Summation for Casey, who doesn’t like to read:
I drove my car from Houston to Dallas and it blew up. Now I have a new one.
For the rest of you:
I skidded into Corsicana sideways at 80 mph…
Preamble (if you are of short attention span, you may skip to the Crux, far, far below)
Let me back up a minute and explain to you how I came to be in this situation. I am, or was, the semi-proud owner of a 2000 VW Jetta VR6. I’ve had it for about 3 years, and I’ve pretty much driven the hell out of it. Not in a bad or abusive way, I just happen to be a control freak when it comes to driving, so I drive myself everywhere. This works out well for the vast majority of my lazy friends who like to drink, or those who are “under-employed” and don’t like to spend money on gas.
About a month ago I took it in for what can only be described as an automotive “spa day”. I washed and waxed it myself, crawling naked over the car, utilizing my copious and extremely masculine Charlton Heston/Burt Reynolds-style chest hair as a gentle loofah. I used only the finest Aveda scented soaps, with lit candles to set a relaxing mood, though they kept blowing out in the wind, forcing me to re-light them with a can of Off! mosquito repellant and a Bic lighter. The people at the car wash stared at me oddly, but this was a day to make my car feel special, so I paid them no heed until they threatened to call the police. After this I checked the tires, made sure all of the fluids were filled, and took it to get the oil changed.
I have no proof that the furthest descendents of homo habilis who staff the Jiffy Lube on Manchaca and Hwy. 71 are not in possession of opposable thumbs (as they were wearing gloves); neither can I exhibit any evidence that said tree-dwellers haven’t the faintest idea which end of the car is used to run over members of Austin’s indigent population and which end has the pipe that they should wrap their gibberish-spouting lips around and inhale deeply the exudations thereof. Still, the tangy reek of suspicion fills my nostrils that at some point they decided to start my car without first having placed the engine lubricant actually within the engine, perhaps feeling that just the oil’s proximity to the cylinders would be enough to frighten the adjacent metal surfaces into lubricating themselves. I imagine that once they found this to be untrue (perhaps due to the grinding sound of metal-on-metal and the shower of sparks that I posit erupted from the area of the lifters), they then placed the lubricant in the correct space, feeling that I would be none the wiser, and perhaps more at peace for not knowing.
In any case, the result was that mere days after having treated my car to what I thought was a Valentine’s Day for my conveyance of choice, a nervous ticking began to make itself heard above the actual sound of the engine. My efforts at repairing the noise, which consisted of checking to make sure there was sufficient oil in the car, then turning the radio up until I couldn’t hear it anymore, only seemed to make it worse. I then ran some engine cleaner through the cylinders to break up any debris, and perhaps remove some of the Jiffy-Lube employee-drool that might have been contaminating the area. This did not help in the slightest.
My next thought was that I had far too much money in my bank account, wherefore I hied myself hence to the VW dealership, where professional mechanics made sure that I would not be lacking in poverty before I left their shop. They charged me almost $100 to tell me that my oil pressure was low, and that a further diagnostic would cost me upwards of $500, just to tell me what was wrong. I thanked them in the language of my native land of Richardson, Texas by extending to them the Middle Finger of Grateful Appreciation of Effort (which seemed to excite them somewhat). I decided to see if I could find a shop that was perhaps not as generous with its account depletion skills, as a reduction to total penury would interfere with my acquisition of fine Scotch (which is necessary for my particular physiology to function at peak performance).
In the meantime, I had a business trip to Houston.
I didn’t feel like spending the time in airports, awaiting a late flight full of ungrateful robots in dark blue uniforms who would torture me with their long and nonsensical screeds about safety exits, water landings, and the finer details of securing ones self by means of a complicated and advanced anchoring strap to a peanut-fart-filled floatation device (presumably so that there would be at least a chunk of torso intact should the plane decide to pull an aerial Titanic). Nor did I care to receive a lecture on how my MP3 player would somehow magically interfere with the advanced navigation systems onboard my 50’s-era prop plane and send the entire thing crashing into the sun or on a search for Atlantis or into an alternate (and imaginary) dimension where logical people ruled the earth and didn’t give lectures about MP3 players on planes.
