5/05/99
I went to a little play on Friday, parking my car in an abandoned U-Park-It. I pulled into the empty spot right across from the sidewalk and street. I half-thought "some gang member will take my car because he'll be too lazy to walk the two feet to the next car." I also half-thought "I'm only going to be gone a little bit, no need to put the Club on." But I left the car in the nearest spot, with the Club on.
As I was coming back from the play, I half-thought "Uh-oh, hope the car's still here." And it was. Then I full-thought "Hey, the window's broken." The back left one, shattered.
The only car-related crime I had been victim of before was someone yanking the hood ornament off my old Mercury Cougar. No hubcap snatched, no gas siphoned, no Jack Nickolson golf club attacks. When I saw the window, I instantly wrote off the radio. OK, I could get a new one. Maybe a tape player. I sorta wanted a tape player, but didn't want to throw out a perfectly good car radio just because it couldn't multitask. Now I had no excuse to not get one. Hey, this wasn't so bad. I'm glad I was robbed!
No I wasn't; I just get dunderheadedly optimistic sometimes. If I ever get stabbed, I'm going to think "Cool! I'm going to meet Jesus!"
When I did a quick inventory check, the radio was still there. As was the Club, my big pile of Parkway tokens, and the scattered papers and leaves that I never notice because they're not by the driver's seat. My car wasn't robbed, or looted or otherwise touched. It was simply shot.
Or so I think. I'm not sure what happened to the window. Another window was broken on the car, the little half-window thing in the back right seat. All the glass was still in the frame of this one, except for a little bullet shaped hole right on my old College of New Jersey parking sticker. If it was an entrance wound, it would correspond nicely to the exit wound of the back left window. But the car next to me didn't have any window damage. Maybe the bullet was traveling up.
The cops said it wasn't a bullet hole, but they didn't seem to know or care what it could be otherwise. I wasn't expecting the JCPD to go into overtime because one guy's got a broken window, but pretending to know about some kids driving around bored with guns would have been appreciated.
After I cleared the safety glass out of the window (that stuff is soooo fun to break) I got to do the classic of redneck home auto repair: the Hefty bag and duct tape window. Unfortunately, I didn't have Hefty bags or duct tape in the apartment, only white kitchen garbage bags and scotch tape. My car window looked like I put a shade on it. Plus, it didn't hold too well. It flapped like Ronald Reagan's neck when I went down the Parkway, until the tape gave way and it stopped making noise or being a window.
There's about ten pages of glass repair shops in the phone book. Some of them are open 24 hours, some of them will deliver right to your door, some of them will give you a complimentary martini while you wait. But every one of them will charge you way too much for one stinkin' pane of glass. My professional glass store estimate was $300, $50 for the door window and $250 for the vent window (that's the official name) because that was a special job. Junkyards, however, are cheaper. Their price was $106, tax included. They also have more rats, but the rats make a mean martini.
By parking in a not really dangerous area of a city a week ago, I was jumping into the uncharted nether regions of the auto industry. I was leaving the happy retail Pep Boys world for a legalized chop shop with no corresponding cartoon spokespeople. I was expecting a bunch of toothless sleazebags who just crawled through half a mile of raw sewage and saw Deliverance as an instructional video. But I was basing this stereotype on my limited knowledge of auto junk yards. I'm sure they would not be inbred freaks.
I was not disappointed. Inbred freaks! One guy hadn't heard of shampoo or soap, but had heard of Brillcream. Another was having a belching contest with himself, and winning. Both of them were missing the same front tooth; I think they must have tried to open the same beer bottle. Both of them were yelling "Out! Get out, now!" to no one in particular. I was afraid they'd be coming after me with shotguns, until the dog they were yelling at poked his head around the counter. They must have taken him through the half mile of raw sewage as well.
But I officially love those guys, because they got me my windows fixed for a third of the regular price. I guess that's the happy ending. I survived city life, which turned out just to be fixing my car. Which isn't that bad at all. Of course, there's still some assassin gunning for my head, but if he hits the car again, I'll sic the junkyard guys on him.