I fell in love with the car the first time I saw it, and would have bought it even if it hadn't run. It was a 1986 Chevy El Camino, a workingman's Cadillac, a car good only for passing other vehicles and looking cool in, a vehicle, in all other respects, of complete and utter impracticality.
That's why I loved it. Its big V-8 got terrible mileage. It was uncomfortable to sit in, and murder on your lower back on long trips. Tall passengers had their legs squashed because it had a bench seat, and I'm short. Its bed was so low, you couldn't haul anything in it, and there were no brackets with which to tie anything down. It didn't drain, either--after a rainstorm, the bed looked like a swimming pool. And the El Camino's rear end was so light, it spun its wheels on gravel, in the rain, anywhere but on flat, dry pavement.
It was totally useless. In other words, it was a work of art.
I bought it one day two years ago when I was living in Florida. The eminently practical Volkswagen diesel truck I had been driving for seven years and 90,000 miles ripped its third clutch cable and all of my patience on a dirt road in the cattle country near Lake Okeechobee. I had just put a new radiator in it, as well as many hundreds of dollars' worth of fuel filters, alternators, belts, fans, hoses, bells and whistles, and it had left me stranded one too many times. "That's it," I said. "Tomorrow I'm buying a new car."
The El Camino was the first American car I had ever owned. It was the first car with air conditioning, cruise control and a radio with "scan" and "search" buttons I had ever called my own. The boys who rolled my groceries out to it stood in awe. When I pulled up for an interview in front of the home of a Florida redneck, I got respect.
As soon as I moved to Phoenix last fall, it was stolen.
It would have been unusual if it weren't. I have since learned that car theft is the most popular leisure-time activity for a large segment of the population in the Valley of the Sun. Phoenix's car theft problem is getting worse faster than any other place in the country. More than 12,700 vehicles were stolen here last year, almost twice as many as in 1988.
I was just one more case rolling down the assembly line. The experience taught me a lot. All of it was bad.
I would love to have a videotape of myself going out to the carport next to my apartment building, 8:30 a.m. one Monday in early December. I know I did a double take. I think I may have even rubbed my eyes. Then I walked back into my apartment and cried.
Then I called the police.
Then I cried again.
The police bureaucracy is a fabulous animal. It is staffed entirely by human beings who have no first names, who insist on being addressed as "officer," and who speak in the flat, effectless tone usually associated with severe forms of mental illness. You will not enjoy discussing the disappearance of your vehicle with these people.
And it will not take long to ascertain the painful truth: The police have not the slightest interest in recovering your vehicle. If they do recover it, it is by accident. And you will wish they hadn't. You will wish, fervently, that your car had found a good home somewhere in Sonora, with someone who would wash it every Sunday.
Alas, two days after I talked to a policewoman with no first name, my phone rang. It was 5:45 in the morning. It was dark out. Needless to say, I was asleep. "You have to claim it within a half-hour or it will be towed to a police impound yard," the voice on the phone said. My neighbor at the time, luckily, was a waitress who went to work at 6:30 a.m. I rushed down to her apartment, shrieking, "They've found my car!" She was just exiting the shower. Together we dashed down to the corner of Roosevelt and 12th Street, where my poor baby was sitting in the middle of a lawn, his face in a large bush.
"Oh, my God!" I wailed, jumping out of Vicky's van. "Oh, my God!" Two of his four headlights were missing, like eyes gouged out, and his left front end was crumpled in, like a face that had taken a wicked punch. Parts of his steering column were hanging loose. A tire was flat. For some reason, his spare was on another wheel. He looked like hell. Bizarrely, he was still running.
I didn't know what to feel. Murderous rage at the kids who obviously had taken a well-cared-for vehicle and deliberately run into walls with it and then parked it in a tree. Pain at the sight of such a pretty thing abused. Then the policeman at the scene spoke.
"What is your social security number, ma'am?"
All my emotions suddenly found a lightning rod to strike."What difference does that make?" I screamed at him. "My car is wrecked and you're asking me what my social security number is?"
When I got in the car, I realized the gas gauge was sitting on empty. Sobbing, I told Vicky I was heading for a gas station and then up to the body shop.
She turned to the policeman.
"Well, suppose there's not enough gas to make it to the gas station," she asked the cop plaintively. "Will you help us?"
"What exactly do you mean by `help,' ma'am?" I heard him ask in that flat voice as I began backing my poor child out of the bush.
I couldn't imagine why he wanted my social security number. I still can't.
I also realized something else. The police already had written off as a lost cause finding the people who took my car. In fact, the furthest thing from this policeman's mind was finding the people who took my car. Last year, when 12,705 cars were stolen in Phoenix, only 84 car thieves went to jail.
Within a couple of hours, with the helpful assistance of the body shop, I was driving a four-cylinder Chrysler with no acceleration. I was also listening to car theft stories.
