Thank god for global warming.

I love the heat of summer more than any other season. To me, Summer is the best time to be alive and NYC is the best place to be. It’s hot, muggy, sweaty and disgusting. The air holds you in its simmering grip like a fire giant’s fist, squeezing you so tightly that you can barely breathe. Even blinking can cause a person to break out in a sweat that drenches them from head to toe.

Even peoples knuckles sweat.

Some people prefer the cool, crisp and colorful season of Autumn. Or perhaps they enjoy the newfound vitality and freshness of Spring. For some crazy reason, a few people even like the cold, dark yet holiday-filled Winter season. Now, I’m not saying these seasons don’t have some redeeming qualities, but the truth of the matter is that Summer can kick all the other season’s asses while eating a breakfast burrito and with one hand tied behind its back.

If I had to describe Summer in three words I’d say: “Fan-frigging-tastic.”

You might be asking yourself what could possibly be so infatuating about Summer that it would make me go on about it like this? Could I be recalling fond memories of my youthful days at summer camp? Do I wish to recapture my long gone childhood by playing a game of Rooftop Manhunt or Full Contact Street Football? Am I suffering from heatstroke? Have I finally gone bonkers?

Or maybe you think I’m just a moron who likes to sweat.

Well, no. Actually, I hate it when I sweat. Makes my underwear bunch up, you see. And don’t get me started on the whole sticking-to-the-plastic-covered-furniture thing. I still have nightmares of the time I spent six hours stuck to my Aunt’s couch in her air-conditioner-less apartment.

I still wet myself every time I hear someone rub two balloons together.

The truth of the matter is that the real reason why I like Summer so much is pretty simple. It can be summed up in five words that will have every man nodding in agreement and every woman gasping in shocked amazement. You want to know the reason why I think Summer rocks? Well then, here it is.

Tube tops and mini skirts.

That’s right, I said it. Tube tops and mini skirts. You all know I’m right. Forget Autumn’s changing leaves and Winter’s wonderland of white snow. Spring? HA! Spring’s got nothing on Summer’s heat and humidity. And, as we all know, it’s only when it’s hot and humid that women are willing to go outside with no bra and a white, nearly-transparent, show-off-your-newly-pierced-belly-button shirt.

Oh yeah, the men are with me on this one.

I don’t know about you other guys, but I spend nine months of the year standing on my front porch spraying hairspray into the air in the hopes of making the hole in the ozone just a little bit larger. Every year I hear about global warming on the news and I pray that the scientists of the world never fix it. Every September, I hope that Summer might last just a few days longer. That I’ll get just a few more days of seeing women in Daisy Duke’s and high heels leaning against a Mr. Softie ice cream truck. That I’ll have another hour to watch sweaty girls in stretchy tube-tops step into an air-conditioned store and literally poke holes in their shirts. That my eyes will have just one more minute to savor the sight of a woman in a restaurant holding a glass of ice water to her forehead and rub an ice cube on her neck.

Damn, I really, really, REALLY love Summer.

Part II – The Missing Limo

“I’m so hungry I could eat my own teeth.”

“You have teeth left? Someone get me a fork.”

“Will you two shut up and look for a place to eat?”

It was 11:30 pm and my prom friends and I were cruising midtown in the Limo From Hell looking for food. We had missed our 8pm reservations at Top of the Sixes by a mere three hours and they had refused to seat us. Can you believe that?

They said the kitchen was closed. Communists.

We now needed to find another restaurant that was a) open, and b) able to seat seven people on short notice and without reservations. We also needed to hurry because the club where the prom was being held would close at 2am and after what we’d been through, if we didn’t get to dance that night someone was going to die.

Probably me.

“Hey guys, I’ve got an idea.”

“GeekMan, you’d better not say Dunkin Donuts again or so help me…”

“Well, that’s not what I was going to say, but they are open 24/7.”

“It’s our Prom Night dammit! I’m not eating a crappy doughnut for my Prom Night dinner, so you better think of something else!”

[sounds of general agreement and imminent mutiny]

“Well, I really wasn’t going to say Dunkin Donuts now and it was just a suggestion before. More like a joke really. You know, a joke?”

