The Brooklyn Bridge Inncident.
The contents of this post come to you under threat of our incarceration (of which we will go into more detail later). This is a very serious issue and is not funny AT ALL. And when I say not funny at all I mean that it is. . . well, I guess it is actually pretty funny.
We left the Christopher (pastor of Memorial Baptist Church and his wife) residence around 2:30 Sunday afternoon, July 2, 2006. We were on our way to the Newark Airport to drop the Christophers off so that they could fly to Alaska.
As we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge the car stalled. If you have ever been on the Brooklyn Bridge, or if you have not, you know that this is not a good situation. Pastor Christopher tried several times to crank the engine but to no avail.
Meanwhile, the natives were getting restless (that means that they were honking and yelling at us as if we had meant to stop in the middle of the bridge).
We all sat patiently while Pastor Christopher called his insurance co. and sought rescue from the current peril in which we had found ourselves. After talking for a while with the agent, he discovered that the tow companies would not come onto the bridge to tow so we were in a no-man’s land as far as towing went. We learned from the insurance co. that we would have to call the police to give us a tow off of the bridge and then once off the bridge we would have to get the private tow company to tow us to the shop. Pastor Christopher called the police and they were on their way. In the meantime we suggested that the Christophers hail a cab from the bridge so that they would not miss their flight. We said that we would take care of the car and stuff. As you may observe in the pictures, Leigh Sykes was kind enough to join us on our exploit.
So Pastor Christopher hailed a cab and he and Mrs. Christopher went to the airport,
and we stayed behind to wait for the po-lice.
Not long after the Christophers had ridden off in the golden chariot, the mighty Keith from the NYPD (we’re still disputing whether he was an officer or not because he was driving the tow truck) came to remove us from danger.
Keith drove us off the bridge and onto centre st. right in front of the U.S. court house. He then hurried off to rescue other poor souls in distress.
Now that we were in Manhattan we called the insurance co. again and I worked on my best Jake Gyllenhaal impression. We found out that the tow company would tow us from Manhattan. . . but only if we paid out of pocket because Pastor Christopher was not there to authorize. In light of this information we thought we would give the car one last crank and lo and behold it started.
We began to make our way back to Brooklyn in our newly revived motorcar. The car stalled and broke down again. On the Bridge. In traffic. Luckily this time there were some pedestrians on the footbridge that were able to point, laugh, and take pictures of us and an older man that pulled off in front of us to tell us that we were not allowed to park on the bridge and that we would go to jail for “take-a de peecture from de bridge.” He also flashed some sort of I.D at us as if to assure of his authority over the matter. Then he drove off. We were thankful for all the help he had been.
We called the po-lice again, but after about 10 min. the car miraculously cranked and ran again. We drove it into downtown Brooklyn where it of course died again.
This time we were able to enlist the help of a tow company that would tow on the insurance claim without the authorization from Pastor Christopher.
(As a side note, this tends to be the basic difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn side. Brooklyn is expensive, Manhattan is astronomically expensive.)
Artie came and towed us to the street where the Christophers live. The car, having at last been defeated by us, resigned itself to cranking and running for us one last time, so we drove it into the church parking lot just around the corner.
Thus ended our saga at around 6:30 that same evening. We hope you have enjoyed it.
