Fidget, meet Ralph. Meet him at McDonald's.

When you carpool to work, the carpool's schedule is necessarily your schedule. We at SFZ have a rule: We do not deviate from the carpool schedule (leave Portland at 6:50 am, leave Salem no later than 5:00 pm) unless each and every one of us agrees to deviate from it.

And that rule works great. Unless you are like me and get the friggin' stomach flu on Monday afternoon. (Oh, by the way, for those of you who are counting, I've now had some sort of stomach virus three times this winter. See Patriot.) Because I was not about to ask the other three carpool members if they could cut their day short and leave at 12:30 pm so that I could vomit in the comfort of my own home, I looked for alternative means of transportation. What I found was the Emergency Carpool Ride Home, which I had signed up for the last time I was sick.

Well, as it turns out, the Emergency Carpool Ride Home is a taxi. A very expensive taxi. A taxi that smells a bit like stale cigarette smoke, but nonetheless is as beautiful as a shiny Rolls Royce because it is going to take me home where my bed is located.

"I'm Bill," said the taxi driver as I got in the car. "You got the stomach flu?"
"Afraid so," I said.
"Well, something's been wrong with the overdrive today," he said. "So we won't be able to go more than 60 miles per hour on the freeway, but don't worry, we'll get you there."

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Broken overdrive? Sixty miles per hour? There's not a goddamned thing wrong with the so-called "overdrive," is there, Bill? You are just going to milk a 50-mile taxi ride for as long as you possibly can.

I thought the same thing. But I was too fatigued to care. Plus, I was focusing all of my energy on not throwing up on the floor of the taxi. (I mean, I still had to ride the rest of the way home in this thing, right?) So I accepted this "overdrive" thing as more evidence that, if there is a God, I have pissed him off somehow. And as we got on the freeway, I tried to sleep.

But sleep wouldn't come. Instead, more nausea did. I had planned for this, however. Back at work, I had packed some plastic garbage bags just in case. But in my haste, I had packed clear garbage bags. Clear. This just won't do, I thought. I'll be damned if I'm going to ralph in this baggie and then have to look at it the rest of the way home, like a friggin' goldfish from the pet store. By then we were in the right lane, behind someone's grandma, driving something like 58 miles per hour.

"Can you take the next exit?" I asked Bill. "I think I'm going to throw up."

Bill's shoulders tightened. He sat up straight. I heard a thud (his foot slamming the pedal to the floor) and an immense "vroooom" (the engine racing). The inertia pushed my body backward. Bill changed lanes. He passed grandma, and he kept going. Faster, faster, faster. Now we're in the left lane. We're passing more cars. I can just see the digital speedometer over Bill's right arm; it reads "65 mph"

"Hold on," Bill said as we veered off the freeway like a rocket-ship. He scanned the horizon for potential toilets. He lifted his index finger from the white knuckle on the steering wheel and pointed: "I'll take you to the Chevron station," he said. But I suggested McDonald's so that I wouldn't have to get a key. He nodded quickly. "Yeah, yeah. They do make you get a key at the gas station, don't they."

Moments later, I was in the McDonald's restroom. The details are unimportant. But what is important is that, when I came back out, Bill was still waiting for me in the taxi. I was a little surprised that he hadn't just abandoned me, as I would have been tempted to do. But as I got back in the car, I noticed that the meter was running. Of course.

Anyway, my stomach felt considerably better. And as we got back on the freeway, Bill pointed out that my urgent need to vomit had yet another silver lining: "The overdrive actually worked," he said. "That's the strangest thing. It hasn't worked all day."

[photo by mikebaird]