[evil glares]

“Puh-lease people, give me some more credit than that, okay?”

[crickets]

“Ahem, well. Anywaste, I was just going to suggest that we go to the Hard Rock Café. They’re open late and I don’t think we should have any trouble getting inside. They’re also pretty fast.”

[awed silence]

“GeekMan, you’re a genius.”

“Thank you.”

“No really, we’re impressed.”

“Well, we do still have a problem.”

“What?”

“Does anyone know the address? I don’t think our driver could find his way out of bed without help from gravity.”

After a hurried consultation, we came to the conclusion that no one knew where the Hard Rock was located well enough to give the idiot driver directions. We used the car phone to call information to get the address and somehow made it to the restaurant at about midnight. After making sure we could get inside to eat, I went back out to the limo laid down the Law.

“Driver.”

“Yes Sir?”

“We’re going to eat here. We expect to be done in 45 minutes. I need you right here in half an hour waiting for us so we won’t be any later than we already are to the Prom. Understand?”

“Yes Sir. I’ll just go around the corner and grab a sandwich and be right back. I’ll wait for you here.”

“Outside the restaurant.”

“Yes Sir. Outside the restaurant.”

“Great. So, you’ll be here in half an hour, right?”

“Yes Sir. Half an hour.”

Happy with this seemingly successful attempt at communication, I joined my friends inside the Hard Rock for dinner. Despite our predicament, we all enjoyed ourselves very much. The food wasn’t great, but we were so hungry by this point that a little thing like taste didn’t matter anymore. Once we had food in our stomachs we no longer really cared about how late we were and how pathetically stupid our driver was. We laughed, and joked and made fun of the whole situation. 45 minutes later we walked out of the restaurant with full bellies and the promise of a fun filled Prom ahead of us. That’s when reality sucker punched us.

Our limo was missing.

My friends and I stood there in utter disbelief. It was unfathomable that our driver wouldn’t be waiting for us after all the other screw ups he had made that evening. He had gotten lost after every pickup. He had ruined our dinner. We were hours late because no matter how explicit the directions he hadn’t been able to follow them correctly.

He was the Forrest Gump of The Limousine & Taxi Commission.

For him to not be waiting for us after all of that had to have been some sort of joke. For a brief moment I actually looked around for a hidden camera and hoped someone would pop up and shout, “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”

I wanted to cry.

Instead, we did the only thing we could do. We called the dispatcher (who we were on a first name basis with already due to our constant need for directions) and complained bitterly about the horrid man they dared to call a driver. We only had an hour of our Prom left and it didn’t look like we’d even make it to the club. We felt cheated, let down and thoroughly disgusted. At 1:30am the limo pulled up to the Café and the driver told us he had gotten lost trying to find a place to get a sandwich.

My friends had to literally hold me back from kicking him in the nuts.

By the time we made it to the club there was only 15 minutes of dancing left. We left the limo and gave the idiot driver explicit instructions. He was to wait at that exact spot for us to come out. We told him that he was not to leave, not even to go to the bathroom, because we’d be back in less than half an hour.

Confident that he finally understood the severity of the situation, we went to our Prom.

It probably won’t surprise you at all that when we entered the club, the first person I saw and the first person who saw me, was my ex-girlfriend. We had only broken up three weeks before but she already had another boyfriend while I couldn’t even get a date for the Prom. She was looking radiant in a little black dress and sexy high heels with a handsome, popular and rich guy on her arm. By this time of the evening I looked more like a half dead penguin in a bad wig who had just run a marathon by dragging himself along by his eyelids.

She’s probably still asking herself what she ever saw in a loser like me.

My limo friends and I met up with all of our other friends inside the club and told the story of our hellish evening to anyone and everyone who would listen. We then danced to every song, no matter how horrible, because we had come too far and through too much not to dance. 20 minutes later at 2:10 am, the last song was played and everyone was told to vacate the premises. Some of our other friends were going to Jones Beach to continue the party and watch the sun rise and we agreed to meet them there. My limo friends and I were the last people to leave the club. Against all the theories of Darwinian evolution, common sense and self preservation, our idiot driver had ignored us yet again and disappeared.

