Terror In The Drive-Thru Lane

This morning I was in the drive-thru lane of a certain fast-food restaurant which I won’t name here. I had just finished ordering my Egg McMuffin® and coffee, and as I pulled the money from my pocket to pay, my keys dropped out. These were the keys to the office door and the men’s washroom at work, which I keep on a rather fetching Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival souvenir brass keychain, and which were now resting on the floor of the car between my seat and the center transmission console.

I wedged my hand down, way down, into the crevice, and with considerable dexterity, if I may say, I deftly managed to seize the keychain between the tips of my second and third fingers. Success! Oh, but what’s this? I can’t seem to withdraw my hand. It’s kind of…stuck.

At first I just kind of chuckled at the situation, the way you do when you when you have a bodily appendage trapped while waiting for a breakfast sandwich. I wasn’t too concerned because, as I reasoned, if the hand could fit going in, certainly it should be able to come out. I tugged harder. Ouch! I tried sliding my hand forward a bit, looking for more wiggle room, but that just seemed to jam it in even tighter. I brought my other arm over and pulled. Ouch! Ouch! Now I was getting worried. I dropped the keys and began frantically rocking the trapped arm as much as I could to try to pry it loose. That’s when I looked up to see that the line ahead of me had cleared and I was next up at the pick-up window. I drove up.

The young woman behind the glass slid open her window, and held out my order with two hands—bag of McMuffin in one, coffee in the other. I reached over and buzzed my window down. Then with my left--and currently only available--hand I reached out (and it was a reach, since my body was listing in the opposite direction) and snagged the bag. I brought it over across my body and laid it on the seat beside me, then reached out again, grimacing and straining, to take the coffee—again moving it across my sloping body—and deposited it into the cupholder. Then I took the wheel and drove off wordlessly.

What else could I have done? I couldn’t very well say “I’m sorry, I can only use one hand right now because the other one is currently stuck here between the seat and the console” because…well, because it would make me look like an idiot. My only hope was that she might think I was the victim of a paralyzing stroke, or had suffered some ghastly injury that rendered my right arm immobile and made me lean to one side and make grotesque faces. The thing is, though, that look she gave me seemed to convey a lot more bemused suspicion than it did pity.

I pulled over quickly into the parking lot and started to panic. I thought about that story of the guy who got trapped under a boulder while rock climbing and ended up sawing off his own arm with a pocket knife to get free. How long could I survive like this, I wondered, before I would have to gnaw off my arm at the elbow? True, I did have the Egg McMuffin to sustain me for awhile, but what about lunch?

Then I had an idea. If I couldn’t move my hand, I could still move the seat! Great lateral thinking, Dan! I reached below the seat front, released the adjustment mechanism and threw my weight back. The seat shot back and I screamed as the flesh on my entombed arm seemed to spin right around on the bone. If anything, I was now more firmly ensconced, and my fingers were starting to lose feeling.

This was getting serious. Or hilarious, depending on your point of view. I tried to stay calm and reminded myself that I could always phone for help if it came to that. But then I remembered that my phone was in my computer bag on the back seat—out of reach. If I wanted to alert others to my plight, I would have to lean on the horn, or drive up to some pedestrians and ask them to dispatch a rescue crew, or maybe go through the drive-thru again and place an order for the Jaws of Life and a side of fries. And then what would happen? It could turn into one of those “kid-trapped-in-a-well” media frenzies, with live coverage of the heroic efforts to extricate me, and the inevitable satellite interview with Wolf Blitzer.

No, too humiliating. I decided then that I had to liberate myself, unassisted, one way or another, or I would die here with a 2005 Saturn Ion four-door sedan hanging off the end of my wrist. This was it. I steeled myself, closed my eyes and gave a mighty pull. I wrenched and tugged and cursed and finally—finally—my hand popped free.

I drove off, gripping my McMuffin with my newly-liberated, swollen, bloody-knuckled fist. Then I remembered: my keys were still down there. Oh well. I can always try again on the drive home.