There's a TV commercial I'm sick of seeing where a woman in the front seat of a car is describing for two people in the back what they can expect at the restaurant they're headed for, which is horrible enough to cause the two passengers to open the door and leap out of the car as it goes down the street. As they roll on the pavement just before springing to their feet, a message is superimposed at the bottom of the screen that says DO NOT ATTEMPT.
Really? Ya think? Or maybe a better question would be, who in their right mind would try that?
There was one time when I was in the front seat of a car being driven by my friend Marcy. We were on our way home from a party, going down Austin Boulevard at a good clip because it was very late and there was no traffic at all. I had been carrying a postcard around with me for two days, forgetting to mail it. As we were going past Morton East High School, Marcy started to brake for the stop light at 24th Street, which was red. That's when I spied a mailbox on the corner to my right. "Oh, look!" I exclaimed. "There's a mailbox!"
At that moment, the stop light turned green, then two things happened at exactly the same time: Marcy took her foot off the brake, and I opened the door and got out of the car. I loped over to the mailbox, deposited the post card, and then turned to where I thought the car should be, but it was not there. I panicked just a little bit, wondering if my friend had left me alone on the streets of Cicero, Illinois, in the middle of the night, but then I saw that she had driven through the intersection and come to a stop across the street.
I ran over to the car, and as soon as I opened the door, Marcy started screaming at me. "What the hell were you doing? You just stepped out of a moving automobile! What were you thinking?" I told her quite calmly that I just wanted to mail my postcard.
I will admit, though, that I secretly do believe that if I had been sober, I'd have killed myself.
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