I decided to take my still-ticking car to Houston; with a little hindsight prescience, I might have thought that this might not have been the wisest choice. Still, I decided that the leather buttock-cupper of mi coche was a far, far better place to be than flying the unfriendly skies with a bunch of strangers. I’d much rather be on the road with a bunch of weaving teenagers, confused old people in hats, speed-addled truckers, fuckwit SUV drivers, and cruising ghetto-sled jockeys; at least I could bang into someone and send them careening off into an embankment to splatter like a paint balloon, perhaps making a colorful (if somewhat sticky and lumpy) Rorshach pattern on one of our over-priced public edifices. I could have my own soundtrack when I finally went berserk and enacted the above. I wouldn’t have to flee the work site, scramble back to the airport in a mad dash to return the rental car, and try to make it through the amoeba-level “intelligence” of the Homeland Security forces before my flight fucked off without me. Also, I would arrive rested and ready for whatever lameness would be laid upon me that day, and could perhaps visit my friends for a light repast of Vietnamese Pho and 12-15 good drinks right before I got on the road. With the powerful disconnecting influence of potent liquors bathing my cerebellum (and its associated motor-functions) in a nimbus of isolated solace, I wouldn’t notice how badly everyone else was driving; I also wouldn’t be angry at the way the road kept moving around to where I could never quite get in the middle, no matter how hard I cut the wheel to the left or right, prayed to Odin, text-messaged the highway to cease its skittish and insubordinate shifting, or sobbed quietly to myself in frustration like George Bush confronted with an educated and eloquent debate opponent.
The drive from the relatively tranquil and serene former hippy town of Austin to the compressed anxiety and hustling traffic of Houston was uneventful. There was the usual parade of imbeciles and highway buffoons, blocking the fast lane, weaving while talking on the phone, trying to change the DVD for their rotten children, and generally just making themselves obstacles to people whose single-minded occupation consisted of driving from point A to shit-hole B. I had many fine discs of music, the evening was sunny, and the car seemed to run as it always had, except for the addition of the loud ticking, as if I was driving a bomb; somehow, this became a comfort to me, the ticking my companion of the road, an unknown quality in my journey that I accepted with the Zen-like equanimity and blank resignation that most believers of Fox news possess; I had acquired this quality through many harrowing (in a somnolent way) interactions with corporate bureaucrats (which is another series of stories and lessons in itself).
I arrived at my destination, a slightly shabby Hampton Inn by the medical center, late in the evening. The droopy-jowled, rheumy-eyed geriatric behind the counter checked me in with the efficiency of a malfunctioning steam-engine, except quieter. His movements resembled those of a patient Tai-Chi master, with every breath and subtle shift of his gnarled hands conserved, as if he did not know which one would be his last. Eventually I dropped my baggage off in the room and scuttled off to meet some friends at a local Slurp-and-Burp for some dinner and drinks.
Here I pause in the recitation of my ordeal to say that I should definitely visit my friends more often. They are less of a burden than the rest of society, occasionally even causing a grin to crease a façade that has become all too used to frowns or strict neutrality in the presence of doctors, surgeons, researchers and money-pimps. It had been so long since I’d seen them that we constantly stumbled over each others’ words in an effort to impart as much information in the limited time allotted to us before I was forced to return to the hotel. There were a number of times that the stories would pile up in a line outside of my ears like fat people at a free buffet table, and I felt that I would need some kind of UHF decoder to slow them down and make them orderly; perhaps a toll booth would do the trick? In any case, I was soon forced to depart in a dutiful manner, sleep being a necessity for my brain to function in my chosen profession on the morrow.
The visit itself was uneventful, even boring, as jobs occasionally are. I managed to break free from the surgeon’s penetrating gaze long enough to grab my gear and flee the building. I actually WELCOME rush-hour traffic at the end of a day of dealing with people who are probably much, much smarter than I am and are more-than-likely just humoring me in certain areas of molecular biology with which I am conversant.
In any case, the leathery and music-filled confines of my jittery conveyance (now sounding like a drunk lobster with Parkinson’s trying to wave “Hello” with all of its feet) was the mental equivalent of a relaxing mud-bath with several high-priced hookers feeding me exotic and unnamable fruits with their toes.
