War Story #15 New York City 1992, 3 Friends on a Road Trip, in my Blue 1982 Chevy Malibu Car, Queens, Chinatown, and Clogging Up The Traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike Going Back to Virginia. Drinking

The High School Year was over. School had lit out for the summer at the Washington D.C. high school I attended, and at all of the Virginia area schools where my friends went.

One of my friends, Holmes, and I had drove in a 1970 Orange Ford Mustang up to Boston, Massachusetts in the Fall of 1991, where we had discovered the soft, seedy underworld that was the Cape Cod Grateful Dead scene. We were in Boston for a weekend Grateful Dead concert. which you can read about here.A Letter from jail to R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. from Patrick Daniel Tyrrell, including War Stories Parts 1 - 7. (C) 2025. Remarkable Females. It is war Story #4.

The schoolyear had been over for a few days, and Holmes and I, and another kid, our friend Nick, had already drove on one road trip in my previous car, a gray 1990 Ford Fiesta to Ocean City, Maryland and back, where I had encountered strange behavior by Maryland police in a rest area. They had gathered around a white trans-am, I think it was, in a semi-circle, but distant, apparently waiting for some werewolf, or a lion, or something to leap out of the car at them and they would have to shoot it. . .(but it wasn't a werewolf or a lion after all -- it was serial murderer Hadden Clark).

I've met Hadden on two other occasions also, and you can read about him, here: Serial Killer, Hadden Clark, I [Patrick Tyrrell] know him.-By Patrick Tyrrell © 2024

It was still June, and although my Ford Fiesta had been wrecked, I had a better car now, a 1982 Chevy Malibu. It was blue.

So, Nick's grandmother lived in NYC and the three of us decided to go there for a couple of days and sleep on the floor of her Chinatown apartment, so we did.

The drive up there was the only uneventful part of the trip, but that all changed when I pulled the car into the city that June of 1992.

Coming in off the NJ Turnpike, I drove in under an overpass which likely is where Lou Reed, on his album called "New York" is talking about where he goes, "The TV whores were calling the cops out for a suck." There were tinkerbell weirdos and whatnot, and the stereotypical looking hookers there, like you see in New York City in some movie called Tootsie, I think it is called.

So we drove through, and it looked much like Lou Reed described it through my windshield.

We were stuck in traffic for a while, but as I got the car near my friend's gramma's place, bad news -- smoke started pouring from the radiator.

It would need a mechanic.

I pulled it into a mechanic shop and told them I would talk to them soon.

So Nick's gramma was way cool, and we said hello, and then we headed back out, to go to Queens and drink 40s of malt liquor with people Nick knew, so that's what we did. We took the NYC subway trains there.

We drank bumpers of it St. Ides on the roof of a building that had recently been featured in an Eddie Murphy movie called "Vampire in Brooklyn". This scene in the picture below is on the roof, the same roof where we got drunk, here:

Yeah, we all got really loaded with my friends' Queens friends, and then we went back in the wee hours of the morning on the New York subway.

The NYPD stopped my friend, Nick, on the Subway because he had written his friend's phone number in big letters down the side of his arm, with a green magic marker. They, the police thought it was a tattoo.

The police thought we should be in school, it being a school night, but we told them we were from Virginia, which we were, and school had gotten out some time ago.

Since school had got out that summer of 1992, I had already;

1. Potentially saved the life of a person who turned out to be a badly abused individual by both of his parents and unbeknownst to me, a serial murderer, named Hadden Clark. Serial Killer, Hadden Clark, I [Patrick Tyrrell] know him.-By Patrick Tyrrell © 2024

   
   

2. Had one hard-drinking road trip to Ocean City Maryland.

   
   

3. Had a friend of mine intentionally wreck my Ford Fiesta car after doing doughnuts in the freshly planted grass of an enemy person of ours in the rain. (I did not care because nobody got hurt in the two-car collision at a four-way intersection my friend said she would try to make happen, and she did). No hard feelings.

4. I had got a 1982 Chevy Malibu to replace it, which was now in a shop in The Big Apple with a radiator full of holes.

   
   

   

The 1990 Ford Fiesta, mine was grey.

1982 Chevrolet Malibu, mine looked just like that.

New York City children remained stuck in their classrooms well into the summer.

This was the beginning of the "stop and frisk" era in New York City under Mayor Giuliani I believe, so that is why the NYPD stopped us on the Subway probably, but we assured the officers that we were in high school in another state, Virginia, 235 miles to the South, not New York City.

The next morning, my friend Holmes ran into a rap artist, I'll find out the name of who, he was drinking his orange juice in a Manhattan restaurant near the sidewalk, and my friend talked with him.

I was dealing with the New York City mechanic, and had payment arranged. He said it would be fixed, and around rush hour I picked up my car and we began to drive home to Virginia, crossing under the same dirty graffiti-ridden, grimy underpass to get out of New York City that we had drove in under a day or two before.

The city had not changed very much since I used to go there multiple-times per year until I was about eight years old in the 1970s and early 80s. I loved New York City back then too; Not-so-much Connecticut -- not Connecticut -- because my parents' friends in CT were not at all my-kind-of-people. That whole scene, Greenwich Village, and those places in the 1970s, and I deduce the 1960s before I was born had different people hanging around who I didn't like -- and they didn't like me.

I still don't like them.

So, as I proceeded on the New Jersey Turnpike, a two-lane highway in those days -- it happened again.

Steam and smoke began pouring forth from the radiator again; the car stalled, and we couldn't go anywhere.

We were blocking one of the only two lanes out of the city at afternoon rush hour on The New Jersey Turnpike; it may have been Friday.

I stood in the middle of the highway and popped the hood. It revealed that the radiator had been plugged full of gum by the NYC mechanic. It really was not fixed and had the same look and feel as chewing gum. It might have been chewing gum.

So, Holmes and I sat on the hood of my blue 1982 Chevy Malibu and smoked cigarettes in the middle of one of the only two lanes on the New Jersey Turnpike. Traffic was backed up for miles because of us.

Hundreds and hundreds of irate New Yorkers streamed past us in their cars making fists and extending middle fingers in our direction, but there was nothing we could do.

It took five, maybe six cigarettes and about 25 or 40 minutes later, before I decided to try to start the car's engine again.

Miraculously -- the engine started.

I knew I had to keep the engine running the rest of the drive home, or it would never start again.

When I filled up with gas, I kept the engine running.

I would have added water to the radiator but it looked like someone had shot the radiator full of holes -- as if with a machine gun.

Wads of orangish-pink chewing gum the shady mechanic had stuck in the leaky holes, saying it was fixed, were falling out of them now that the metal of the radiator had turned red hot.

For long stretches of the highway that night I coasted with the car in neutral to keep the engine cool (don't try this at home).

We coasted into our town of McLean / Great Falls Virginia very late at night on a humid summer night, and I felt like a champion for successfully getting the damaged car and us returned to Virginia. It is about a five hour drive from New York.

The car could of totally exploded without a radiator to keep the engine cool, if so it would have looked something like this -- actual footage of an automobile bursting into flames in Alexandria, the night of about December 1, 2025, just the other night my son filmed, just five nights ago.

A car burst into flames on the side of the road in December, 2025, Alexandria, Virginia, King Street.

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