A fair trade

(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.