I did a lot of things wrong during my time in California. I've debated the reasons behind this with a number of people over the 20-odd years since it happened, but the reasons aren't really germane to the discussion today, so I'll skip that. Bottom line is, whether through plain stupidity or some subconscious self-destructive impulse or whatever, I messed up a lot of stuff.

Prime example: I was making more money than I ever had up to that point, and yet I managed to get my car repossessed just before Christmas, a week or so before I was to fly back East to spend a few days with the gang in Worcester, then head north for a couple of weeks with family. I'd saved up all of my vacation time for the occasion and would be gone for three weeks.

With much grumbling, my father paid off the car, but the repo people refused to return it, and I wouldn't have an opportunity to trek out to wherever the hell in the East Bay they were—Brentwood, I think (the town in Northern California, not the neighborhood in LA)—and retrieve it before my flight out. Grudgingly, the repo agency agreed to hang onto it when I get back.

The weeks that followed were pretty much the worst of my life. I arrived in Boston to find that the friend who was going to pick me up at the airport, Derek Bacon, was unable to do so on account of the fact that he'd been unexpectedly hospitalized while I was in the air. He died the following day, while I was crashing at his apartment with his roommates. I came down with a terrible cold, or maybe the flu, the day after that and the rest of the "vacation" is just a blur.

I got back to California in the first week of January, wishing I could be anywhere else at all. In my memory, the Oakland cop was actually waiting on my doorstep when I got home from the airport, but I have to assume that's not really how it went; regardless, one of the first people I talked to when I got back, besides people at the airport and Zoner, was an Oakland cop, who came to let me know that, and I quote, "We found your car."

I said something distracted like "Yeah, it got repossessed, but it's OK now, I paid it off."

"No," said the cop, "there's been a whole 'nother chapter since then."

Yep. Someone broke into the repo agency's impound lot, one dark night while I was in New England, and stole the Accursed Neon. Of all the cars that were presumably there to take, they picked a blue 1995 Dodge Neon Sport Coupe.

For what purpose this was done, I'm not sure. Evidently not for the usual reasons people steal cars, since when it was found, everything was still in it—the seats, the stereo head unit, even the various portable personal effects that had been in it when it was repossessed. They didn't even take the change out of the little slots in front of the cup holder.

What they did do was make it an undetermined distance from the repo lot before realizing that the car had a flat tire. One of the back wheels had a slow leak that I'd been pumping back up at gas stations every week or so, because the tires that car needed were an unusual and expensive size, and while the car sat in the repo yard it went flat. Strangely, the thieves didn't abandon it at this point; rather, they pulled over and put on the spare.

Evidently they abandoned the original wheel by the side of the road; at any rate, the cops never found it, nor the jack and tire iron. With the donut spare on, the thieves carried on with whatever their urgent mission was. They made it all the way back to Oakland before crashing into a bridge abutment, and only then did they abandon the car.

I don't know why I automatically assume they were plural. I think it just makes the whole thing seem less pathetic and like more of an adventure to imagine that there were two of them, and that they had some incredibly urgent reason they needed to get from Brentwood to Oakland at whatever time of night that was—so urgent that they would steal a car, change a wheel on it when they found it had a flat, and then persevere with it all the way to wherever they misjudged the approach to an overpass. It makes me less angry if I consider that they might've had a good reason to do it, when Ockham's razor suggests they were probably just high.

Anyway. The car was recovered, and was in a fairly sorry condition, with its crushed front corner and missing rear wheel, but weirdly unmolested interior. (I remember the insurance lady solemnly telling me that she was sorry to report that they had spilled something on the passenger seat, leaving a huge stain on the bottom cushion. I didn't have the heart to tell her I did that myself, months before the car was even stolen. The thieves actually did nothing at all to the inside of the car, apart from losing the jack and stuff out of the trunk.) The adjuster determined that the damage was reparable, my insurance company tore a strip off the repo agency('s insurance company), and repairs commenced.

A couple weeks later, I got a call asking me to report to the repair garage where the insurance company had sent the car. I arrived to find the adjuster for my claim and the guy who ran the garage looking Gravely Thoughtful and the Neon up on the lift, still not entirely put back together.

"So!" said the adjuster, a doggedly upbeat young man I'll call Mitch because I can't remember his actual name. "It, uh, it turns out I probably should have totaled this car."

"Really, why?" I wondered.

"Steve, you wanna take this?" Mitch asked the garage guy, whose name probably wasn't Steve, but anyway.

Steve took me under the Neon and pointed out a bunch of things I didn't understand, but which I vaguely recall had to do with the way the front suspension was attached to the car's unibody chassis. Evidently whatever the thieves hit had wrenched the whole thing out of alignment in a way that would be trivial to repair on a body-on-frame car, but sort of utterly fucks up the whole thing on a unibody one.

Still, he explained, they'd gotten so far into the repairs on this one before discovering the problem that, after much consultation, he and Mitch had decided to press on and see if Steve could fix it. You never want to hear your mechanic tell you something that begins with the straight-faced phrase, "if I can make it safe..."

So, another month went by, whilst Steve and his people labored mightily to straighten a part the industry regards as unstraightenable, my insurance company eyed the steadily piling-up of his labor charges, and I had to rely on Zoner—who was, with the best will in the world, not the most reliable of taxi services—to get to work, and, equally problematically, get home again. Zoner had a habit of showing up super-late for work on Monday and making up for it by not going home until sometime Wednesday.

Particularly on top of everything that had gone wrong just before and during the Worst Vacation Ever, that whole period was just hell. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I went to a psychiatrist for the first and (so far) only time in my life and just told her, "I never should have moved out here. Everything that happens in this place is insane. Write me a prescription to go back East." She gave me one for Prozac instead, which only seemed to make me edgy, and not in a cool gothy way. I developed high blood pressure and acid reflux so epic I would sometimes wake up in the night with acid pouring out of my nose. (I wish I was making that up and it didn't really happen to people, but it does.)

Finally, though, Steve succeeded in doing the impossible and the Neon was returned to me, all shined up and with the new wheel not too obvious compared to the other three. They even bought me two new tires, so that both of the ones on the back would be worn about the same. And right now you're expecting the next phase of the horror to be that Steve and Mitch were totally wrong about the former having been able to fix the car, but no! It was perfectly fine. Tracked as well as when it was new. It did come with a little card like someone with a fainting disorder would carry, warning anyone who tried to do a front-end alignment on it that the passenger side front wheel needed to be adjusted in some nonintuitive way to preserve proper tracking, but hey, we all have our little handicaps to work around, right? I've never believed in scrapping a car that had anything wrong with it that you wouldn't put down a dog for having.

So that was the bright spot of the California adventure, and it really sums up the nature of the whole experience: that one of the nicest things that happened to me out there (getting the Neon back fully repaired) only happened at the end of a long chain of crappy things (the car being repossessed, then stolen, then wrecked, then going through an absurdly-drawn-out repair process).

Not long after that, I got fired. It was a mercy killing, really. My lousy attendance pattern was only part of the problem; I was also doing shitty work and not caring about it. Also, I've always had a low tolerance for all that rah-rah-go-team horseshit companies do, and my emotional state really eroded what little ability I normally have to conceal my disdain. The company had very rapidly grown up out of the startup-making-good phase I joined it in, and, although I didn't know it, was entering a serious make-ourselves-look-attractive-to-bigger-companies phase instead. The management team had changed, the department I was in was being reorganized, and I hated it there. It was time to go.

TO BE CONTINUED...

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.