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meatloaf and an Ebay car
Sunday, April 27 2008
Gretchen, the dogs, and I packed into our one remaining working Honda Civic and drove south into New Jersey, to the souless suburbs south of Bernardsville. Our mission was to pick up a replacement for the gutted hatchback in our driveway. It was from the 1998 model year and had cost us only $2600 on Ebay, so we were wondering what kind of condition it would be in. Its write up had suggested problems typical of a ten year old car, along with a few that suggested an unusually stressful life. Other bidders had apparently been leery of the description, and this was how we had ended up winning.
Still, something was a little odd about today's pickup. The seller had told Gretchen to call a half hour before arriving, something Gretchen hadn't remembered until we were five minutes away. And he hadn't directed us to his house but to an Exxon station. Once there he told us to wait, giving us time to run the dogs around in a patch of forest where one almost expects to find decomposing human bodies. (Someone had hung a roll of toilet paper on a branch, convenient for defecatory purposes except that rain had fused it into a bleached mass of cellulose.)
Eventually we got a call giving us the directions for the final leg of our journey. We ended up at a large, beautiful house tucked behind gloriously flowering trees. In front were several cars, including a ridiculous Nissan sports car and the car we'd come for, a black Honda Civic without any plates. It looked okay, more or less. There were a few dings and some asshole had snapped off the radio antenna, but in general it looked to be in better shape than the other hatchback had been in on the morning of its demise. I looked under the car and its exhaust system looked as if it had been recently replaced.
The guy selling the car was named Andre, and the first problematic issue was how we would pay the balance of what we owed (after the $500 deposit), since Andre didn't want to accept a personal check. While Gretchen and he worked on that issue, I put the plates from our old hatchback onto the black hatchback. I didn't really have the right tools, but I somehow managed anyway. By now Gretchen had given up on calling our bank, since the PIN number for the phone system was evidently different from the one used with cash machines, and thus unknown. So then Gretchen tried to reach our bank using Andre's web connection, but that failed as well. So Andre drafted some kind of document for Gretchen to sign and accepted the check; what else could he do?
Meanwhile I'd rigged up a CB radio in the car to help Gretchen and me communicate during our convoy back north.
The first thing I noticed when attempting to drive the just-purchased black hatchback was that the handle on the automatic gear shifer came off in my hand. Hmm, that didn't seem good. And then I noticed a six-inch-long crack in the windshield just to the right of my center of vision. I don't remember that being listed in the Ebay description (though a missing five dollar vent had been). As we returned to that Exxon station we'd stopped at earlier, I pulled in to fuel up for the ride home. Using the CB radio, I'd already told Gretchen about the problems I knew about in the car, and she was wondering if we should take it back. At this point the problems seemed annoying but fixable, so I said we should just go home, but skip our original plan to hit a Trader Joe's along the way in New Jersey (there aren't any in our part of New York). Meanwhile, my blood sugar was trending into dangerous territory, so I went into the Exxon and bought a box of cheese nips and a can of Monster energy drink. "Is this what you're having for lunch?" asked the plump young counter girl, who was obviously working this job as one of the burdens of youth. "Yes," I said. "Awesome!" she replied. It's rare that an employee in a gas station makes such effortless use of irony, so, despite the desperate condition of my blood sugar, I savored it.
It was a fairly miserable drive back to Hurley. The black hatchback had more than a few unpleasant quirks. The suspension seemed somewhat beat, and the car tended to squeak like an old schoolbus every time it hit a bump. More troubling, though, was the fact that the speedometer and odometer didn't work at all. The former registered a constant velocity of 20 mph no matter how fast I went, occasionally jumping up to 60 when I pushed the button on the CB radio. And the latter didn't add a single mile to its 117,456 tally during the entire 110 mile drive home. Furthermore, there was no functional music system in the car, but at least its Ebay listing had stated this, so I'd brought an MP3 player to listen to.
The moment we got home, I immediately went to work attacking the car's problems. I applied some special goop to the crack in the window, the kind of goop that hardens from the effects of the sun's ultraviolet transmissions. Then I set to work diagnosing the problem with the speedometer and odometer. I tried swapping the Speed Sensor from the stripped hatchback, and when that did no good I tried detaching various cables. It was very helpful to be able to consult the the dissected remains of a nearly identical vehicle.
When nothing else worked, I swapped in the speedometer/odometer cluster from the stripped hatchback. Only then did the speedometer and odometer resume normal function. Unfortunately, I the check engine light also resumed normal function, giving me an error code indicating the failure of one of the oxygen sensors. This car was going to be nothing but trouble, that much was clear.
This evening Penny and David came over. They arrived before dark and spent some time marveling at the sheer austerity of the stripped hatchback in the yard, which David compared to something one normally sees along a certain notorious expressway in the Bronx. Gretchen had made a vegan meatloaf with gravy which proved unexpectedly delicious for all concerned. (Like most people, I don't find the word "meatloaf" the least bit appetizing.)
Later we all went upstairs and watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Gretchen and I have watched it many times (though not recently), while Penny and David had never seen it. As with the meatloaf, they found it an unexpected treat.
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