Baby You Can Drive My Car
It began innocently enough, a gig in Ypsilanti just off the main drag, Michigan Avenue. The bass player would knock me down for expressing any of my motherly concern about Ypsi. When we were in high school it was Ypsi-tuck. Home to the countless hoards of poor white trash Southerners lured north by the promise of good jobs in the auto industry. Well the unions did their job for some of those hoards. The lucky didn't stay long. They left the town of Ypsilanti to be turfed out to college students, the struggling middle class who couldn't afford Ann Arbor and in some obvious pockets, the poverty stricken hoards that could no longer even dream of a job in the slumping auto industry. Now Ypsi carries the odor of fear from drug-fueled crime and a sense of commercial abandonment.
So why should it be a surprise that some idiot would steal the ten year old Honda Accord. Who would want it, we asked ourselves. The two answers: that it was for parts, or joy riding teenagers, still seemed to beg the question: Who would want such an old beat up car?
A question I had to keep asking yesterday after the police "recovered" it. What a voyage into a strange land that I can only deem valuable as some kind of fodder for my fiction. The Sheriff's department is the last place one would imagine oneself to be fearful, but the clerk sat behind half inch thick plexiglass and could not manage a smile nor any small talk as she operated her keyboard with a kind of disdain that sends chills even to a law abiding citizen. I was on the "other" side. And that was just the beginning. Things I noticed: Of the dozen African Americans milling around that lobby were two children, and they were the most silent people in there. The women, three or four talking on cell phones despite a sign saying "cell phone use prohibited" were loud and angry. I remember hearing one woman saying: "That's just not how the system works, and I know the system." I felt hopelessly misinformed. In my world "the system" has little to do with me. But once your car is stolen you are part of the system.
First surprise: you get ripped off, and then the system rips you off. I would have to pay to get this car back. Somehow the amount didn't strike me till later: $169...a numerical sign for "I fuck you", okay more accurately: "I blow you, you blow me". The additional $2 for using my debit card, was just another kick in the rear. It could have been worse I guess, another $40 a day for "storage" in the worse butthole of the city full of assholes. (No offense to Ryan or any of the other fine residents that we know.) Second surprise, the worry about the condition that the car would be in once abandoned. The answers to that question seemed obvious, but we are white people born with the certainty of hope. David and I drove to the impound lot with a sense of excitement. Would the cds still be there, his sunglasses, his muck boots, at the very least, his gas can, as there was certainly no gas in the car. Well of course nothing was left in the car, except for some suspicious baggies that the tow truck driver advised us to get rid of, if we were stopped by the cops the car would just end up getting impounded again. Somehow that was more upsetting than the shattered windshield, the shorn off side mirrors, or the blinkers that don't work.
The sense of violation was complete when after ferrying back with a gallon of gas from a gas can pilfered from another abandoned vehicle, and hooking up the jumpers, the car still would not start. I guess I'll call AAA I tell the lone employee of Budget/ Stadium Towing, after he tells me they will charge us for a jump (this after the first no-gas attempt was free I guess). I feel completely hopeless, starving, and freezing, standing in this dark graveyard for cars, surrounded by snarling dogs. So I go through the long reciting number process with AAA, and then the clerk says hold on I'll get the name of who is coming out to give you a jump. The guy turns to David and says I better go get my truck they're going to call us. Yep, AAA cheerfully reports: Stadium Towing will be out to help you within an hour. It was somehow satisfying when we were able to get it going before the tow truck got back there...our own little FU.
Now I can get indignant about the abuse of my property...but there is also my white liberal guilt. What is property to some poor kid who's only hope at acquiring property is theft, a hit rap song, or a mean jump shot? It is the source of all evil, isn't it. My righteous indignation versus their righteous indignation. Is it some odd coincidence that prior to getting the call to pick up the car I was at my parents, showing them how to use their stereo system, and my mother had me put in the Martin Luther King tape. The voice that sounds like coffee is still ringing in my head ..."people say why can't the negro pull himself up by his own bootstraps?..." All I can do is try to feel some sense of hopeful accomplishment: some poor kid has some pretty good boots to get through the winter. And maybe, just maybe, Charlie Slick's birthday mix tape, that David mourns losing most of all, will do a number on his head, and those bootstraps will feel a little more within reach.
