It is not possible to get from a spot out on Ocean Avenue near 19th in San Francisco all the way back to the Mission District in five minutes. Google Maps says it takes sixteen. Most days it would take twenty or more.

But, as I found out one day, it depends on your motivation, and your car, and a lot of stupid luck.

It was several years ago. I was working in an office job out in the foggiest area of San Francisco. Just after lunch, I was talking on the phone to my charming domestic partner -- not yet my wife then. It was the usual personal phone call -- pick up something at the store on your way home.

Then she broke off in the middle of a sentence and screamed "No!!" Then I heard the phone hit the floor. More screaming, thuds, the sound of a struggle. Good Christ, what was happening? I only listened for a few seconds, but those few seconds sounded like sheer terror. Exactly the way it would sound if a psycho had burst into the house and was kidnapping someone. 

So I hung up the phone and called the police, told them what I'd heard, and asked them to send the cavalry to the house. Then, in a moment of panic, I decided I had to go there too. 

It usually took twenty or twenty-five minutes to drive home at the end of the day. I was about to cut that by more than half. 

I did have the kind of car you'd want to have if you had to tear down the highway as fast as possible: a 1987 Toyota MR2. It had 110,000 miles on it and it still ran great. I was about to find out how great. 

I drove fast but cautiously about a quarter of the way along busy Ocean Avenue, then turned onto the freeway, and there I cranked the car to an unsafe speed. In the interests of non-self-incrimination, I won't say how fast I was going. (The "200 MPH" in the title is an homage to a forgotten Bill Cosby LP. I didn't get up to 200 mph.) But I did cover the distance in about eight minutes. 

I pulled up to the house just as the police were leaving. And for the rest of the story, you can read Sirenita Lake's spellbinding account.

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A word, though, about the Cosby record. It came out in 1968, when I was 12. As I had done with most of Cosby's three previous records -- the ones with "Chicken Heart" and "Noah" -- I had committed the entire LP to memory. And I planned to recite it in front of a hundred Boy Scouts at camp that summer. 

Boy Scout camp was a pain in the ass to a large degree. The main problem were the Explorer Scouts, teenaged bullies who played the part of instructors in Scout knowledge. One of them had nearly killed me -- or at least that's what it felt like -- while supposedly teaching us lifesaving techniques. But there was one thing I could do that none of the other Scouts could do: get up in front of everybody and make them laugh. I didn't have my own material; I was content to steal Cosby monologues. But it's a tribute to how well-written they were that a 12-year-old white kid could make a bunch of other Midwestern white kids crack up to the same material. 

The summer before, I'd convulsed the whole camp with "Chicken Heart." So this year I had Cosby's newest album with which to regale the other kids. But on the last night of camp, when the big campfire was always held, it rained cats and dogs. The campfire was called off. And that was the end of my career as a Scout-comedian.

Ten years later I became a performance artist. I was finally old enough to have my own material. I never did recite Bill Cosby's piece "200 MPH." But at least I got to drive really, really, scarily fast one day.