Crash!

"So, have you stuck your penis into your slut roommate yet?" Lizzie asked me this afternoon.

"Jesus, Lizzie!" I said.

"Oh, come on," she said. "You haven't hidden the sausage with Suzie?"

"What the fuck? Where the hell did this come from?"

Elizabeth is a very strange girl. She grew up with a police chaplain for a father, a Puritanical tyrant who once embarrassed her among all her friends by storming into the school and trying to get her high school band director fired when he found out a couple of the band kids were making out in the bus during a road trip. Her mother played her part as victim and suffered through what amounts to years of emotional abuse, supposedly for Lizzie's sake, but not without making sure Lizzie knew how much she sacrificed for her. My impression is that Lizzie is every bit as judgemental and conservative as her father on the inside, but she hates that side of herself and rebels against it outwardly. Before she can get completely free, however, she finds herself mired in guilt and unable to escape.

Most of the time her rebellion takes the form of crude words at unexpected moments, but it always sounds awkward and forced. For example, Lizzie would never say, "Have you fucked your roommate?" Nice girls don't say the "F" word. But she would ask me if I had stuck my penis into her or played "Hide the Sausage," which sounds every bit as crude to my ear. It's like she's trying to be bad without really being bad, and failing to succeed either way.

"What's with this all of the sudden?" I asked.

"I need to get laid," she said. "I want Joey to bang me for about three days 'til I'm sore." Joey is one of our producers. Lizzie decided at some point this past week that she wants to go out with him. Unfortunately it appears that Joey isn't interested. He's convinced she's still a virgin at age 24 and isn't the least bit stirred at the prospect of becoming her first real boyfriend. ("Issues, man," were his exact words.)

"I was just thinking about sex," Lizzie said, "and realized I hadn't heard about you gettin' any since you've been here."

I said nothing.

"Have you?" she asked. "Gotten laid?"

"That's not really any of your business," I said. I didn't want to have this conversation. Especially not with THIS version of Lizzie.

"It is my business," she said. "You want to get with my friend. I look out for my friends. I don't want you getting with her if you've picked up some disease from that nasty roommate of yours. You give Lynn a disease and I'll cut it off."

"Lynn and I are just friends," I said.

"But you don't want to be."

"No, but she has a boyfriend."

"You care whether she has a boyfriend?"

"She cares," I said. "So I really don't have a choice."

"But you do like her?"

"Yes," I said. "You know that."

"So you want to slip her the salami?"

"God, Lizzie!"

A few minutes later she was back to normal. She's done this maybe four or five times since I've been working with her. The first time it freaked me out a little, but now I just accept it as her way of dealing with her own problems.

I'm glad she pulled herself together, because we didn't realize at the time that we were driving right into a big problem. Literally.

It happened as we were on our way to do our live shot for the afternoon show. I was winding the live truck along a two lane road when I came up on a blind curve around to the right. Just as I was entering the curve the mast alarm let out one very brief, very loud beep, accompanied by one flash of the red alarm lamps on the dash. At that same moment, the engine died.

Gee, it looks like Jake's "safety" system works.

When I lost the engine, the power steering also died. I've driven a car in the past in which the power steering had failed, but this took me by surprise. It took all my strength to manhandle that truck toward the right side of the road instead of into oncoming traffic.

I was driving pretty slowly through that area, so I didn't have enough momentum to get completely off the road. As we were coming to a halt, I had my hand on the shifter to put it in park to try to start it back up when I suddenly felt us lurch forward and heard a huge "BANG!"

The guy behind me never hit his brakes. The impact shoved us onto the shoulder, but the other guy spun to the other side of the road. His airbags had deployed. His car was clearly totaled.

The guy was pretty dazed. He got out of his car and stepped right out into the road, in the path of oncoming cars. Luckily they slowed down, but I thought we were about to be involved in a news story ourselves. He needed medical attention and ended up going to the hospital.

I feel fine right now, and Lizzie seemed to be okay. CP Rick came out to survey the damage and make sure we were all right. I don't appear to be in any trouble over this, because the mast was down when I left the station. Something weird happened with Jake's handiwork. The damage to the truck looked pretty bad. After we got the police report done, Rick called Al in to take us both home, and he stayed to take care of getting the truck towed.

Obviously the live shot was cancelled.

I have a feeling Lizzie and I are both going to be sore tomorrow, but not the way Lizzie wanted.