Things That I Have Wrecked

It was 4 years ago this month.  Nadia and I had just came back from our honeymoon in Jamaica and we were craving something simple to eat after spending a week gorging on the lavish all-you-can eat buffets and fancy sit-down dinners at the many restaurants that the Sandals Resort had to offer.  I actually gained 10 pounds the week we were there but that was okay…the waist is a terrible thing to mind.  Our first night back home we decided on a simple frozen pizza so I put it in the oven and went upstairs.  I came back down after about 15 minutes and something was terribly wrong.  The whole place wreaked like chemicals and I assumed the oven was on fire so I ran over to take the pizza out.  I could not see any smoke or fire, but in the bottom of the oven was a dark greenish gooey plastic glob with some twisted orange streaks running through…it was kind of cool and it looked like art but I had no idea what the hell it was or how it got there.  Nadia and I stared at it for about 5 minutes but could not figure it out so we threw it away.

A few days later I realized (as is the norm) that I could not find my expensive sunglasses.  I am the poster-child for ZZ Top’s ‘Cheap Sunglasses’ song…I constantly lose my shades so I just buy cheap $5 pairs whenever I see them on sale at gas stations or wherever.  This one time however I owned a sweet pair of $100 shades that Nadia had won as part of a golf package from the United Way auction that we have at work every fall.  So normally I wouldn’t care that I had lost my shades, but these were the only nice expensive pair that I had ever owned.  We looked all over the house, cars, work, everywhere till, duh…it finally dawned on me that the cool plastic gob of goo in the oven was my cool shades.  When I am not wearing my shades I often hook them onto the front of my shirt, and when I bent over to put the pizza in they must have slid off into the oven.  Strange that I didn’t hear them fall.  Ah well…live and learn.  In particular I learned that it is not a good idea to cook your shades at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.  They don’t like that.

Over the years I have wrecked a variety of things.  I never mean to, but sometimes things just get wrecked.  If you read my 1/17/12 blog entry ‘Another Reason Why You Shouldn’t Warm Up Your Car’ you know about a couple of them…like my Dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett and his 1982 Pontiac Bonneville.  The Opel was wrecked beyond repair, but actually the Pontiac went into the shop and came out crisp and clean with a new grill, hood and front quarter-panels. 

The Pontiac’s pristine condition did not last very long however, as a few weeks after it’s revival I was driving it down I-94 from Waukesha to Milwaukee, WI.  I was behind a semi-truck when suddenly it ran over a tailpipe that was laying in the road.  The back tire ran over the end of it and kicked it up in the air.  I remember perfectly almost like it was in slow motion, the tailpipe spinning end over end and tracking right for my head as we sped towards each other at 65 mph.  There was no time to do anything but instinctively duck as the twisted hunk of metal crashed into the windshield right in front of my face.  The glass bent, cracked, spider-webbed…but it did not break and the tailpipe bounced off after doing its work, ready to wreak havoc on the next poor b*stard.  I believe it was my sister Jan who was with me in the front seat and it scared the crap out of us but we were fine.  I just remember thinking how glad I was to be in a car and not my motorcycle or it would have taken my head off.

That was not the only windshield that suffered under my care.  Before the ’82 Bonneville there was a brown 1978 Plymouth Volare stick-shift station wagon that my mom and dad hated…we called it the ‘Vo-Lemon’.  The “Volare” nameplate fell off on the way home from the dealer, which was just the first of dozens of problems with that piece of junk.  It was truly an awful car, but it was the first car I had ever driven so I have some fond memories of it.  Well…again…I am too old for my dad to ground me so I might as well come clean on how the windshield got busted on that thing.  When I was 16 my friend Aaron Vermillion and I and a couple other friends took the Vo-Lemon to the Waukesha County Fair for the night.  We had a great time, met some girls, probably had some beers…the usual.  It was a great time and Aaron was pumped.  He was a very hyper guy and when it was time to leave we got in the car and he got in the passenger side and let out a huge yell and punched the windshield in happiness.  Crack!!  The whole thing splintered.  Dammit!  He did not mean to break the windshield though so for Aaron’s sake I had to lie and tell my parents that we didn’t know how it got cracked…that we got back to the car and somebody must have broke it while we were at the fair.   My dad has a huge brain and knows just about everything, so I figured he would somehow figure out that it was broken from the inside, not the outside.  But I guess not because he got it fixed and never said anything.  Sorry Dad.

