For most of my first stint at the University of Maine, the 1993-94 school year, there was Gojira, a 1985(? I think? They were basically unchanged from 1972 to 1987) Chevrolet pickup with moonshot mileage that had made the rounds of the family. It was originally my aunt Dot's, then I think my grandfather had it for a while, and then Dad, and then me. It was originally black, but Dad was going through a phase where he painted cars. He repainted our old green Malibu, but for some reason replaced the metallic green it originally was with a sort of flat house-paint green, and he hadn't sufficiently cleaned up after sandblasting some bits of it, so it had a startlingly abrasive non-skid finish. He also painted my grandparents' blue '87 Pontiac a different shade of blue. Then he had some of the blue paint and some of the green paint left over, so he mixed them together and painted the pickup, which ended up being an interesting color that was hard to identify for the blank on the car registration for. I think we ended up calling it green, but it could just as easily have been called blue.

("Interesting" is usually a backhanded dis when it comes to car colors, but it really did look nice.)

Anyway, Gojira was pretty beat up. One day that winter, I was parking in the commuting student lot on campus, way the hell out past the Pillars of Hercules by the performing arts center, when along came a kid in a shiny new car. I can't remember now exactly what it was, other than it was a very expensive German convertible—either a Porsche, or an SL-class Mercedes-Benz. Graduation present from prep school, no doubt. Whichever, the kid driving it was trying to Arrive in a jaunty and casual manner, but it was winter, so what he actually did was slide into the side of my truck.

He leaped out in a panic, visions of tripled insurance premiums and parental wrath dancing in his head, and we surveyed the damage. He'd hit the side of the truck's bed, right in front of the wheel well, with the bumper of his car. The car wasn't even scratched, and I couldn't tell which of the various dents on the truck was the new one—he'd basically just rearranged them a bit. So I told him never mind, be more careful, and he was so grateful I think I missed an opportunity to recruit my first world domination minion by letting him leave.

I took Gojira with me the next spring, when I dropped out of UMaine to take a job doing tech support for a now-deceased PC-clone manufacturer, but an aging Chevy pickup was not really a suitable vehicle for that sort of employment. A bunch of people I knew worked there, and it's hard to carpool with a pickup; plus, although still running well, the engine had >250,000 miles on it and was starting to use an inconvenient amount of oil. Rather than rebuild the engine, my father persuaded me to accept the gift of my grandparents' old Pontiac and return Gojira to him.

(There is a postscript to the Gojira saga, a little cautionary tale about good timing. Shortly after he got it back, Dad was under the truck replacing the hanger bearing on the drive shaft—yes, GM's stellar drive shaft engineering was still in effect in 1985—and happened to bump against the fuel tank—which promptly disintegrated, dumping a few gallons of gasoline on the ground and, presumably, him. Evidently it was so rusty by that point that only the inertia of its various constituent rust particles was holding it together...)

I drove the Pontiac for an uneventful year or so, until the time came when I had to have it inspected. There I ran afoul of one of the scourges of life in that great Commonwealth, the predatory inspection mechanic, who fails your car, puts a sticker on it saying so, and tells you that to pass the one permitted reinspection, it needs thousands of dollars' worth of work that—by law!—he must, conveniently, be the one to perform. (I haven't lived in Massachusetts for many years. I can only hope that this is no longer how the law works there, because I have seen a lot of outrageously crooked shit in my time, but that earns a big slice of the cake.)

Fortunately, for once in my life I hadn't left something to the last minute, so there was still a week or so left on the previous year's inspection sticker. I don't remember exactly how, but I somehow managed to talk the guy into not taking the still-valid one off and slapping the FAILED one on, went away "to get the money together" for the repairs... and, while the old inspection was still valid, traded the Pontiac in on a new car.

Well, almost new. The car I traded for was of the then-current model year, 1995, but it had been purchased once before, by someone who had it just long enough that they had to sell it as a used car. Evidently whoever it was had decided, just a bit belatedly, that a Dodge Neon Sport Coupe was not to his taste after all.

Yes. I bought a first-generation Dodge Neon. Willingly. On purpose.

