Our new car is cursed

Oh, you may chuckle over that statement, but you have no idea. So, we’ve had our new car since May and I’ve already been rear-ended in that thing and here is our little tale of woe from this morning.

[It was a clear Thursday morning around 6:40 a.m and the sun was still rising above the hills on the eastern horizon. There was not a cloud in the sky and the temperature was a comfortable 70-ish degrees.]

Having just finished one graveyard job at the newspaper a bit early, I decided to sit in my car and have a quick nap before returning to the start of my second newspaper job about 45 minutes later. I got comfy in the back seat of our car, set my cell phone alarm clock to wake me up 30 minutes later and promptly dozed off.

I was woken up when the car suddenly started rocking and shaking. Being groggy from a lengthly nap of 15 minutes, and not wearing my glasses, I sat up, blinked away the grogginess and put on my glasses. What happened next was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever encountered.

[Gradually slipping back to reality from sleepy-time-land, our protagonist surveyed the situation.]

When I looked directly in front of me, out though the windshield of the car, I saw a young latino woman. She had long black hair pulled up into a pony-tail, she was wearing a black tank-top and blue denim jeans and was puffing away on a cigarette. I watched as she put her right hand on the hood of our car, reached down below my field of vision and made some sudden up and down thrusting movements with her left hand/arm which in turn caused the car to rock. Since I was parked under a tree in the middle of an expansive parking lot, my first sleep-hazed thought, was that she must have a dog who was used the tree as a lavatory and that for some reason, the dog was bumping against the car. She seemed so nonchalant about the whole thing. This had all only taken about 30 seconds.

As I sat there watching this woman, I noticed there was a car that appeared to be a silver Toyota 4-Runner parked next to her with the engine running. In the driver’s seat was a young white man who appeared to be about 23 or 24, who seemed to have reason to look about the parking lot in a rushed “i’m on the lookout” manner. After watching the two of them for a few more seconds I decided to get out of the car and see what they were up to.

[The automatic sliding rear door slid open with a press of a button on the keychain lanyard. Paranoid White Boy stared at the opening door as if watching the hatch of a UFO open in front of him. Our protagonist emerged groggily staring him in the eyes as if to say "What the hell do you think you are doing?"]

As soon as I made eye contact with Paranoid White Boy he shook his head “no” at me several times, then pointed to Creepy Latino Chick. I looked at Creepy Latino Chick who stood there for a moment. I looked at the front of my car and saw that she was apparently trying to break off the license plate mount from the front bumper. It was bend out and downward at an awkward angle and splinters of our broken license plate frame were scattered on the ground in front of our car. I looked up at Creepy Latino Chick who rushed over and hopped into Paranoid White Boys car and they proceeded to back up as I moved toward them yelling “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” I blame my sleepiness for my stupidity when I shouted “STOP! Where are you going?!”

Not my most brilliant moment. They backed up and stopped, staring at me like I just sprouted an extra head. I ran up to the side of their car and the window was rolled down a bit so I pounded on the window and again asked them what exactly they were trying to do. At which point Paranoid White Boy had had enough and sped off so fast and frantically he ran over a big island in the parking lot and went into a forced dead end of the lot. When he realized he would have to turn around and come back my way he stopped, backed out of the one-way entrance to the lot, backwards onto a one-way street, peeled out and was gone.

The thing that really irks me is, not necessarily that they had the cajones to try and jack up my new car but this: What on earth would posess someone to try and break off the front license plate mount of a brand new minivan, in a big empty parking lot at 7 a.m. in the morning? I could understand if I had the license plates on the car as people are known to steal those, but they haven’t been put on yet. They’re currently sitting on the floor of the car between the front seats but I haven’t put them on because we’ll just have to take them off when we take the car into the body shop to get the dents fixed from the accident a couple of weeks ago. So, really, all they would have ended up with, had they succeeded was a broken up license plate mount to the front of a Honda Odyssey with a broken license plate frame and a red and white Manly Honda license plate placeholder. I really wanted them to just explain to me what went through their heads when they thought this would be a good idea.

On second thought, maybe Keli’s bad luck with cars has rubbed off on me and I’m the one that’s cursed? In hindsight I should have done one of the following:

• Written down the make, model and license plate number of the car
• Called the non-emergency Santa Rosa Police Department number asking them to send someone over and bust them in the act
• Gotten out of the car with the tire iron just for effect
• Giggled like a school girl and pushed the panic button on the keychain lanyard spooking them out and making Parnoid White Boy even more paranoid

Or all of the above. Stupid lack of sleep clouding my judgement!!! Instead of doing any of the clever things, I picked up the remnants of the license plate frame and moved my car to the newspaper’s parking lot as I remembered they recently installed security cameras there. I called the S.R.P.D. non-emergency line to just give them a heads up about what happened as they may be on the prowl still. The dispatcher got a kick out of my tale of woe and thought it was hilarious and said he wished he could have seen the look on their faces when I got out of the car.

Related posts:

1. Henry Rollins
2. Today rules
3. I hate preschool
4. 5 Books That Changed My Life: Part 4
5. My Trip to the Nation’s Capitol

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