My Dog is Chelsea

About a month ago, the newspaper I had spent every waking moment of the previous three weeks creating finally went to press. This was vastly exciting, a huge relief, other good things, etc.

But because I am good at being cheap and I wanted to save the neighborhood association thirty bucks in delivery fees, I agreed to go out to Gresham to pick up our stacks of paper. This would have been a not-so-bad thing to do (minus the whole having-to-go-to-Gresham thing) had:

1) I not hit the road at 4 pm.
2) I not hit the road at 4 pm on a Friday.
3) The publisher not closed at 5.

You can see where this was going: nowhere fast. I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic heading east on i-84 when my mother called:

Mother: Oh, Laura?
Laura: Hey, I have no minutes, I can’t talk.
Mother: Oh, okay, I can’t talk either. I’m in the airport about to leave for Buenos Aires.
Laura: What?! Since when?
Mother: I didn’t tell you?
Laura: It’s sounding familiar, but I thought you were going, like, I don’t know, next year!
Mother: Oh, well, no, I’m leaving now.
Laura: Okay, well, I haven’t called you because I’m out of minutes, but I’m going to have to put Chelsea to sleep soon.
Mother: That’s sad.
Laura: Yeah, I know, it sucks.
Mother: She’s very old.
Laura: I know.
Mother: Oh, that’s too bad. Listen, they’re boarding, gotta run. Call your brother.

Like I said, I was getting nowhere fast.

When I finally reach the end of the traffic, it’s 4:51. I’m about 8 miles from Gresham. I can make it, I tell myself. If I speed. So I put the petal to the rubber mat on the floor and accelerate to top-Tracker-speed: 70 miles per hour. Ten seconds later, I hear a loud crack and my car swerves into the next lane.

What the hell? I think. That was weird.

But then I look in my mirror. Turns out, you see, that my innocent little photoblog from my last post actually would become a bit of a problem. If you recall, in Method 2 Step A, I demonstrated how to open the side window of a Geo Tracker.

Well, I didn’t mention this the other day, but when I opened the little window, something went wrong. I accidentally broke off a tiny little cheap-ass piece of plastic, which, ironically enough, would end up causing as much damage to that window as the Schmuckface had done to the other. All to help avoid costly window-breakages in the future.

At the time, I didn’t think it was such a big deal. But now there I was: flying (in relative Tracker-terms) down the interstate with my left window and half of my roof thrashing about in the wind, thanks to the missing piece of cheap-ass plastic. The force of the detached roof was so great that it actually became difficult to drive in a straight line, and worse, I noticed, the black metal piece that connects the back window to the tailgate was about to come loose. And THAT would’ve been bad.

So I pull over on the shoulder. It was a good place to stop: the lane to my left was ending soon, so most cars had already moved over, giving me plenty of room to inspect the damages. I take a walk around the car. I appears that my left rear window has dislodged itself from the groove, taking the back window and part of the top with it. So I click it back in, readjust the black metal piece, get the roof back in place and head off.

Ten feet later, I hear a clunk. And another. And another. I stop again only to discover that a long piece of random scrap metal has somehow lodged itself into the intestines of my car’s underbelly.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m talking aloud at this point. I torque the metal stick out of my car, and throw it with the rest of the rubble on the embankment.

I look at the clock: 5:56. There’s still time, I fool myself into thinking.

Back on the freeway, I tepidly accelerate the car. When I reach my final cruising speed of 50 mph (I’m not taking any chances now), I decide that my roof is fine and I’ll make it to Gresham just in time—except that the window rips off again, and lo and behold that stupid black metal piece is about to fly into the windshield of the car behind me. I pull over immediately, but this time, it isn’t particularly safe. Semis are flying by at warp speed and nobody seems willing to shift lanes to avoid sideswiping a girl fixing her crap car. I try to click the window back into the groove but I can’t—the cars are about to side-swipe me. At the very least, I remove the black metal piece from my rear window and throw it in my car. No need to fuck up someone else’s ride.

I figure I can drive really slowly and get off at the next exit and things will be fine. Yeah, well, going 35 miles an hour on the freeway for three miles, turns out, isn’t the safest. But hey, I finally get to a gas station and stop to take a breath.

Let’s recap:

-It’s 5 pm on a Friday evening.
-I have no cell phone minutes to call anyone for help.
-I’m on the outskirts of Gresham.
-My car’s roof has gone haywire.
-It’s cold.
-I have no newspapers.

Inside the gas station, I have never been so happy to see duct tape in my life. With numb fingers, I tape the side window shut. I attempt to re-zip the back window but I discover, much to my dismay, that the zipper has done one of those numbers where it splits at the wrong end and won’t reverse to undo the situation. It’s 100% stuck on the wrong side and it’s becoming clear that I can’t fix it. At least without forking over a good $300 odd dollars to a Chevy parts dealer.

So I tuck the stupid piece of plastic (aka my back window) into my “trunk” and hope for the best. I am resigned to the fact that the publisher is now closed. It is time to get stuck in traffic on the way home—which, in a way, is better than no traffic: at full speed my car is evidently quite dangerous.

THREE DAYS LATER, at the publisher in Gresham:

Laura: Well, thank you so much for helping me load the papers into the car.

PE: Oh! That’s when the front desk closes. The graveyard shift is out back here until about 4 am—you can pick up your papers anytime. Heck, you can stop by in the middle of the night if you’d like!

So, like I said: who’s the schmuckface now?

PS, I still have no back window.