Big surprise.

Sighing in resignation, we made the call to the dispatcher. Apparently, our idiot driver and moved the car about 10 minutes away from the club and then fallen asleep in the back. It took three calls for him to wake up and answer the car phone. By the time he made it back to the club it was almost 3am and my friends and I had had enough. We decided to forget Jones Beach and just write off our big Prom Night as a spectacular loss.

It was time to go home and have a good cry.

I was the last person to be dropped off. By the time I made it home it was after 7am and I was so tired I didn’t even bother to curse the driver when he forgot to open my door for me. I had been out all night and all I had to show for it was a wrinkled, cheap tuxedo, a no-longer-poofy pompadour, and the memory of being lost in some of the worst parts of the Bronx with an idiot driver who wanted to stop and ask the ‘nice gentleman with the gold teeth hanging out at the payphone’ for directions. To top it all off, two weeks later I received a limousine bill for $600.

That bill was never paid.

So, how was your Prom?

Part I – The Limo of Doom

“Let me get one more picture, GeekMan. You look so handsome I could cry!”

“Moooom!”

I rolled my eyes while my mother made cooing noises and lined up the Polaroid like a shotgun at my acne covered face. We were standing outside our Brooklyn apartment building waiting for my rented limo to arrive and whisk me away to my High School Prom. I was dressed to the nines in a rather threadbare, black, rented tuxedo that smelled of mothballs and cheap detergent, and my $30 second-hand shoes had been shined to mirror brightness by a combination of a black magic marker, an old washcloth and generous amounts of spit. My brand new contact lenses were causing me to blink furiously and my eyes were watering at an almost biblical rate as I stared intently down the street and willed the limo to appear like magic and save me from yet another silly photograph. Catching a glimpse of myself on the window of a parked car, I cocked my head to the side and smirked at my reflection in my best Michael Knight impersonation.

“Damn,” I thought as I straightened my bowtie. “Eat your heart out James Bond!”

I patted my Dipity-Doo and Aqua-Net styled hair back into its limp and very un-cool pompadour and tried to smile for the camera. As soon as the little black box had vomited forth yet another iron-clad example of why I should never be allowed to breed, I again asked my mother for the time.

“Mom, where do you think the limousine is?”

“Don’t worry Geek, I’m sure he’ll be here soon. He’s a professional.”

“I know mom, but maybe we should call…”

“Stop fretting and let me take another picture of my darling boy.”

“Mooooom!”

The limousine was already almost an hour late. Being the one responsible for the limo, my friends had decided that I was to be the first person picked up. Of course, that made it my responsibility to make sure everyone was picked up on time so we could head off to our fancy dinner and the Prom. Even though not one of my friends had a real date for the evening, we were all prepared to enjoy ourselves to the max.

We were going to have fun Porky’s style.

Although I was all of seventeen, I was a real city boy so I didn’t own a car and hence had no idea how to actually drive to any of my friends’ houses. Because of this, I was hopeless at giving directions unless it was by foot or train. All I did know was my friends’ addresses (written down on a piece of paper for the limo driver) and their general locations on a map. I was positive that that was all I’d need to give the driver for him to find my friends.

It worked for taxis, so why not limo’s?

My friends lived all over the five boroughs so it had been calculated that we’d need about three hours to pick up everyone and make it to the restaurant in time for dinner. One of my friends lived close to me in Brooklyn, three lived in the wilds of Queens, one lived in the unknown and dangerous seeming Bronx and one would meet us outside the restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.

BTW, Staten Island doesn’t really count as a borough because… well, it’s Staten Island.

We had reservations for dinner at a fancy restaurant called Top of the Sixes at eight o’clock and it was already six. I was beginning to get worried, especially since I had gotten this limo based on a ‘friend of the family’ type connection and my friends were counting on me to pick them up and get them to the Prom on time. We had all decided to go to this shindig only two weeks before and finding a limo was very hard to do at the last minute during Prom season.

I didn’t want to let my friends down.