I managed to crawl along on I45N for about an hour-and-a-half before I reached Conroe, where there was a Gold’s Gym (of which I am a member in good standing); here I intended to wait out the remaining traffic by attempting to form myself into a shape other than round and also eyeing scantily clad females of all shapes and sizes (more on this in a later prolix screed). The workout ended up being far more intellectually and physically stimulating than the females, many of whom seemed in the later stages of a terminal bloating illness that also affected their fashion judgment (small towns are NOTORIOUSLY lacking in gay men to heal this terrible malady). I backed towards the door of Gold’s, fearing to be trampled in a stampede by the Sows of Conroe, and scurried next door for some of that land-locked local sushi I’d heard about from the Center for Disease Control bulletins out of Atlanta. It was quite delicious, though the monster turd that wrestled free of my aching sphincter the next day almost required an epidural and a C-section to deliver (crude, I know, but it’s how I felt at the time, and far be it from me to hide such a common uniting factor as a stink-pickle from you, my dearest friends and almost acquaintances).
My car was still percussive, beginning to sound like Tito Puente on a crank-bender, but I felt that I had no choice but to continue onwards towards Dallas. Truly, I figured that I could probably make Big D before the car finally threw up its hands and expired. My supposition was that, whatever happened, it was in the hands of the fates (though hopefully not those of Atropos, the cutter of the life-thread; I was hoping that she was on vacation or at least very inattentive during my particular sojourn) and would probably be highly entertaining, no matter what the outcome. Since I am never wrong, this time I was also of course RIGHT, and the results were…ah…absorbing of my full attention for a very brief period, to say the least.
The Crux of the Biscuit (ADD people, begin reading here)
Approximately 30 miles south of Dallas is the city of Corsicana. I am very familiar with this town because I went to jail there once. I was driving back from Galveston with my girlfriend at the time (an enrapturing creature named Shawn who I came to find out later was actually a logic-supressing, heart-devouring fiend from the darkest and most fetid regions of The Pit) and got pulled over for speeding. I was taken to the lovely Corsicana jail for ANOTHER speeding ticket that I had not remembered to pay (Frisco, TX., $75), and the rum-drunk knuckle-dragging member of the local constabulary wrote me ANOTHER speeding ticket, in addition to treating to an overnight stay in the Cement Hilton. Shawn was forced to drive the remaining distance to my parents’ house in Dallas while I went to rot overnight with the other scoundrels and social rejects.
When I called my parents, hours later after being “processed” (which consisted of fingerprinting, an orange jumpsuit, yellowed-rubber flip-flops and two pictures (one frontal and one profile) for some government employee to whack off to), my dad answered the phone. When he heard my voice on the other end of the line, he started laughing and asking me how the food was. I could hear the laughter of Shawn and my mother (may just her big toe rot it Hell) coming from the background, and the sound of a bottle of wine being opened to celebrate my incarceration; they were having a FINE ol’ hootenanny while I was doing hard time (okay, maybe slightly spongy time) in the Corsicana Gulag. My father mentioned that he MIGHT show up on the morrow to retrieve my sorry carcass once I had served my seventy-five dollars worth of penance.
There I go, digressing again. The above paragraph was not germane to the tale, I just thought I’d scribble it down for your edification to show I’d been around a bit.
In any case, I45 runs through Corsicana, along with a bunch of other little Podunk, no-name, one-horse towns that derive their primary income from setting speed traps on the 3-mile section of revenue-producing highway that has been allotted them. Also along this highway is a drive-in movie theater, and this IS an important part of our story, but not until the end, the very end…
So anyway, I found myself traveling at the apotheotic (is that a word?) speed of 80mph on this particular highway, approaching the drive-in theater that I didn’t know was there yet. I had just emerged from the shoulderless cement confines of a construction area with concrete barriers scant inches from the driver’s side of my Jetta that had run for many, many annoying and grey miles. It was late evening, having just gotten full dark, but still having a faint hint of cornflower blue at the Western edge of the sky where Sol had just laid itself down for the night (or perhaps there was a club in which it had ensconced itself to boogie the hours away while Night did its thing). Distantly I could see flickering images, which I thought might have been the random firing of my neurons that had escaped into the ocular region of my brain, or perhaps an acid flashback of some sort come back to haunt me like some evil golem from my partying past.
