I was still moving towards New Jersey, since the tunnel has a downward slant coming in. As a matter of fact, this was the fastest I had gone in hours. But I'd be a 3000 pound paperweight in the right hand lane soon, rolling deep underground. I looked like the other cars packed around me going in, but I had no way of getting out.
1:30 P.M. My brother Brendan called me out of the blue one Sunday afternoon. He needed to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for his art history class. His paper was due Tuesday. The Met closed at 5:30 today, and wasn't open on Monday. Brendan was 50 miles away in Rutgers, with no car.
I live in Jersey City, right by the Holland Tunnel. Brendan could take a train and a PATH to reach me, and I could drive him to the Met from there. We could also continue on the PATH to 33rd Street and switch to a subway, but time was crucial, and we could make better time driving in the city.
If I ever think that again, someone please slash my tires.
The gas tank of my car (a '96 Toyota Camry) had just started blinking empty the third time. My low fuel light has its own personality: it goes on for a mile, goes off for five, goes back on for five, goes off for another one or two, and then comes on full time, after which I've got a minimum of 23 miles to find a gas station, probably more.
Brendan didn't make it to Journal Square until nearly 3:00, thanks to the Newark PATH train taking its own sweet time. I met him at the station, and we beelined it to the tunnel. Tunnel traffic took half an hour. Lousy, but no surprise. I'd been through hour-long traffic jams on both ends before. Brendan and I got caught up on movies, our default topic of conversation.
There were gas stations flanking the Holland Tunnel, with some of the best gas prices you'll find. It was very tempting to pull in and gas up. But Brendan needed every bit of time he could.
We made it in the tunnel at 3:25, and out at 3:30. Two hours until the Met closed. From here it was a straight shot up Fifth Avenue. But that assumed I could reach Fifth Avenue in two hours.
I've never seen gridlock coming out of the Holland Tunnel before, but now that I was in a rush, traffic picked today to plop its sedentary ass down on Canal Street and take a nap. Just a few cars were getting through at every light, and the light was many blocks away.
"Maybe we should have taken the subway," I told Brendan.
7:43. The Holland Tunnel tips down to get underneath the Hudson, so I was still on momentum. I kept hitting the gas pedal, but nothing was happening. Occasionally the car in front of me would slow down. I had to mash my foot down on the no-longer-power-brakes to avoid a collision.
I really wanted to throw the car in park and see if it started up again. If traffic would ever come to a dead stop, I could throw'er in park and restart the engine without anyone catching wise. But traffic wasn't panning out that way: the one time I wanted a jam, I wasn't getting it.
The tunnel flattened out, the traffic got quicker, and my car got slower. The empty space in front of me grew bigger and bigger. I rolled at 8 MPH, then 5, then 3. The first of what I was sure were a full night's worth of honks began. Now was as good a time as any. I put all my weight on the brake pedal, jolted the car to park, and turned the key. The engine started.
Thank the Lord. I shifted to drive and hit the gas. I went ten feet and the engine sputtered out. I tried starting it again. This time I went five feet. Soon I wasn't able to start the engine at all. That last bit of fumes in the tank had just been used up. I was dead in the water. Under the water, technically.
3:50. It took twenty minutes to escape Canal Street and cut left to the West Side Highway.
It was the beginning of a fluke April heat wave (a bank clock said 75 degrees) and Brendan had the air conditioning on. I didn't know how much gas was left in the tank, and idling with the AC gusting wouldn't improve the situation. I turned the AC off, and rolled down the windows.
The West Side would be considered gridlock in most other parts of the country, but to me it sped along like a herd of stallions. I gloried in seeing my speedometer occasionally poke above 30.
I turned off West Side a little before Central Park and worked my way east. Fifth Avenue looked like a mess, so I went up Fourth Avenue instead. I plowed straight into another logjam.
The blue and white flags and the multiple puffy white tunics in the crowds said this was the Greek Independence Parade. Fifth Avenue was shut down, and the sidewalks were packed with hundreds of guys names Stavros. Cops were at every intersection, directing the potentially lethal 1 MPH traffic. Every parking space for a mile was probably taken.
"We should have taken the subway," I said.
The car behind me blared its horn. And so did the five behind it. The left lane was moving OK, but a new merge had set up right behind my car. My driving leg began spasming wildly, looking for something it could do. The rest of me wasn't faring much better.
There had to be some procedure for a hasty tow in this situation. A tow truck would gets called from Manhattan, it'd work its way through tunnel traffic, and bingo, it'd be at our side...in four hours. For the rest of the day I was going to be the most hated man in New York. And New Jersey.
Brendan fumbled with his cell phone to call 911. Did cell phones work in the tunnel? I never quite found out, since I shouted for him to get out and push.
With Brendan pushing the car went about one mile an hour. The tunnel was a mile and a half long, I figured we were half a mile inside it, so we'd be out in an hour.
I was waiting for a smash from behind me, the first of many. Every single rear end collision and other accident from this, and there had to be lots in the works, would be on my head. There's no other guy to blame here, this was clearly the work of me. People could get hurt in situations like this.
I felt guilty doing nothing while Brendan was working, but someone had to steer. I wanted to push, to put all my nervous energy into something. If I did a driver push with the door open, however, the first car to pass me by would shave my door off.