Just as I was about ready to explode into a fiery ball of anxiety, the limo turned the corner and I felt myself relax. I think I might have visibly shuddered as the pent up frustration in my body was expelled in one massive sigh of relief. My muscles relaxed to the point that I needed to hold on to something just to keep from falling down.

It was like a full body orgasm without the mess.

As the long, black limo pulled up to my apartment building, I smiled and waved farewell to my mother and walked out to the street. The limo driver was a young man, barely in his twenties and he immediately popped out from the drivers seat and opened the passenger door for me. As I got in he gave me the first warning of the horror that my night would turn out to be.

“Sorry I’m late, but I got lost.”

Unfortunately, my danger-sense was as yet undeveloped and I failed to comprehend this early warning of impending doom. I shrugged and let it slide figuring that anyone could get lost, even a New York limo driver. He shut the door smartly and hopped back into the front seat. With one final look at my mother standing in the doorway we were off.

Cue horror music.

As I sat there in the limo I became enamored with its sleek and sexy interior. It had big, wide leather seats that could easily accommodate all seven of us, little lights for reading, neon lights running around all the windows and a deep, black carpet. It also had a separate tape deck for the passengers, a mini bar and, oh my god, an actual car phone!

I felt like a rock star.

As we stopped at the light at the end of my block, the divider glass that separated the driver from the passenger lowered itself. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Alas, it would turn out to be the best thing about the entire evening.

“Where to, sir?”

Wow. He called me ‘Sir’.

“I have a list of addresses for my friends here. They’re listed in the order that they need to be picked up and we need to hurry because we have a dinner engagement at Top of the Sixes at eight.”

I handed him the list and sat back in the seat nearly bursting with pride because I’d managed to use the word ‘engagement’ in a real sentence. I amused myself for a while by daydreaming about using other grownup and important sounding words in sentences later on in life. Words like ‘loquacious’, ‘fastidious’ and ‘avocado’. Five minutes later we were on the Belt Parkway headed for NYC.

A small man with a large trumpet began playing ‘Revelry’ somewhere in the vicinity of my left temple. I hastily leaned forward and knocked on the privacy partition.

“Excuse me, driver?”

“Yes sir?”

“Shouldn’t we be picking up my friends?”

“Sir?”

“My friends. The people I’m going to the Prom with?

“I’m taking you to meet them at the restaurant now, Sir.”

The little man played louder.

“No. Nononono. You don’t understand. We need to pick up my friends first, ok?”

“Your friends, Sir?”

“You know, my friends? I gave you a list of their addresses a little while ago? We’re supposed to be picking them up so we can all go to dinner and then to our Prom?”

“Oooohhhh! I’m sorry sir, I didn’t realize you wanted to pick them up first. Although, to tell you the truth, I thought it was a little strange for you to be going to dinner all alone in a limo.”

The little man on the trumpet was joined by a choir singing ‘You’re Screwed’.

“OK. Well, we need to pick up my friends, starting with the one on the top. She lives only a few minutes from my house so all we need to do is go back to that area and get her and then we’re back on schedule, right?”

“Sure sir.”

“Great.”

The choir and trumpeter paused for dramatic effect as the marching band filed onstage and waited for their cue.

“Uh, Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know how to get there from here? I seem to be lost.”

The marching band burst into an ancient Scottish polka on their out-of-tune bagpipes. They were accompanied by the sounds of the veins in my forehead bursting like cannon-fire as I suddenly developed a twitch in my left eye.

“You’re lost?”

“I’m afraid so, Sir.”

“You don’t know where you are?”

“No Sir.”

“You. Are. Lost.”

“Yes Sir.”

“OK. Fine. No problem. I can handle this. I’m cool, I’m calm and I’m collected. There’s no need to panic. My friends won’t kill me, right? They’ll understand it wasn’t my fault, right? Right?”

“Sir?”

“Shut up.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Alright. I’ve got it. This limo has a car phone, right?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Great. Then I suggest you call your office and get directions.”

“Excellent idea, Sir.”

He looked directly at me from the front seat and slowly, ever so slowly, blinked. Neither of us moved to pick up the phone.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Would you happen to have the number to my office on you? I forgot to bring it with me.”

Oh. My. God.

*** Next time, the Prom Dinner Fiasco ***