Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual SAAB STORY At underground parking garages, I like watching the "valets" gas vehicles up the spiral ramp, weaving around columns and going airborne over grates and speed bumps. But not...
...I didn't like this line of thinking...
...I appreciate your honesty...
...And this particular one is wholly unsuited to me...
...Come...
...Well, courage is like an eighth cardinal virtue, without which one cannot practice the other seven...
...With thank-you-sir-thank-you-sir still ringing in my ears, I drove away feeling terrible, with no idea whether I'd done a good turn or simply been bullied—no idea, in fact, whether I had any moral bearings whatsoever...
...I called him up and told him it would cost him 20 dinosaur books...
...President Clinton's recent pardon of Patty Hearst, strangely enough, reminded me just how the car had wowed me during our dating years...
...Well, actually, they'll have to rethread that belt at the dealership...
...He drove us back down...
...A friend of mine confessed that the photos the Symbionese Liberation Army released after kidnapping Hearst (or to use her exuberantly pornographic nom de guerre, "Tanya") had made a never-to-be-effaced erotic impression on his 13-year-old self...
...We were parked by the offending pole...
...Repairing it is a chore—the parts are so expensive you'd think they were handcrafted out of saffron, chinchilla, and emeralds and brought from Sweden by dogsled—but I do it gladly...
...I sifted the facts...
...My bumper was going to get fixed one way or another, whether I paid for it or the garage did, whether I took it to the dealer or the kid's friends soldered and taped it up in his driveway in Falls Church...
...I began to feel like I'd wronged my children just because I'd been too cowardly to face a showdown with some fast-talking immigrant...
...Know the feeling...
...Yeah, the, uh...
...But not yesterday, when I saw my own car ascending with a softball-sized patch of pistachio-colored paint next to the headlight, and the plastic belt that secures the bumper flapping about...
...It was the machine gun she was holding," he said...
...I'm not a car person...
...It's the same col—" "I can fix...
...Hey, stop...
...Oh, sir...
...Not to sound like a Beach Boy, but the thing hits 150 mph with no coaxing...
...So I told the kid, "Forget about it...
...On the other hand, would the boss not understand that, and fire the kid anyway...
...Cars I own tend to acquire nicknames like "The Crate...
...There was a fresh gash in the paint, obviously from my bumper...
...If you think of that as 100 pints of Guinness or 30 CDs, then I had done a virtuous thing...
...bumper...
...On the other hand, I didn't want to collect from the kid, I wanted to collect from his boss...
...Today my wife drives a mini-van, but (or rather, therefore) the Saab has mammoth sentimental value...
...By laying that decision in my lap, he pretty much wrecked my week...
...We turned the corner of the "orange level," and suddenly we were on a level painted pistachio...
...Now he leaned across the gearshift and pled: "Oh, please, sir...
...I'd pressed a dollar absent-mindedly into his palm (showing how little service has to do with tipping) before I said, "Hey, uh . . . " "Oh . . ." he replied, study- • ing the concrete floor...
...I didn't really mean it...
...Please...
...He wasn't a very good faker...
...I decided to forget about it, and cover the cost by agreeing to do a book review an editor had offered me days before...
...It's a turbo-charged SPG, which must be the Swedish acronym for "fitted with an Air Force jet engine...
...Say the repair costs 500 bucks...
...On the one hand, I've seen the lines of impatient parkers, stomping, looking at their watches, waiting for their cars...
...I ask you please do not to tell my boss...
...I didn't— but maybe it's like sitting beside the woman you dream of marrying in a car that does 200 if you push it...
...Somerset Maugham once wrote that money is like a sixth sense, without which one cannot enjoy the other five...
...The guy had really nailed it...
...But I have children now, and if you think of it as 20 dinosaur books or 10 trips to the zoo (with popsicles after), it looks a bit different, doesn't it...
...It's more a Coed Bombshell Accoutrement than a family man's drive-to-work car—a ten-year-old, fire-engine-red Saab my wife bought in her early twenties...
...Why don't you drive it around a bit more...
...The car was parked next to a pole...
...I show you...
...Why should the kid suffer because his boss rushed him...
...It used to be easier...
...On the other hand, Ethiopians run most of the parking garages in Washington— maybe the don't-tell-my-boss line was a ruse he'd worked out with his father, who owns the place...
...Generally, this is the sort of thing you have to be drunk to do: Just smashed my car...
...BMWs and Mercedes pass it only with my permission...
...See...
...I said...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...An Ethiopian kid hopped out, smiled, and spread his hands, as if to say, "Ta-da...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 20
