back neck and shoulder injuries were distributed. All this happened right in front of the Highway Patrol Car, so, since Help was there and Jaime could tell that no one was seriously hurt, we moved on with traffic. I was literally shaking in my seat as my body had flooded itself with adrenaline and freak-out juice. It wasn't us. It wasn't me this time- it was someone else. I was OK. The tiger pounced, and it wasn't me.
This absolutely made me feel sure that we were in the right place at the right time. And even is we weren't, my clever and amazing husband saved us.
Oh, and if that isn't enough to make you a believer, after I calmed down, Jay suggested I call Mike Mayhall, our friend from Universal and Sea World, to get a recommendation of a good Cajun place to eat. Mike had moved to LA some years ago, but he knows his gumbo. We called Mike. He answered. He was 15 minutes down the highway from us, about to eat at a Cajun restaurant, did we want to join him? Yes, yes, I believe we did. And we did. And I ate jambalaya, gumbo, and red beans and rice, and oysters, and had a massive beer the size of a human head. The meal of a tiger-escapee. It tasted like Awesome.

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