Well, then I could take over pushing as soon as Brendan got tired. I wouldn't want him to have to do the uphill section after the straightaway. Hell, pushing a 30-pound bicycle up a hill sucks; this would be dangerous, stupid, and a major traffic jam for hours to come. And it would take just one overzealous driver to accidentally kill whoever was pushing.
"We really should have taken the subway," I said.
4:30. A meter was open on the corner of 84th, normally a crooked crapshoot to find a spot. We pulled right into it. Finally, our luck was changing.
I had been telling Brendan to get out and run to the museum for ten blocks and half an hour now. I wasn't the one with a grade riding on the trip, so no point sticking with me until I could ditch the car. Brendan didn't want to ditch me, however, especially with so little chance of finding a parking space. Meeting up with him if I couldn't find a spot would be a problem, but so was Brendan flunking out of school because of a parking matter. The 84th Street space shut both of us up.
We ran through the museum and Brendan scribbled notes on as many paintings as he could. They were all in the Lehman Collection, so there was no shuttle running through the Temple of Dendur. He got enough notes to write his paper, and more importantly the museum receipt to prove he was there. Most paintings on his list could be viewed in books and online, so this trip was mainly for the receipt.
We came out of the museum with a load off our backs. The time crunch was over. We sat on the steps for twenty minutes and watched street performers flip over each other. Traffic would probably stink all the way home, but the only rush was to be home in time for Futurama at 7:00.
Park Drive was slow, but not unreasonably slow. The term 'unreasonably' was reserved for Central Park West, which was undistinguishable from a parking lot to the naked eye. We had the radio on, and we were making a block a song. It took half an hour to make it down to Columbus Circle.
Times Square was the usual five mile an hour crawl through, but it felt like the frickin' Autobahn. I enjoyed every bit I could. Traffic was always lousy on the outbound Holland Tunnel, especially with Broadway matinees letting out, and we were hitting that mother head on.
The tunnel backup was only a couple blocks, though. It looked like twenty minutes, max. I wanted to move ahead a car length to see what was going on, but that didn't seem to be happening. Our light went green, then red, then green again, and still not a single car was moving. This could not possibly be good. I started to worry about not having enough gas.
I shifted the car in park. I wanted to just turn the car off, but I figured starting it back up every car length would burn more gas. There are maybe five gas stations in Manhattan, and I had no idea where any of them were.
We spent an entire hour moving one block. 1010 WNYS described the Holland and Lincoln outbound traffic as 'jammed' without any further comment. I was hoping to hear about an accident in the tunnel to explain this, some idiot who ran out of gas for instance.
There was no mention of the George Washington Bridge. "How far is the George Washington?" Brendan asked.
"About a two and a half hours round trip," I said. It was sounding tempting. Two and a half hours of perpetual motion beat this unspecified holding pattern easily.
"We really should have taken the subway." I said.
It took an hour and a half to move the four blocks. Traffic speed was actually up to the high single digits going into the tunnel. The worst was finally over, I thought.
7:50. Cars blasted by me as I sat uselessly in the driver's seat. People were cheering Brendan on as he pushed. When he died of carbon monoxide, I'd be in trouble.
We were going to be on 1010 WNYS. And possibly the Post, when we got arrested. There had to be something illegal about what we were doing now.
Someone in a car behind us shouted something. Brendan stopped pushing and ran back inside the car. "They're going to push us out."
The car behind us inched forward so our bumpers were kissing. I gave a thumbs up to the driver, he accelerated, and we began rolling forward.
When the momentum bled off I braked again and let the samaritan line up the bumpers. We went forward again, but with a horrible metallic clanging. There goes the rear bumper, I thought. A couple thousand bucks to fix, but it'll be worth it.
Someone from the samaritan's car got out (there were three of them in the car, two guys and a girl) and retrieved a flat rectangular object from the road. A license plate. THEIR front license plate. Dammit, they were getting damage from this. One more thing for the stained conscious to deal with.
There had to be constant contact between the two cars, or else we'd be smashing our bumpers together. When the driver eased his acceleration I rolled ahead of him an inch or two, which was enough so we both had to come to dead stops before he could give another nudge.
The uphill section gave my car a tendency to roll backwards, which worked great to keep the constant contact going. One continual thrust of acceleration took us all the way up the tunnel. We were making speed comparable to the cars in the left lane, actually.
The night sky of New Jersey was a beautiful sight. I was never so happy to see that orangey pollution.
There's a red light immediately after exiting the tunnel, with a gas station to its side. My car rolled to the red, and I ran out to the samaritan's car. I forget what I said, but it included a couple variations on thank you, and me grabbing the hundred bucks I had in my wallet and putting it in the driver's hand. He offered to push up to the gas station, but I didn't want their car to risk more damage. One solid Brendan push later, we were at a pump.
The samaritans drove off. I have no idea who they were. I hope a hundred bucks was enough to fix their license plate; I would have given them five hundred if I could.
"That was, like, the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me," Brendan said. I agreed. Not only did they help us, they helped thousands of other cars, and prevented an even worse traffic jam in the city. Maybe even a couple injuries.
I filled the tank with a credit card. It took an eon to fill. I suspected that maybe this was some other engine problem, not just running out of gas. But the car was fine; there's not even any body damage to my rear bumper. There is, though, the screw from the samaritan's license plate stabbed through it. I think I'm going to keep it there.
I'd really like to meet the samaritans again. Buy them dinner, make sure their car doesn't have any other damages, find even more variations of thank you to say to them.
Hopefully they live close to the subway.