Another car that I wrecked was almost completely my fault.  For a couple of years in the mid-1990’s I owned a sweet lime-green 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger.  I got it for only $500 from my ex-wife Lona’s grandpa and it was in mint condition.  After buying it new in ’74 he basically just drove it to the grocery store and church and it only had 50,000 miles on it.  Remember the scene in ‘The Jerk’ when the crazy guy starts shooting at Steve Martin at the gas station and he says:  “He hates these cans!”?  If you look closely, you will see a yellow ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger slowly drive by in the scene.  That’s my car.  Anyways, in the late summer of 1997 on a Sunday afternoon I was heading down I-94 East from my girlfriend Mugsy’s house in Minneapolis, MN to my house in Madison, WI.  I was 20 minutes past the Wisconsin border and still had 3 hours to go, but we’d just had a great weekend and I was feeling great.  I was cruising along about 70 mph, listening to my new live ‘Doors’ cd on the stereo and plowing through a bagful of Burger King cheeseburgers on my lap while reading the cd insert. 

In other words I was paying zero attention to the road and just humming happily along when all of a sudden: ‘BLAMMO!!’  I had no idea what was happing, but the entire car was up on two wheels.  The two tires on the passenger side were still on the ground but me and the rest of the car were high in the air with the car on a 45 degree angle.  We hung there for a bit and then ‘THUMP!’ the car came back down on all 4 wheels and started fishtailing all over the road.  There were cheeseburgers and soda and cd’s and cassette tapes flying all over the inside of the car as I grabbed the steering wheel and fought to bring the poor thing under control.  I ended up on the left shoulder of the freeway and pulled over as much as I could so the cars whizzing past me would not be a factor.

However the center median of this stretch of the freeway was a deep gully that dropped off almost immediately so I couldn’t pull over too far.  Still not having the slightest idea of what had just happened I opened the driver door and attempted to step out.  I put my left foot down and tried to stand up but it was such a steep angle that my ankle gave way and I rolled all the way down the hill about 20 feet to the bottom.  As I laid in the ditch on my back with a sprained ankle and a totaled car, I stared up into the sky and the first thing to came to my head was:  “Why has my god has forsaken me?”  In other words, what the f*ck just happened?!  All of a sudden some old dude’s head comes into view and he bends over me and asks if I am alright.  I rolled over, got up, and then hopped/crawled up the hill till I get to my car and surveyed the damage.  Both tires on the driver side were flat, and the whole car was on a weird sideways angle.  The car wasn’t a rectangle anymore…it was a parallelogram.

I still had no idea what had happened, so the old man pointed first to his large mobile home parked on the right shoulder of the freeway, and then to a huge spare tire laying in the ditch behind me.  The spare had come loose from the back of his mobile home and had been laying in the middle of the freeway.  He was parked and was trying to come grab the thing out of the road when I came along and hit it flush with my front left tire which catapulted the left half of my car up in the air.  Such a shame…it was a sweet car but the whole undercarriage was completely bent beyond repair.  I somehow got the insurance company to give me $1,000 for it though.  Twice what I paid, but I still would have rather had the car.

I have wrecked a lot of other cars, boats, hotel rooms, houses and relationships since then but I will spare you any more details for now.  As I said I never mean to, but sh*t happens.  You just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, accept the consequences and learn from your mistakes.  Have a great weekend ya’ll and try not to wreck too many brain cells.