Range Ball

As some of you know (probably most of you, since I bitched about it endlessly in email,) I broke my car the other day. The rest of you, who are probably not familiar with the non-tormented, un-darkly-mysterious part of my life, may not be aware that I'd occasionally get off my brooding, black motorcycle and strip off the leathers and boots and chains and drive a real car. Well, "car" was a little strong. Probably even "real" was a bit much, if it got to that.

OK, it was a VW Beetle. An OLD VW Beetle. An old, "Hunter's Orange" VW Beetle.

Yes, I know, you'd have expected me to be in, perhaps, a classic black and chromed 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS with the 396ci engine and mounted James Bond machine-guns or some such. But cars have never really been my thing, and expensive cars have really never been my thing. For my money, cars are a way to get from somewhere to somewhere else, just another tool designed to assist me in doing what I want where I want. I have no more emotional investment in whatever car I'm driving than I would in a hammer I was using to put a nail in the wall or, for that matter, a sharp stick I've found to scrape the crap from between the cleats on my combat boots. It functions or it does not, end of relationship.

Now, I have a niece who is absolutely model/Hollywood/girl-next-door beautiful. She is just a knockout, but also about the nicest girl in the world, which is a combination that's rare-unto-myth.

Wait. This all ties together in a minute. Really.

One of the things about being a gorgeous girl was that she was surrounded essentially from birth by all the classic studmuffin sorts. She was always the leader of the A-list pack with the quarterback following her around like a lost puppy and usually with the rest of the team or other students orbiting in a cloud arranged in more-or-less descending pecking order waiting their turn for her to smile at them for a minute. It was almost a quantum-physics lesson, as the single point of her was the center of a large number of universes.

At any rate, she used to own this Beetle.

Told you it was related.

Every cop in the county knew her because, without putting too fine a point on it, she was a horrible driver, and that little blaze-orange car couldn't have been easier to pick out of traffic if it were on fire and had an occupied stripper pole on the roof. But when they'd stop her and walk up to her window, ready to do bad traffic-cop stuff to her, she'd beam that "holy-fucking-wow-is-she-hot" smile at them and inquire sweetly whether she'd done something wrong.

If she ever got a ticket, I don't know about it.

She and that Beetle went together like ham and cheese, if ham and cheese were ever "cute as a bug," raw, innocent sex flitting around town in her darling little almost-a-toy little Barbie car with plastic flowers in the holder on the dash. She and that car, in other words, were just fucking adorable.

Yeah, like I didn't hear you thinking that. Don't be an ass. She's my NIECE. I mean, ewwwww.

She eventually settled in on one of the swarm of drones surrounding her, picking one who'd moved on from being a studly Master Race Football Hero to studly Master Race Army Dude.

It turns out that Studly Master Race Army Dudes wouldn't be caught dead driving a fluorescent orange VW Beetle, and certainly not one which used to belong to his significant other during her social-butterfly-babe, "pre-him" period and, even more importantly, one which still had flowers in the little plastic holder on the dash. When I found during casual conversation that this was an issue, I offered them (him) a ridiculously small amount of money to take the little horror off their (his) hands, and I suddenly found myself in possession of my very own cheaper-than-dirt, zero-macho, screaming-orange VW Beetle.

I realized I was going to have to studlify the thing a bit before I could be seen in it, so in a fit of redesign, I tossed out the flowers.

No. That's a lie. They were there for months until my granddaughter, whom I indulge in all things, latched hold of them one afternoon and used them as hair decoration after which they promptly became Desaparecidos.

So, y'know, voila, the transformation was complete, or at least as complete as need be to meet my rather loosely-defined standards. Y'see, one thing I've figured out at my age is that if you need a macho car to keep your dick stiff, you've got problems that the Chevelle isn't going to fix. So, I really did nothing with the car except change oil once in awhile, usually when the oil light came on and it was down a couple of quarts anyway.

Of course, the little orange wad got no respect whatsoever in traffic. On several occasions, I got to watch the expression on some hairball's face when I unfolded about three times getting out of the driver's seat to go across the parking lot to discuss some little traffic dispute which he'd initiated while thinking he was screwing with the usual orange VW driver. Any one of these incidents alone was totally worth the price of the car.

