A Bad Idea I'm About to Do

by Chris Gethard

  My parents recently asked me to remove a bunch of belongings I had stored in their basement. I spent hours sifting through old junk and eventually stumbled upon a dusty cardboard box. Inside was my top hat. My face burned with humiliation as I remembered the last night I had worn it. I threw it on the garbage pile, then reconsidered. I kept it, if only to remind myself that some dreams should remain just that.

  I was smart enough to never tell my dad this story. He would have just called it bullshit anyway.

  He would have been right. I am not White Magic.

  I Fought the Law and the Law Most Definitely Won

  I am not a stupid person. I graduated from a well-known (though overrated) college. I read The Economist (only on airplanes, but that still counts). I DVR Meet the Press (although I also DVR America’s Best Dance Crew). What I’m saying is that I’m normally a fairly intelligent person who doesn’t actively look for stupid situations to get involved in, or who revels in his own stupidity. I think that’s what makes the depths of my occasional stupidity that much more profound.

  For example, I once microwaved a plate and a metal fork, and didn’t know this was a problem until a slowly rotating ball of flame erupted inside my appliance.

  “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” my roommate yelled as he opened the door and saw the microwave on fire. I was watching reruns of Beverly Hills 90210.

  “Shut up, it’s the season where Brandon’s dating that racist girl,” I answered.

  I once drank an entire cup of pinto beans thinking it was some sort of soup. It was not soup. It was a cup of beans, companion to the rice I had previously consumed. I drank the liquid surrounding the beans from the cup directly, as if it were a broth. This was stupid both in that (a) I don’t know the difference between beans and soup and (b) I don’t use spoons.

  Years ago I was walking with my friend Kevin on a hot day in Manhattan, when I made an observation that turned into yet another stunning display of my occasional idiocy.

  “It seems like the city’s always cooler than Jersey,” I said. “I wonder why that is.”

  “Oh,” he answered. “We have this law here. If you have an air conditioner facing into your apartment, you’re required to have a second one facing out to cool the street.”

  “That,” I answered, quite seriously, “is the smartest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  He stopped in shock. Disappointment washed over his face.

  “I was kidding, you fucking fool,” he said.

  But at best, each of these examples is a distant runner-up to what I can easily say was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. When I think of the incident in question, I try to make excuses. “I was young.” “I was overtaxed mentally.” “It’s probably good for a man to go batshit nuts once every few years.” None of these excuses hold water. Now, more than a decade after the incident occurred, I still can’t fathom what got into me.

  Of course, it had to do with a car.

  I’ve known my roommate for fifteen years.

  “I’ve never been in a car with you,” he recently told me, “without feeling like I was going to die.”

  I’ve long been convinced that when I meet my end it will in all likelihood be behind the wheel of a car. It’s not that I’m a bad driver. I think I’m actually the most highly evolved driver on the road. One day everyone else will finally understand how I drive and eventually catch up. It’s like when people say to athletes: “Oh you can’t run that distance in that time.” And then someone will do it and then, like, six other people will do it the next year and everyone will amend their comments to say, “Oh I guess it is possible after all. We can do that. Humanity has reached that point.” That is how I drive. Eventually humanity will catch up and recognize me as a pioneer, as a trendsetter. Who likes to go fast. And doesn’t really see the point in being cautious.

  Every time I’ve ever sat down in a driver’s seat and my mother is nearby, we go through the same routine. As I buckle up and adjust my mirrors, she solemnly walks to the driver’s side of the car. I roll down my window and patiently look at her.

  “Please,” she pleads, making direct eye contact, “drive carefully.”

  I ignore this request.

  A handful of amazing feats and daring accomplishments I have pulled off behind the wheel of a car that I am genuinely proud of include: driving from New Jersey to Chicago by myself without stopping for anything besides gas; a four-day stretch where if I wasn’t sound asleep I was driving, and that includes eating all of my meals behind the wheel; driving cross-country by myself in three days; making it through traffic from the Jersey Shore to Manhattan during rush hour in under forty-five minutes, achieved through a combination of dangerous weaving, a commitment to never using the brakes, and self-motivation achieved by repeatedly shouting the words “I am the King of New Jersey!” at my terrified girlfriend.

  All of these fall into that wonderful category of “either high points or very, very low points in life.” The apex of these moments, the decision that to this day I still consider my stupidest, happened when I was twenty years old.

  When I was a junior in college, Wednesdays were the stressful turning point of my week. I was taking a full course load of classes, but ambitiously decided that I could also work two full days a week forty-five minutes north of my school. I managed to pack five classes in from Monday to Wednesday, exhausting myself in the process. It was all worth it because of my job—I was the sole employee working side by side with the two owners of a magazine called Weird NJ, a journal dedicated to chronicling anything bizarre, haunted, or odd about New Jersey. I defy anyone to tell me of a cooler job they had in college.

