I was a senior in high school, and I had been dating my first girlfriend for about six months – yeah, that’s right, my first girlfriend happened when I was going into my senior year of high school, but I didn’t hit puberty until I was like sixteen so cut me a fucking break. Anyway, it was early December, and I just wasn’t really feeling the whole thing anymore, which of course is what led to my decision to end the relationship. The only thing even close to breaking up with someone that I had experienced in my life was when I stopped going to one lady to get my hair cut and started going to a different lady, which is a roundabout way to tell you that I had no fucking clue what I was doing. Looking for a little bit of advice, I went up to my dad before I left to tell him where I was going, hoping to be blessed by some kind of fatherly wisdom that would open my eyes to the right way to go about everything. What I got instead was, “Oh. Good luck with that.” So, with absolutely no idea how I was going to go about it, I hopped in my parents’ Subaru Forester (an absolute pussy magnet, by the way) and drove off to pick her up.
This is when things started to go bad for me. I picked her up and said hi and bye to her parents for what I believed would be the last time I’d see them for a long time. We went to a Starbucks near her house, and without thinking, I decided, “Sure, you can pay for our hot chocolates if you want.” Not a great start. Then when we got back out to the car, I realized I wasn’t exactly sure how to start the topic of, “Hey, you know how we’re dating now? Well, I think we should not do that anymore. Cool,” so I ended up digging myself into a deeper hole by sitting around for an hour and a half just talking to her like I wasn’t about to take a steaming poop on our relationship.
When I was finally able to sack up and rip off the Band-Aid, it honestly went pretty well. I know that every time you break up with someone, you feed them a long string of bullshit about how, “We should still be friends,” but with her I was feeling pretty confident that we’d be able to – after reading the rest of this story, you may not believe me, but we actually are still pretty close. But that’s when things started to really go to shit.
There haven’t been too many moments in my life that have made me feel as if I took a Mike Trout line drive to the groin, but I can tell you for a fact that this moment is absolutely one of them. When it was time to take her home, I went to grab the car keys, and for a second, I was alarmed because I couldn’t find them. Luckily, I had decided to make sure they couldn’t fall between the seats and put them in the ignition for safe keeping. Now for some of you more familiar with the innerworkings of a motor vehicle, you may be ahead of me. For those of you who are as clueless I as was, though, let me explain to you what happens when you leave your keys in the ignition for an hour and a half: your car battery – you know, the thing that makes it go – will fucking die. That’s right, I pulled a total Jesse Pinkman. In both of our defenses, though, the buzzer didn’t buzz, so chill the fuck out Mr. White.
So, I’m sitting there for probably about three minutes just turning the key in the ignition, begging the universe to end this mental cock and ball torture and let me go home. No such luck. After this had gone on for a bit, she looked at me and delivered a sentence that I really didn’t want to hear: “Tim, I don’t think it’s going to start.” Now if you’re someone who spends all day in your garage turning the 1995 shitbox you got for three hundred cash from your neighbor into some kind of decked out sex-mobile, you might be thinking: “Big deal. Just get a jump from someone.” To that, I’ll have you remember that I was not aware that leaving the keys in the ignition for safe keeping was a bad thing to do, so asking someone in the parking lot for a jump wasn’t in the commonsense agenda for the day. Instead, I decided that the best course of action was to have her call her dad, who could drive over in just two minutes, and have him give me a jump.
He was, of course, all smiles when he got there because he had yet to hear that he was now helping his daughter’s ex-boyfriend with a jump. Honestly, had we still been dating, the time we spent getting everything hooked up and moving again would have been a great bonding experience. I, however, was not able to enjoy this sentiment because I was completely focused on not shitting my pants due to the rising fear that he was going to realize what happened and leave me just as stranded as Jesse and Walter White.
By some miracle, I made it out without him knowing what was going on. After he finished, he and his daughter went on their way with a big wave and him saying, “See you later, Tim!” to which I thought, “No, you really won’t.” I then waited until he had gotten out of the parking lot and proceeded to drive as fast as possible away from the Starbucks that to this day still haunts my digestive system every time I drive by it.
Moral of the story: if you’re going to break up with a girl in your car, bring some jumper cables and go on YouTube beforehand to make sure that you know how to get it started again. Just in case.
