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donut and be on the side of the road once again.” I told him we’d stop in Birmingham, change cars, call the office, and tell them that we might be late for the show. We’d get there when we get there. Tony started panicking. He wasn’t used to calling the office and dealing with problems. He was used to dealing with problems his own way, but that’s another story. I still just remember Tony sitting there mad, saying, “We’re stuck on the side of the road and you worried about eating.” I was like, “That’s because you didn’t work today.” What can I say, I wanted a sandwich.
    Jumping the Wrong Curb
    Jack Swagger
    The road: That’s where you really earn everything that’s thrown at you. The travel schedule is crazy. Once you get into it, three months seems like a year because you’re working every weekend. There are a lot of good times too, because we have a good group of guys, a really good atmosphere backstage, so to travel with these guys, they really become your family. The three-hundred-mile drives can be tough, but it’s worth it.
    Strange things end up happening, though, when you spend so much time driving. A few months ago, we were in Laredo, Texas, trying to get to this Outback Steakhouse. I’m driving down the street and all of a sudden it turns into a one-way street heading into this hotel. But instead of pulling all the way around to get to the Outback, I think I can cut through the hotel parking lot, but as I pull around, I see that the parking lot is all blocked in. So I’m driving around and I see this little area open up, and it looks like a little service road, so I figure I’ll just drive down off what looked like a little curb and we’ll be right there. Only thing is, as I’m driving out of the parking lot and onto the grass in front of this curb, I realize the drop is actually about four feet down, right onto cement. So I try to stop, but I hit the brakes too late and we can’t stop and the front wheels are off the curb. I try to back up, but the tires are just spinning, so the only place I can go now is down. So I take the rental car and we do the drop. Bam! Not too much damage, just messed up the bumper a little bit. But now we realize we’re not even in the Outback parking lot. We just dropped into the parking lot of some speaker store, and not only is the store closed, they have their parking lot gated off and the gate is locked. So not only did we just take a four-foot drop in our rental car, but now we’re locked in this speaker store’s parking lot.
    So we’re looking around and we find some little wooden pallets, and there we are in the middle of the night, trying to build a bridge back up the four-foot drop so we can drive back to our original spot by the hotel. Unfortunately, all we end up doing is messing the car up some more. Next thing we know, a cop pulls up and he’s just looking at us, like, “What do you guys think you’re doing?” Luckily for us, the cop ended up calling the owner, and the owner of the speaker store came down and unlocked the gate for us. The whole time, though, the cop just kept looking at us like we were idiots.
    Full Moon
    Maria
    I like to drive fast. Very, very fast. And this one time I was driving fast, and of course I get pulled over, but what I didn’t realize is that I had another speeding ticket that I forgot to take care of. So I’m driving by myself in the middle of Ohio, there’s nobody around for miles, and I’m going about eighty-five to ninety in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. When the cop pulls me over, he tells me, “I can’t let you drive. You don’t have a valid license.” I was like, “What?” I didn’t realize that I had this other speeding ticket out, so they ended up towing my car and I was stuck on the side of the road with all of my suitcases waiting for a cab to come pick me up. All of a sudden, this other car goes zooming by and my phone starts ringing. It’s Matt Hardy, and he’s like, “Are you