The Price of Independence

Jamie parked and ran inside, breathless and shaking as she called her best friend.

"Alice, I got the car, I have it now, and it's parked out in front, right in front. I can see it from here." Jamie was near hysteria, "Yes, that's right," that's exactly what I said." Jamie continued, "I got the little red one."

"It's about time," said Alice, "when can I see it?"

"I'll be there in a flash," said Jamie. At that they both laughed.

"When were you ever anywhere in a flash?" Alice was still laughing. "You'd be three hours late if you left five hours early."

Jamie turned away from the window. "Who are you, the tardy police?" Geez, could Alice flip to the dark side or what? "O.K, O.K., I'll see you in a few minutes."

Jamie returned to the window, checking again for the presence of her almost brand new sports car as it sat there gleaming in the sunlight. It was red, chic, and shared with the bank. After all, it was the nineties, and this was Los Angeles. She had already racked up an impressive balance of debts via credit cards and student loans. Tacking an extra few thousand on for a good cause could hardly be called irresponsible.

At twenty-seven, Jamie was still a graduate student and shared an apartment with two roommates and had for the last six months saved every penny, nickel, and dime toward the down payment on her wheels of freedom, and was finally able to send into history the miles of pedaling, busing, hitching rides, and her dependence on Alice.

It wasn't always like this. Jamie's mother bought her a nice little car when she went away to undergraduate school at Santa Barbara, but she totaled it in a three-way fender bender. No one was really hurt, but she was on her way to the insurance office and just didn't make it. Naturally, the other drivers sued and she had to call her mother for help, and of course, her mother rarely failed any opportunity to revisit Jamie's lack of ability to "comprehend the consequences of her actions." Each retelling of the incident was cause for her mother to escalate the damages and attorney fees, gasping for air in between spouting the exponentially skyrocketing costs, hyperventilating into the telephone until forced to sit down for lack of air. Jamie had vowed to be more conscientious, and doubled her efforts to save, save, save until she could afford both insurance and a car. In the meantime, Alice was her only ticket to mobility. Independence appeared to be a very costly set of circumstances. Jamie and Alice met back home in high school and had been best friends all through college and now they lived only blocks from each other. Although they were the same age, Jamie had somehow managed to transfer her dependence on her mother to Alice. The substitution seemed to help Jamie pull away from her family, but the fact remained that Alice was her mentor.

Alice drove her everywhere and she dearly loved her, but she could be a little sarcastic about the whole thing. Oh well, that's all over now. Jamie wrapped her arms around herself, pirouetted into the bedroom, and flung wide open the shutters that kept her clothes from falling out. She stood in front of her closet, staring without focus, looking for something red. Bright red, racing-car red, no, Jamie needed ownership red. After a while, she collapsed on the floor and wandered through her things from the bottom up.

"OK, alright," gifted as she was with a kind of divine shoe intelligence, she muttered small loving phrases of encouragement to herself. Jamie pulled out the first of seven racks that held a minimum of five pair each on four rows, straddled it and began the process of choosing. "It's always better if the shoes are right." After she dug up the strappy red sandals, the matching sundress with a small cherry print was a simple matter. Jamie shoved everything back inside and kicked the door closed.

One of her roommates yelled after her, "You're looking really hot, what's up?"

Jamie twirled around and pointed in the direction of her car, "I'm on my way to Alice's." "We're going to the beach." Jamie smirked a little to herself, not once, not even once did one of these guys ever offer her a lift. The fact that her roommates were both in their late twenties, had significant others, and were rarely around, gave Jamie the illusion that she had the whole house to herself. That was a plus, along with her tiny rent. On the minus side, Jamie was responsible for most of the household management with no help from either of them. The car was a great equalizer.

Outside, Jamie approached the jaunty little automobile with valentines in her eyes. She caressed the bonnet and let her fingers drift over the windscreen. She opened the boot, threw her beach bag inside, and dug in her purse for the keys with the matching ceramic apple on the ring. As she positioned herself behind the wheel in proper sportscar fashion, the warmed leather and almost new carpet fragrance united to form a heady liaison. Jamie remained complacent and calm as she conformed anatomically to the sleekly designed bucket seats.

Top down, blond hair flying, Jamie drove the two blocks to pick up Alice.

"I told you she was a beauty," said Jamie, "I've decided to call her Gizela."

"This is not a German car." Alice was laughing. "You can call her Gertrude Stein for all I care, you know, a rose is a rose, etcetera."

Jamie lowered her black patent leather trimmed sunglasses to peer at Alice. "Is she a sexy Brit?"

Alice moved away from the car, pulling her bag in a kind of slow motion movement, as though the car might capture her. "I suspect you may call her anything that moves you from one place to the other."

"I know that," said Jamie, "she's British, and I should probably call her Elizabeth or Mary, or maybe she's a he." Jamie offered a solution, "How about Lord Nelson?"

Gizela protested all the way to the beach with popping, clangorous, clattery, rackety sounds. Alice seemed relieved and jumped out of the car as if she thought it might blow up. Jamie tried not to be apprehensive, but when she got out and closed the door, Gizela shuddered all over. She continued to clank for a while, and then emitted a long drawn out wheezing noise.

Alice stood there staring at the car with her arms folded, watching the car twitch and shiver, like something dying.

"Is she asthmatic?"

Jamie assured Alice that she would make an appointment next week for a tune up, "You know how idiosyncratic these foreign cars are, don't you?" Jamie looked again at her new dependent, and wondered just what kind of money she would need to support it.