  The Weird NJ office was in my hometown of West Orange. While that was pretty far north of Rutgers, it was only a short drive from my parents’ new house a few towns away. So each Wednesday, as I sat through night class desperately trying to stay awake, I knew that I had an hour’s drive ahead of me. By driving home at night, I’d determined I could avoid rush-hour traffic in the morning, which would allow me to get an extra half hour of sleep. Living the kind of schedule I was, the phrase “getting an extra half hour of sleep” sounded as appealing as “walking free” sounds to a prisoner or “hooking up with the lady who plays Jane Holloway on Mad Men” sounds to the modern heterosexual male.

  After my classes wrapped up a few minutes before ten, I’d give myself just enough time to grab a quick dinner; then I’d rush home and jump in the car.

  I’ve always had a very good ability to rationalize things. During those late-night drives to my parents’ house I’d often say things to myself such as “There’s not too many other cars on the road tonight, I can cut loose a bit.” Or “Since I’m so tired, it’s a responsible thing to drive really fast and get off the road sooner.” Or “It’s necessary that I speed; I’m going to have to be well-rested and at the top of my game if I am to fulfill my duty as a chronicler of New Jersey’s best ghost stories.” Regardless of my rationalizations, the point is I drove way too fucking fast.

  Of course, my behavior did have its consequences. By the time I was twenty, I’d already gotten a handful of speeding tickets and crashed a couple cars. In each case, per the laws of the state of New Jersey, I received points. Not good points, like in basketball. Bad points, like in golf. I had eleven points. Twelve points was when the state stepped in to say, “It would be safer for literally everyone else if we took away your license for the next three to five years.”

  That night, charging north on Route 287 going 80 in a 65 when I already had eleven points was already a dumb decision. But then there’s what came next.

  While my dangerous proximity to the points-based driving cutoff certainly doesn’t excuse it, I do think it helps explain my reaction when I saw the headlights of a car sitting on the highway’s median blink on as I flew past. In the split second it took for me to realize that the lights to my left could only belong to a police officer, I knew my license was going to get suspended. That’s when I took a ba
d situation brought on by my own dumb behavior and threw some dumb fuel on the dumb fire. I hit the gas.

  Without really thinking I intentionally initiated a high-speed chase with a New Jersey state trooper.

  “My mother is going to kill me,” I mumbled as I pushed the pedal to the floor.

  By the time the cop turned completely onto the road, I was driving well over 90 miles per hour and had put a considerable amount of distance between us. Unfortunately, he was game for the challenge. I looked in my rearview. As he completed his turn, he squared his car directly behind me and began catching up very, very quickly.

  Still, for some reason he didn’t turn on his sirens or lights.

  I guess that means I’m not doing anything wrong, I tried to convince myself. If his lights aren’t on....

  He was gaining ground fast, but I was coming up on the next exit, which would dump me out in a sedate, rich town called Bernardsville. I knew from my time at Weird NJ that Bernardsville was home to the Devil’s Tree, a freaky-looking tree that supposedly kills you if you touch it. More importantly, I knew that the town had a lot of desolate, dark roads. If I could just make it to the exit before the cop caught up to me, I figured, I might be able to kill some time on those dark roads and lose him for good.

  I took the exit, slowing down only as much as inertia and gravity forced me to. It was a sprawling horseshoe exit that looped around wide before heading into town. As I screeched to a halt at the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp, I saw the cop speeding on to the far end of the horseshoe, still tailing me.

  You can still stop, I thought to myself. He’ll probably take it easier on you if you just stop now. . . . Or, fuck it.

  I gunned it again.

  For some reason, in my exhausted, anxiety-addled state, I’d begun to think of my behavior as somehow heroic. Like I was the little guy and the cop was “the man” who was “keeping me down.” Like it was a battle of epic proportions and I had to “win.” Meanwhile, from the perspective of anyone not living in the world inside my head, I was simply an asshole who was driving too fast and now attempting to evade arrest.

  I made a left onto a wide, tree-lined street. Every time I had a chance to turn onto a narrower, more desolate-looking road, I took it. Then, as I came to the end of a cul-de-sac, I pulled off a driving feat that was badass even for me: a ’70s cop show–style peelout. I hit the brakes and my car spun to a stop. The smell of burning rubber lingered in the air. For a person as tragically uncool as I am, it was a pretty cool moment.

  I turned off the car and threw myself to the floor. I formed my body into a tight ball and wedged myself between my seat and the car’s pedals.

  I breathed heavily as the adrenaline rushed through my body.

  I did it, I thought to myself. I got away.

  I sat up and peeked out the window, my thoughts racing a mile a minute.

  If he comes down here, I can sprint through those woods, I told myself. I bet there are tons of places to hide in there.

  But then, as the stillness of the air set in around me and I noticed how quiet it was—only crickets broke the silence—the euphoric feeling of escaping the cop quickly twisted and hardened into a pure terror that sank low into the pit of my stomach.

  Holy shit, I thought to myself, I just broke more laws in the last fifteen minutes than in the rest of my entire life.

  My adrenaline crashed and I went into a panic.

  I understood that I’d fucked up really bad. I also knew that the cop was definitely still out there. It had been only a few minutes; there was no way he had given up yet.

  I’ll never do something this stupid again, I thought to myself. I looked at the roof of my car and put in a quiet plea to God. I swear. Just please don’t let him find me.

