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I'm a bad car owner. Not on purpose. I don't abuse or neglect my cars. I don't take off my belt and beat them when I've been drinking. They have relatively good lives - they get to go on long drives and they get their oil changed frequently enough. But they break a lot. And at some point the blame has to be pointed at the owner. It may not be fair, but that's how life works. I'm like a good baseball manager whose team keeps losing. At some point, the manager gets fired. Somebody should probably fire me from owning cars.
I've had three cars now. My first was a red 1988 Dodge Raider with silver racing stripes. Raiders were a lot like Isuzu Troopers but with the middle section removed. It was a squat, bouncy little box and it was awesome. In high school I wrote a personal narrative about it but I didn't get a very good grade because my English teacher pointed out that personal narratives weren't supposed to be a list of beloved standard features. Although I never took the Raider off road, it was equipped to handle any such adventure. It had a handle bar in front of the passenger's seat so he or she could hold on for dear life if it ever flipped. It had a roll bar so that the roof wouldn't cave in when we flipped. And it had a "tiltometer" that measured the Raider's "tilt." This was important because it would tell me that, yes, the Raider had really flipped.
Eventually the bottom of the radiator melted off. Some would blame me for not refreshing the coolant aqueduct, but I blame my mom. She screwed up the vanity plates.
The vanity plates were a birthday present. I had come to the conclusion that the Raider was the most badass car on the road but I wanted to make it more badass so I decided to paint a flaming skull on the hood. But this turned out to be too expensive. A vanity plate was the next best affordable option.
My friend, Greg, and I had a brainstorming session to come up with a phrase that would appropriately capture the Raider's totally aggressive attitude. Greg suggested:
RAPE AND PILLAGE
I liked the idea but it was too long. A vanity plate can only have seven characters. We considered:
RP&PLLG
But what does "RP&PLLG" mean? RIP AND PULL G? Who or what is "G"? We gave up trying to fit "rape and pillage" on a plate and finally I settled on:
RAIDAH
Which is exactly like RAIDER, but with a Boston accent. It was a good fit. I liked to think of my automobile as a car that would pick a fight in a South Boston Irish pub just because someone had told it that its sister looked Italian. Who's going to screw with a guy that has "Raidah" on his license plate? Nobody under 5'10", I can tell you that.
So I asked my mom to get me vanity plates that said RAIDAH. On my birthday, I was presented with a brown rectangular package from the Maine Department of Motor Vehicles. I opened it and removed the plates. They said:
RDRDR
I found a wall and banged my head against it.
Nobody knows how my mom came up with RDRDR. She couldn't defend it. Needless to say, the plates never made it on to the car. They were too embarrassing. Putting them on the Raider would have been like adorning an American tank with a "Proud Parent of an Honor Student at Darien Middle School" bumper sticker. It just wouldn't work. So the Raider traveled on without an identity. Its only label was a series of numbers and two letters. It slowly died. Thanks, Mom.
I was car-less for several months but then I bought my dad's white 1997 Eagle Talon. I liked it because it was relatively new and it went relatively fast and it had a CD player and leather seats. I didn't like it because it made me look gay. But it was definitely worth keeping.
When I had bought the car from my dad the insurance had stayed under his name so he had warned me not to let anyone borrow it. I thought he was joking. I let my friend, Heiny, take it to go skiing but he never made it to the mountain. He slalomed through a guardrail instead. The car was totaled.
At this point I probably should have vowed to take public transportation for the rest of my life, but I brazenly ignored my past history and started shopping for a used car. Experienced cars, when you don't buy them from your father, are surprisingly expensive. After hunting around for several weeks, I found a reasonably priced Jetta in Hooksett, NH. The dealership was called Auto$ave.
Important Lesson: If you're ever in the market for anything, and you're prepared to spend thousands of dollars, and it's something important (like a car), and you really don't want it to fall apart, don't shop at a place that uses dollar signs instead of S's.
The car salesman whom I spoke with was a mechanic with a tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt and grease stains all over his NASCAR hat. I brought him over to a black Jetta GLS that I liked.
"Can I take this car for a test drive?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. He had the kind of backwater New England accent that makes farm animals skitter for cover. "Which one?"
"This one."
"That one's not ready."
"Why not?"
"It doesn't have an engine."
"Oh."
I was told that I could test drive a Kia Sephia instead. I declined, but they assured me that the Jetta would drive beautifully once they got, you know, the engine and stuff back in it. I said, "Okay. Well, can I see the vehicle history report?"
They said no. This was the reasoning: if they showed me the vehicle history report, then they would have to show everyone the vehicle history report. This is the same argument that my fourth grade teacher employed to defend not letting us eat Combos in class. I persisted and said I would walk off the lot if they didn't show me a VHR. They said they didn't know where it was. I started walking. They suddenly found it.
The owner of the dealership showed me the vehicle history report. There was a photograph paper-clipped on to it that showed the same Jetta I had been looking at, but half-crumpled. "This explains the blood stains on the upholstery," I said.
"You mean the cranberry juice," he said.
But despite plenty of good reasons to run away, I bought the car because I needed to drive to Cape Cod that weekend. Since then, the car has developed more idiosyncrasies than a senile great-uncle. It frequently rolls its own windows down. It tells me to check its engine just because it's bored. It waits five minutes into a drive and then starts honking as if I've stolen it. (The security system is like an old guard dog that's mostly blind and deaf but still thinks it has a job to perform. Most of the time it just naps and farts but sometimes it wakes up and starts barking just in case it missed anything.)
I tried to boost the Jetta's self-esteem so I bought it four fake chrome hubcaps for sixteen dollars each. Most of the time the Jetta is appreciative of the hubcaps but for some reason whenever we leave the city of Boston, it kicks one off across the highway median. Sometimes I run across traffic to retrieve it but usually it's too far away and too dangerous a recovery mission. So if you're enjoying one of my fake chrome hubcaps right now, you're welcome.
Someday I'll have a salary and I'll buy an indestructible Volvo that never breaks down. If they'll sell it to me. I'm worried that dealers are beginning to catch on. Nobody wants to give a car to a bad car owner.
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