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"Breakdown #1: Radio Play Cut"
From Plato's Garage
In the realm of car maintenance, I have spent most of my life on Yiker's Island. This is where you are banished when you are constantly in danger of having your car break down on you due to lack of funds for routine upkeep, and your only response when it does break down -- which is often -- is a half-fearful, half-exasperated, "Yikes!" For years, I was led on by the global poverty conspiracy, which assures that it costs way more to keep fixing something constantly on the cheap than it does to fix it once the expensive, thorough way. Even though I spend thousands of dollars on automotive Band-Aids over time, I was never able to afford to fix any car right on the first go. Last time my Jetta broke down, it sat for six months getting axle arthritis and brake-drum rot while I rode the bus and tried to conjure money for its repair. When I finally did get it repaired (something about a hydraulic oil-life system), my financial reality went on an upswing. The next time my car gave me warning that it would be breaking down soon, I was able to act quickly.
My sister and I were heading out of town on an abnormally sunny end-of-February L.A. day for a getaway to the desert. As we zigzagged through East Los Angeles to avoid the traffic on the eastbound Interstate 10, my oil light started flashing. It never bothered me that I didn't have an oil-pressure gauge because I didn't know how to read one anyway, and I figured this idiot light would let me know if the engine were going to blow up soon or something. I don't know why I didn't quite believe there was something wrong with the car when it started screaming at me..
"Yikes," I said, as the light went on and buzzed in a loud, multi-octave drone. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and checked the oil.. It was clean and completely full. I decided it was a false alarm, and kept going, satisfied that it had just needed a little under-the-hood attention. After a couple of blocks, the light began to buzz again, and I figured I would have to take it in to have a mechanic look at it.
The closest auto shop was the Mobil station at the corner of Alameda and the 10 intersection, just east of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. The friendly Korean owner listened to my complaint and asked me to give him a call back in about two hours. We spoofed around Little Tokyo and had an early lunch of tempura and soba. I was peevish and worried about the fate of my car, and I somehow got stuck on finding a space-boy silver, segmented goose-down jacket in order to calm myself down. Several stores in Little Tokyo were offering this specific item because of some odd, local marketing trend, but none of them fit me, so I tried to get lost in the maze of kitsch Japanese knickknackery in a store my sister was browsing. We ate lunch without talking much, and afterward I phoned the garage.
"Bad fuel pump," the owner tells me.
"Oh!" I say, thinking that it sounds like a cheap and easy job. "How much?"
"About three hundred."
"Oh, shit!"
"Yeah, fuel pump is expensive! You want me to do it? Three more hours."
I reluctantly agreed, and offered the bad news like a dog presenting a dead bird to my sister, who was completely unperturbed by the entire mishap. I do not remember what we did in the next three hours, but I was depressed and sluggish and whiny -- the way I had been for several months without knowing why. I could tell that my sister, though she is a bastion of tolerance and didn't show her annoyance at all, was getting tired of my behavior. When we finally headed back to the garage, it was the middle of the afternoon, and a late winter storm was beginning to kick up thanks to our constant companion of the last several months, El Nino. We leaned forward to steady ourselves against the blustery wind as we tromped down Alameda Street back to the Mobil station.
When we got there, everything was complete, so I paid the owner and headed off down the freeway. Two minutes later, the oil light started its whine again. My sister and I looked at each other and laughed. When it continued for two more minutes straight, I turned around and went back to the garage. The owner said he would replace the pump again, but it would take another two hours.
I sighed and groaned while my sister assured him that yes, this would be fine. We walked the other way this time, to hang out at Union Station and maybe get some coffee or something. It was freezing in the great hallway of the station, and we took possession of a whole bank of sturdy, leather upholstered chairs after buying indigestible snacks and a fashion magazine at the kiosk. Half of the people around us looked -- as we did, I guess -- like they had no intention of boarding a train or meeting anyone who might be getting off of one.. There was a band of preteen skateboard punks riding through the center corridor, terrorizing passersby under the gruff direction of a seedy older guy with greasy hair and a tattered motorcycle jacket; a couple with a small child and a baby, who kept leaving the infant in each other's care while they got up to obtain peripheral items at the kiosk and the sandwich stand -- a forgotten napkin, an extra ketchup packet, a plate and a fork with which to attack a fallen-apart sandwich, a pack of gum. It took a lot of exhausting, complicated maneuvers for one or the other of them to gain the freedom to secure each one of these things, and after half an hour of this, they were both surly and disgusted by the amount of energy they were having to exert in performing these simple, unimportant tasks.
The baby was unimpressed by their dilemma. He continue to attract anything remotely sticky to himself, until he was covered with a film of chocolate and soda and mayonnaise that continued to grow and expand even after his older sister and parents had finished their sandwiches and Cokes and ice cream bars. Then there was the constant influx of salespeople and general managers on business trips, dressed in hopeful, utilitarian white-collar suits, tugging along their bulging file caddies and flimsy overnight bags. The whole scene made me even more depressed than I already was, and I went outside every half hour on the dot to smoke a cigarette as it began to sprinkle.
At 5:00, we returned to the garage to find that they had replaced the fuel pump again, even though they had found nothing wrong with the previous one. I thanked the mechanic for his effort, and we headed east on the 10 one more time. This time, we made it almost fifteen miles before the oil light did its thing. I went on for another fifteen while my sister and I wondered out loud what might happen if we just kept going. Then the scar started to overheat, and I turned around and headed west back into town. I left my car ant home and we took a taxi to the Burbank airport to get a rental car. We drove to Nevada through the night, taking turns dozing in the passenger seat, doing 95 or 100 as we passed several convoys of eighteen-wheelers winding their way through the shallow hillscape of the high desert.
As I drove, I fell into highway hypnosis. Dotted yellow lines passed under the belly of the red Pontiac Grand Am in as insistent, mesmerizing rhythm until the road in front of me became the main highway through a dream state, and I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep. As I floated along in this trance, I thought about my Jetta sitting in my garage at home, just waiting until it could raise its idiotic alarm again. I made a deal with it: even though I felt I had done more than enough to fix it, I would do my best to continue taking care of its problem if it would promise to take car e of me when I was in trouble. That done, I couldn't stop thinking that my car's odd insistence to keep buzzing and blinking even after multiple repairs must have been a sign. I was sure that my Jetta was trying to tell me something about myself, and when my sister and I checked into the Avi Indian Gaming Resort at 3:00 in the morning to get some sleep, I was still trying to figure out what on earth it might be.
Copyright ©
2000 Rob Campbell.
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