It was the first car I ever bought from a dealership and the first time I'd ever financed anything. It was all jolly exciting. And it was probably a huge mistake, like you make when you're 22 and really shouldn't be out in the world without adult supervision, but what the hell. Good decisions don't make for interesting stories.

And actually, I quite liked the car. It was a sort of metallic royal blue, and the Sport model came with body-color door handles and mirror covers (which is a small thing, but makes a substantial difference in the look of the car), alloy wheels (they weren't quite as ubiquitous back then), and the more powerful of the two available inline-4 engines (which had all of 150 horsepower, but, hey). It was a two-door at a time when that sort of thing was becoming increasingly rare in non-sports cars. It rode well, handled acceptably, and the manual transmission was fun to drive (and really necessary if you wanted to get the most out of that little engine). No, their reputation notwithstanding, I would contend that my Neon's problem was not that it was a bad car.

My Neon's problem was that it was cursed. Not cursed like Christine, it didn't want to hurt anybody, but cursed like it had been built over an ancient burial ground. Bad shit just happened to that car.

Here's an example: One winter morning, only a few months after I got it, I was walking toward the car to go to work when a station wagon* came mushing along the side street it was parked on, slipped on the slushy snow, and banged into the side of the Neon. The thirtyish woman driving the wagon glanced over, clearly aware that she had just sideswiped a parked car, and then, without missing a beat, drove on. I had to chase her on foot—me!—to the next corner with a main road, where she had to stop for a red light. And then, in the classic Massachusetts tradition, she copped an attitude with me because her kids were going to be late for school.

Lady, I don't give a shit if your kids never go to school again in their lives, you just hit-and-ran my car.

A little while after that, someone with a lot of time on his or her hands and a screwdriver went down the block puncturing everyone's curb-side tires, leading to the bemusing discovery that another of the Sport model's features was a rare-size tire that cost about twice as much as normal ones. (I am not accusing station wagon lady of this cruel and pointless crime because that would be petty, but she was awfully pissed off about getting caught.)

In the spring of 1996, I took a job out in California with a company that paid for my relocation, so some men with a truck came and took all my stuff out ahead of me. They would have taken the car, too, but I decided to drive out with my father, in a sort of reprise of the big summer road trips we used to take when I was in high school, so we loaded up the Neon and hit the road. We went the normal way out to Chicago, then got off the Interstate and used a guidebook to follow as much of old U.S. Route 66 as we could find.

It was a nice trip, and the Neon didn't give us any trouble until we reached New Mexico. There, just as we were passing through Albuquerque**, the air conditioning failed.

It was April, which doesn't sound so bad, except that, well, we were in New Mexico, with Arizona and the high desert of California still to get through. I wanted to find a Dodge dealer and get the damn thing fixed, but Dad had a flight to catch at the other end and was afraid we'd have to wait for parts or something, so we pressed on.

Tempers grew somewhat shorter in the Neon after that. Because of that, we skipped the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. I'm not going to say the high point of the southwestern leg of our voyage was thus the Chinese restaurant we ate at in Barstow, because we did see some cool stuff (such as the classic car dealership in Kingman, Arizona, and the frightful but very beautiful mountain stretch of old 66 between Kingman and Oatman), but things were a bit subdued thenceforth, in an effort to avoid escalating tensions to levels that would result in actual homicide.

So, the trip finally finished up with nobody dead, Dad flew home, and there I am in California, being confronted with weird shit like having to prove my citizenship to the DMV and the authorities caring more about the car's emissions profile than whether it's actually safe to drive (although living in Massachusetts should have at least pre-primed me for the latter), and being issued one of the only license plates I've had that I was ever able to remember (3PMD331, no idea why that's stuck in my head all this time when I couldn't begin to tell you the number on either of the cars I actually have right now). It was a strange time. And it was about to get even stranger.

TO BE CONTINUED...

--G.
* For younger readers: A station wagon was a kind of car with an enclosed rear seating-slash-baggage area instead of a trunk. They still exist, but aren't called that any more. Nowadays, manufacturers give them all-wheel drive; make them taller, uglier, and worse to drive; call them "crossovers"; and charge about 20% more for them than a normal car for no evident reason.

** Provide your own "Weird Al" Yankovic reference here. Remember to use your inside voice.
-><-
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.

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.
-><-
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.

