Do you have a few minutes? This is going to take a while. Settle in. Relax. Fix yourself a negroni. Or two.

Let’s get the poker out of the way. I got nuthin’. Real poker players don’t tell bad beat stories. So, I got nuthin’ for ya. I thought I played well both days. I have zero to show for it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Enough card troubles, let’s talk about car troubles.

Ruth often chides me that I love my car more than I love her, my family, and my dog, which is, of course, patently false. Obviously, I love my family more than my car. I just… I just love my car different.

I mean, my car doesn’t hog the duvet or keep me up with its snoring. And my car doesn’t bust my ass about my ineptitude with technology. And my car doesn’t eat grass and then puke all over our most expensive carpet.

It was love at first sight. We met on the lot. A shiny new 2011 midnight blue 128i convertible. Loaded. I kicked her tires and she kicked mine, if you know catch my drift. (I hope you do. I have no idea what that’s even a euphemism for.) But I can tell you this. She came home with me.

Almost 16 years later, and the bloom has never left the rose.

***

I noticed in Kahnawake that something was leaking out my car. I later found out the liquid was coolant, which apparently does something in the engine. The engine is at the front.

Fred, the very nice 400-pound lumberjack-man who runs the auto shop at my hotel/gas station/depanneur/diner said I should leave the car there and take the train home. He worried for my safety, nice man.

Bob at Canadian Tire, who was born to wear the red triangle nametag on his shirt, said the car would never get me home in that condition.

What do they know, right?

I called my poker partner, Domenic. Domenic is as Italian as Stracciatella. He knows how to make a traditional red sauce, and he knows other shit, too. I put my money on an Italian every time. He said get in the car and go. He said I should stop at every OnRoute on the way home and let the car cool down for ten or fifteen minutes and I’d be fine.

That made the most sense to me.

Other than the fact that I knew I’d have to eat something at every pitstop.

As one does.

I stopped at the first OnRoute at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield. All good. Ingleside, all good. I stopped at the third one, Mallorytown. By this time, I’d eaten a Tim Horton’s bagel BLT, a Burger King spicy chicken sandwich, two coffees, a bottomless diet coke, a bag of zesty ranch veggie crisps, and a packet of jalapeno beef jerky.

I gained 11 pounds in a little under two hours.

Just as I was leaving Mallorytown my car whined like a little bitch. And then she shut down.

I called CAA and asked if they could tow me back to Toronto so I could sell my baby.

The nice woman told me that I had two choices. I could keep my present CAA membership status which gives me 10 free kilometers and then pay $4.50 per kilometer after that. The 317 kilometer tow would cost a mere $1381.50.

Or, she said I could upgrade my status to “premium” and get 320 kilometers at no cost which would just barely cover the 317 kilometer trip and the tow would be free.

How much to upgrade, I asked, cringing.

Nine dollars.

Hmmmmm. What to do. What to do.

***

Chris from CAA showed up an hour and a half later with a flat bed tow-truck the length of a city block.

“Y’Sure you brought a big enough truck there, Chris”?

He laughed, as he towed my tiny car onto the huge flatbed.

I climbed way up into the passenger cabin of his massive vehicle and settled in. Chris and I were going to be roommates for the next four and a half hours. Or so I thought. (foreshadowing) So we might as well get to know each other.

He’s short-ish and thin-ish and bald-ish and he’s been driving a tow truck for ten years and before that he drove a dump truck for twenty, and he’s 50 and he has a 33 year-old son and he’s married to his second wife and he likes motorcycles and camping and… whoa… back up a sec there Chris.

You’re 50 and you have a 33 year-old son?

Yup, knocked up his high-school sweetheart, and the two Catholics did the right thing and got married and had the kid. And got divorced a year later.

He asked if I had kids and I told him two boys 28 and 25. He said “So you musta had kids early too, you’re my age?” Maybe that flattery was his way of securing a tip at the end of the day. If so, it worked like a charm.

I explained to Chris that the difference in our ages was the same as the difference between him and his son. He thought about that a second and exclaimed “You could be my dad!” I winced because, in theory, it was true. And in practise, well, stranger things have happened…

And Chris plays poker! Loves it! Plays tournaments at the casino in Gananoque all the time. We were going to get along just fine.

