Monday, January 14, 2008
Left Waiting on the Church Steps
UPDATE: if you got here via a “muscle car” link, you will be sorely disappointed - unless you are okay with other kinds of cars too. This one ain’t muscular. Except in terms of the writing, of course, which is my usual literary version of six-pack abs (buried under several inches of abdominal adipose).
As promised....
Let’s take a backward glance, shall we, to the neon and neoprene of the early nineteen-nineties - an era of good feelings and personal actualization for all sentient beings on this great green globe. Twin Peaks was in its first run, twin towers cast shadows that slid across Manhattan but not the rest of the world, and Kelly and I had only lately arrived in Frisco City. We lived in a small apartment, we kept two charming cats, and Kelly was leasing a diminutive and undistinguished car.
Back in L.A. she’d tried to get along with a superannuated Toyota Carina (sic) that was actually powered solely by the force of good intentions and a small group of inventive Ethiopian mechanics. When it finally actually burst into flame and acceded to its doom, instead of trying to buy another untrustworthy antique more useful for amusing and enriching greasemonkeys than for providing reliable transportation, Kelly opted to lease a real - albeit real cheap - new car instead. We stuck with Toyota but updated to a Tercel hatchback in low-charisma white. It was the first truly new vehicle either of us had ever called our own and we were delighted by its cozy interior, in-dash AM-FM radio, new car smell and four steady-firing cylinders. It wasn’t anybody’s idea of a muscle car (not even the weak muscles like the ones for extending your fourth toe) but we had a small life and it met our needs.
The lease, as I recall, ran three years, of which we lived the first two in L.A. and the last in S.F. We kept the Tercel gassed up and running smoothly, which really didn’t require much work. As another condition of the lease, and of driving a car in general, we also kept it insured. Insurance, of course, is a formality. There’s never any reason to invoke a claim. The maniac at midnight who leaves your car a misshapen hulk on the sidewalk is an urban myth, statistically.
You can see where this is going, right?
I’ll go on anyway. You’ll get a kick out of it.
Three years had elapsed since that sunny SoCal day when we drove the Tercel off the lot. The days had been happy and full, frustrating and vacuous, dull matte grey. It had been life, lived in part behind the wheel of our little leased car, and now that lease was up. It was time to turn in the Tercel. Of course, since we’d paid for our allotted time, we’d have been fools not to keep it for as long as we could. To turn it in early would have been a waste. This, as it turns out, was the hubris of utilitarianism - a lesson we learned the hard way, as follows:
The lease was a contract with monthly payments. So was the insurance. These two contracts were slightly - just very slightly - out of phase. Insurance was due one week ahead of the lease. This meant that we could have paid for a month’s insurance to cover the last week of the lease, or we could let the insurance lapse and ride our karma for seven short days and a drive to L.A. to drop off the little auto-ette. Karma abounded in those halcyon days; money to piss away for three extra weeks of insurance on a vehicle we’d no longer possess did not. Such an expenditure would be non-utilitarian. We therefore allowed coverage to lapse, and dug ourselves just a little more deeply into the inevitable travesty of fate.
We were going to drive down to do the drop-off on Saturday. The preceding Wednesday our doorbell rang at 2 in the goddamn morning. More accurately, the buzzer for our intercom snarled and awoke us from the sound sleep of blissful ignorance. Fumbling and indignant, I shuffled over to answer it. “Yes?” “This is the SFPD, your car is parked illegally, get down here and deal with it.” His voice was humorless and brusque. “Be right there.” I ran to the front window and looked down to the street; red and blue flashers cast crazy pantone shadows. I pulled on my robe and Kelly got hers and we went downstairs to see what had been wrought.
The cop’s cruiser was double-parked in front of an empty parking spot at the leading corner of the block, a spot where, in fact, we had parked the Tercel earlier that evening, but where at that moment no car was parked at all. Our car, the uninsured hatchback with the lease about to expire, that had carried us to San Francisco but still had to make it back to L.A., rather than being where we’d left it, now hunched like carrion halfway up the low marble steps of the First Church of Christ Scientist.
This church was the architectural anchor of the intersection. It’s got lovely ocher bricks and warm Romanesque proportions. The harmonious effect of the overall design was being thrown off, however, by the presence of our little car. The Tercel now seemed to have a footprint more like a trapezoid than a rectangle. From the front, the vacant stare of the headlamps and radiator grille still gazed out at us like a patient etherized; meanwhile, the back of the car bore immediate and obvious evidence of a powerful impact on the left side.
The cop was profoundly unamused. “What the hell were you thinking, parking there?” Glass littered the blacktop at our feet beneath the space our left fender had recently occupied. I inhaled some predawn patience for my answer, then replied: “I didn’t park there, officer. I parked right here. It looks like somebody ran into my car and pushed it all the way across the sidewalk and up the steps.”
“Yeah?” He seemed to be considering this novel hypothesis skeptically but fairly. “How old’s that body damage?”
“Never seen it before, officer. And I think this here was our tail lights.” I pointed with my toe to the glittering rubble strewn around us.
“Hm.” He was, reluctantly, persuaded. “Okay, I guess. Just get it off the church property. G’nite.” He turned to go.
“Hold on, there, officer, please.” Maybe my exhaustion and exasperation caught his attention; he turned back around impatiently. “Can you give us a report on this, or something? Our car is trashed here. At least let me get your name.”
I’d come outside without paper, of course, which I remembered as I patted myself down on the sidewalk in the gloom of the night. The cop sighed and pulled out a pad to prepare a report for us when he got a squawk on his shoulder-radio. He and it barked a short conversation back and forth. Suddenly, then, without a word to us, he bolted back to his car, hopped in, drove fast up to the next corner, and then pulled a hard left out of my life. The street was quiet for a moment, and then I heard sirens from two or three cruisers turning on not far away. It was a full-on high-speed chase down California Street toward the gulch as a miscreant flew past us followed by four noisy cop cars, roaring past us into the silent maw of the night.
Then it went quiet again and we just stood looking at our car smashed up on the steps of the church. I went inside and called triple-A, came back out to wait for them and for the cop to come back to finish his report. Eventually, triple-A came; the cop did not. Once the car had been towed away I called the police department to try to track something down but I never even got close. By the time the weekend came and the car was due back to the agency, we were negotiating paying for a lease extension so we could get it repaired instead of being charged with the total loss of the vehicle. More money? Sure they agreed to it.
Once the car was repaired we returned it, and once the car was gone, a week or so later, all hope I’d had of scaring up a police report was gone with it. On an uninsured car, that meant that the bill was ours and ours alone. We fought it for months but not with a righteous heart. We’d extended beyond the known limits of our karma and we had to pay the price - in this case, several hundreds of dollars, month after month, every month for about three years. That’s the deal we worked out with our leasing agency. We eventually paid off our overdrawn karma though, all right. With interest.
The events of that unkind night and its salvo of repercussions stung badly for a good long time. But time did move us into newer, wiser ways. There were specific evolutions, like how we make sure now that we’re insured against madmen at midnight, at least to the extent we’re legally or contractually obliged. But the main lesson was less specific than that. Karma, it seems, has a specific tensile strength, and we’d managed to find its breaking point. That’s the mistake we won’t be making again.