  Sitting at the end of a dead-end street wasn’t a good strategy. If he didn’t come and find me personally, then someone in the neighborhood was definitely going to call the police on me. It was the middle of the night and I was sitting in my crappy car in a cul-de-sac, lurking in the darkness in a rich neighborhood. I couldn’t just wait and pray that I would get out of there.

  My only hope was to get back to the highway without running into the cop again. I turned the car on and headed back out into the neighborhood, making random turns on the crisscrossed streets. My hope was that if I picked an unexpected pattern of roads on the way out, he wouldn’t be able to catch up to me, as if I were Pac-Man and he were one of the ghosts.

  I managed to make it back out to the main road without the cop finding me. I headed to the highway, and soon the on-ramp was in sight. For a fleeting moment I thought I was going to make it.

  Not surprisingly, the cop turned out to be much smarter than I was. As I passed a hidden driveway just a few hundred feet away from the highway entrance, a set of headlights blinked on. This time, I tried proving that I’d learned from my mistake by pulling over immediately.

  The cop pulled up behind me and directed his spotlight into my rearview mirror, blinding me. Though I couldn’t see anything, I heard him get out of his car. He slammed his door angrily and made his way toward me. He shined his flashlight into my side-view mirror in a successful effort to blind me just a little bit more.

  “License, registration, insurance now!” he barked at me.

  “Sir, I’m really sorry,” I said. In my experience with cops, the only way to get out of a ticket was to be completely subservient. “I—”

  “SHUT UP,” he screamed at me, red in the face.

  I opened my wallet and handed him my license. Then I meekly opened my glove compartment to get the rest of my paperwork, and grimaced when I realized things were about to get much, much worse.

  “Sir, I hate to say this, but I seem to not have my registration and insurance cards on me right now,” I squeaked.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asked, genuinely baffled. This hard-nosed, no-nonsense police officer honestly thought I was messing with him.

  “No, sir,” I said. “I seem to have misplaced them.” I looked at him, doing my best to convey the demeanor of a remorseful and cowardly man, hoping he’d take pity on me. He looked over my license.

  “Where are you headed, Mr. Get Hard?” he asked. I didn’t correct his pronunciation.

  “Home,” I answered.

  “Back to Fairfield?” His tone made it clear that this was another nail in the coffin.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Well, then,” he grunted, “this exit is not on the way to Fairfield. I guess it’s safe to surmise that the only reason you got off at this exit was to evade capture by me.”

  I was done trying to get away. I hadn’t managed to drive my way out of this mess, and there was definitely no way I was going to talk my way out of it either. I mentally prepared myself for a night in prison.

  “Yes, sir, that’s correct,” I replied. He shook his head before turning back toward his car. Before he walked away, I blurted out exactly what was on my mind.

  “And I just want to say that this is easily the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

  I didn’t say it in a whiny or pleading voice. My tone was flat. I just wanted it on the record. I fucked up, and for some reason, I wanted to make sure he knew I knew that.

  He looked at me with a combination of hatred and confusion.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”

  He walked toward his car, his boots clicking on the asphalt. My heart raced as I thought of what life would be like now that my driving privileges would be replaced with a criminal record. Then, the officer paused. He turned and headed back in my direction. I braced myself for a tongue-lashing. Instead, he reached toward the window.

  “Get home safe, Christopher,” he muttered, handing me back my license.

  “Oh. Okay,” I said.

  I leaned out the window as he turned and walked away.

  “I’m really sorry to have wasted your time tonight, sir,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He got into his
car and disappeared onto the highway. I shook, unable to process that he had actually let me go. Anxiety overtook me along with an overpowering sinking feeling. Now that I was out of trouble, I retroactively experienced all of the fear and nervousness that should have stopped me from going on such an ill-advised adventure in the first place. For a moment, I honestly thought I was going to shit my pants.

  Luckily I managed to calm down before evacuating my bowels. Driving home, I thought about how dumb I had been. I thought about how my schedule was crazy, how I was slowly killing myself—mentally if not physically—and how things needed to change.

  I was also left with one nagging question: Why did he let me go? Maybe he appreciated the honesty I put on display through my admission of guilt and subsequent condemnation of my own intelligence. Maybe I just got lucky, and pulling off the highway meant I had left his jurisdiction, that all he could do legally was put the fear of God in me. Maybe I was so visibly pathetic that he decided to take pity. I will never know the answer, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it both as I drove home that night and since.

  Despite my fear, I also thought about how many (yes, ill-advised but absolutely and undeniably) badass things I had pulled off that night.

  I’m glad the cop didn’t give me a ticket. But not just because I avoided the points and retained my license. All the tickets up to that point hadn’t had an effect on me. I’d viewed avoiding them as some sort of weird self-destructive game. In my mind, I had every right to behave how I wanted. It was the cops’ job to try and stop me and it was my job to try and get away. We were all just playing our roles.

  That cop’s leniency was a choice. It made me realize that I had choices, too. I could choose to not push things so far. I could choose to live a less hectic life that wouldn’t make me feel that behaving like an insane asshole lunatic was either necessary or cool. I could choose to take care of myself, to put my health and safety ahead of my ambitions and obsessions. Most importantly, in a few different ways, I could choose to slow down.