One evening, after an unsuccessful half hour search for a parking spot, Brian had taken a corner in a nearby parking lot too fast causing his truck to spin out loudly. This displeased a local officer of the law who put his siren and lights to work for a one mile-an-hour, ten-foot chase.
As if somehow sensing just how uncooperative Brian would be, the cop blasted a flood light on the truck. Inflicting temporary blindness upon suspects is never a sufficient enough display of one’s authority, and so the Baconator decided to blow our ear drums out and publicly humiliate us with his megaphone as well.
“Step out of the car, Stud Muffin,” the cop screamed into the machine as the speakers vibrated with ear-shattering feedback.
Brian and I turned to each other. “Stud muffin?” we asked at the same time. I didn’t need Miss Cleo to tell me that things were about to get ugly. “You think you’re real tough, do you, Hot Shot?” the cop continued.
He sauntered around to the driver’s side and shined his flash light directly into Brian’s face. Immediately, Brian was overcome with rage at this brazen show of abused power. He got that crazy look in his eye – an inherited trait passed down from my mother-in-law – that alerts the recipient that it might be a good time to stow any sharp implements or heavy objects in an unreachable place.
“You had anything to drink this evening?” Sergeant Sass seethed at Brian through a clenched jaw.
“Why yes, osifer, I have.”
“What have you had,” he demanded in an impatient don’t-push-me-boy tone.
“Oh man. Where do I even start? I had a Gatorade, a glass of water, than, whoa, you won’t believe this one, a glass of milk.”
“That’s it! You think you’re real funny, Son, do ya?”
“Oh-ho! Did you mean, ‘Have I consumed any alcoholic beverages this evening?’”
I elbowed Brian hard in the ribs as I waited for the cop to pull him out the window and arrest him. But instead of slamming him up against the car head first and jamming the flash light up his ass as I was expecting, the officer got a call on his walkie-talkie. He jumped in his SUV, skidding off to fight the pressing white collar crimes of Newport Beach, which presumably included such injustices as poodle grooming gone awry or condensation from a neighbor’s front yard waterfall spraying onto someone else’s Ferrari.
Our encounters with the parking patrol went similarly down hill so that eventually we gave up seeking legal aid and began dealing with our neighbors on our own again. We spent hours devising grand plans of revenge that involved baseball bats, eggs, dead fish, a horse’s head, and ninjas for hire. Since we didn’t actually buy eggs, but egg whites, we were left contemplating a rather anticlimactic form of revenge. There’s just something unsatisfying about running up to someone’s car, peeling back the foil lid on a cup of Egg Beaters, and then standing at the close range necessary to pour the egg substitute onto the vehicle. I considered asking the neighbor if I could borrow an egg and then hurtling it at their car but something told me they just might put two and two together, and since our apartment had glass doors, I knew we wouldn’t be safe if we got caught.
After such intense brainstorming we would be minutes from sneaking into the alley in ski masks with a car jack in tow. Having had to park miles from our house at least once a week and trudge home after work because our garage was blocked by such things as a kiddy pool filled with chocolate pudding, I had just about had it. Especially because it never failed that as soon as I arrived back at the alley, sweaty, sunburned, and harassed, the car and/or dessert that had been blocking our garage was no longer there.
When the cars would come back later and skid into position on top of the yellow line, I begged Brian to ram his truck into their cars until it pushed them out of our way. The absurdity of using such loud, expensive, and glass-shattering physical force to remedy a situation pleased me deeply. The thought of The Beast looking on in horror as we helped her move her car brought a smile to my face.
“It is tempting,” Brian agreed. But then he reconsidered. “I don’t know. As crappy as The Ocho is, I’m not sure I want to make it any worse. I’m already embarrassed driving that thing.”
“Come on, babe. It’s The Ocho. No one will be able to tell the difference.”
This was a true statement. The Ocho was Brian’s 1997 Chevy S-10, but it was hardly recognizable as such, hence the nickname; we called it The Ocho because its estimated value was roughly eight pesos.