The hailstorm that moved through the area on the edges of the tornado swarm a few years back knocked the glass out of all the houses and destroyed roofs for a mile each direction from my place. The VW was in an uncovered parking lot, and therefore got the shit kicked out of it. It didn't break any window glass (which was a near-zero probability event, but then that's why they call it near zero,) but destroyed the headlights, parking lights, and taillights, and made the entire rest of the car look like someone had been working it over with a ball-peen hammer. The insurance company gave me a fairly giant check (more than I'd paid the now-ex-stud-in-law for it in the first place) to get all the dents out of it and perhaps repaint.

"Yeah," I thought, "that's exactly what I'm going to do is spend a batch of money on a POS car so that it doesn't have dents. I'm totally on board with that," after which I paid off a credit card instead.

As a result, my distinctive car was even more distinctive. Every single mechanic (and many people just passing on the street) would comment on the dimpled complexion of the thing. My boss called it my "Titleist" because he said it looked like one of those orange practice/range golf balls you can see being used by amateurs across the country.

In fact, that's exactly what it looked like. A range ball. I was going to get a graphics guy I know to put a vinyl "Titleist" logo across the thing. 'Cause I'm just that classy a guy.

The VW, Post Hail. Or A Golf Ball.
One Or The Other

Alas, I never got the chance. Last week I was roaring down the road to work running about Warp 3 when what appeared to be a chunk of truck tire appeared in my lane. I was, at that moment, passing a line of traffic on a bridge approach -- there was nowhere to go.

I wasn't that worried about it. I'd hit chunks of rubber before. They'd taken out fog lights, various fiberglass chunks -- never anything serious. I figured I'd wind up out of the car on the road shoulder trying to get the lower part of the bumper re-attached.

Then, about 0.01 second before I hit it, I realized that it was a black lump of...what? I don't know. But it wasn't tire rubber. I did NOT want to hit it, whatever it was. So, I tried to dead-center it in the hopes that whatever it was would clear the undercarriage. As you may know, the undercarriage of a VW Beetle is approximately 0.7 inches off the ground, so that wasn't happening.

It sounded like I'd hit a car battery at about 70MPH, which, for all I know, was exactly what it was. I never did find out for sure. I knew instantly that there was a real problem. The dash lit up with a variety of lights, and things weren't looking good behind me, either.

Have you ever seen a movie that features one of those old WWII era dogfights that used to go on between bomber aircraft and defense fighters? Usually at some point, large holes are made in one or the other or both, and a rushing stream of vaporizing fluids roar out in a rapidly-expanding and worrisome cloud. THAT'S what I saw in the miniature rear-view mirror. It was pretty clear that my car now looked a lot like this:

I maneuvered through traffic and pulled over to the shoulder. When I got out of the car, the stink of gasoline was so thick it was nearly unbreathable. Lots of vapor...and then I heard the shushing rush of fluids.

I walked around to the passenger side, and there saw a river of raw gasoline pouring from under my car, enough so that an actual current could be seen in the flow, rushing down the embankment. Of COURSE I'd just filled the car about 30 minutes prior to this, so of COURSE it was a full load.

I did some quick math in my head...let's see, I had a giant  rushing batch of gasoline, virtually all of which was turning into vapor, with an ignition point of about 500°F and a flash point of about -45°F, and I'd been running at Warp 2.97, which made an antimatter-remix chamber temperature of about 500,000°F -- yeah, this is going to work out well.

I called the fire department to come kitty-litter the gasoline river, and then kicked back and waited for the fireball.  It never happened.

I had the car towed to a VW shop, and told them to (a) give me an estimate on how much it was going to cost to repair a gutted gas tank and (b) to work up a trade-in value in case (a) made me shit myself.

(a) did (make me shit myself,) especially after they'd added in the fact that whatever I'd hit damaged everything from the windshield washer reservoir to the brake system, not even counting the gas donut (with a hole that size, it's not a "tank" anymore,) and (b) was reasonable, so I bought a new car. It looks like this:

 ...and it doesn't suck. Turns out I may have spoken too soon on the macho-car/dick stiffening thing.

As for my busted-all-to-flinders Titleist? Well, after having seen me in it and been with me in it for over 1/4 million miles (about 274,000, actually) all the kids and grandkids are in tears because I've had the damned thing for large chunks of their lives. Nostalgia, and all that. So, I've taken to telling them that I just retired it and moved it to a farm where it can run and play with other old Beetles.

I don't think they're buying it.

Crippled-Up Beetle In The Mirror Of Its Replacement Wondering
Where I'm Going And If I'll Have A Yummie Snack When I Come Back