willhines.net

The National Kidney Foundation came to my house and towed away my car yesterday. It’s a donation, theoretically, though that implies I have passed on to them a thing of value. My car is old enough that I had to pay them $30 to take it. A fair deal to someone who doesn’t want to deal with junkyards. I suppose if they scrap it, it’s valuable. I scrambled but could not find my camera in time to snap a photo.

I felt more sad that I expected to see the car towed off. AND I think it was resisting being taken. It allowed its alternator to break, meaning it couldn’t be driven. It got buried under 2 feet of snow. It allowed its license plates to be rusted to its bolts.

The guy who drove the tow truck was very impatient with me when he learned the car couldn’t be driven, and was buried under snow. It’s true, I had not prepared much. I think I had grown so weary of tending to the car, that I couldn’t bear to put more work into actually getting it in towable-shape. The guy hooked a chain under it’s front left tire and yanked the heap from underneath the snow and out into the always-busy Lorimer St. When a line of cars formed behind, furiously beeping, the guy directed me into my driver’s seat: “Steer it — just follow the truck.”

I hopped in and he started dragging my chained car to a less busy street. Unfortunately, I forgot that you have to put keys in the ignition and turn them to unlock the steering wheel. So my car, with its drive train rigidly held in place, swayed leeeeeffft and riiiiight behind the tow truck, narrowly missing oncoming cars at one end of its swing, and almost scraping a line of parked cars on the other — John Hughes comedy style.

The guy stopped the truck and stormed over to my car, just as I had fumbled the keys out of my front pants pocket.
“FOLLOW THE TRUCK” he yelled.
“Yeah, I, the key, you didn’t, I…” I stammered, but he was already stomping back to his tow truck. If the guy had bothered to exchange one sentence with me, I might have had time to think through what I was doing. Then again, I’m a moron about cars.

On the less busy street, we ripped the license plates off. He looked at the maps and jumper cables in the back seat and asked me in a bewildered tone “You’re not keeping your cables?”
“No, I don’t need them.”
“Keep them! SOMEone will take them!”
“Do YOU want them?”

He just shook his head, giving up on me. He mumbled something about “save money - you’ll live to be 90 and feel like you’re 70,” but I didn’t try to expand that into a conversation. He gave me a receipt, and I watched him drag my car north into Greenpoint and away. Yeah, I felt sad.

But I’m glad to not have to get a jump start on Friday morning to move it across the street.

Edited to add: after he questioned me for leaving my jumper cables, I decided to open the trunk to take a last look at what was in there. I pulled out a set of scuba flippers which Matt DeCoster had brought by for a Fun Squad taping the year before. So that was all the tow truck guy saw me salvage from my car.

| Tags: car