Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The Garage - Part II

A tentative bargain has been reached, with a minimum of acrimony and a conscientious effort toward interest-based negotiations and sensitivity recognition.  If it all winds up where it looks like it’s headed, we’ll have done quite well for ourselves, comparatively speaking.  But for better or worse, it looks like the ugly part is nearly over.  On the flight home, I watched Silicon Valley grow and sprawl out before me as the airplane barreled into Oakland, on a flight two hours earlier than I had expected to take out of L.A.  We descended at sundown over voluptuous hills.  For a short day, it had been quite full and I was glad to be so close to home again.  That’s when I wrote this:

Mountains riffled like a spine
with ribs that tumble to each side
between them, twisting riverbeds
lie dusty, gasping in the wind
occasional dirt fire roads
meander lost among the peaks
where scruboak peppers leeward slopes
and small bright pools, mysterious,
glint blinking in the shifting sun
with water cloistered to themselves
as if some egg- and oystershells
had been set yawning in the earth
so pale and thirsty underfoot
awaiting their eventual
evaporation and demise
and leaving nothing else behind
but memories of mossy banks. 

It was a lovely flight home and I’m glad to be back.  I have a lot of work to do but I leave the office early tomorrow and don’t go in at all on Thursday; it’s all for the improvement of my ETERNAL SOUL so let’s try to cut the man some slack, okay people?  Oh that’s right you’re antsy because of that thing with the car.  Well, the story so far is that the damn thing broke down, I got a tow from a man who was more like a cartoon hero than a human being, and he took me to a questionable garage in a questionable part of town.  The end of the story is in the extended entry below, so you can just ignoe it and go on with your day if that’s what you’d like to do.

TowGod spoke up with a clear, powerful voice and gave the vaugely menacing mechanics the basic facts of my circumstances.  It was determined, at a level simultaneously both somewhat over my head and rather beneath me, that the men we had come to visit were qualified to diagnose my woes, and they’d get back to me sometime the next day with whatever news they had.  But now I needed to get home, and that meant I had to myself a cab.  Hooded glances went around the room.  We all knew, out there in the Scungehouse District, that it would take some time for a cab to get to me.  As I hung up after calling in the request, I told them what we’d all feared: “Half an hour.”

The three guys inhaled, looked at the tattoos on their biceps and on the backs of their hands for a few moments.  The pause lingered like a bad smell in an elevator. The main guy, the brusquest and burliest, glanced over to my tow driver.  Something was communicated: I saw the tough mechanic ask it in a wordless instant; I sensed the tow driver responding in some sort of affirmative way.  The mechanics emitted a collective sigh and the one possessed of a middling level of toughness turned and demanded of me, almost belligerently: “Hows come you wearin yer hat backwars, then?”

Backwards?  Really?  Damn but I’m stupid sometimes.  I pulled off my watchcap and appraised it.  It seemed to be turned right way around.  “Backwards?” I asked with a veneer of what I hoped was machismo over my underlying insecurity and surprise.  “How?”

“Oh, that aint a baseball hat innit,” he queried flatly.

I let the limp cap flop in my hands.  “No, it’s got no brim.  So its got no backward.”

The #1 tough mechanic snickered a taciturn “heh.” He reached forward into the cardboard box at his feet and handed me a can of Schlitz - “Guess you’ll be hanging around fer a while then - have this.” I gratefully took it, popped it, pulled down half in one long swig.  Thise elicited a few microscopic nods and my tow driver grabbed a beer too.  The guys got back to their conversation, which the main guy occasionally interrupted to assure me that he’d kicked all their asses plenty of times and could do it again too.  They re-lit a joint I’d thought I’d smelled from the first, sent it around.  The magnificent golden tow driver hung out - one of the guys.  It seemed I was one, too. 

My cab arrived in 25 quick minutes; my cabbie was a chatty young woman who drove fast, asked interesting questions, and undercharged me.  I let her.  I knew that the raunchy sweet car I’d left behind was a goner, that I was about to lose in it a close friend and valuable helpmate, not to mention the thousands I’d dumped into repairs and maintenance.  But on that chilly evening it felt like I was getting something back.  I wasn’t sure what it was but it seemed to have something to do with confidence, or acquiscence, or acceptance, or something.  Whatever it was, I decided to get as much of it as I could grab - and after I sold that car for a big loss I never really felt ripped off.  Whatever I got that night my car broke down for the last big time, it felt like fair compensation. 

The new car is still running like a top, but I take the bus to work every day anyway.  Four months after I sold the beemer I got a notice from Colma, the city of the dead (where all SF’s cemetaries are located), letting me know “my” car had been abandoned there.  I let them know the decrepit old hulk wasn’t mine anymore.  A year or so later I got a letter from someone who’d bought it, asking me for some information on the maintenance history and operational quirks.  I didn’t have much to share with her.  That story, for me, had long since ended.  Just like this one ends for you, right here and now.