One Saturday afternoon I and seven other teenagers traveled to Baltimore from some event in York. I took three favored passengers with me, definitely Matthew, maybe Becky and Samantha, while the other four piled into Warren’s father’s late-model Buick sedan. My Beetle was by far the cooler car, all did agree, but in horsepower was of course no match for the Buick. As we headed south on I-83, Warren decided to show me just what he could do with it. So he would block my lane, slow to 40, and then zoom away when I tried to pass. Other times he would “drive rings” around me by passing on the left, getting in front of me in the right lane, allowing me to pass on the left, falling back to get behind me again, and repeating as necessary to drive home his tedious point.
By and by he pulled far ahead of us, perhaps by a mile, apparently got to talking with the others in the car, and forgot about us back there, while we labored up a long incline, pedal to the metal and doing all of 50 in the left lane. But I didn’t let up on the gas as we wheezed over the crest of the hill, and then we began to pick up speed, while Warren continued to loaf along at 60, way up there in the right lane.
We began to close the gap, and at every moment expected Warren to see us in his mirror and be instantly gone. The Beetle’s shuddering speedometer needle touched 60, then 70, then 80, air-cooled engine blattering, passengers hooting. Soon we were only a few car-lengths back on the long downslope — surely now Warren will see us bearing down upon him.
But he never looked up until we were right at the left corner of his back bumper, and then it was too late. My speedometer didn’t register past 80, but with the assistance of gravity and unanimous encouragement from my passengers, we must have been doing over 90 when we screamed past, inches away from the Buick’s haughty chrome. Fortunately some instinct for self-preservation kicked in about then, and I kept my eyes mostly fixed on the road and my hands in a 10-and-2 deathgrip on the wheel. But my passengers reported that Warren was so startled by our sudden re-appearance that he nearly drove off the road. I did get a glimpse of his face, aghast and mortified, in the mirror.
Then we pulled alongside another Volkswagen doing about 50, matched our speed to its, and kept Warren and the others prisoners back there the rest of the way to the Beltway. Free of I-83’s paltry two lanes, they easily got around us and then really were gone.
Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies 
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