I first encountered this when I got my grandparents' old Grand Prix. I had never bothered registering Gojira in Massachusetts; in fact, now that I think about it, I suspect Dad and I never bothered to do a transfer of ownership on it, and it was just on his plates the whole time I had it down there. That was trusting of him...

Anyway, when my grandparents gave me the Grand Prix, that wasn't an option, so I took the old Maine registration, my proof of insurance, and whatnot and trundled on down to the Registry of Motor Vehicles office in Worcester to see to it.

The first snag we hit was when the lady finished looking through the papers I'd given her and said, "There's nothing here to calculate sales tax from."

"What sales tax?" I said.

"You have to pay sales tax on automobile purchases in this state," she said, as if explaining something simple to a very slow child. Holding up Gram's "I hereby give my 1987 Pontiac..." note, she went on, "This bill of sale doesn't say how much you paid for the car."

"I didn't pay anything for it, my grandmother gave it to me," I said.

RMV Lady shook her head severely. "You can't receive a car as a gift," she said. "There has to be a way of attributing the value of the transaction for purposes of taxation."

"So... Massachusetts wants to tax me on the moral value of being given an old car by my grandmother?"

"If you want to view it that way."

"... What if I paid her a dollar for it?"

She gave me a look like, Now you're getting the picture, backwoods boy, and said primly, "That would do."

So I amended the note to include "for the sum of $1" and paid, I think, seven cents' sales tax on the purchase to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and all was well.

A year later, I encountered a different and altogether more vexing oddity of the system, when the time came to trade the one-dollar Pontiac in on the Neon. Because here's the thing about the Massachusetts RMV: They don't do temporary license plates. At all.

In most U.S. states of my experience, when you buy a car from a dealership, the dealer puts a paper license plate on it, and you have a while to get around to going to the town office or the DMV or wherever and properly registering the car. (When I was a kid, it was 10 days in Maine; I think it's two weeks now, but everybody still calls them 10-day plates because that's how we roll up here. Seriously, we give directions based on where things used to be. "Turn left at where the Buick dealership was...")

Well, not in Massachusetts, no sir. You buy a car in Massachusetts, it leaves the lot with real grown-up license plates on it, or not at all. (Well, I assume you could have it towed or taken off on a flatbed, but, I mean, who does that?)

For some of the bigger or higher-end dealerships, all this means is that the sale paperwork takes even longer than normal, because those dealerships have RMV offices built in, and they can take care of all that for you while you cool your heels in the salesman's cubicle, resisting the upsells for tire insurance and aftermarket rustproofing and stuff. That's how it worked when I bought the Saab I used to have; Charles River Saab wasn't a big dealership, but it was fairly upscale. I might've been the plebbest customer they ever had there.

The Dodge dealer I got the Neon from, though, didn't have that. Instead, the rule for places like that was that you had to wait while the dealership sent an employee to the RMV to register your car for you. This tends to take many hours—the already-very-long time it takes to do anything at the RMV, plus however long it took the guy to drive over there and back. It's ridiculous.

On the day I bought the Neon, it was even more ridiculous, because the guy who normally did that at Harr Dodge was out sick that day, and they couldn't find anyone else who wasn't too busy to do it. They tried to get me to come back the next day, but they had already taken the Pontiac away, so what the hell was I supposed to do, walk home? I argued with the salesman about it for a bit—at one point I got so disgusted with the whole affair that I told him to give me my Pontiac back and we'd forget the whole damn thing—and eventually he agreed to a Cunning Plan, to wit:

He would throw a test-drive plate on the junkiest car on the lot, and I would drive over the RMV and pretend to be a dealership employee in order to register my own car. I would then return the junkiest car to the lot, get into to the hopefully-not-junkiest car on the lot, to which the service department would have affixed the Pontiac's old plates while I was gone, and we'd all get on with our lives.

And it worked! I went in and put the papers on the counter all, "Hey, (mumble) from Harr Dodge, got a customer registration for ya." I don't think the RMV dude ever even looked at me.

I think I've just admitted to three different motor vehicle registration irregularities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As with my high-speed adventure in the Camaro in 1991, I can only hope that the statute of limitations has run out.

--G.
-><-
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.