We woke up, and I asked Jon if he wanted to stay in New Brunswick. I told him I most certainly did not. He agreed. And we were off, immediately and without looking back, away from the shitland that is New Jersey. On the way out I told him we should just dive bomb the van into Brooklyn and figure things out when we get there. The important point here, from my perspective, was to keep moving - particularly away from Jersey. Jon, being the compliant, shrugged his shoulders and said, "okay,"
An hour or so later we reached the Holland tunnel, an absolute master piece of civil engineering. The road and toll booths that led into the tunnel however, were not so intricately planned. Coming off the freeway, we haphazardly wandered onto a 10 lane street, that really was supposed to be a 6 lane street (I think), which was full of waving lines of cars that didn't seem to have any particular order or plan in mind. Moving at about 42 FPH (feet per hour), we crawled and powered our way through blocked intersections, swerving motorcycles, and creeping smart-cars which tried to wedge themselves into every ass-crack of a gap they could find.
We managed to squeeze ourselves about 6 cars back from the toll booth, which was relieving because we were low on gas and I didn't want to try and exit off the street to one of the Jersey gas stations that lined the entry to the tunnel, not to mention getting back into this nightmare. I was oddly glad I was driving the van. I thought beforehand that it was going to be a nightmare to drive it in New York, particularly in situations like this, but I found that I was mildly amused that I could shove cars aside using the "I'll fucking hit you," scare technique -
The "I'll fucking hit you," technique was primarily comprised of just driving at someone very very slowly until they realized they were in a tiny expensive car and were afraid to be run over/crushed. Of course, this feeling of dread could be amplified by squinting one of your eyes, pursing your lips, and scrunching your nose every so slightly to the side, achieving that determined, yet insane look. The crazy gaze, when paired with a huge van, terrifies people: when a driver looks up into the van's menacing grill bearing down upon them, and as they slowly edge their line of sight upward towards the gaze, they realize, startlingly, that it's being driven by a crazy person and their life might be about to end. They will get the fuck out of the way.
6 cars back from the booth, and with our spot secured, I was staring at the gas gauge wondering if it was going to hold out, or if we were going to have to run the gauntlet of drive-by fuck you's that would no doubt ensue if we stalled in the tunnel. A soft thud woke me from my mindless daydreaming in fuck-you land as the van rocked back and forth a few times.
"Oh, what was that?" I asked Jon. He stuck his head out the window and looked backwards.
He brought his head back into the van and replied, "Some guy just hit us."
"Really?" I said, laughing. He nodded. I shrugged, I didn't really care about the van's paint, and I couldn't muster up enough concern about a .25 mph crash. The point is, that fucker wasn't going to push me out of the spot, and I felt pretty confident that my 1982 G20 Chevy van could take a piss on his Lexus after kicking the nuts and bolts out of it's tail pipe.
He did, however, mind, that he had hit me and came up to our window to share his feelings with us through our window. His sharing included raised arms and a question, "why'd you hit me?" he asked.
"What are you talking about," I replied, "you fucking hit us."
"Well, you were trying to cut," he shot back.
"We're not moving, no ones moving, except you." I laughed and let him angrily stomp back to his car. Shortly thereafter he decided to just launch into the mess, and floored it ahead of us through some gap where he was quickly barricaded in and trapped in a swarm of cars.
We limped our way through the tunnel and emerged, unfortunately, on the lower west side of Manhattan on a Saturday night: I know, poor planning, or none really. Stuck in traffic, we started, somewhat desperately, searching with what means we had to find a gas station. We had a GPS, and the GPS had a "gas" button, and that was about the extent of our resources.
The first place it led us to was non-existent. Luckily, that spot was on a main corridor on the lower west side, so it only took us 15 minutes to explore it. The next spot the GPS told us to go was a little more complicated, about 5 blocks from Union Square which meant heavy traffic - not a good thing when your gas gauge dropped below the E an hour earlier. Without much of a choice we decided to give it a shot. Worst case: we could easily push the van faster than traffic, so it wouldn't be as bad as the van dying in the tunnel. Between staring at my gas gauge, and having a man walk up to the van and ask us if he could take our picture because we looked like Cheech and Chong, we made it.
We took a 30 minute break, enjoying our free parking on the lower east side. We got some fuel, next step: find the Brooklyn bridge. We decided to ask a cop the best way to get to the bridge, and he told us while giving us the your-a-fucking-idiot look after he realized we were driving. We got over the bridge without an incident, and began rolling around Brooklyn at about 11 or midnight.
To be honest, I wasn't really sure where to go, so I told Jon I was just going to drive around for a little bit until we found something promising. We stopped at a McDonald's for about 25 minutes to steal some of their internet, and without really much aid from that, we continued our wandering. After about 20 minutes later, after noticing 150 orthodox Jews marching around in full garb, I figured out that it was Yom Kippur. Considering the only two type of neighborhoods we were finding were Jewish and Ghetto-as-shit, I didn't think we were going to find much of anything to do at midnight, so we went to Queens...
It was already about 2am when we reached Queens and I was tired. I didn't feel like wandering around anymore and I didn't really know where the fuck we were anyway, so I told Jon I'm going to give it about 15 more minutes for something amazing to happen. Nothing did. And instead of staking out a spot in the city, I figured if we drove east on Long Island long enough we ought to hit some po-dunk hick town where we could crash in some parking lot. We found Hicksville, literally...and drove a bit south from there to some acceptable rednecky place where we parked next to a row of houses and called it a night so that we could have a decent amount of energy the next to tear apart Brooklyn.
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