(From the Register-Pajaronian)
About three weeks ago, my car started having trouble going uphill. At first, it was just the odd lurch when I’d accelerate away from a stoplight that happened to be on a slope. By last weekend, the clutch could be heard slipping and howling unabashedly at the slightest hint of an incline. A problem, because my car is an automatic, and so had no clutch that I was aware of.
On Monday, I broke down (not literally, thank God) and crippled it into a transmission shop on Soquel Drive. A lot of people feel that auto mechanics are not a trustworthy bunch, but in my experience, they are as honest as anyone else in a profession that often has the customer over a barrel, such as lawyers and heart surgeons. You both know you need what they’ve got, so any bargaining on your part amounts to so much coyness. As the joke goes, we’ve established what you are, madam, now we’re just negotiating a price.
So, with my car suspended over my head on a lift like a geometry textbook in a bully’s hand, I signed the paperwork, which actually detailed a figure substantially less than I had feared, and was told to come back at 2 p.m.
I walked down into Soquel Village and bought some coffee and an egg-and-cheese croissant at the Ugly Mug. After I was finished, it was only 12:30, so I had more coffee and sketched out some column ideas on a brown napkin like the kind we had at my high school. One of the most endearing things about the Ugly Mug is that all the napkin dispensers have stickers on them reading "PAPER=TREES."
I thought about my car and found that I don’t give it enough credit. It’s a stunningly powerful thing, really, and I take it for granted most of the time. Without a car, I’d probably lose my job. My frequent impulsive daytrips to San Jose, Monterey and Half Moon Bay would have to stop, and going to see my friends back home in Reno would be out of the question.
I don’t love my car like some people do. I nearly loved my previous car, a Honda that was totaled when a legally reckless and possibly drunk driver drove into me in an almost perfect T-bone in Sparks, Nev., and blew my Honda across two lanes and up onto a curb. The insurance settlement was somewhere between vaguely insulting and rampage-inciting, leaving me with the unremarkable little Toyota I have now.
But as uninspiring as it is, I have to admit that I have flogged it mercilessly for more than three years and it still fires up each day at the first turn of the key, ready for more. The car carried me to class in Reno for a while, then it moved me to Las Vegas for a magazine internship, where it took a serious sandblasting and inched along Paradise Boulevard behind thousands of lost tourists.
Two months later, it took me back to Reno and ferried me about until I finished school and moved to Santa Cruz. In the interim, it suffered through an appalling number of trips to Lake Tahoe, the Bay Area and the Napa Valley. On a pair of 1,300-mile jaunts to northern Oregon and back, it narrowly kept a jaywalking deer’s six-point rack out of my body cavity at the expense of its own and recovered in time for a second run, only to have to cart its heartbroken captain all the way back to Nevada after an unceremonious (albeit appropriately overcast and drizzly) dumping.
The Toyota has seen passengers so drunk they couldn’t work the seatbelt release. It’s described spectacular circles on more icy parking lots and gamboled broadside into more snow drifts than I care to think about. It sat quietly in the parking lot of the college bar where I used to work while a strawberry blond and I sat less than a foot apart and poured our hearts out as the windshield fogged up against the night air and people waited for each of us somewhere else. We both looked straight out through the opaque safety glass at the back wall of the pharmacy next door the entire time and never at each other. It would have made things worse.
I looked up from my napkin, which was now covered in semi-legible notes. According to a clock on the wall, my car would be ready in half an hour, about as long as it would take me to hike back to the shop. I folded up the napkin and put it in my pocket and pushed my way through the screen door and onto the street. It had been a long trip to get here, and in spite of anything else I could say about it, my car had carried me most of the way. I figured a couple hundred dollars worth of work was the least I could offer in return.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Paris Hilton is a control freak, or how I spent my winter break
"That," Stephanie said, "might be the ugliest sweatshirt I’ve ever seen."
There were eight of us sitting around an intricate wicker table on a patio at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas. The chairs and lounges were also made from dense spools of wicker with big white cushions and were almost deep enough to stretch out on, so the group’s posture ranged from perching to sprawling. I had some coffee.
To my left, a broad reflecting pool with nude statues and huge bushy trees scattered around it led up to a textured wall a few hundred feet across with water streaming down its face. On my right were thick windows leading into boutiques and everyone was looking through one of them at a young guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a sparkling death’s head design on the back.
I didn’t think the gems were real diamonds, but they could have been, because the guy had walked in with Paris Hilton. They were carefully ignoring each other, but every time one of them rolled their eyes and gazed disinterestedly at something, the other would steal a furtive glance before resuming casting hopelessly about for something, anything, that didn’t just bore the hell out of them like everything else in this backwater town. Showing affection is the first step toward giving up control, I guess.
I was quietly pleased to note that Paris looked about like I’d expected and that she really did not have a very pretty face, a position I’ve maintained for several years now. Of course, she could probably have bought my love, but it would have taken more than a $1,000 hoodie with Ghost Rider on the back.
She didn’t rush outside and make an offer, so I drank some coffee and lounged back on the lounge and talked. I didn’t have a lot to say at the moment, but fortunately that’s one of the last things I consider before joining a conversation. After a bit, I realized that, with the exception of Stephanie and my buddy Ray, I hadn’t known anyone at the table more than three days and I already liked them. I wondered if that meant I was giving up control. Paris probably wouldn’t approve. I decided I could live with that.