As I got nearer and the images resolved themselves into those of Tom Hanks in what I now know is The DaVinci Code, I realized that it was an outdoor venue in which you could park you car, buy some popcorn, view a talkie, and have a make-out session with a homeless girl you’d picked up on the highway (using the overpoweringly buttery stench of the popcorn to disguise the reek of her body-odor and Patchouli stink that flowed like a river of undead trout from her poo-dreads).
Alas, I had no fragrant double-X-chromosome indigent with which to go wenching, so I contented myself with calling a friend to leave a message that there was a drive-in just south of Dallas that might be worth investigating someday.
Forever onward from this fateful day I would wonder if it was the signal from the phone, or a certain frequency of vibration in my voice, or a road vibration, or the way the incandescent rays from the sodium highway lights, that caused things to go awry the minute I had terminated the conversation and replaced the phone in its customary cubbyhole in my dashboard.
A great many things happened in a very short span of time, though it seems to me now as if events had slowed immensely, like time had been left outside in a Swiss winter and now poured slowly, treacle-like, from whatever font or vessel contained it. I will try to describe for you how it went…
It seems that my engine and transmission had, for quite some time, merely been living in the same space and tolerating each other for my sake, much as a couple who should have long ago divorced will stay together (with immense bitterness) for the sake of their children. Like said should-have-split couple, when the end finally came, it was in an immense and passionate explosion. The engine and transmission had a HUGE fight and decided to quit talking to each other. (Here, I must simply end the Bad Marriage analogy unfinished, because here is where the similarity ends).
There was a grinding and screeching as the engine quit working and the wheels that had formerly driven the car forward in style now attempted to halt it in mid-rotation. I jerked the transmission out of 5th gear and into neutral to keep the wheels moving and the car under control. An immense “PAF!” was heard, along with the sounds of pinging metal reflecting at speed from the underside of my car and the road. Someone threw a wool coverlet from Bed, Bath, and Beyond over my windscreen; this was actually no fuzzy blanket, but a layer of black and heated oil thrown from the shredded seals of my engine that had reflected from the inside of the hood and been blown backwards by the wind of my passage.
When I had pulled the car out of gear, I must have jerked the wheel slightly sideways, and this must have occurred when I still had some iota of power steering; now that steering had gone the way of the Dodo (no engine power = no steering power) and the car’s nose had begun to slew to the right, as if the back of the car had realized that it had been neighbors with the front of the car for many years and decided to come over for a visit, or at least to see what all of the noise was all about.
This would not do, and did not bode well for my future plans of remaining whole and intact.
Luckily, I had not yet reached the next construction zone, which I saw later was hemmed in by those aluminum railings that you often see on the edges of large precipices or cliffs, punctured with car-shaped holes and bearing little crosses around the metallic tears. I was in an area of median that had no curbs and consisted of nothing more than nicely wild green grass and black Texas loam, which is what I began to slide sideways into at this time.
I hazarded a glance from the driver’s side window, which had now become more of the windscreen along my vector than a side window. This distressed me somewhat, and the stream of invective that I had begun during the rain of oil redoubled in intensity; I felt it best at this time to look elsewhere for solace.
As it turns out, the passenger-side window offered a different if equally lamentable vista. At first I thought that oil had made its way around the side to cover the passenger window; however, I was soon disabused of this notion when I noticed that it flow appeared to be moving rapidly, and I could see flashes of the streetlights peeking through. I figured out rather quickly that it was just an immense rooster-tail of grass and dirt thrown up from the wheels and undercarriage of the car, scrawling the tale of my passing in a wrathful series of scars upon the gentle slopes of the formerly untrammeled median.
I did NOT feel well about this.
I must say, truthfully, that this was the most terrified I’d been in quite a while; there was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation except to try not to wet myself and die with unsightly underwear when the coroner came to vacuum up the bloody chunks from the length and breadth of the highway, and perhaps the tops of the street-lamps if the final impact and explosion were sufficiently spectacular. My sphincter had a death-grip on the leather of my seat-cushion, and had pulled 10 lbs. of stuffing from the seams of the seat; pucker-factor of 9.7 (the only higher I’d ever experienced was having a gun point-blank at my face, an event that has occurred more than once, unfortunately). I began scrambling around the inside of a car like a panicked squirrel inside a 55-gallon oil-drum, squeaking and throwing what small dignity remained to me out the window and towards the side of the road, where hopefully it would not shatter; perhaps the ambulance personnel would take pity at the obvious disarray and terror in which I had expired and place it in a cooler with my head, where people would remark at my fueral, “At least he died with his dignity intact.”
