Commutation: Out of Gas

For the most part, anywhere in Kentucky or, any where you would find fans of the Kentucky Wildcats, you can walk into a vehicle registration office and ask for a Kentucky Wildcats tag to put on your car signifying that you are a Kentucky Wildcats fan. So, it could be said that you have a wildcat tag. 
In the lower more poverty stricken or just blatant outlaw circles of society this term “wildcat Tag” has a different meaning. In this disambiguation a wildcat tag is a tag that is registered to one vehicle but has been placed on a different one. The purpose of this is to have a tag that is showing in date on the off chance that a police officer won’t call it in or, the car that you are in might be under pursuit so, stealing a tag plate from a car that looks the same might help keep you from being caught.
As the story goes, I was hanging around with a couple of my cousin’s way back in the day whose names I will change here to protect the guilty. I will call them, Rob and Bob, because it rhymes and is easy to remember. 
Rob came up with this old Mercury Monarch, that of course none of us had the money to tag, which was just as well since he didn’t have a title for it anyway. This thing was on its lasts legs as it was but, would serve the purpose of getting us too and from wherever we might need to go for a season. To solve the problem of legal obligations Rob took a tag off an old ford station wagon that he had been driving and put on it. The tag was still good and, might get us by if the police just happened to get behind us.
As I’ve said we didn’t really have much money so gas could sometimes be a problem. There was one early evening that we had five dollars to put in it. All we had to do was make it to town, which we did not. About half way there it sputtered and died so, we decided to let it coast on the momentum that it had in hopes that it would get us a little closer but, we knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t get us close enough. So, when the car dropped down to about thirty or so miles per hour, Rob jumped out and decided he would run with it while pushing to get just a little further.
As your reading this I’m sure logical deduction may kick in and you might think, “wow, thirty miles an hour is pretty fast.” Or you might not realize it but, either way, I’ll go ahead and sum it up. As I said in the introduction to this thread of posts walking (or running) on the ride is different than riding or driving in a space/time kind of way. Driving thirty miles an hour would seem really slow but, the average human can only run five to ten miles per hour. A really fast human can only run fifteen miles per hour. 
So, Rob opens his door, I was in the passenger seat, Bob was in the back seat, Rob jumped out and, I watched him disappear. The door swung closed but, not all the way. Of course, my mind ran instantly looking for solutions: do I jump over and hit the brake, do I get behind the wheel, do I jump out. Before actual solutions surfaced the door swung open. Rob’s arm reached in across the seat and he grabbed hold pulling himself back into the car, into the driver’s seat and, back in control of the car.
It never occurred to me to ask him what it was like down there so close to the pavement being dragged by a car that no one was driving. I wonder often if it would have been better for him if he had turned loose. I’m sure the moments of that journey from pavement to driver’s seat probably seemed to last a while for him. Regardless, we all had a chuckle out of it and I still do any time I think of it.

Don’t try this at home kids.
Johnny R Draper 

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