Chris has never been to Vegas, but he was very curious about it and when I told him I’d been there over 100 hundred times in my life, he had so many questions. Most of them revolved around “The Bunny Ranch”. I told him I’d never been, but he figured anyone who’d been to Vegas that many times must be an expert on “The Bunny Ranch” so the questions kept coming anyway. He did want to know about the hotels, and the poker, and the shows, but he really wanted to hear about “The Bunny Ranch”.

Chris would like to win the lottery and buy a place in The Dominican because “there are not so many liberals there”.

Chris told me that he likes working for CAA and he likes the other drivers, but he feels some of the younger drivers aren’t that well-trained, especially the “new Canadians”.

I don’t get it. It’s fine to have your unevolved, sexist, racist, views but why would a guy that white talk to a guy he just met who looks like me and talk as if we were a couple of old buddies leaving a KKK meeting together? Presumptuous, much? Shouldn’t he just assume I’m a Jewish intellectual libtard and keep his unprogressive mouth shut?

But, if my dad taught me anything, it’s not to judge others. And especially don’t judge them when you’re in the passenger seat and they screaming down the highway doing 120 clicks at the wheel of a vehicle the size of a mountain range.

And listen, Chris is not evil. He’s just insulated. He grew up in Smith Falls and got as far as Prescott, Ontario where he lives with his new wife. He’s good at his job and he works his ass off, and she does too, and they live in a 700 square foot apartment for $1000 a month and still live paycheck to paycheck. That’s what he told me. I was going to suggest that maybe a few less tattoos would stretch his bank account some, but I decided against it.

Anyway, around Whitby a bunch of lights on his dashboard suddenly light up like a slot machine and Chris carefully pulls off the highway as the vehicle slowly powers down and we come to a lilting stop in front of The Whitby Sport Hall of Fame. Who knew there was such a thing?

“This sorta thing happen a lot, Chris?”

Nope, not in ten years on the job, never.

Chris calls his manager who suspects it needs coolant. Chris wishes he had some.

“Coolant!” I screamed. “I have coolant for fuckin’ days”

I jumped up on the flatbed which is five feet off the ground while Chris watches this 67 year-old man tiptoe around the edge of the bed, and carefully open my car door while balancing in the air, and I pull out of my backseat a 2 litre carton of premium Prestone 50/50 coolant that Bob at Canadian Tire insisted I buy, and I toss it down to Chris.

Maybe Chris has never knowingly met a Jew in his life, but I will guarantee you that he’s never met a Jew with coolant!

He pours the coolant in where coolant goes and triumphantly starts the vehicle, and,,, AND… AND… nothing. Dead. Dead as Rose Kennedy.

It’s pitch dark, it’s getting cold. We’re holding up traffic in front of The Whitby Sports Hall of Fame. What do we do now, Chris.

My car is five feet in the air and with no power, Chris can’t even lower the flatbed to roll my car off back. He’s stuck and I’m stucker. We’re destined to be together for all eternity

Chris has no frame of reference for this circumstance.

Seven phone calls later, here’s the solution. CAA has to send another flatbed, just as big. We’re going to somehow back the new flatbed flush up against the old broken down one and literally roll my car from one flatbed to the other. But to do that we’re going to have to push (or pull) Chris’s vehicle off the main road to give us room to maneuver the switch.

We wait an hour until Ilyas shows up with his big rig. Ilyas is one of those “new Canadians” from Afghanistan. He’s so nice, especially to Chris. He tows Chris’s truck into the parking lot where we’re safe from oncoming traffic.

He knows that once we transfer my car from one truck to the other that Chris is going to have to wait by himself until his company sends a bigger tow truck for the tow truck (yes, that’s a thing) and he knows that Chris is going to be waiting at least four hours, if not all night, for this huge tow truck to come. Ilyas offers to go get Chris Burger King. Or water. Or charge his phone if he needs it.

Chris politely declines the new Canadian’s offers, maybe slightly more progressed than he was ten minutes ago, who knows.

The transfer of my car from one truck to the other took a while and it was cool to watch thes two professionals work together hand in glove.

And Ilyas drove me home from Whitby. He wasn’t a poker player. He was on the phone a lot (on a headset, of course) so we did]n’t converse much but he got me home safe, and we deposited my car on my driveway back where it belongs.

Montreal to Toronto in ten and a half short hours.

I think everyone learned something today.

My wife and my dog mobbed me at the door like I was BTS and they were a couple of teenaged girls.

I like my car. Now I’ll get another.

I love my family. They’re all i really need.

Thanks for reading.