Then the car…
…just…
…STOPPED.
It just stopped dead (pun intended).
I was, of course, flabbergasted. I actually comprehended what that word meant; “struck dumb with astonishment or surprise”, or “overcome with amazement.” I was still extant. After extracting the cotton, leather, and seat-springs from my butt, I crawled out of the car. There was a deafening silence, except for the sounds of metal pinging and cooling, the gasping last breaths of my vehicle as it expired and went towards the light.
I walked around towards the front of my car; the front of the car was slightly more towards the road than the rear of the car, but the whole thing was axle-deep in mud and grass, the empty and soulless husk a terrible reminder of my years of abuse. I placed my hands on my head and ran them through my hair, the universal sign of “Holy Fucking Shit and his brother Fuck Me, that was close.”
I looked towards the road and the median that lay behind my now-defunct Jetta. There was a wide swath of destruction, with grass and dirt clods lying in the road, along with what appeared to be a freshly-dead possum. Poor bastard. Imagine your possum-self rooting along the road for tasty insects, thinking, “As long as I stay away from the big shiny things on the hard cold stuff, I’m safe.” Then, suddenly you see this large black object come skittering at your cranium and POW! Non-existence for you, my chum…helluva way to go out, if you ask me, which you didn’t…
Suddenly sounds penetrated my hearing in a bolus, as if I’d come up out of a dive into a swimming pool in the middle of a riot at the circus. I could hear honking and yells in the distance. I turned around, hands still on my head, perhaps attempting to keep it from blowing off in the gentle breeze of the Texas plains.
Apparently I had come to a halt directly in front of the drive-in movie theater, whose patrons had received rather more than an eyeful of a bonus show they hadn’t paid for, which consisted of me losing the road like a drunk dropping his keys in the toilet of his favorite bar and spinning out of control like Halley’s fucking comet. This and my subsequent miraculous survival had thrilled them so much that, in an immense eructation of joy and amusement, they were showing their appreciation by honking their horns, flashing their lights, and yelling for all they were worth.
This had taken several seconds for me to figure out, as the brain-lightening of the adrenaline began to wear off and my thought-processes began to function again. When I finally came to this conclusion, I myself took satisfaction in my remaining corporeal and animated and raised both my hands triumphantly above my head, jumping and shouting like the fool that I am and will hopefully always will be…”Whoooooooo!”…”Yeah! Alriiiiiiiight!”…”Yowza!” (maybe not that last one)…
A Corsicana policeman, who had apparently seen the whole thing from the safe distance of the Galaxy (the name of the drive-in theater), pulled out of the drive-in and around the back of my car. He heaved the bulk of his gut out of the Caprice first, grunting with the effort. He was grinning ear-to-ear when he finally managed to emerge, and after assuring that his gut was symmetrically placed over his gun-belt (perhaps gut-belt is more appropriate), he sad, “It looks like you blew your seals.”
A logical conclusion, and one that I had already come to even as my car did its level best to imitated a break-dancer in a full head-spin. My reply was succinct:
“You wouldn’t happen to have some clean underwear and a drink in your car, would you?”
He laughed, as I knew he would, and shook his head no, but he offered to call me a tow-truck. I took him up on the offer, and finished the ride back to Dallas in the reeking confines of a greasy truck, with the even more reeking and greasy tow-truck driver talking about NASCAR and spitting tobacco into a battered and obviously well-utilized Pepsi cup.
The car itself, except for the blown engine, was fine. A hose removed the dirt and grime from the underside and the wheel-wells. My dad voiced his concern in the only way I’ve ever heard him voice it, when I’d obviously done something that could have resulted in my messy and untimely death:
“How in the HELL did you to THAT?!?”
Still, he did take the time to loan me his car so I could get on with my business for a few days, while he found me a loaded 2006 Jetta at auction for less than wholesale. He’s having my car fixed and will sell it, removing the difference between the sale-price and the cost of the engine. I ended up with a new car with 40,000 miles of warranty on it for around $13,000, which is far nicer than the one I had. It will take me a while to pay it off, but things turned out just fine, in the end.
Oh, and it has side-impact airbags, just in case I decide to do a draedle impression on the highway again…