The co-worker whose junker truck got stolen from the newspaper's parking lot. The woman at the motor vehicle office whose daughter's Honda got stolen twice. And the famous man whose car got stolen from the state capitol parking lot, so he went home at lunchtime and got his father-in-law's car, and that was stolen by the time he left work at five o'clock. Almost everyone I talked to, in fact, had either had their own car stolen or had a family member whose car had been stolen. I had also found out that your chances of having your car removed from your possession are greatly enhanced if it is a General Motors vehicle, especially a Camaro, Firebird, or Monte Carlo. Secretly, I was somewhat pleased that my car was considered a desirable item. My liberal, import-owning friends had never quite gotten the point of a gas guzzler with attitude.
I was also having daily conversations with my insurance company, as well as chats with the man at the body shop.
"We should get it done by Christmas," he told me.
As it turned out, almost everything on the car's body that possibly could be replaced had to be. Almost the entire interior needed to be redone as well. And every single object that had been in the car--from my road atlas, owner's manual and fuzz buster to my phone book, water bottle and laundry detergent-- had been removed. I was especially annoyed about the laundry detergent.
And the work dragged on and on. "We should have it done by New Year's," he told me.
"We should have it done tomorrow," he told me a week later.
My education continued. As it turned out, the body work took exactly the length of time the insurance would pay for my rental car. Surprise! Theft, by the way, is one of the reasons Phoenix insurance premiums are so high.
By the time I drove my darling child home, I had spent $450 of my own money on minor details the insurance company didn't cover--like taxes on the rental car, the first two days of the rental car, and the price difference between the somewhat old and worn tires that had been destroyed by the thieves and the brand-new, top-of-the-line, needlessly safe tires they had been replaced with. I had also spent $5,000 of my insurance company's money. I had a file folder full of report numbers, claim numbers and telephone numbers. I hadn't heard a peep from the police.
Since El Caminos were obviously sitting ducks for thieves, I got a car alarm. I also got one of those hooks that go around the brake pedal and the steering wheel. I used them both every night. Every time my neighbors slammed their car doors near it, my car's alarm went off. It drove them crazy.
Sometime in May, when the weather began getting seriously warm, my car alarm broke. I figured the wires melted. Less than two months later, my car got stolen. Again.
"Please, God," I prayed, "this time, let it be in Mexico."
Alas.
The second time around, however, I had everything down to a science. I reduced my rage time from three days to three hours. I had the rental car the same morning, and from a company that throws the first couple of days in free. I had the police tow my poor baby to the impound yard when they found it. To save myself the unnecessary trauma of actually having to look at the damage, I had the body shop fetch it from there and start work on it.
I was reduced to helpless rage only once. That was when I called up the police to tell them my car was gone, and the woman on the other end of the phone asked me for a phone number where I could be reached. I tried to give her both my home and work numbers, but she stopped me.
"You can only give me one," she said mechanically. "The computer only has room for one."
"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of," I shrieked.
I actually enjoyed my other conversations with the police, prepared as I was for their lack of first names. I even talked to a cop who was a member of the Nature Conservancy.
And I accumulated more good car stories. A lovely dispatcher told me her brother's pickup has been stolen and stripped twice, the last time left in the riverbed. From the Nature Conservancy member I learned that Toyota trucks are popular theft items, as are Toyota 4Runners and Nissan Pathfinders. From the fellow at the body shop, I heard about the man who had his Chevy Monte Carlo stolen four times in six months.
I found myself becoming a connoisseur of theft. I was unreasonably annoyed that the people who took my car found it necessary to smash the driver-side window to get in, when I had broken into it myself twice with a wire coat hanger. Stupid thieves, I kept saying to myself, my car got taken by stupid thieves. My car got broken into by the only teenagers in Phoenix who don't know how to bend a wire coat hanger.
I found myself strangely calm during the usual insurance company hassles, like calling up the person you have been told is your "claim representative" and finding out that he is on vacation. I found myself facing with something approaching equanimity the fact that I will once more hemorrhage money for the things the insurance company won't cover.
Partly, this is because I have also been telling myself, "That's it, I'm buying a new car."
I have been thinking about this for some time, and have decided, more or less, that when the car to which I pledged eternal love two years ago is out of the shop, I'm selling it. It breaks my heart. I love that car. That's the problem. So does everyone else. What I really need is a piece of automotive dorkiness no one in his right mind would steal. I've settled on a practical, gas-miserly, made-in-Japan, eco-freak station wagon, the kind to which self-righteous bumper stickers--"You can't hug your kids with nuclear arms"--gravitate as if by magnetic force. I don't want to do this. It's been fun being cool for two years. I sure will miss my darling baby. But I can't live like this anymore.
Last year, when 12,705 cars were stolen, only 84 car thieves went to jail.
Your chances of having your car stolen are greatly enhanced if it is a General Motors vehicle, especially a Camaro, Firebird, or Monte Carlo.
My liberal, import-owning friends had never quite gotten the point of a gas guzzler with attitude. Every time my neighbors slammed their car doors near it, my car's alarm went off. It drove them crazy.
