They're Called House Geckos

Friday night, I was leaving work and my car wouldn't start. And nobody at The Client works on Fridays, so nobody was around in the parking lot to give me a jump.

I had to call my father to swing by on his way home from work to bail me out. Jumper cables didn't help; turns out, my battery was just coming to the end of its life.

I left the car at work overnight and brought a new battery out the next morning to take it home.

-

Yesterday, driving home from work, I was going through Meadows Place, which is a tiny little city. Little, as in, like, three blocks little. The Meadows isn't so much a city as it is a residential neighborhood with a bunch of senior citizen homes. The cops in the area are assholes; the kind that'll ticket you for going 37 MPH in a 35 MPH zone.

I was doing about 50.

And as I was driving through, I crossed a sheriff on the on-coming side of the street. Soon as I passed him up, I watched him, from my rear-view, take a U-turn and flash his lights.

Right around the same time, the car to my right made a right turn. He might've braked too abruptly or didn't use his signal or something -- I wasn't paying attention to him -- and the car behind him rear-ended him.

The sheriff stopped those guys instead, and I got off scot-free.

-

After leaving the gym tonight, I was cooling off on the trunk of my car in the parking lot. The weather at night around here has been nice and breezy lately, maybe because Ike's on the horizon -- I dunno, I never paid much attention to physics or biology or whatever the hell science class teaches hurricane mechanics.

A fella leaving the gym got into an old navy pick-up that was parked next to mine and tried to start up. His engine churned, coughed, and died. I watched him make two or three more attempts until he looked up and made eye contact with me.

"Won't start, huh?" I asked. I hate it when people ask obvious questions like that. No shit, it won't start, smartass, who the hell churns their engine for fun?

"Can you give me a jump?" he pleaded.

"'Fraid I got no cables," I shrugged. "Do you have power? Your radio still work? Your headlights come on?"

He turned up his radio and flicked his lights on and off, "Yeah, I got power. What does that mean?"

"Honestly, I got no idea, man. People ask me that all the time when my car don't work. I dunno what it does."

Damn it, I'm a dumbass.

I let the guy borrow my phone to call around for help. I got a fancy shmancy phone, though, and he's pretty old, so I had to dial for him. He only knew one number, some chick, and it went straight to voicemail everytime. He left her a few messages, pleading for her to come get him.

"You from Arlington or something?" I asked him because I recognized the area code of the recipient. For whatever reason, I know area codes to dumb places.

Turns out, the guy's from Dallas and he's just in town for a visit. It was probably a dumb idea for him to take a road trip without carrying a cell phone of his own and in a car prone to failure, but I refrained from telling him so.

I sat around in the parking lot with the guy, asking bypassers if they had jumper cables without luck, until I decided it was time for me to go. I bid him good luck and started getting in my car. As I was loading my gym bag in the backseat, I found jumper cables under the driver seat. My father had forgotten them there from Friday.

"Hey hey hey," I cheered, "Your lucky day, chief!" I said "Hey hey hey" like Doug Butabi did to the skank in A Night at the Roxbury.

-

When I got home, I saw one of those little lizard things crawling on my front door. I pulled its tail off. Don't know why.