Friday, July 5, 2013

MY REAL LIFE THELMA AND LOUISE MOMENT

This wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the movie and this actually happened before the movie but when I watched Thelma and Louise for the first time again in a lot of years the scenes of them getting hit by the guys made me think of this incident that happened to me and my girlfriends. One evening when I was about 24 years old I went over to visit with a girlfriend who was about four years older than me whose husband had been killed in a car accident the year before by a man who was crazy and trying to kill himself and ended up driving his car across the center lane in an attempted suicide and he ended up killing my girlfriend’s husband and living through the whole thing, unfortunately. Ray was the love of Kaye’s life, they had gotten married when they got out of high school and they had an 8 year old daughter when Ray died in the horrible head on car crash that Kaye ended up with a broken pelvis and Ray ended up with a crushed chest. Kaye spent most of the year physically and mentally recovering from the crash. She had just bought herself a brand new baby blue Firebird with power everything for her birthday and we wanted to go out and have a nice dinner and some drinks to celebrate. Kaye invited her sister Joanna along. She was recently divorced and was about two years older than me. Joanna had gone through a pretty brutal divorce and all 3 of us were just looking to go out and have a nice dinner and some drinks and conversation afterwards. We went to a local western themed steak house and had a nice dinner and then afterwards we went to the bar at the restaurant to have some drinks and talk. We were having a nice visit when a group of 4 guys started hitting on us and wanting us to dance with them. We politely declined but they wouldn’t take no for an answer so we all 3 danced with them in an effort to appease them and get them to leave us along. It had seemed to work as after we got done dancing they left us alone as we had asked. Soon after that the bar was closing for the night so we left. We went to Kaye’s brand new car and right after we got in the car one of the guys in the bar walked up to her window and knocked on it. She had power windows, this was in 1982 and it wasn’t all that common on my car’s or those of my friends, and she opened her window partway and the guy stuck his arm in and tried to grab Kaye. She quickly hit the power window button and closed it on the guy’s arm. He started yelling and she told him to pull his arm out. He did but when she went to back the car up his buddy had her car blocked with his truck. We were beginning to get a little worried at this point since there were 4 of them and 3 of us. She pushed her car against his truck a little so that she could position her car to jump the curb so we could get away. When she did so one of the guy’s started yelling that she ran over his foot, she yelled out if he moved out of the way she wouldn’t have to drive over his foot as we managed to jump the curb and drive off. The guys all jumped in the pickup and chased us but Kaye was more familiar with the back roads of the town and we managed to lose them. We got home safe, sound and really freaked out. The next morning a cop came to the house and told us a guy turned Kaye in for hit and run on his pickup, apparently they had written down the license plate number while they were trying to chase us down the night before. When we told the police what had happened they left to go talk to the guy and we never heard back from them.  Couldn’t believe those jerks had the nerve to assault us and then when we got away to try and make the whole incident our fault. None of us went out again for quite a long time after that and it did leave an ugly taste in my mouth. Pretty fricking scary and we did nothing wrong except to try to be nice the wrong guys.

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