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per gallon!) is in the plus column as well. Is it built for a car chase? Probably not. However, that was never really a consideration, given it hadn’t crossed my mind that one day I might be chasing a drunken diabetic motorist swinging an endangered primate out her window while driving at breakneck speed toward the toll booths of the George Washington Bridge.
    But that was exactly the situation I now found myself in, although I figured I’d caught a break when her Range Rover didn’t go into the E-ZPass lane. As a result, my plan was a simple one—that is, when Denise Rodecker stopped to pay the toll, I would jump out of my car, run up to
her
car, reach inside, grab the lemur, run back to
my
car, get back into my car, make a huge sweeping U-turn into a westbound lane, then leisurely drive back to the peace and quiet of my home in Fox Hollow Estates. Even with my taped ribs and soft walking cast, I was confident I could easily pull this off. Innate quickness played a major role in my winning four varsity letters in fencing at Haverford College (“Go Black Squirrels!”) and I had no doubt it would trump any of my current liabilities, given the short distance between our cars.
    So when her Range Rover slowed to a halt to become the second car before the booth, I reached down to shift the Prius into neutral and felt something lying on the console that I hadn’t seen in the darkness—a rubber tube. I grasped it, pulled it toward me and could feel that there was something weighted at the other end. From the glow of the lights above the toll booths, I then saw that the tube was attached to a contraption that could very well have been the insulin pump Denise Rodecker kept yammering about. How it had gotten into my car was beyond me. And I had no idea how the weird-looking wooden thing lying next to it got in there as well. I picked up the wooden thing and saw what looked like, well, it looked like some kind of mask of a native of a tropical environment with the words “YA MAN” painted on his forehead. Out of sheer curiosity, I put the mask on my face and checked what I looked like in the rearview mirror when suddenly I noticed that Denise Rodecker’s car had moved up and she was now, in fact, being handed her change by the toll collector. So I grabbed the pump, opened the door to my Prius, and hobbled toward the Range Rover, yelling, “Hey, look what I have!” at the top of my lungs, but I wasn’t fast enough to get her attention as she pulled away from the toll plaza and onto the bridge.
    So I immediately turned, paid no attention whatsoever to the toll collector, who screamed when she saw someone wearing a YA MAN mask holding a strange-looking device with wires and tubes attached to it, hobbled back to my car, got in, and purposely screeched through the toll without paying as I didn’t want to risk losing sight of the vehicle that was now carrying my precious lemur toward Manhattan.
    Did my Prius let me down? Not really. Look, it wasn’t the car’s fault that it ran out of gas about a third of the way across that bridge. Because the Prius was so incredibly fuel-efficient (sixty-eight miles per gallon!) I had a tendency to be lax when it came to refilling—knowing that even if it did run out of gas, since it was a hybrid, the battery could still power it. No problem, except that the battery could only power it up to thirty-four mph before the gas kicked in—which meant that if the car
was
out of gas, that was the fastest it could go. Thirty-four mph. Good news if you’re driving on local streets trying to get to an Exxon station. Absolutely dreadful news if you’re trying to get away from a veritable armada of police cars, fire engines and EMS trucks that think you have a homemade bomb.
    But that’s what happened—although at first I had no idea the roadblock at the other end of the GW Bridge was intended for me. All I knew was that as I saw