Yeah, I know I wrote in the last entry I wasn’t blogging again until next week. So sue me. That was before my car died, before I found out my AAA membership was expired, before I rented a car under fraudulent circumstances, and before I ran a toll booth (just to put an exclamation point on my meteoric downfall into a life of crime).
I left Boston shortly before lunch expecting to arrive at Penn State around 7 p.m. I was on the Mass Pike when my trusty 1991 Mitsubishi with nearly 100,000 (which had never given me a single problem) started making a strange noise. In less than 5 miles, the hidden dashboard indicator light that says YOU ARE TOAST was blinking. The car lost power rapidly, and I barely made it up the next exit ramp. It died at the toll booth, and while pushing it to the side of the road (smoke billowing from under the hood), I’m thinking “Fuck! There is no way I’m going get there in time to watch all of Survivor!” Then I checked under the hood to make sure the car wasn’t on fire. It wasn’t. It was just burning oil. Lots of oil splattered everywhere.
It took me at least 10 minutes to find my AAA card, which I’ve never used. When I told the representative my membership number, he informed me that my membership expired last November. “How can that be? It automatically renews on my credit card” I ask. I was apparently never notified that the card number on file expired last November. (I’m still getting the monthly newsletter, which I never read). After venting a few minutes with a AAA call center supervisor, he kindly renewed my membership retroactively and summoned a tow truck.
Richie, the tow truck driver (who reminded me a lot of the fat guy who played Santa on the last episode of The Sopranos), dropped me off at a car rental place on the way to the towing company parking lot. While I was getting my wallet and a few things from the car, he went inside and told the car rental agent I’d had an accident and needed to rent a car. He came back outside and told me “just tell them you had a fender-bender and they’ll give you the rate with unlimited mileage.” Unlimited mileage is good, especially when you’re driving over 1000 miles in a weekend, so I played along. When the agent started asking me about “the accident,” who was at fault, and if I’d called my insurance company, I became awfully vague. “Well it was mostly a mechanical problem, and I had to push it off the road, and there was so much smoke, and it all went so fast someone mighthavebumpedme but I’m not turning anything in to the insurance company, so you can skip that part. Here’s my credit card … give me the keys.”
Back on the turnpike in the rental car, I approach the next toll booth, reached into my bag and grabbed my Fast Lane transponder (one of the those devices that transmits a signal so you don’t have to wait for a ticket). I haven’t driven a car with an automatic transmission in ages, so when I instinctively raise my left foot to “press the clutch,” what I actually do is slam on the brakes (this while going through the “Fast Lane”). The car behind me slams on it’s brakes and comes screeching towards me. The Fast Lane transponder flies out of my hand onto floor, and to avoid an accident I just hit the gas and went flying through the toll booth. The toll booth lights start blinking red and a buzzer goes off. Fast Lane didn’t receive my signal from the transponder that was on the floor under the dash. The Mass Pike has video cameras installed to capture the license numbers of people who run toll booths. What’s the chance they’ll track me down with the license number from a rental?
At this point, I really needed a cigarette. Are rental cars supposed to be non-smoking nowadays? They are never equipped with a cigarette lighter anymore. This does not deter me, however, from the nerve-soothing qualities of nicotine. Not wanting to dirty the spotless ashtrash, I flick my ashes out the window. The aerodymics for ash-flicking are substantially different in this car than what I am accustomed to, and in mid-flick, the cigarette bounces off the door post. At this point, I couldn’t tell if the butt had landed inside or outside. (But do I smell something burning?) I had just passed a sign from a rest area, so I zoom into the rest area, get out of the car, look around and find the cigarette butt had landed on the back seat, burning a hole in the plush cloth interior of this brand-new Toyota which had a grand total of 88 miles on it when I rented it. Maybe I can creatively arrange the seat belts in such a way that this little mark might go undetected when the car is inspected on it’s return.
In a welcome relief, the final 6 hours of the drive were completely uneventful. I pushed the boundaries of acceptable speeding and made it into State College to see the last 25 minutes of Survivor (which played out exactly as I predicted in e-mail to both Beau and Max yesterday morning). And I’m going to see lots of friends I haven’t seen in a year and have a weekend full of fun and not think about the fact that my car is so totally dead that to get it repaired would probably cost more than what the car is worth.
