Lee Geiger

If you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you will never get found.

Author Unknown

The best part of Wednesday’s note was receiving a dozen or so emails from AARP cardholders who claimed they still haven’t grown up. What a fun place to be in life.

The Story: Part II

Monday, Sept. 16– It’s 2:45 in the morning, and I’m walking along the Las Vegas Strip desperately seeking a remedy for my new bride’s upset tummy. I stumbled upon a busy 7-11 convenience store located next to a seedy strip club with a fleet of Harley Davidson motorcycles parked out front. I wasted no time picking up a can of 7-Up, an orange, and a box of powdered donuts. I remembered to grab a bottle of Pepto-Bismol while standing at the register. I then sprinted back to our ramshackle motel like a knight in shining armor. Anne took a hit from the Pepto and promptly went to sleep. I stayed up the rest of the night contemplating our next move, the donuts disappearing slowly.

First things first: fix the Rabbit. At precisely 7:00am I called the local Volkswagen dealer and arranged for them to tow the car and get it worked on. Then I went to work fixing Anne. I called the Frontier Hotel and pleaded with the front desk clerk for an check-in early. She eventually took pity on me and checked us into a room. Anne, who drank the 7-Up after waking up but wisely passed on the orange, starting feeling better and ordered herself some room service. For some reason, her level of concern over our present situation didn’t come remotely close to mine. “I trust you,” she kept saying, obviously delusional. Later that morning the VW dealer called informing me that our car needed a new clutch, that it would cost $500, and that it would be ready by 4:00pm. I had already spent over $1,000 of our wedding kitty in less than 48 hours, and I hadn’t even changed time zones.

We picked up our car and left town immediately, with a goal of reaching Salt Lake City by midnight. The car drove well through the Nevada desert, and it even had a little more pep in its gitty-up. The Pretty Blonde and I started to decompress and shared joyful laughs, figuring if we could survive the first 48 hours of our marriage we could survive anything. Sometime around 10:00pm we pulled off the freeway to get gas and a burger in Beaver, Utah.

As soon as I removed my foot from the accelerator, the car lurched and the engine died. We managed to cruise into a gas station. After briefly losing my mind, I instructed Anne to get in the front seat while I pushed the car back into the street in an effort to jump-start our disabled vehicle. Miraculously, it worked.

Tuesday, Sept. 16– Day Three of Happily-Ever-After found us wakening bright and early at The EconoLodge in Beaver, a drive-thru community of a thousand rural souls. It was at this juncture that I decided our best move was to wave the white flag and surrender. We removed everything out of the Rabbit, boxed it up and shipped it off to Hanover. I then called my brother Steve, who knew people in Salt Lake City, to arrange for the car to be picked up and taken out of its misery. Anne spent part of the day writing postcards to family members, informing them we had decided to forego my pursuit of an MBA to instead become a car mechanic, where the two of us would go into business running an auto repair shop. That evening we boarded a Greyhound bus and headed for an airport hotel in Salt Lake City.

Wednesday, Sept. 17– The one “must do” item on our trek across the country was a stop in Denver to visit Gaga, Anne’s 80-something year old grandmother. No matter the cost or inconvenience, there was absolutely, positively no way we could book a flight to Boston without a stop in the Mile High City to share a few hours with Grandma. Delta Airlines offered such a flight, though it required an additional layover in Atlanta. We arrived late into Boston and arranged to stay with friends of Anne. By the end of the day our wedding kitty was down to around $1,000. But we had a wonderful visit with the original Lady Gaga.

Thursday, Sept. 18– Anne’s friends were generous enough to sell us a queen-sized mattress and box springs they had in a spare bedroom for $100. After breakfast we rented a small truck from Hertz and headed for Hanover, a two-hour drive from Boston. Shortly before crossing the New Hampshire border, I noticed a sign instructing all trucks to pullover at the next weigh station. But I thought that was only for “real” trucks, not our miniature 12-foot box carrier. No sooner had I crossed the border did a pair of New Hampshire Smokey the Bandits wail their sirens and flash their lights to pull me over. You would have thought I was smuggling kilos cocaine. After a ten minute shakedown that nearly caused me to lapse into cardiac arrest, I opened the back door of the truck and showed them our cargo. The cops let us go after we promised never to do it again. We made it to Hanover and spent our first night in our refurbished World War II-era Quonset hut in Sachem Village, Dartmouth’s married student housing ghetto. We had made it!

Friday, Sept. 19– We used the truck to pick up our boxes that had arrived from Utah. That left us with one major to-do before the start of classes on Monday; get a car. Otherwise The Pretty Blonde and I would have to hitchhike to get around town, a circumstance that gets more unpleasant as winter approaches. By this time our wedding kitty was down to less than $500, so our choices were slim. Fortunately, a Tuck classmate knew of a local young couple with a new baby who was looking to unload their 1972 Honda Civic, a “winter car” on baby-coach wheels featuring a floorboard that, thanks to a dozen winters of churning through rock salt, offered an unobstructed view of the roadway below. We bought it for $400. You were now unofficially broke.

Saturday, Sept. 20– New Hampshire law requires that every car sold in a private transaction needs to pass a vehicle inspection. What gets inspected, and how they judge what’s inspected, is left to the mechanic’s imagination. And, as I was soon to learn, their pocketbook.

I drove our crumbling Civic to a local auto shop, where a grizzled grease monkey with bad breath and a dozen teeth told me he’d give it once over. When I returned later that afternoon, he gave me the evil Snake Eye and told me my naturally air-conditioned car had some “issues.” Once it became clear I didn’t have the financial resources to move this transaction forward, he told me he had no choice but to quarantine my vehicle. He ignored my pleas while driving the car into a fenced back lot. No deals, no wheels.

Later that night, over a dinner of bread and water, The Pretty Blonde and I hatched a plan to get our car back. We may have been out of money, but we had an extra key to the Civic along with a boatload of guile. We borrowed a friend’s car and drove to the auto shop where, under the cover of darkness, I snuck into the back lot and stole our car. If I didn’t know I had married my soulmate before, I did now. My money says Mr. Toothless Mechanic never missed it.

Sunday, Sept. 21– A miserable black cloud of deep regret hung over us all day. We returned the Honda to its original owner, only to learn that the young couple, poor and on welfare, had bought food with our money. Regardless, we had to officially nullify the transaction. Otherwise, Anne and I could get in some real trouble. We asked them to pay us back when they could. Later that night I lay in bed, wondering if I really did get married just one week earlier. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Monday, Sept. 22– Day One of classes over, I trudged over to the Dartmouth Financial Aid office. Already beset with almost $50,000 in student loans, I was prepared to get on my knees and grovel for more money. But what happened next shocked. Miss Financial Aid Officer picked up the phone and arranged for me to meet a friend of hers who was a loan officer at nearby Dartmouth National Bank. Upon learning I was a soon-to-be a Tuck MBA graduate, the loan officer knew my odds were good at making a decent living. She even pulled a file of Tuck placement statistics from her desk drawer. “We can loan you up to $15,000 for a new car,” she said with a sparkle in her eye, “because we know you’ll earn enough money to eventually pay us back.” One week later, we were the proud owners of a shiny new silver 1985 Toyota Corolla. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

First a new wife. Then a new car. Then more debt. Growing up is exhausting.