Catnip for Car Thieves

The day had started so auspiciously. It was a Thursday morning, and since I had shown up nearly two hours early on the first day of my new job and a good forty-five minutes on the second, I'd decided to leave at eight for a nine a.m. arrival.

I've gotten in the habit of stopping at 7-11 for coffee before my drive to work, and since I still had ten minutes to kill, I decided to walk a loop around the block, leaving out of the front my building, stopping for coffee and coming up the gentle hill of La Paz Drive where my gray, dependable, sporty, 2004, Toyota, Corolla waited patiently for my arrival. I almost never lack for street parking there, except on the occasional weekend night, and the night before I'd parked it in the exact same spot where I'd left it for nearly a fortnight while I was in Chicago for the Holidays.

The morning was bright and warm and not too busy, it still being the first week of January. I can't remember what I was preoccupied with during the coffee leg of my journey except that it was funny and had put me in a really good mood. I was following this train of thought while, coffee in hand, I marched up La Paz. I'll try to reproduce my train of thought as I bobbed up the hill:

"so the gnome says to the octupus no the gnome says to the...car's not there, where'd I park...to the squid he says...empty spaces wait I thought I parked....there's a gnome and squid and they're at the....fuck....pharamacy....what the ff--shit!

WHERE THE FUCK IS MY CAR!?!"

That last part I said aloud, I think, and it was more of a rhetorical question, because I knew in my bones at that very instant that my car had been stolen. Decorum, however, necessitates much waling and gnashing of teeth in such instances, preceded by looking around the empty space where your car used to be as if an unseen assassin had thrown a water baloon at your feet.

I decided to cover the bases and leave the inevitable theft question to last. I looked accusingly at the other cars: "What you doing here? You seen a gray Corolla? I ain't playin' whichyou!"

Pushing open the door of my apartment, I was greeted with that feeling you get when forced by circumstance and not desire to return to where you just were. The apartment looked stupid. "Whuh?" it asked, its mouth full of cookies. "Shut the fuck up," I retorted and picked up the phone. It took a half hour of dialing, scrawling, hanging up, dialing again, scrawling again before someone told me, with authority, "sorry, we havengotchor car, my fren."

The police told me I'd have to come down to the station to file a report in person. I always feel like I should do some penance when ill fortune befalls me, so I opted not to wake up my neighbor and ask to borrow his bike but to walk until I could find a cab. I headed back down that aforementioned gentle hill and perhaps because my head was held low, I saw

THIS!


Just sitting there, parked unassumingly in an actual space in a little lot behind a church. It had moved not more than a hundred yards since the previous night. I was relieved. "There you are," I said. "How did you get there?" It responded with mischievous silence. I walked across the street to get a closer look and understood why.






The police told me they'd taken it for parts. All in all it was the airbags and seatbelts out of the interior and at least the radiator out of the hood. They left all my CD's, my raincoat, some scripts I had from work. In fact they didn't take anything out of the car except a roll of quarters. They even left a hat on the dashboard. The police ended up coming to where I was and taking inventory. They told me they could impound it for prints but not to expect much. A woman from the insurance company cooed at me reassuringly on the phone, and I hitched a ride with the tow truck to body shop.

I've been driving a silver Taurus in the meantime. It beeps for no reason and chugs gas. It's got a huge nose and a huge ass, so it feels like I'm riding around in an ostrich. Meanwhile, my lonely, hobbled car sits in a body shop not two blocks from my place. I don't know what's going to happen yet. It may be a total, as it was apparently driven without the radiator. I'll find out its fate this week.

The frustrating thing about all this is that there's nothing I can really "learn" from it. While I own a Club and had had it on while I was gone for Christmas, I had neglected to put it on that night, just as I had on a hundred other nights when it wasn't stolen. The thieves, of course left it in the car, where I found it under the seat, mocking me. Now I don't go anywhere in the damn Taurus without ratcheting on the Club, because there's no way I can get my rental stolen (this may be a good time to note that this car is a replacement of my previous car that was stolen in Chicago). Perhaps I can sell myself as a "car theft expert" available to comment on shows life "Real Stories of the Highway Patrol" or on networks like "CNN." In the meantime, I see happy, healthy gray Corollas everywhere I go, and kick them.