The Ocho always managed to evoke an anger/rage syndrome in anyone who looked at it. Within the first week of Brian’s purchasing of it, the tailgate was stolen. When we were dating it was not uncommon to leave it parked on the street only to return to where we’d left it the night before to find a different car in its place.
The Ocho spent much of its life in the impound yard for no good legal reason accept that it was an eyesore. It wasn’t long before we received a phone call from the security guard at Brian’s
Newport Beach office informing us that there had been a problem with his truck and that we needed to come remove it from the premises immediately. When we pulled up to find it, it had given new meaning to the Chevy slogan, Like a Rock. His car had been stoned. There was glass all around it and giant rocks inside on the now well-ventilated upholstery. A large dent in the side of the truck sat inverted with a boulder directly below it. His side mirrors were hanging by wires. All of this in what was one of the safest cities in the world. We had no known enemies at the time and could only conclude that yet again, the car had caused another person to be flooded with disgust by its unsightly appearance in an otherwise gorgeous landscape.
Brian drove around with cardboard windows for months after that, refusing out of principle, to pay for something he was not responsible for. Barreling down the 55 freeway in the fast lane, mirrors dangling in the wind, cardboard windows flapping over potholes, The Ocho came upon a very large metal object in its path. Unable to swerve without taking out other cars, Brian braced himself for impact and plowed into, what he realized at the last minute, was a grocery cart.
The grocery cart immediately wedged itself under the front bumper with a loud crash before throwing out a vibrant shower of blue sparks in its wake. Brian dragged the cart at full speed until he was able to exit the freeway and pull into a parking lot.
He crouched down on his hands and knees and pulled with all of his strength to remove the cart that was now welded to the bumper. In a fury of sweat, Brian finally dislodged the shopping cart… along with his whole front bumper, which he threw in the tailgate-less bed before continuing on to his new office in
Irvine.
And for all of the abuse The Ocho took, it rarely reacted in protest. Brian had only changed the oil about once in half a decade and yet The Ocho never had any major, or minor for that matter, mechanical problems. Sure, it continued to get as discombobulated as a double-jointed Cirque Du Soleil performer, with the driver’s side door getting wedged not only open but bent back against the front of the truck by a street lamp after he had left it open for visual aid to get out of a tight parallel parking job, but it never did break down. It was the giving tree of automobiles. It seemed to me it could handle a few good smashes into a Bronco.
I wanted nothing more than to slam it forward, SMASH, jerk it back into reverse a few feet before, SMASH, crashing again, and again, as we let out shrieks of maniacal laughter. When I was done I would like to dump a pool of chocolate pudding on the totaled Bronco before slashing the tires with a machete.
But alas, Brain chickened out at the last moment – whining about jail time and his virgin exit hole – and since I couldn’t drive stick there was no street justice to be had.
When The Beast and her posse finally got evicted, the owner’s cleaning crew began piling up strange items by the trash cans including, but not limited to, closet doors with holes punched in them that were covered in profane graffiti that told a tender tale of fucking one’s mother.
I ran into the owner in the alley one day when she had come to survey the damages to her property. It took all of my self control not to run her over with The Ocho as I completely blamed her for pushing me to the brink of insanity by waiting so long to extract her devious tenants from the neighborhood despite our numerous complaints.
We’d nearly come to blows with her tenants repeatedly and it was a good thing we hadn’t; I heard later that she had spent all day spackling bullet holes in the ceiling. She explained to other neighbors that judging by the shell casings littered across the destroyed carpet, The Beast was packing a lot of heat. I guess sometimes it’s best to let patience win out over revenge as you just never know if your neighbor sleeps with a sawed off shot gun.
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<p><p>RIP The Ocho..i miss you..I only got to ride in you once. : (</p><br />
<p>But..I did randomly park next to you once at the Spectrum and the odds are like 1 in 4,000 of that, actually..</p></p>