Fine Driving Machines, Part 2

Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2003 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

Why are hospitals so reluctant to give you an invoice?

After my pop died, four months went by before his insurance company was finally billed for the eight days that he spent in intensive care. In an attempt to learn the price tag for my one night* in the unhushed and unhallowed halls of medicine, I've had to harass four different people in two different departments over a period of two weeks. The hospital still hasn't sent me the official written invoice, but I've a pretty good idea of what the total will be, and I am immensely relieved that it's not going to be as immensely expensive as I feared. Won't be even a third of what I was expecting, so I won't have to sell the Apache or the Chrysler. But I'm thinking of selling the Apache anyway, for the Fiend's sake, so that he can keep his '65 Corvette. The Fiend frequently uses the Apache because the 'Vette is not a useful vehicle for hauling furniture. He's been talking of selling the 'Vette and getting a small knock-about truck that gets reasonable gas mileage and won't scar his karma if he puts a scratch in it. The Apache, admittedly, is a bit too pretty for comfort. And its consumption of gas is not at all reasonable. I'm afraid three of my four vehicles are gas hogs, and thus support terrorism. Yep, I'm the reason America is going to war with Iraq. Tsk, tsk. My saving grace is my Chevy station wagon, aka the Murder Weapon, which averages 26 MPG, between highway and city driving.

But you don't give a damn about the Chevy's MPG, do you? Right now, you're saying, "Wait. The Murder Weapon?"

Oh, right. I haven't finished that story, have I?

(For those who came in late, Part One can be read here.)

How I Almost Killed the Mater, Part Two
--In Which the Mater Eases On Down the Road
and is Surprised

The Murder Weapon...

...is a 1987 Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport station wagon. Which I bought for $125, but actually only cost me $25 because the guy I bought it from added a $100 tip to my fee for clearing the junk out of his backyard. You're probably thinking, wow, that's a nice tip, but you didn't see his backyard. The Chevy was sitting on four flat tires in grass up to its windows, looking like the second-largest piece of junk on the lot (the biggest was a shed I had to pull down and haul away, but I got to keep anything in it, so I made off with a croquet set, a Japanese pruning saw, a box of glass insulators, a stack of old license plates, and several rolls of chicken wire, and my former former boyfriend, Peter, scooped up 'bout a dozen black widows). When I took a closer look at the Chevy, I realized it was in pretty good shape. So I had Peter clear the black widows out of it, towed it to my mechanic, and two days later my $25 Chevy had cost me an additional $650 but I was driving down the road in the best $675 I've ever spent.

Chevrolet doesn't make the Celebrity anymore, which doesn't surprise, because it's a small car remarkable only for its plainness and total lack of sex appeal. And the Eurosport wagon is one of those accidents of design that resulted in a cheap low-maintenance vehicle, which is the last thing any American car-maker wants to produce. How the heck can they keep their bloated corporate edifices afloat if you're not bringing your car back to the dealership every 3 months for "recommended maintenance"? And what's the point in selling you a car if within three years you don't give up in frustration with the piece of junk, and trade it in for a new one? Built-in obsolescence: the foundation of the American economy.

Even though driving the Eurosport dints my vanity because it's such a eunuch, the car is a sturdy beast that hides a fair amount of muscle under its blas� exterior. And because it saves on gas, I use it whenever I don't need the sheer power of the F350. I can cram quite a bit into the back of the Death Cart, and still haul a small trailer loaded with a cement-mixer or a hydroseeder** or a couple of pigs. So you can understand why this was the ideal choice, sans trailer, for the mater's shopping excursion for our annual festival of gluttony, i.e. Thanksgiving.

Yeah, the Death Cart. That's its other name, now.

But on that bright and blameless Tuesday before Thanksgiving, it was the car with no name. Which, for those who know their Clint Eastwood movies, should have been harbinger enough. But the day began in innocence, as do we all. And by afternoon, all was still painted with innocent light, as I handed the keys of doom to the mater.

And then she drove away.

Her plan was to ply the highways and byways between a half-dozen destinations around the Southland. I did not expect her to return until dusk, but no later than that. The mater does not like to drive at night.

Approximately a half-hour later, I'd gone to the kitchen to make tea, but was standing before the open refrigerator, eyeing a bottle of Firestone Double Barrel Ale, when the door opened and in walked the mater. (Like most families, we never use the front door to enter each other's homes. Family, like servants, is always accorded the privilege of entering through the kitchen.) She looked at me, very pink in the cheeks, but otherwise pale, and said, "I broke the car."

I stared at her, bottle in hand, slightly nonplussed, waiting for elaboration.

"The steering wheel fell off," was her explanation.

And that, really, is the whole story. There's little more to tell, except to say that if the steering wheel had fallen off five minutes later than it did, the mater would have been barrelling along a winding canyon road at fifty-five miles an hour. The mater might have survived. She was wearing her seatbelt. The car might have veered into the side of a hill instead of flying off the edge of the grade. As it was, she was on a street 'bout a mile from my house, accelerating just after a stop, going no faster than 20 miles an hour. The steering wheel fell off, the engine conked out, the gentle slope of the road eased the car into the curb (luckily there were no cars parked along the road), and the drag of the curb on the tires slowed the car to a stop. The mater doesn't remember if she used the brakes. She doesn't remember exactly what she did when the car stopped. She may have sat there for a while. Eventually she got out of the car and locked it, leaving the steering wheel on the front seat. Then she walked back to my house.

And that's how I almost killed the mater, but didn't, because of a fateful five minutes. A long black smear of rubber marks the spot where the Death Cart rubbed its tires on the curb. I see it almost every day. Atheist that I am, I still have enough residual superstition in me to make me wonder if I shouldn't lay some flowers on that spot, in propitiative gratitude to whatever powers that might be, for the memorial that never was.

As for the mater, she was spooked for a day or two, but she enjoyed telling the tale of her adventure to everyone she knows. She insisted, despite strenuous argument from me, on paying for half the replacement of the Death Cart's steering column. Yep, I'm still driving it. On the Monday before Christmas, the mater borrowed it to do some shopping.

~

*A night of culinary nightmares (olive loaf and Jello salad) and Vicodin dreams. My doctors insist that Vicodin is not a hallucinogen. Hah! Tell that one to the two tattooed aborigines who paid a visit to me in the hospital, wearing nothing but boas draped around their necks and long sticks stuck in their penises. The boas were not the big snakes, they were the fluffy scarves; these were made out of dried grass. A nurse who looked like Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously came in and shooed the aborigines away, so I'm pretty sure she was a hallucination too.

**Which is a thing we landscapers use to plant lawns. You paint the ground with a seed-mulch by spraying the muck out of a high-pressure hose. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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