Car and Car, Oppressors at Large

Chapter One: Car and Car meet, and share a bed

When I was a young, carefree lass of 22 I came to the great and mighty city of Raleigh after graduating from Boston University with a degree in English and bright hopes for the immediate future, such as fame, fortune and a superior job as a featured writer for some brilliant literary magazine.

I brought with me: a boy, an old futon and a 1990 white Honda Accord.

After a rather rushed and drunken first year in the great south, including a job as a sales assistant at a media group, a few major things happened all at once. I met my future husband (who was not, you see, the young man I was sharing an apartment with), I decided I wanted to quit my job and Carissa Sue and Bethany came out to meet us for drinks one night.

We had a mutual friend who'd pretty much convinced the two of them to move to Raleigh just because, as many of us had, and they did it. This was a very good sign.

Needless to say, the fall of 2001 was eventful.

And one particularly heartwarming event occurred when I suddenly realized, having gotten myself into quite a situation (a.k.a. new boy, no more apartment) that I had no place to live and Carissa and Bethany swooped to the rescue, offering me their couch in their townhouse, on a very special little street called Kelly Ct.

Here are some things you should know about Kelly Ct.:

1) our neighbors were 11-year-olds who liked to sit on the front stoop and take frequent swigs from their handles of vodka
2) the closet door on the second floor facing the stairs wasn't attached and, you guessed it, could fall from its hinges at any moment and crush you as you were coming up
3) Bethany, Carissa and I used to call each other on the way home from work almost every day even though we'd see one another in mere minutes

We also drank a lot of margaritas.

I moved into Carissa's bedroom and bed at first. We decided we'd be like Bert and Ernie. Eventually I got my own room when a third Kelly Ct. roommate moved out, but Car and I still like to tell everyone about the early days when we slept together each night.

A lot happened over the next few months, one of the most important things being us all getting to be great friends. This involved a lot of nights out, and in, and a lot of prank phone calls, highlights of all those crazy nights being our fabulous Christmas party, the time we had a mattress in our living room and that time Bethany fell off the bar at Banana Joe's and Car and I made J drive from Chapel Hill to drive us home while taunting a police officer with the fact that he "couldn't arrest us, we were drunk, but we weren't driving."

Then there was the time I got Norwalk Virus from some bad oysters and puked 13 times. I kept a tally on our dry-erase board on the fridge.

One of the most important events, of course, happened when Carissa and I, out at a bar, became inexplicably angry at everyone else and decided that we were "Car and Car, Oppressors at Large." We wrote it on a napkin. We were all set to oppress everybody but my guess is someone bought us a cocktail and we simmered down.

Since those first months a lot has changed. Bethany moved to D.C. I moved to Chapel Hill and got married. But Car and Car are still, and will always be, going strong.

And since we are such magnificent oppressors, since we email all day long and someday, will rule the world, we thought, what better way to instill our power than through a blog?

We'll be discussing men, social life, how we are always hungry and other great topics. Send us your questions, and we will send you our wisdom. You may not like our answers, but believe me, we are right.

posted by Cara Maria McDonough @ 10:03 AM