My Own Testosterone-Driven Calamities are Numerous. Here's One.

Back in the mid-seventies I was driving on a frontage road when, for a split-second, I thought that I may have caught a glimpse of the love-of-my-life walking on the side of the road as I blew past her at fifty-plus miles per hour. At that time the status of our relationship would be best described as "broken-up" (thankfully, today's status is best described as "married for thirty-one years"). At any rate a testosterone-induced rush compelled me to attempt to perform the perfect tire-smoking one hundred and eighty degree rear-end whip-around. I pulled on the parking brake release with my left hand while simultaneously hitting the parking brake with my left foot and cranking the steering wheel to a hard left with my right hand.

At first the execution seemed to be immaculate. The rear-end of the car swung around precisely one hundred and eighty degrees, my right foot now pinned the accelerator to the floor and I'm going to rocket across the one hundred yards of pavement that separate the girl and I in an impressive--dare I say spectacular--fashion!

Then all hell broke loose. The Combination of lateral G-forces and sudden open-throttle induced torque was too much for the aging motor mounts to bear. The motor emancipated itself from those shackles and proceded to dance the Funky Chicken, ultimately shoving the belt-driven engine cooling fan into the radiator.

At this point the car went into its special effects mode, first the audio effects, then the video effects. When the fan blades began to hack away at the radiator I was sure that my car was being riddled with deafening staccato bursts of machine gun fire. Then came the video effects when my car did a dynamite impersonation of Old Faithful as a dense geyser of steam erupted from the destroyed radiator.

I just went from exhilaration to deflation in 2.7 seconds.

Need I say that at this point I was praying that the woman whom I thought I saw was not the woman whom I thought she was!