lesson, I suppose.
Another uniformed gentleman took Gina away to do all the choreographed calisthenics you see on Cops. Thank God she’d decided against heels. While she aped drunken Darrin’s Dance Grooves outside, I was going ape-shit inside. They were about to take her down to Chinatown! And it was all my fault—sort of. I promised baby Jesus I’d buy the ten-lesson package from Drive Right as soon as I got back to Washington—just please don’t force her to fashion a shank out of her Shu Uemura eye pencil. As I begged our Lord and Savior to spare Gina from a life of checking “yes” to the crime conviction question on any application, Bilal reached into his back pocket and pulled out his PalmPilot. Bilal has JC on speed dial? Nope, but he does have a saved game of Solitaire.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I said, wedging my head into the space between him and his home screen. Visual confirmation complete. This dude was in fact playing a game designed specifically for octogenarians and eighth-graders while the woman he told me he loved (again, we’d known each other for one-third of a day) was pivoting with her left foot on the imaginary line, dividing the us of right now from whatever we were before an acronym made everything all blurry. DUI. Don’t underestimate incompetence. What was bizarre about this entire situation, aside from the fact that an innocent Riesling-induced rage had spun way out of control, was how damn nonchalant Bilal was acting about the whole thing. As if Gina and I both had brought this on ourselves. As if the two of us together were the problem. Maybe one without the other would have a chance.
Every good friend just wants to be needed by the other, until she’s not because a penis has come between them. Then when the thing goes limp, she’s needed again, and whatever condescension she feels is fleeting, wiped clean by the righting of the order of things. This was how it was supposed to be, right? Just me and Gina. I hated him for making me feel so damn useless.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do right now,” Bilal said without looking up from the stacks of cards smaller than Chiclets in his hand. He was serious. This was happening. I was being voted Most Likely to Have to Get Her Shit Together When Boyfriend Loses His without having to hand out cupcakes or oversize buttons.
“Are you insane? We need to figure out what we’re going to do if they arrest her ass,” I said, squinting my eyes in the rear-view, trying to make out if the objects therein appeared bigger than they actually were. I mean, were we really in the shit? Was Gina going to do time, or at the very least suffer major bureaucratic inconvenience, because I was too busy for a driving lesson ten years before?
“Oh, they’re going to arrest her,” Bilal announced, without pity. Great, a card game enthusiast and a pessimist.
As far as rescue teams go, Bilal and I sucked. Lacking the positive energy necessary to secret her out of those handcuffs and back in the driver’s seat, we spent the next half hour debating whether or not Gina (a) brought this on herself, (b) would get out of this unscathed, or (c) would be not only scathed but scared shitless. He kept the time by tapping black and red cards across the screen with his stylus. I drummed the backbeat against my window, watching to make sure she wasn’t getting brutalized—or worse, videotaped.
A rap on the windshield threw us off. Yet another Mr. Officer, Sir—this one kind of sexy in that lame Bachelorette Party stripping-to-get-through-med-school sort of way, did I mention it’d been a long time?—came over to smash my pipe dreams: Gina was in a mobile home being booked under the suspicion of drunk driving. Her continued refusal to take a breathalyzer test (more balls!) would most definitely end in a one-way ticket down to Chinatown. Population: alarming. Praise Jesus, there was a conjunction in there somewhere. If one out of the two of us had a California driver’s license, they could release her to our custody, and this whole thing would play out in the fluorescent light of day court. Otherwise, The Explorer was on its way to wherever irresponsible cars go for a time-out. Since Bilal was from Ohio, and I was from Idiot Island, our last card got played before the game even started.