Gizela did not start up for Jamie the next morning, but a neighbor was able to jump-start her with cables. She also did not start up in the evening, but AAA came to the rescue with dancing orange lights bouncing off twilight windows and they also had jumper cables. A pattern began to emerge consisting of AAA in the morning and evening and whenever she needed to actually start the car. The latent deficiencies of Jamie's charming little sportscar began to loom like an insidious disease, pernicious and debilitating. After the twenty-fifth recorded call, AAA canceled her membership and Jamie was left to seek other more creative devices to activate the moving parts of the newly and more appropriately named "Leech."

Jamie's social life took on new aspects as she stipulated ownership of jumper cables as prerequisites to any new relationships. Her dinner date conversations were directed toward the rehabilitation and mechanical modification of foreign cars. Jamie became educated to the "foot on the clutch, through the intersection," method of avoiding police detection, as the hole in the muffler allowed horrendous blasts of noise and noxious fumes to emit with each shift of the gears.

Shortly after the first payment, and the second rain, the inanimate object of Jamie's affection ceased to function. Even the casual dates she hustled were getting scarce. At that point, and from thereafter, rain, dew, or, a damp rag landing in the general vicinity, would be the cause of starting failures.

Jamie answered the phone hoping it was someone with car savvy. It was Alice. Jamie had not told Alice all of the symptoms of her sick car.

"Jamie, said Alice, "we're meeting at Chris and Bob's, be there at eight."

"Does anyone there know how to pop a clutch?"

"You're car is not working?" Alice's sarcasm had a slight edge.

"My car does work," said Jamie, "after I get it started."

"I don't believe you," said Alice. "It wasn't really working the day we went to the beach. I could hear strange noises and what's that popping all about."

"I took it to a garage," said Jamie. "The guy told me that the spark plugs don't ignite, the carburetor doesn't eject, and the fan belt doesn't propel."

"Oh." Alice sounded sympathetic, but Jamie couldn't tell for sure. Alice could be enigmatic.

"Alice, I'm begging you," said Jamie, "I'm on my knees. Jamie was close to tears. "Please come and get me. I'm being victimized by a malfunctioning, mechanical mistake."

"Jamie, you bought a parasitic accumulation of unreliable automotive parts," then Alice continued in a much less judgmental tone. "Are there any working pieces at all that could be salvaged, you know, at the junk yard?"

"No," said Jamie.

"Let's bury it and have a great funeral."

"I've lost my job," Jamie was trying not to be upset. "I need to find something where the requirements aren't so stringent, like attendance or being on time." She was miserable, embarrassed and broke. "I'm going through jobs with the velocity of sound." Jamie was on a roll. "We could sell tickets and make it an event." "How many of our friends have been invited to a wake for a car?"

"I've renamed it "The Leech." Jamie was not going to cry, not now anyway. Alice always made Jamie feel better, no matter what.

Every conceivable mishap occurred with alarming regularity, from a frozen gas tank cover, in LA yet, to the total obliteration of the electrical system. The latter was a sequence of chain reactions that also destroyed the recently purchased and installed battery, ignition and fan belt.

Jamie was on the freeway heading for home when she noticed smoke spewing from the hood. First the adapter blew up, creating a fire in the wiring system, which in turn caused the alternator to explode. As Jamie pulled over to the shoulder she was able to coast into a gas station to the consternation of the attendant who attacked the hood of "The Leech" with a fire extinguisher. The fire was finally out and as it was being towed away, a policeman handed Jamie her ninth moving violation.

Luckily, the scraping of the loose bumper against the pavement muted the clatter of the muffler falling to the street, or Jamie would have been hauled in for littering.

"Alice." Jamie was on the phone again. "Should I set fire to it, or leave it in the street for vandals?" Jamie begged her advice. "Should I put it in gear and shove it over a cliff?"

"Find some deranged person and sell it," said Alice. "There must be someone willing to buy a non-functional pile of debris."

By the middle of the following week, during which Jamie displayed previously hidden negotiating skills, she was once again employed and mobile.

"Actually, Alice, the job is perfect," Jamie said. "This time I found a neat little design office three blocks from home and they let me do my homework when I have free time." Jamie interrupted her call to Alice to transfer an incoming call, "I might even finish school before I start collecting Social Security.

"Is The Beast operating?" Alice asked.

"The Leech is parked right outside." Jamie had no intention of admitting to Alice that she had somehow lost the reverse gear and could only move in one direction, forward. Parking was a huge challenge and required serious planning. She could only put it into a "first in line parking place," which sometimes took an hour to locate and it always stuck out a little because she couldn't pull it back. She would usually just get out after parking and push it into place with a good kick. Jamie remembered the flashing hold lights and let Alice go.

Just when Jamie reached the bottom of her bankbook, and the Z's in her address book, her responsibility for "The Leech" came to an abrupt end. The car was not where she had parked it that morning. As she looked all over the campus parking lot, a bubble of joy ran through the tips of her fingers and toes.

Someone must have stolen it. It would have to be someone who was a car genius to get it started and drive it away. But it was definitely gone. Jamie reported the loss to the police and to her insurance agent and called Alice.

"Alice," said Jamie, "the most wonderful thing has happened at last. A car thief saved my life." Jamie was ecstatic.

"Can you come and get me?"

"I'm on my way," said Alice.