Sunday, September 12, 2004
The Garage: Part I
This has been a pretty solid weekend. Friday night we watched Iron Monkey, which was beautiful and hilarious, in that the action was so flamboyantly unbelievable that it wasn’t even worth trying to take seriously. People don’t run up walls and hover in midair kicking in multiple directions like that. Not in this neighborhood. It was positively anti-gravitational, and that was about what I needed.
Saturday we saw a piece of the Power to the Peaceful concert, which was conveniently held in a nearby part of a nearby park. The bit we saw was the String Cheese Incident set, which was about five songs in about half an hour. They played one song I liked but didn’t know, two songs I like just fine, one song I really enjoy, and they also played my favorite song - Restless Wind, on which they really went to town. It was glorious. We sat way up on a hillside next to the meadow and kept free of the unusually intense hippy melee, which is really saying something for hereabouts.
And today we drove 70 miles each way to a massive agglomeration of outlets, an outlet mall with almost 150 different stores, a mall so massive we had to repark the car twice (that’s three parking spots altogether) to keep the process moving forward. note: one of the shops at the outlet mall was called “Country Clutter.” I imagine the original name, “White Trash Backwash,” just didn’t pull down the traffic they were looking for. I’m happy with my swag but my feet are sore and tired - we were out for almost eight hours and for the record I would rather go to starbucks and drink their corporate jive than ever again set foot in an Erik’s Deli, so there. In addition, this morning I re-located a little notebook that had gone missing for a while, so I’ve got that going for me too. And the weekend was actually even fuller and more interesting than just these tidbits suggest but I think you’ve got enough to chew on for now.
Oh okay then, I’ll tell you a little something about when my car broke.
I never really stopped loving that care but after a certain point it stopped loving me or anything else. It had been a strangely scented pimped-out mess when I got it; I’d spent two years or so getting the tires changed out, the suspension rebuilt, the windows de-tinted, the odor partly mitigated, the stereo updated… the car was sleek and fast, if you weren’t looking too closely in the first instance and were lucky in the second. It got broken into a lot, but I dealt with it because it made me so wonderfully happy to own the damn thing.
That is, it did until it stopped. It started stalling in traffic, and then not starting up again. Sometimes I could jump it back to life and sometimes I couldn’t. It was increasingly moribund, more and more clearly on the verge of death.
Naturally, when it finally went over into utter ruination, I was out with a friend who was leaving town - it was our little “going away” dinner. I’d picked her up at the hosue where she was staying on a Marin mountaintop, but I stalled out in traffic on our way to the restaurant down in the flats of San Rafael and I couldn’t restart it at all. I was in the middle of three packed lanes of traffic. I got anxious and started sweating. A lot. I was on the verge of freaking out. Then, as if on cue, someone graciously bumper-pushed me to a curb and I abandoned the hulk there for the duration of previously planned meal, which I failed to enjoy very much as I stewed about my incapacitated automobile. After the meal I checked the car again for a miraculous recovery: it was still totally dead, and I was still totally bumming. I had no other option: I called AAA. They promised a tow within half an hour.
My friend called for a cab, since I was useless to her, stranded as I was with my defunct beemer. Until this point I had been pretty distracted; my auto woes were the main thing on my mind. But now I had a couple of Singhas working their way into my bloodstream and I was realizing these were my last minutes with my friend for quite a while. The time was nigh to cool myself down. So we sat on a bench near my car’s earthly remains, and we had a really good rambly talk.
Time flew and Mandy’s cab hadn’t yet come when my tow truck pulled up. It was driven by the very image of the star high school athlete at his eventual station in life - tall, broad, burnished, wholesome, and of course, enormously muscular. I started feeling inadequate as soon as he dismounted from his bulky truck. Within moments he’d bound my car to his rig and hoisted it up on it’s hind tires like a dog compelled to beg. He moved with confident speed, surprising grace and inexorable strength. Swallowing my puny weak gall, I gave Mandy a hug goodbye and she promised me she’d be okay till her cab arrived. I left her smiling and alone at the corner; the way she tells things, she got home just fine.
Before I had a chance to wallow in my lameness barely at all, the Tow-donis posed me a little brainteaser: where did I want to be taken? Based on the make and model of my car, the problem I was having, and where I was having it, he had two suggestions. He seemed as if he was trying to be objective about my choices but it was clear pretty quicky that one of the two was less expensive and he liked the people there better. I picked that one and we started rumbling into the bad part of a nice town.
The lost-er I got, the more superhuman my tow driver seemed to be. He was cheerful, improbably spotless, articulate, omnipotent. His massive hands were clearly capable of bending girders, to say nothing of resolving my little crisis. The small shops and cafes that lined the road where we’d started had given way to looming warehouses and quonsets, a landscape where windows were occasonal kohlblack eyes on pugnosed utility barns turned brown with rust, grey from neglect. My cool stupid car dangled limply from a chain behind us; the enormous engine of the tuck beneath me sounded like it could bore to the planet’s core.
We pulled up at the sole active operation on some sorry alley lined with huge shuttered buildings. Three guys were sitting around the bay of their auto repair shop under buzzing tube lights with a 12-pack of cheap beer on the concrete floor in front of them. They wore hats from autoparts suppliers, and appropriately soiled denim, plaid, and t-shirts. They were unshaven, goateed, mulletted. The walls were covered with ads featuring nearly-naked women caressing cans of bud and coors, and auto parts. Country music was playing on a miserable radio. They turned to look at me with deep scepticism as I got out of the truck.
That’s as good a place as any to leave this for now. I have a very early day tomorrow, which I will mostly spend on a trip to LA and back for a bargaining session. I should get a decent lunch out of it, anyway. Assuming I survive, I’ll get the second half of this to you soon. Otherwise, it may take a little longer.
