The Art of the Road Trip

Three days in the city

There are a lot of things I don’t have a clue about, automotive repair and the female orgasm being the most troublesome from a day-to-day standpoint.

One thing I do have down pat is the road trip, whether it be a spur of the moment weekend excursion to a well-known destination or a long, drifting sojourn across unexplored regions of the great American West. This past weekend, a few friends and I dropped into New York City for whirlwind tour of the world’s capital, so I find it only fitting that I now use this didactic experience to share with you the specific keys of making your future road trips as intellectually stimulating and spiritually satisfying as ours.

First of all, the trip must take longer than five hours and no matter how many people you bring along for the ride (say four, for example), it helps if they are all of the same gender, since including those of the opposite sex will limit the conversation in certain unforeseen ways (more on this later). All occupants should be more or less unemployed and nearing the final dredges of their bank accounts. Ideally, occupants should also hold college degrees that only prove they’ve spent a lot of money and not that their maturity or intellect has risen one nano-particle since high school when their most cherished accomplishment involved autographing a beer-bong called “Diddy”.

The chosen method of transportation should obviously be the most dilapidated car available to any one of the travelers and certainly must have over one hundred thousand miles on the odometer. The vehicle need not be “broken-down” per se, as no one wants to be stuck waiting for Triple-A in Nedbeattysassindeliverance, Pennsylvania. However, the automobile should be missing minor pieces that prove truly annoying during a long car ride: cup holders torn out, the flip covers missing for the mirrors above the driver and passenger, a rearview mirror torn free. That kind of thing.

The conversation during the trip must be as painfully crass and inane as the occupants can tolerate. Discussion must be limited to sex, bowel movements, fellatio, and theoretical devices that could allow one to combine two or more of these activities (a system of pulleys perhaps?). You must also sit in traffic, possibly just before the George Washington bridge, for more than an hour, during which time it will be one person’s job to stand sentry for attractive members of the opposite sex in other moribund vehicles and one person’s job to ridicule this sentry for clearly scanning only for attractive members of the same sex. The driver should bitch ceaselessly about how much this traffic sucks, and should there be a third passenger (as was the case with us) it is his job to periodically use his Brutus the Buckeye neck pillow to bat at the driver’s crotch, so as to increase the driver’s road rage and thus the possibility that he might take aggressive action and ramp over a concrete barrier to get them out of this traffic.

The destination must be the claustrophobic apartment of an old friend in a city that is out of your league both monetarily and socially, and it truly helps if this friend is known in the group as the “crazy one” or the “ridiculous one” or the “one who once walked naked through a house party with his hands on his hips, defiantly barking at other guests, ‘What? What are you looking at? I can’t make it grow.’” This friend should undoubtedly have a live-in girlfriend, who has chosen to escape town for the weekend, much to her benefit, as the first thing this friend says to you upon pulling into town is something to the effect of, “Hey, Markley, you look like you haven’t had a good fist in your ass for a while.”

During your stay, several things must, as the kids say, go down. First and foremost, you and your friends must watch a mutually favorite sports team lose a very important game in a very important series (perhaps the NBA finals), so that you’re forced to spend the next three days dissecting, digesting and speculating as to what went wrong with more thoroughness and passion than th bi-partisan commission spent examining the intelligence failures behind the attacks of September 11th. By the time you’re done, it should be more likely that a terrorist will defy every military and law enforcement agency and successfully strike the United States than that you would lose game 2 if the owner made you this team’s head coach.

Also, at some point you must run into an attractive blonde from Texas in a bar and take turns unsuccessfully hitting on her. In fact, unsuccessful conversation with females should occupy 64% of your waking hours, followed in a distant second by jokes about the male anatomy, specifically your close friends’ male anatomies (approximately 23%).

At some point after returning home from a night on the town, you must videotape the conversation that ensues, never failing to document your friend's five-minute shouting tangent that includes a soliloquy involving accusations of improprieties with Taiwanese prostitutes, the clap, a seal’s mouth, and the final non sequitur affirmation: “…Because you know, Markley, in the end you can’t escape the monkey.”

During this profanity-laced set of hours that slip by so easily into the dawn, you must ingest as much food as possible, and hopefully the videotape will not help you document just how many calories you sucked down. Chips, pretzels, old pizza, candy, and beer are preferable. Of course, sometimes you have your druthers and sometimes you don’t. In this case, you must be willing to wolf down wet cattle afterbirth like it’s ice cream because likely that will be the quality of food available to you in your friend’s refrigerator. You must be willing to ingest substances not considered edible by FDA standards, such as a frozen chicken burrito the occupants of the apartment have been trying to give away since they first moved in and found it lying in the back of the freezer. The “chicken” part of the burrito must necessitate ironic quotation marks when written, and you must melt some type of cheese on it. Any and all food substances must then sit in your stomach for at least 48 hours and arouse the sensation of giving birth to a pronghorn antelope calf when finally evacuated.

Finally, the trip should conclude with some type of bizarre encounter on the return drive home, either by crossing paths with the missing girlfriend at a random gas station on interstate 80 or by having directions solicited from you by an elderly gentleman with a pet raccoon perched on his shoulder (or both).

By keeping these simple, relatively universal concepts in mind, you can guarantee you and your friends an exciting, challenging and highly satisfying road trip experience. It’s probably some of the best advice I can give you because it’s best to live like you’re young while you’re young.

Or, as a great sage and raconteur I once knew put it, “’Cause you know, Markley, in the end, you can’t escape the monkey.”