It was a little overcast, cool for Vegas but sultry for most places, and a faint breeze made me glad there was a heat lamp above us. One of the girls was drinking a White Russian and I watched as thin veins of cream ran down through the Kahlua underneath. During a pause in conversation, I noticed that she was looking at me with her dark eyes slightly narrowed and the smallest of creases in her forehead, like she was trying to decide if I was sort of cute or sort of annoying. It seemed like a lot of people had been looking at me like that on this trip. I assumed the best and finished my coffee.
Later, we all went back to Stephanie’s house, where most of us were staying, to change clothes before we went to an Irish bar for a drink. We had to take turns in the bathrooms and got in each other’s way in the kitchen and had to jostle, bargain and wrestle to fit everyone into the car.
We piled out in front of McMullan’s pub and ambled inside. They didn’t have a table long enough for all of us, so we sat at the bar and took up most of its L shape.
As the bartender pulled taps and surreptitiously checked his hair in the mirror, it dawned on me that I had lived alone for four years and had never had company for more than a week at a time.
When I’d first let a room by myself, it had been because I was sick of racing for the shower every morning and finding other people’s underwear in the refrigerator when I got home from work. Now I was getting downright misty about it. I’d forgotten that living with someone not only makes you the first in line to give them a nice deep guillotine choke when they finish off the cereal without for Christ’s sake putting it on the shopping list, it also makes you de facto friends. As if you needed an excuse.
We had to lean way into the bar to get everyone’s glass involved in the toast, but no one complained. Stephanie and her boyfriend argued softly with big grins on their faces, which were very close together. Ray gestured emphatically as he explained the proper role of government in America to a tall guy from Chicago. The girls from New Jersey played up their accents and laughed. The girl with dark eyes sipped her Disaronno on the rocks and looked over at me. I gulped the head off the top of my Harp draft and smiled.
There were eight of us sitting around an intricate wicker table on a patio at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas. The chairs and lounges were also made from dense spools of wicker with big white cushions and were almost deep enough to stretch out on, so the group’s posture ranged from perching to sprawling. I had some coffee.
To my left, a broad reflecting pool with nude statues and huge bushy trees scattered around it led up to a textured wall a few hundred feet across with water streaming down its face. On my right were thick windows leading into boutiques and everyone was looking through one of them at a young guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a sparkling death’s head design on the back.
I didn’t think the gems were real diamonds, but they could have been, because the guy had walked in with Paris Hilton. They were carefully ignoring each other, but every time one of them rolled their eyes and gazed disinterestedly at something, the other would steal a furtive glance before resuming casting hopelessly about for something, anything, that didn’t just bore the hell out of them like everything else in this backwater town. Showing affection is the first step toward giving up control, I guess.
I was quietly pleased to note that Paris looked about like I’d expected and that she really did not have a very pretty face, a position I’ve maintained for several years now. Of course, she could probably have bought my love, but it would have taken more than a $1,000 hoodie with Ghost Rider on the back.
She didn’t rush outside and make an offer, so I drank some coffee and lounged back on the lounge and talked. I didn’t have a lot to say at the moment, but fortunately that’s one of the last things I consider before joining a conversation. After a bit, I realized that, with the exception of Stephanie and my buddy Ray, I hadn’t known anyone at the table more than three days and I already liked them. I wondered if that meant I was giving up control. Paris probably wouldn’t approve. I decided I could live with that.
It was a little overcast, cool for Vegas but sultry for most places, and a faint breeze made me glad there was a heat lamp above us. One of the girls was drinking a White Russian and I watched as thin veins of cream ran down through the Kahlua underneath. During a pause in conversation, I noticed that she was looking at me with her dark eyes slightly narrowed and the smallest of creases in her forehead, like she was trying to decide if I was sort of cute or sort of annoying. It seemed like a lot of people had been looking at me like that on this trip. I assumed the best and finished my coffee.
Later, we all went back to Stephanie’s house, where most of us were staying, to change clothes before we went to an Irish bar for a drink. We had to take turns in the bathrooms and got in each other’s way in the kitchen and had to jostle, bargain and wrestle to fit everyone into the car.
We piled out in front of McMullan’s pub and ambled inside. They didn’t have a table long enough for all of us, so we sat at the bar and took up most of its L shape.
As the bartender pulled taps and surreptitiously checked his hair in the mirror, it dawned on me that I had lived alone for four years and had never had company for more than a week at a time.
When I’d first let a room by myself, it had been because I was sick of racing for the shower every morning and finding other people’s underwear in the refrigerator when I got home from work. Now I was getting downright misty about it. I’d forgotten that living with someone not only makes you the first in line to give them a nice deep guillotine choke when they finish off the cereal without for Christ’s sake putting it on the shopping list, it also makes you de facto friends. As if you needed an excuse.
We had to lean way into the bar to get everyone’s glass involved in the toast, but no one complained. Stephanie and her boyfriend argued softly with big grins on their faces, which were very close together. Ray gestured emphatically as he explained the proper role of government in America to a tall guy from Chicago. The girls from New Jersey played up their accents and laughed. The girl with dark eyes sipped her Disaronno on the rocks and looked over at me. I gulped the head off the top of my Harp draft and smiled.
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