Last night I was out until after 1.00am with a sick car. The complicating factor was it wasn’t my car… So here’s the situation, my parents went away for a weeks vacation and they left the keys to the brand new Porsche… wait, that’s someone else’s story. Mine goes something like this:
The Nissan 240Z
My close friend/martial arts instructor Mark has a hobby… collecting Z Cars. Mark has two of these cars so far: one that he wants to use for stock car rallies and the other a “parts” car. As part of getting the one car ready to rally, Mark needs to restore/fine tune the first car.
Yesterday, he had to go to Watertown NY to pick up a motor for the car that was coming down from Canada. There was no way that he was going to be able to fit it in his Jetta. So we arranged that we would swap cars for the day. He would use my Blazer to pick up and transport the motor, while I zipped around town in his Jetta. I enjoy borrowing the Jetta because it’s a stick shift and I don’t usually get the chance to drive them (I learned to drive on a powder blue VW Rabbit stick shift). So everything was right with the world. Mark was off picking up his motor. I was zipping around town. Then it happened…
I was returning from RIT at about 11.20pm after attending some *shudder* student plays there (the horror, the horror). All I wanted to do was go to bed. As I approached Highland Park, suddenly, the clutch went to the floor without any resistance and the Jetta was not shifting. I’ll translate this for those who are not wise in the way of stick: that’s bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad! After a lot of work I managed to get the car into first and trying to keep the tactometer as low as possible, managed to limp the car into the Highland Diner parking lot; all the while thinking: “Great… I killed Mark’s car.”
The next hour and a half was a very lonely time. I tried calling Mark, but it kept rolling into his voice mail. “Good” I thought, “that means there is someone home.” I left a message, a pathetic message what went something like this:
ahh… hi Mark, it’s Matt. Ummm… Got some bad news. Sorry. It looks like the clutch went on the Jetta. I got it into the Highland’s parking lot. Sorry. Give me a call back when you get a chance. Umm…. No I mean give me a call back as soon as you get this. Sorry ’bout this. I’ll be with the car. Talk to you later. I mean soon. Call me when you get this. Sorry about this. *click* — I tend to say sorry a lot. It’s a habit I try to break but can’t seem to do it. Sorry.
I refused to leave the car, in part because it was a long (though not undo-able) walk to my home and more importantly you just can’t abandon a friends car like that. So I sat there, trying to stay awake (I had no desire to spend the night in a Jetta in a parking lot), calling mark every five minutes only to continually get his voice mail. On the plus side I got some great sex tips from Love Lines and then heard the thrilling end of the World Series Game (thank God for Radio). By quarter to 1.00am I was really starting to wonder if I’d be there until morning. It was somewhere around that point that I did fall asleep only to me almost immediately awoken by my cell phone (which is far louder than I remembered it….). Any onlooker must have thought the guy in the Jetta was having a seizure when I jolted awake and did my best to answer the phone.
Mark took everything very well, he was over there within fifteen minutes. He inspected the clutch; we decided that >hopefully< the clutch cable had gone and it would be an easy fix. We stuck a note in the window saying he’d be back the next morning to have it towed and drove me home. Since the motor was to be dropped of at a shop today it was still in the back of my car. We decided that he should keep the Blazer to finish the “Motor Quest.” So this morning I’m without car and working from home. Still there is something strange about getting dropped off at your house by you car (or truck in this case) and then watch it drive away…
tonight…
We’re having a round of auditions for the plays I’ll be directing as part of the exact theatre company (I am planning on starting that blog one of these days). After that I think I’ll be going with friends to check out the martial arts silliness of “the one”.
tomorrow…
Henry Rollins baby! More to come on that…
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