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?crazy week. Luckily, by this time, we had each in turn gone to “Uncle A?s” (pronounced “theo?s”) for breakfast. I highly recommend the place. Try the egg salad. Well, according to Suzanne, there was neither anything wrong with her car nor was there any way to get it going. The irony of that left me chuckling for exactly three-quarters of a second. Well, turns out that not only will the car not start, due to the rarity of real estate around Times Square, it is also located nowhere near the hotel. Thirty minutes later, after much hand-wringing, thumb-twiddling, and two-way paging, Perry and I walked the five blocks down to the parking deck where the Hilton parks its guests? cars. Serving as our tour guide was the head of security for the Hilton Times Square. He was a very helpful shortish guy with a Brooklyn accent. He must also have been relatively attractive, because as the local vagrant grabbed his rear, she exclaimed, “Um, I like it like that!” Suzanne and David stooped outside the hotel on Forty-second Street.
We found Suzanne?s Tahoe on the bottom floor of the parking deck where Perry got in, and gave the key a few turns in the ignition. I looked knowingly at the hood of the car, furrowed my eyebrows and gave my diagnosis. “Won?t start.” I know a little bit about cars, and I had read somewhere that without starting the car, we would never get it back to North Carolina under it?s own power.
We talked with the owner/manager/valet here at the parking deck and he gave his opinion of the situation. Probably a clogged fuel line. Something that could be fixed with “pry” if we could find some. After that went through a couple of translations, I realized that the word attempted through a heavy Spanish accent was “spray,” and I tottered down to a gas station a couple of blocks away. No pry. Back to the helpful Hilton guys. On this post Independence Day weekend, there?s a mechanic open at Twenty First Street and Eleventh Avenue. Further than I?m going to push a sport utility vehicle. So Perry is on the phone with AAA. He first talked with an operator in NC, who upon freaked when she heard he was in New York. ?Are you okay? Are you in a good part of town?? She didn?t feel any better when he couldn?t tell her exactly where he was. I guess it?s good she didn?t hear the car alarm sounding on the other side of the street. Well as he was waiting to be connected to a local AAA representative, I wandered down into the parking deck to have a second look at the bane of our trip. I found the hood up, a towel laid over the front and a Mexican bent over the towel. I never figured out what he was doing with the broomstick he had in his hand, but he had the intake removed and was more than pleased when another of the parking attendants came down with a bottle of nail polish remover. It still hasn?t occurred to me why these men would have such a bottle, or how it helped the process in which they were involved. I will not attempt to describe what happened next, because although I watched, I did not understand it. I felt like I was watching “Junk Yard Wars” as three men made a lifeless heap of metal do unbelievable things. Perry cut his conversation short at the sound of a severely distressed truck puttering and puffing, but returning to life. Like Lazarus, the Tahoe rose from the stone tomb called a parking deck. David and Suzanne?s anxiousness morphed to joy as they saw us drive instead of walk back to the hotel. We packed in our luggage and headed down to Twenty First and Eleventh where the mechanic confirmed what Suzanne had suspected all along. Nothing wrong with the car. That didn?t stop me from dumping a bottle of fuel filter and carburetor cleaner into the gas tank anyway.
With Perry commanding behind the wheel, and I navigating haphazardly from shotgun, David and Suzanne were sleeping soundly by the time we exited the Lincoln Tunnel onto the New Jersey Turnpike. They didn?t wake up until the right rear tire blew out?ten minutes later.