matthew’s alibi

It’s been a very bad month in terms of cars. I’ve been towed three times, but, lest you assume I’m a one-trick car-owner, I offer in my defense that each tow was different.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning. In the beginning of July, I met Mitch. If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you know that the car hunt was not going well. Then, one July morning, it all changed. I met Mitch. He was a white 92 Honda. For once, I didn’t hate the way a driver’s seat felt. I was desperate at this point, having looked at so many cars and met so many truly frightening individuals selling them (thanks craigslist!) that I would have happily gnawed my own arm off at that point if it would have gotten me a reprieve from car shopping.

But Mitch seemed ok, and he was cheap, (hundreds of dollars under Blue Book value. Why these things don’t raise red flags for me, I’ll never know), and so it was love. My mechanic friend Wolfgang came out to take a look, and proclaimed him sound, and so it was a deal. I bought my first car with $2,500 cash - the total of my savings - and registered him the same day, spending a grueling afternoon at the AAA office with the seller, a complete wanker who was selling the car for his boss’s wife, as a favor. Said boss was a big time producer, having worked on Law and Order, and I had to hear about it ad nauseum. I’m not sure selling your boss’s car as a favor to him is the sort of thing you really need to do in the world of TV if you have talent, but I could be wrong, and if I am, there’s another reason I probably won’t be making it big as a network TV producer any time soon.

Mr. Producer’s bitch doubled as a “business consultant,” and thought it would pass the time to chat with me about attaining my dreams and realizing my goals. I responded by pretending as best I could that I had no dreams nor ambitions, which seemed to stymie him, and that gratified me.

He also suffered from a not-uncommon Los Angeles malady, What-Good-Is-It-If-It-Doesn’t-Earn-Me-Money disease, so, ever the contrarian, I listened (patiently, I thought) to his schemes, and responded with platitudes about how unimportant money was in the scheme of things. That seemed to vex him. It passed the time.

Mitch was obviously not in pristine condition. He needed new brakes and new tires, which he got immediately. But the transmission was funny - it would go up to three or four thousand RPM with the gentlest tap of the gas, and would physically jump forward sometimes when advancing from stoplights. My trusty mechanic, Ken Piechowski (major props to his patience and assistance) said that it was a fluid issue, and the transmission may have a leak, but I’d have to take Mitch to a transmission specialist to know for sure.

Before I had a chance to do that, the master cylinder failed.

I was in Burbank for the day - it was my day off, and I was auditioning for an MTV reality show pilot. Burbank is in the Valley, north of Los Angeles proper. I had stopped by NBC studios in the hopes of talking to someone about the page program, and was headed home, when my brakes, which had been soft, failed entirely. I had missed the entrance to the freeway, and was going around the block to try again. It was then that my brakes, rather than stopping the car, screamed. I did eventually get Mitch stopped, and decided driving Mitch home by myself was not the best idea - he needed a lift.

Getting a car towed from the Valley during rush hour is not cheap. It was worth it though, for the stories I heard on the ride down. The driver lit up when I told him that I had studied philosophy in school (he asked, I don’t generally announce it). He was so excited, it turns out, because it seemed to him the perfect opportunity to tell me all about his own philosophy. I genuinely believed he chose his occupation mainly because it gave him a fringe benefit he absolutely couldn’t resist - a completely captive audience. His philosophy turned out to be an awkward mix of new age garble and Christianity, with baffling endorsements for war sprinkled liberally throughout (”the world only respects force. We have to go in there and show them who’s boss.”) Frequently in life, I’ve found, it’s not even worth responding with anything other than a non-committal “huh.”

The other highlight of the trip was the driver’s “you know how it is” speech. I wish I had a tape recorder. It was one of the best monologues I have ever heard. It was almost completely without context. He introduced it solely by saying “you know how it is.” He continued: “You own a junk yard. There’s always the booze, the whiskey. Things get boring there in the afternoon. You drink a little more than you should. Maybe do some heroin, some cocaine.” My eyes keep getting wider. It was becoming clear that this story is more about him than it is about me. “Then, the women come.” Okay, I was with him up to that point. The junkyard, ok. Alcohol, sure. Cocaine and heroin even. “The women came?! to the junkyard?!” I asked. I was trying to picture the women swarming to this man, boozed and cracked out with wrecked cars scattered around. It just didn’t seem plausible. He was undeterred “yeah, the women. You know, I was married. But I was seeing several women in the afternoons at the junkyard.”

From there on, the story got a lot less interesting. What with the booze and the drugs and the women, the business fell apart. He joined AA, sobered up, and became a born again Christian, started reading M Scott Peck and telling people about The Road Less Traveled, and why we should bomb Iraq.

After the master cylinder was replaced, the transmission issues once more took the fore. It turned out the drivers side axel wasn’t inserted the way it should have been, so as soon as the fluid went in, it poured right back out. Easy enough to fix, and a lot cheaper than it could have been, but having been driven for a month on low fluids took its toll on the transmission, and it was never really smooth again.

I told the story of my second tow in the last blog entry. That was Friday a week ago. Over the weekend, I saw a couple of shows - Michael Penn at Largo with an old friend, and on Sunday I saw PJ Harvey with a new friend at the Henry Fonda Theater.

On Monday, I was driving to work. I wasn’t really ready for the Monday, but it was upon me, and so I was in the car, just a few blocks from my house, heading south on Curson, when, advancing from a stop at a stop sign, Mitch took it head on from an oncoming Jetta. It was absolutely horrific. There was only time to realize things were very bad, and to feel absolutely helpless to do anything about it. The impact propelled Mitch into the oncoming lane of traffic on the cross-street - nothing was coming, thank God. The crash was loud enough to wake the people up in the houses around the intersection. Some of them came out to make sure we were okay. One couple was particularly kind and helpful - they brought us water, and talked to us, really took care of us both. They were a real glimmer of hope on what was otherwise a pretty miserable day.

Mitch sustained a lot of damage to his front fender, and was not drivable. He was towed to a local tow yard, and I walked home, feeling very far from my family and friends.

I’ve spent the week since taking care of all the logistical stuff that needs done after a car accident - dealing with the insurance company (I had liability only insurance, and Mitch was totaled - so the Jetta, which sustained a lot more damage, will be all paid for, and I’m out of luck, car-wise), getting Mitch’s injuries appraised and then getting him sold for salvage and towed (and learning that salvage yards only pay about a tenth of the value of the car - a nasty surprise), getting a rental, and beginning the car hunt anew. It’s not been a very good week, and it’s underscored how alone I am out here - almost all of the people I know in LA are CTY people, so they’re only here in the summer. It’s made me seriously consider whether I want to stay.

That’s still something I’m mulling over. I wish I had a better ending for this entry, but all I can report is that I’m still alive, if a little shaken, and everything else is up in the air - although I’m leaning toward staying. And I’m hoping tomorrow morning the trip to work goes more smoothly than it did last week.