When I got home I got a little crazy when Warren told me he was taking my car to work today for Larry to borrow to move Ari. Everybody wants to...if not rule the world... drive my car.
So why should it be a surprise that some idiot would steal the ten year old Honda Accord. Who would want it, we asked ourselves. The two answers: that it was for parts, or joy riding teenagers, still seemed to beg the question: Who would want such an old beat up car?
A question I had to keep asking yesterday after the police "recovered" it. What a voyage into a strange land that I can only deem valuable as some kind of fodder for my fiction. The Sheriff's department is the last place one would imagine oneself to be fearful, but the clerk sat behind half inch thick plexiglass and could not manage a smile nor any small talk as she operated her keyboard with a kind of disdain that sends chills even to a law abiding citizen. I was on the "other" side. And that was just the beginning. Things I noticed: Of the dozen African Americans milling around that lobby were two children, and they were the most silent people in there. The women, three or four talking on cell phones despite a sign saying "cell phone use prohibited" were loud and angry. I remember hearing one woman saying: "That's just not how the system works, and I know the system." I felt hopelessly misinformed. In my world "the system" has little to do with me. But once your car is stolen you are part of the system.
First surprise: you get ripped off, and then the system rips you off. I would have to pay to get this car back. Somehow the amount didn't strike me till later: $169...a numerical sign for "I fuck you", okay more accurately: "I blow you, you blow me". The additional $2 for using my debit card, was just another kick in the rear. It could have been worse I guess, another $40 a day for "storage" in the worse butthole of the city full of assholes. (No offense to Ryan or any of the other fine residents that we know.) Second surprise, the worry about the condition that the car would be in once abandoned. The answers to that question seemed obvious, but we are white people born with the certainty of hope. David and I drove to the impound lot with a sense of excitement. Would the cds still be there, his sunglasses, his muck boots, at the very least, his gas can, as there was certainly no gas in the car. Well of course nothing was left in the car, except for some suspicious baggies that the tow truck driver advised us to get rid of, if we were stopped by the cops the car would just end up getting impounded again. Somehow that was more upsetting than the shattered windshield, the shorn off side mirrors, or the blinkers that don't work.
The sense of violation was complete when after ferrying back with a gallon of gas from a gas can pilfered from another abandoned vehicle, and hooking up the jumpers, the car still would not start. I guess I'll call AAA I tell the lone employee of Budget/ Stadium Towing, after he tells me they will charge us for a jump (this after the first no-gas attempt was free I guess). I feel completely hopeless, starving, and freezing, standing in this dark graveyard for cars, surrounded by snarling dogs. So I go through the long reciting number process with AAA, and then the clerk says hold on I'll get the name of who is coming out to give you a jump. The guy turns to David and says I better go get my truck they're going to call us. Yep, AAA cheerfully reports: Stadium Towing will be out to help you within an hour. It was somehow satisfying when we were able to get it going before the tow truck got back there...our own little FU.
Now I can get indignant about the abuse of my property...but there is also my white liberal guilt. What is property to some poor kid who's only hope at acquiring property is theft, a hit rap song, or a mean jump shot? It is the source of all evil, isn't it. My righteous indignation versus their righteous indignation. Is it some odd coincidence that prior to getting the call to pick up the car I was at my parents, showing them how to use their stereo system, and my mother had me put in the Martin Luther King tape. The voice that sounds like coffee is still ringing in my head ..."people say why can't the negro pull himself up by his own bootstraps?..." All I can do is try to feel some sense of hopeful accomplishment: some poor kid has some pretty good boots to get through the winter. And maybe, just maybe, Charlie Slick's birthday mix tape, that David mourns losing most of all, will do a number on his head, and those bootstraps will feel a little more within reach.
When I got home I got a little crazy when Warren told me he was taking my car to work today for Larry to borrow to move Ari. Everybody wants to...if not rule the world... drive my car.